Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Jim Abourezk: A rare bird

Posted: February 28, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Jim Abourezk, the South Dakota politician who died last weekend at 92, was among the most interesting and engaging people I’ve ever met.

We crossed paths in Wounded Knee during the American Indian Movement takeover in 1973 and later when he tried to get the United States and Cuba to resume diplomatic relations. But I spent a lot of time with him in Iran during the hostage crisis when he represented the Palestinian leadership, who were friendly with the ayatollah.

Later, while researching a book about South Dakota, I’d join him at his daily lunchtime gathering at his wife’s restaurant in downtown Sioux Falls. He even wrote a glowing review of the book.

Abourezk was the first Arab American to serve in the House of Representatives from 1970 to 1973 and then in the U. S. Senate from 1973 to 1979. He decided not to run again, mainly because of family reasons and a difficult campaign he always faced in South Dakota, which usually elected Republicans. Abourezk and his fellow senator, George McGovern, were the exceptions as populist Democrats.

In his 1989 memoir, Advise and Dissent, Abourezk wrote of the Senate: “Where else are your doors opened for you, is your travel all over the world provided free of charge, can you meet with world leaders who would otherwise never let you into their countries, have your bad jokes laughed at and your boring speeches applauded? It’s the ultimate place to have one’s ego massaged, over and over.”

A wonderful storyteller, Abourezk would regale people with stories of his colorful past.

He grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where his Lebanese father ran a general store.

Abourezk served four years in the U.S. Navy following World War II. He worked a series of jobs, including as a rancher, blackjack dealer, and judo instructor, and then earned a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines.

His job as a civil engineer took him to California, then back to South Dakota, where he worked on the Minuteman missile silos in the western part of the state. He attended law school and opened a solo practice in Rapid City.

Abourezk ran for South Dakota attorney general in 1968 and lost. But he remained undeterred from entering politics and narrowly won a U.S. House seat in 1970. Two years later, he jumped to the Senate. During his term there, he was a seatmate to both former Sens. Joe Biden and Edward Kennedy.

In the Senate, he opposed U.S. policy in the Middle East, which favored Israel then, and pushed legislation to help Native Americans.

During the vote to give control of the Panama Canal to Panama, the Carter administration barely won the day. In fact, Abourezk joked about how he held back his vote until the administration promised him millions of dollars in aid for South Dakota.

After leaving the Senate, he created the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and had law offices in Washington and Sioux Falls, where he focused on legal matters for Native Americans.

For those of us who had the pleasure of knowing Jim, his presence at his lunchtime get-togethers will be sorely missed.

The Biden Administration in One Paragraph

Posted: February 25, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized

If you want to know the difference between the Trump years and the Biden years you can’t do better than this paragraph

As recently as Thursday of last week, FEMA again denied aid to East Palestine. The message was clear: help was not coming. But the following day, within a couple of hours of Donald Trump announcing he planned to visit the town, the Biden administration reversed course and announced it would send aid to East Palestine. 

Here comes a one two punch for the Medical Transgender Profit Machine

Posted: February 24, 2023 by datechguy in culture, medicine, Uncategorized
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Jason “Sonny” Pratt: I get it, by day the mild mannered children’s book author, by night the fearsome masked avenger.

Jon Sable [in B.B. Flemm guise] Just the opposite actually. If anyone knew I was writing Children’s books…I don’t even want to think about it.

Sonny Pratt: Well if you’re embarassed about being a children’s author why do you keep doing it?

Jon Sable: Sonny, There’s just so damn much money in it.

Jon Sable Freelance #7 1983

One of the things that has become very apparent in reading about the Transgender push among medical centers, particularly involving the young is that it’s a cash cow.

You not only have low risk (in terms of complications leading to death) elective surgery but you have drugs and hormone treatments taking place over the course of years or even decades and a psych department staying busy with counseling that can last just as long.

That’s a ton of billable procedures and products for EACH person who dives into the Transgender pool that will keep your practice and department in the black for many many years and all it requires is to throw out that pesky first principle of medical treatment “Do no harm” and replace it with “Do no harm to your bottom line.”

