The people's voice of reason
The people's voice of reason
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Recent columns on AU’s academic and athletic performance induced more response than usual, prompting more regular submissions for Gazette readers to consider. If interest continues in perspectives of this sort, I’ll submit something every week to ten days. A compelling correspondence received w.r.t. AU’s current cycle of decline began with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s remark, “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more… everyone should be forewarned.” Prof. Dimon is on par with Harvard...
Four hundred five winters have passed since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, 404 winters since they hosted the Wampanoag at that memorable Thanksgiving feast. As they drafted the Mayflower Compact that laid the foundation for the colonies, the states, and the nation that would follow them, they bequeathed a heritage that we should be proud of. But would the Pilgrims be proud of us? If William Bradford, their Governor and historian, could speak to us today, he might say something like this:...
What are our most sacred possessions? Obviously ourselves, our families, and our health would top the list. For most people, the most precious material possessions are their homes, especially for the ones who have lived in them for many years amd have spent much of their lives improving and fine-tuning them to specifically match their needs and lifestyles. For this reason, a home should NEVER be violated. Invading a person’s home is an absolute NO. Everybody has a RIGHT to protect his home f...
Many a youngin with a Greek Yiayia (grandma) heard ‘pedimou’ - i.e., my child. In the most endearing, God loving inflection and Spirit, I can still hear it spoken from both my righteous, steadfast Yiayias helping me discern good and evil. Hard to imagine a more antithetical, deleterious spirit than what we’ve observed from Clinton, Trump, Epstein, et al political parasites and pedagogues like Harvard’s Dr. Summers who educate them. There was a time our nation rejected charlatans who stole c...
Crossing the Rubicon, a common phrase used to describe a point of no return, is typically traced back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon in January 49 BC, initiating the Roman Civil War. An analogy can be drawn between the actions of Caesar and those of Lincoln in his call for 75,000 “volunteers” from each State to invade the seven States that voted to secede from what they understood to be a voluntary union. After Lincoln resupplied Fort Sumter (an act of war), he got the antic...
In the 1985 movie "Back to the Future," Michael J. Fox jumps into Christopher Lloyd's levitation-equipped Delorean and the two take off into the year 2015, ending up into a swarm of flying cars. The year 2015 has already passed a decade ago, and except for a few experimental examples, we still have no mass market flying cars. According to Wikipedia, a flying car must meet these specifications: "A flying car must be capable of safe and reliable operation both on public roads and in the air....
Recent headlines coming out of Auburn University chronicle the ongoing metastasis of President Roberts’ cancer destroying this once great school of higher learning and athletics if we fail to remove this pollutant and his minions; (re)read my 5/1/24 Gazette column https://www.alabamagazette.com/story/2024/05/01/opinion/prof-roberts-theres-a-cancer-on-the-presidency/3257.html]. These past months indicate historically unprecedented levels of failure in football and the wholesale violation of 1...
In a rare case of self-inflicted torture, I watched some of Maine Senator Angus King’s questioning of Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Defense (now War). Various topics were covered, including the renaming of bases. King falsely accused Robert E. Lee of committing treason by resigning from the U.S. Army and siding with his State in 1861. Since King was born in Virginia, one might ask if he really believes that nonsense or if he is just another historical dimwit. Much has been written about L...
Think of Dracula, think of Bram Stoker, whose 1897 horror novel Dracula has inspired hundreds of progressively inferior vampire movies. But Dracula was real – not the vampire, but Count Vlad III Dracula (A.D. c. 1428 - 1477) of Wallachia (now part of Romania). Known as Vlad III the Impaler but called Dracula (after the Order of the Dragon, a knightly order founded to defend Christendom against the Ottoman Empire and Islam), the Count’s brutality staggers the imagination. But as my personal phy...
Last month, I illustrated the stupidity of our auto engineers in their zeal to make all new cars crushable and become total losses whenever they suffer from minor bumps and bruises. I also illustrated a solution to this insanity, and I’m praying that at least a few engineers in the right places will wise up and take action. But that is not the only engineering blunder with our cars today. They are also overloaded with gross excesses of explosive air bags—sometimes with as many as 10 or pos...
It was the fourth century A.D. Yes, I know the politically-correct crowd says we’re not supposed to use B.C. and A.D. anymore, because they mean “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” (in the year of our Lord). Those terms, we are told, refer to the birth of Christ and that is offensive to some. Instead, we’re supposed to say B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) and C.E. (“Common Era”). But what makes the Common Era common, other than the birth of Christ? Our Founding Fathers finished the Consti...
Happy 26th Anniversary to The Alabama Gazette! Time to reflect back over a quarter century to herald this brave paper standing strong on the First Amendment; it prints submissions of big government conservatives and modern liberals as well as observations and perspectives of small government conservative/classical liberals like me these past 16 years. Those who regularly consume news from our local East Central Alabama ’Pravda on the Plains’ publications recently witnessed a social media sta...
