“Is a Preemptive Strike in the Offing?” by Peter Burrows 4/12/24 elburropete@gmail,com 

This is a very important read. When Obama said Iran wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because it would be against their religion, he was 180° wrong.  Here’s a link to the article:

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2024/04/11/is-a-preemptive-strike-in-the-offing-n4928096

I’m glad to see that an MSM writer with a following has spelled out this apocalyptic Shia doctrine. Maybe somebody will inform Trump, who’s as clueless as Old Joe.  From the article:  

” Shi’ites believe that Allah’s kingdom will be established on earth by the Twelfth or Hidden Imam, whose “second coming” can be accelerated by creating the right set of circumstances, namely, the fomenting of violent upheavals in a holocaust of blood and fire among the nations of the earth — in particular, Israel. And the mullahs are just crazy enough to bring such a cataclysm to pass.” 

I wrote about this many years ago in “Monsters from the Id” which uses the old sci-fi movie, Forbidden Planet, as metaphor for our times. The conclusion is still relevant, more than ever:  

“The Iranians say they are not trying to build nuclear weapons, and even if true for now, their long range intentions are very suspect. They’ve been waiting for the Mahdi for over 11 centuries. A few more years, or decades, to gather the means to start the final confrontation with the Satanic West is of little import. 

“The number one question: Are they really planning to start a nuclear holocaust as a religious imperative?  If so, preemptive war, not Neville Chamberlain, is the only rational course of action.. 

“Question number two, maybe it’s really number one: Do we have the moral courage for such a course of action?” 

https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/137

Reader defends the Muslim race by Peter Burrows 1017/23 elburropete@gmail.com 

Last Friday, October 13, I posted in the online newspaper The Grant County Beat a link to my article, “Would the world be better off with no Jews or no Muslims?” This was an update to a 3/8/2022 article and was prompted by the recent Hamas attack on Israel.  

There was only one reader response, an email addressed to both myself and the editor of The Grant County Beat.  If it had been addressed only to myself, I wouldn’t be sharing it. Since it was also addressed to the editor, I assume the writer had no expectation of privacy and in fact may have wanted her letter to be published in the Beat.  (I have deleted her phone number. I doubt she wanted THAT public.)

For reasons that should be obvious, the editor decided not to post the reader’s opinions. I don’t have any such inhibitions and I think a hard-hitting criticism of my work might be enjoyed by many of you. First, you may want to read what so infuriated her:  

https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/1149

Email from Shannon Salcedo, 10/13/23 

“It is the Muslims who are the worst of people and the Jews who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.”  

This was thee most UNHINGED racist article I EVER read in my life, and Peter Burrows and the Editor have embarrassed the entire SW region of NM for having the gall to post this ignorant pile of manure. I would suggest to Mr. Burrows to get our of his dirty-poverty stricken-drug addled-government corrupt-County and meet other people. Sh*t, meet people who practice other religions bc he literally cherry picked a bag of sh*t and developed an article to demonize an entire race of people, and the editor green-lighted it. This Article of Idiocy makes me SOO happy I moved out of Grant County, and left the church, and only visit 3x a year bc these people are dumb and feed on ignorance.  

Mr. Burrows reeks of arrogance, privilege and hate in this article, and fails to realize he is a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. So, let me help fix this terrible headline for Mr. Burrows: 

“It is the Boomers who are the worst of people and the Gen-Z’rs who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.” 

I plan on sharing this article with my 18yo daughter and all of her friends in Denver, just to remind them all how important it is to vote. People like Mr. Burrows are the type who will gladly deny a U.S. Tax Paying Citizen of any civil rights bc he’s white and privileged and has a nice pension. His writings are atrocious.  

Boomers like Mr. Burrows are the greatest threat to democracy and the environment, and his article continues to prove my valid point. “The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin,” – Sen. John McCain and the only difference between Libertarians’ and Republicans is weed. 

To The Editor: If you need content writers, please contact me, I can help you. I’m currently working on —– (Deleted: Two paragraphs of suggested local topics the Beat should have articles about.) 

You don’t need to post racist hate filled articles on your site like this one. There’s tons of material to work with in Grant Co. for a great article. Just talk to the people. That’s what I did when I was in Bayard in late Sept. early Oct. and I have a world of content to write about. You need to put Mr. Burrows terrible content in a place NO ONE can find on your web-page. And keep it there. Sincerely, Shannon Salcedo C: (—) — —-E: shannon.salcedo@yahoo.com  

Here is my email response to Ms. Salcedo and the Beat editor: I would like to thank Shannon Salcedo for a thoughtful, reasoned and fact-filled analysis of my article. I especially wish to thank Salcedo for apparently assuming that Islam is a race. Most people don’t know that, and I think people of the Lutheran race and, especially, people of the Catholic race should take note of that insight. 