While exposing this might be effective to some degree against hospitals and practices that depend on donations and sponsors no amount of public shaming or twitter quips or thoughtful commentary or even detailed exposés is likely to cause people who have abandoned both Judeo-Christian ethics and medical ethics for profit to change their behavior.

This however might:

A woman in Ontario who identified as transgender and underwent hormone therapy, a bilateral mastectomy, and a hysterectomy filed the first lawsuit in Canada against her healthcare providers for facilitating her transition. 

Michelle Zacchigna, a 34-year-old woman from Orillia, Ontario, recently announced a lawsuit she filed against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who treated her over the years, alleging that they failed to address her complex mental health needs and instead allowed her to self-diagnose as transgender and undergo irreversible procedures that she now regrets. 

It’s worth noting that this woman is 34 and started this process at 21 meaning that this has been going on for a very long time before attention was being drawn to it.

“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deepened voice and male-pattern balding, and without the ability to get pregnant. Removing my completely healthy uterus is my greatest regret,” Zacchigna wrote in a blog post for Lighthouse Forum.

Zacchigna’s lawsuit claims that the healthcare providers who treated her failed to address her serious mental health issues and developmental disabilities and instead offered her irreversible medical interventions. 

“The Defendants permitted Michelle to self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment without providing a differential diagnosis or proposing alternative treatments,” reads the Statement of Claim filed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

I suspect this is the first of many such lawsuits we are going to see over the years as people who have been castrated and sterilized in their youth discover that it doesn’t bring them the relief promised by those who drugged and cut them up for fun and profit.

Mind you as I noted this woman was 21, can you picture how strong that argument might be for a person who started this as a teen, as a minor, as a pre-teen. The lawsuits practically file themselves. Once we start seeing jury awards in the millions or even tens of millions (after all when your life has been destroyed by thirty you might have fifty years of suffering to pay for. the cost benefit analysis will change in a real hurry.

These suits will be a series of solid jabs to the transgender body mutilation industry, and now Florida is preparing a follow up right cross taking a completely different tack:

The new bill, called the Reverse Woke Act, flips the gender transition movement on its head by requiring employers that provide coverage for gender transition procedures also to provide coverage for de-transitioning. It even puts employers on the hook for de-transitioning coverage for people who are no longer employed by the company if they worked there when they transitioned.

“An employer that covers the cost, directly or through benefits, of gender dysphoria treatment for employees must also cover the total costs associated with treatment that reverses the gender dysphoria treatment, regardless of the rate of coverage provided for the initial treatment,” reads the proposal introduced by Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia.

“An employee who received gender dysphoria treatment through coverage provided by an employer is entitled to full coverage by that employer of the total costs associated with treatment that reverses gender dysphoria treatment if the employee later determines that the gender dysphoria treatment was not appropriate for him or her and wants to reverse the treatment, regardless of whether the person is currently employed by that same employer at the time of such determination,” the bill continues. “An employer’s obligations under this section are not affected by whether the initial treatment is provided in this state, and an employer may not make coverage of subsequent treatment contingent on whether the employee receives such subsequent treatment in this state.”

So if you’re a woke employer or corporation coving Transgender transition to show just how moral you are, you are on the hook to take care of the person who changes their mind, even if the person in question no longer works for you. You could be stuck dealing with such cost years or even decades later and subject to civil suits if you don’t pay up.

Can you say “Cost prohibitive?”

Or to paraphrase Sherman: We cannot change the hearts and minds of those woke people in the medical profession, but we can through the courts & legislatures make the financial risks of the transgender industry to hospitals so terrible that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.

This is the first step in a long march, may legions follow.

The Biden Regime is planning on surrendering US sovereignty to the World Health Organization

Posted: February 23, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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The latest move by the Biden Regime rises to the level of treason because they are planning on implementing a treaty that would surrender the sovereignty of the United States over to World Health Organization.  To accomplish this they are doing an end run around the Constitution of the United States because they are implementing the treaty without the advice and consent of the Senate. 

Here is the clause of the treaty that is designed to supposedly grant the United States, and all other nations, the authority to circumnavigate legislative approval.