We hear “Lost Cause” commentary ad nauseum from so-called experts, most of whom are political leftists, neocons, Straussians, and others of a similar ilk who claim the War for Southern Independence was about maintaining slavery. In reality, the only threat to slavery was outside of the Southern and Border States (Lincoln and the Republicans made that crystal clear). This arose, at least partially, from the Republican agenda of wanting only White settlers in the West; they consistently aff...
Most of my readers will recall Elkanah Tisdale’s iconic political cartoon evoking "Gerrymander" nomenclature for Massachusetts’ redistricted manipulations following the 1810 census. A July 18, 2024 post by Neely Tucker [https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2024/07/gerrymandering-the-origin-story/] featured former chief of the Rare Book & Special Collections Division guest, Mark Dimunation. He offered the following on gerrymandering which has become part of our lexicon these past two centuries: “The term,...
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” Most of us know why the Marine Hymn speaks of the halls of Montezuma. It refers to the Mexican War (1846-48) in which the Marine and other American soldiers, led by General Winfield Scott fought a fierce battle from Vera Cruz to Mexico City and stormed Chapultepec Castle. But what about the shores of Tripoli? That’s another story. It goes back nearly 1,400 years to the beginning of Muslim Jihad, but let’s start with 1785. Thomas Jefferson...
Every passing year, our automobile engineers continue to fail miserably in their production of quality products. In their efforts to build bling, style, and needless options, they are neglecting the basic essentials—durability, dependability, economy, and most of all—SIMPLICITY. That means easy to build, easy and inexpensive to repair, and the ABSENSE of gimmicks that tend to disrupt basic functions. Among the most neglected car parts are the BUMPERS. Like their names imply, their purpose is...
Although not an “abolitionist” in the strict sense, Abraham Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery. Lincoln’s view was common within the Republican Party. Abolitionists were generally despised in both North and South--many would be considered radical even by today’s abysmal moral standards. Abolitionists, e.g., Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner routinely criticized Lincoln for his tepid anti-slavery views. Lincoln’s focus was on maintaining the geographical Union--slavery was a secondary...
Comrade Trump’s Big Soviet Bill further mashed the accelerator on our path to the junk heap of history. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act [OBBBA] is now law, adding hundreds more pages of unconstitutional text to the federal register. Echoing Speaker Pelosi (Trump’s past Kabuki Theatre friend when ‘donning’ his longer worn Blue Soviet jersey) shrieks “We had to pass the bill to know what’s in it,” our DC politburo is keeping the trend to oblivion set by Comrades Trump (45) and Biden these past year...
Lincoln claimed the North was fighting to preserve the Union. However, fighting to preserve a voluntary Union is a contradiction since force is antithetical to voluntary consent. Alexander Hamilton noted: “To coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised…Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself; a government that can exist only by the sword?” The New England power structure did just that....
If you don’t know the answer to this question, or even if you had to think about it for awhile, you’ve proven my point: The Korean War (June 1950 – July 1953) is America’s forgotten conflict. Of all the memorials on the Washington Mall, the Korean War Memorial is my favorite. In graphic detail, larger than life, it depicts in stainless steel 19 gaunt American soldiers in full battle dress as they grimly ascend a hill to commence an attack. Instead of being bunched together, they are spaced...
Back in 2011, a group of researchers at the University of Bristol performed some ultra high precision analyses on some of the Earth's oldest rocks from Greenland. These were four billion years old—almost as old as the Earth itself at 4.5 billion years. Using tungsten as a benchmark, the studies concluded that tungsten along with our precious metals in the Earth’s crust originated from a global bombardment of “about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material” that occurred about 200 mil...
The June 2025 Los Angeles riots have initiated constitutional questions about State vs. Federal authority. Per Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, it is up to the Governor or legislature of a State to request federal assistance; otherwise, the general government can enforce federal laws but generally has no authority to interfere with State affairs. Furthermore, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. A catalyst for this act was to...
South Dakota’s Mt. Rushmore exhibits the faces of four presidents immortalized in stone: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt (TR). As the story goes, one morning in 1979 Washington noticed that Roosevelt was missing from the monument. When asked, Jefferson said simply, “All I know is, he muttered something about it being HIS canal, and he picked up a big stick and started walking south,” TR described his foreign policy as “speak softly and carry a big sti...
Have you ever wondered why you seldom see any small pickup trucks in recent years? And the few you do see are older ones—1980’s and earlier. Why don’t automakers make and sell any new ones? Today, we see huge hulking gas-guzzling behemoths with big 4-door cabs and often puny 4 to 5 foot beds that won’t haul very much. They are utterly impractical for most farmers, contractors, handymen, and anybody else who needs an inexpensive utilitarian truck to carry stuff around. Of course automak...
Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples [1995 Barnes & Noble p. 376] narrative on anti-slavery forces resistance upon Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854 passage in the US Senate (re)affirmed the principle of “popular sovereignty” triggering the Anthony Burns [https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/burns-anthony-the-trial-of-1854/] incident in Boston. The Compromise of 1850 included a Fugitive Slave Act requiring slaves be returned to owners, even if in a free State and legis...
