Jed Somit’s letter in the Aug. 19 TGI is hopelessly inaccurate, for the following reasons: 1. Somit implies that because Niihau Ranch does national defense work, it doesn’t care about Hawaii’s marine wildlife. False. To the intense and well-documented disgust
Jed Somit’s letter in the Aug. 19 TGI is hopelessly inaccurate, for the following reasons:
1. Somit implies that because Niihau Ranch does national defense work, it doesn’t care about Hawaii’s marine wildlife.
False. To the intense and well-documented disgust of Kauai’s fishermen and boaters, Niihau Ranch has a decades-long history of trying to protect marine wildlife.
2. Somit’s reading comprehension is apparently so poor, that (while quoting me) he completely missed the point that I was talking about PLANTS only. (Read his letter again — the word “plants” is specifically in that quote.)
I never have, and probably never will, make such a statement about Hawaii’s insects, birds and (especially) marine wildlife — many of those life forms are not biologically incompetent.
3. For some weird, unknown reason, Somit has jumped to a conclusion that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is involved in this discussion.
It isn’t.
Now here are the actual facts about the year 1964 — facts that Somit doesn’t mention.
1. 1964 saw the real start of the Vietnam War, the first war that America ever lost.
It was in that war, for the first time ever, that politics began to replace military science as the basis for America’s war-making decisions.
In the years since, this deadly dangerous precedent has vastly expanded: America’s military affairs are now routinely conducted, not with military logic or common sense, but according to the personal whims and political agendas of powerful politicians.
This can only lead to disaster, just as it did in ancient Rome.
2. 1964 also saw the start (at Berkeley) of the first of the 1960s student riots on American college campuses.
Up to the end of the 1950s, American colleges and universities had been centers of traditional American principles, such as truth, freedom and independent thought.
And they routinely produced millions of well-educated students, who were capable of deep thinking, and had excellent analytical skills. Thus their graduates were highly resistant to all totalitarian doctrines, and could not easily be deceived by the lies and propaganda of communism and socialism.
This situation naturally did not suit America’s communists at all. If America was to be softened up and weakened ideologically, those colleges and universities had to be forced into a more leftist posture.
So — the communists made some plans.
And J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, learned about those plans …
Somewhere around 1959 or 1960 (I don’t know the exact date) he secretly warned the heads of America’s colleges and universities, that the communists and their allies would soon try to force their leftist ideology onto America’s institutions of higher learning. He even described the exact tactics that the radicals later used.
(Incidentally, I still have an official government record of that advance warning.)
But with their usual smug feelings of intellectual superiority, many of the academics dismissed Hoover’s warning as the paranoid fantasy of a dumb cop.
Thus they were caught totally unprepared in the mid-1960s, when America’s colleges and universities began exploding in riots, like a string of giant firecrackers.
To this very day, I am still astonished at what a huge amount of turmoil and trouble such a tiny, tiny number of communist agitators caused there. They were incredibly skilled and efficient and devious — and they ran rings around the politicians and government officials, who were totally unable to cope with them.
But I personally saw it happen. And I now completely believe Mao Tse-Tung’s boast, that with only 3 percent of the population on his side, he could disrupt, divide and destabilize any country, and cause a successful communist revolution there.
Today the threat of communism is at least temporarily gone, but the damage the communists did in those far-off days still endures.
Many of America’s colleges and universities are no longer citadels of truth and freedom and independent thought; instead, they have become bastions of radical left ideology and propaganda.
They now routinely produce students with very liberal-left views and poor analytical skills, and some of those graduates, who have ascended to high levels of government, are making incredibly foolish decisions about the conduct of America’s national affairs.
3. 1964 also saw the birth of America’s drug culture, at the same time and place as the first great student riot at Berkeley. At that time some of those same radical leftists began experimenting with drugs.
(For just one example, I saw my first stoned-out druggie while I was infiltrating the FSM headquarters in Berkeley, California, disguised as a college radical.)
From Berkeley the drug use spread across the bay, into San Francisco’s beatnik colony.
Soon after they started using drugs, the beatniks (who hated their derogatory, dead-end name) began referring to themselves as being “hip” or “hipsters.”
The name stuck. They became known as “hippies,” a term that still exists.
The drug culture next infected California’s surfer population, and the surfers and hippies have since carried it into every part of America.
Today, half a century after its tiny beginnings in 1964, America’s drug culture has become a gigantic factor in America’s decay and decline.
4. But by far the greatest and most far-reaching event of 1964, was its November presidential election.
In that election America’s voters decisively rejected the principles of America’s Founding Fathers. Instead, they turned to the corrupt, Roman-style, welfare-state principles of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”
Now here is a partial (partial only) list of the escalating after-effects of that fateful 1964 election.
A. Like ancient Rome, America has become a welfare state, with steadily increasing numbers of people now dependent on government handouts.
B. The morals of America’s people have been severely corroded by their welfare state habits. Huge numbers of people now know, that no matter how risky, lazy, irresponsible or self-destructive their lifestyles are, the government will nevertheless provide a cradle-to-grave financial and medical safety net for them.
C. America’s military forces are being dangerously weakened, as more and more government money is diverted from national defense, into the social spending programs of a welfare state. America’s enemies see this, and are becoming bolder.
D. America’s entire political process has been corrupted by the nation’s welfare state mentality. Today a majority of the voters just want more government benefits, and don’t much care about the honesty of the political candidates.
And the politicians realize this. Many of them know that they can now be as corrupt and incompetent and deceitful as they want, so long as they give the voters more and more government benefits.
E. A gigantic and totally unpayable national debt has piled up. This government debt will never be repaid, because (in order to get themselves elected and reelected) the politicians are routinely spending far more money than the government takes in each year.
At some point the U.S. government will go bankrupt; its money will become worthless; and the entire American economy will crash, just as the Weimar Republic did.
America’s military power will then also collapse, leaving “Israel” without its usual umbrella of American military protection: and, in frantic desperation, the “Israelis” will defend themselves with their nuclear weapons.
In closing, I repeat my statement, that 1964 marked a tremendous turning point in American history — it set the stage for the great national decline we are seeing today.
At that time I happened to be living in the area where much of this action occurred, and I personally saw some of it go down.
And because I happened to be well-trained in history, I immediately realized the dangers of what I was seeing.
In fact, I got so worried about the situation, that I even did some undercover investigative work for the California state Legislature.
But that’s another story. And in this analysis of the historic events of 1964, I will write no personal sidebar, except to say, “I was there, and was involved, and understood the significance of what was happening.”
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Keith Robinson is a co-owner of Niihau.