The WHO CA+ may be applied provisionally, in whole or in part, by a signatory and/or Party that consents to its provisional application by so notifying the Depositary in writing at the time of signature of the instrument, or signature or deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, formal confirmation or accession. Such provisional application shall become effective from the date of receipt of the notification by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

The despicable and corrupt process is documented in this article from The Epoch Times.

“Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals, and health officials.”

There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration’s position. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws, while other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.

According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.

The author of the article is suffering from several common and dangerous delusions.  The first is the belief that the Supreme Court issues rulings that are in any way based on the Constitution of the United States.  Another is the belief that the Supreme Court has the authority to grant a branch of the federal government the power to completely disregard the plain text of the Constitution.  The final delusion is the belief that only the Supreme Court has the authority to declare that a given law or treaty violates the Constitution.

Here is a summary of The United States v. Belmont ruling.

 301 U.S. 324 (1937), was a dispute between the federal executive branch and the State of New York over property rights to a deposit from a former Russian corporation with August Belmont & Company, a private New York City banking firm. Belmont established executive predominance over state laws and constitutions in the sphere of foreign policy, and allocated the constitutional power for initiating executive agreements solely to the president of the United States.[

By examining the actual text of Article 2 Section 2 Clause 2, it becomes obvious that the Supreme Court made a grave constitutional error with that ruling.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur

From the text of the Supremacy Clause, which is  Article 6 Section 2, you can see that only treaties passed through the formal constitutional process are the law of the land.  Agreements signed by just the president are not listed therefore they are not the law of the land.

 This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

In Federalist Paper 75 Alexander Hamilton discusses the treaty making power granted in the Constitution.  No president has the constitutional authority to enter into any form of treaty without the advice and consent of the Senate.

The president is to have power “by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur.” Though this provision has been assailed on different grounds, with no small degree of vehemence, I scruple not to declare my firm persuasion, that it is one of the best digested and most unexceptionable parts of the plan. One ground of objection is, the trite topic of the intermixture of powers; some contending that the president ought alone to possess the power of making treaties; and others, that it ought to have been exclusively deposited in the senate. Another source of objection is derived from the small number of persons by whom a treaty may be made: Of those who espouse this objection, a part are of opinion that the house of representatives ought to have been associated in the business, while another part seem to think that nothing more was necessary than to have substituted two-thirds of all the members of the senate to two-thirds of the members present. As I flatter myself the observations made in a preceding number, upon this part of the plan, must have sufficed to place it to a discerning eye in a very favourable light, I shall here content myself with offering only some supplementary remarks, principally with a view to the objections which have been just stated.

With regard to the intermixture of powers, I shall rely upon the explanations already given, in other places of the true sense of the rule, upon which that objection is founded; and shall take it for granted, as an inference from them, that the union of the executive with the senate, in the article of treaties, is no infringement of that rule. I venture to add that the particular nature of the power of making treaties indicates a peculiar propriety in that union. Though several writers on the subject of government place that power in the class of executive authorities, yet this is evidently an arbitrary disposition: For if we attend carefully to its operation, it will be found to partake more of the legislative than of the executive character, though it does not seem strictly to fall within the definition of either of them. The essence of the legislative authority is to enact laws, or in other words to prescribe rules for the regulation of the society. While the execution of the laws and the employment of the common strength, either for this purpose or for the common defence, seem to comprise all the functions of the executive magistrate. The power of making treaties is plainly neither the one nor the other. It relates neither to the execution of the subsisting laws, nor to the enaction of new ones, and still less to an exertion of the common strength. Its objects are CONTRACTS with foreign nations, which have the force of law, but derive it from the obligations of good faith. They are not rules prescribed by the sovereign to the subject, but agreements between sovereign and sovereign. The power in question seems therefore to form a distinct department, and to belong properly neither to the legislative nor to the executive. The qualities elsewhere detailed, as indispensable in the management of foreign negotiations, point out the executive as the most fit agent in those transactions; while the vast importance of the trust, and the operation of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation of the whole or a part of the legislative body in the office of making them.

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