Shannon Salcedo then sent another email to myself and the Beat editor, although I don’t think it was a response to my email to her: 

You know, I should’ve calmed down before emailing you about your Article of Ignorance that I had read, but I was SO shocked. I’m used to seeing this kind if trash on Reddit or The Daily Caller. Rush Limbaugh would be proud of you, and he was a disgusting pig. 

Religion is cancer.  

Those who demonize groups of people over a Religion that is not the preferred by “Christians” are worse than a stage 4 colon cancer.  

Your Facebook page is dumpster fire of MAGA-chud talking points: 

1. Demonize minorities (you REALLY don’t like black people, OR Hispanics, Democrat voters, women, etc.)  

2. Climate denier (AZ and NM will run dry in 15yrs, CO river is toast) 

3. Obsessed w MSNBC headlines  

4. No minorities in your “FRIENDS” group. ALL whites. And old.  

You deserve to house and support every drug addicted baby born in Grant County; eat diesel exhaust and drink Bayard water for the rest of your days. My daughter and her generation will tell the next ones of how YOUR generation tried to kill them all w ignorance and greed, all so you could help Big Oil frack your back yard so you can run your a/c when its 150⁰ in June.  
Shannon Salcedo C: (—) — —- E: shannon.salcedo@yahoo.com 

Here is my response, which Ms. Salcedo has not yet answered.   

The religion you are defending commands – commands — the death penalty for gays, adulterers, apostates, and anybody who doesn’t convert to the religion of Islam or refuses to be ruled by the religion of Islam.  It also allows husbands to beat their wives, fathers to kill their children with no penalty, and lots of other sweet stuff like that. 

Are you defending Islam because you think it is a race? Islam is no more race than Christianity is a race, and Islam, like Christianity, has adherents who represent all the races of the world.  

You should learn something about Islam before you defend it. Maybe you could buy a Koran and read it. (I recommend the Mawdudi translation.) If you know HOW to read the Koran it will save you a lot of time.  Here’s a 20-minute guide, Intro to Summary: https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/749 

                                                                              ### 

Would the world be better off with no Jews, or with no Muslims? By Peter Burrows  10/16/23

In the Koran, which is the eternal and infallible word of God, we are told that Jews and Christians are “the worst of creatures.” God then tells us that Muslims are the “best of creatures.” Elsewhere in the Koran, God clarifies that Muslims are not just the best relative to Jews and Christians, but that Muslims are “the best of people ever raised up for mankind.” 

God also tells us that between Jews and Christians, it is the Jews who are “the most hostile” to Muslims while Christians “are closest to feeling affection” for Muslims. Thus, of the two “worst of creatures,” God leaves no doubt that the worst of the worst are the Jews. 

These revelations, some 1400 years ago, came at the beginning of Islam while Judaism had been around for hundreds of years.  The Jews obviously far outnumbered the Muslims then, but Muslims are fierce proselytizers, and in only a decade or two they outnumbered the Jews, who are anything but fierce proselytizers.  Today, the world population of Muslims is about 1.8 billion and the Jews only about 15.2 million, a ratio of over 100 to one.  

The Koran, however, does not say that Muslims were destined to be the MOST people, but that they are, and always will be, the BEST people. Since the Allah of Islam is all-knowing, all-wise, omniscient and omnipotent, surely after 1400 years He has enabled His Muslims to achieve a stunning array of achievements.   

At the very least, we should see these achievements reflected in the number of Nobel Prizes received by Muslims.  The Nobel Prize has been awarded since 1901 for accomplishments in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Economics was added in 1968. These are what I call the objective prizes. The two subjective prizes are for literature and peace.  

Since 1901, 609 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 975 people (prizes are frequently awarded to joint efforts) and Muslims have received – Drum Roll Please – THIRTEEN!! Of those, only three were in the sciences, seven were Peace Prizes, three for literature. None of those were awarded to Saudi Arabians, who have preserved the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for 1400 years and could be considered the best of the best. In fact, not one Saudi has even been nominated for a Nobel.  

How does that compare to the Nobels received by the worst of the worst, the Jews? Wikipedia estimates that Jewish recipients were at least 20 percent of “over 900” recipients, and a Jewish organization estimates the number is “at least” 210. To be conservative, and to simplify the math, let’s assume that the number is 195, or 20 percent of the 975 recipients.  

That would mean that Jews, who are outnumbered by Muslims over one hundred to one, receive 15 times as many Noble Prizes. If my math is correct, that makes Jews FIFTEEN HUNDRED TIMES better than Muslims. If we just count the Nobels won in the sciences since 2000, which doesn’t count literature or peace prizes, the Jews outnumber the Muslims by 52 to one. (Fifty-two hundred times better?)  

Nobel Prizes are only one criterion to judge “best” people. Music, for example, is an area where the Jewish contribution to America, and the world, is endless, from Gershwin to Billy Joel to Itzhak Perlman. Very few know that both “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” were written by a Jew, Russian-born Israel Isidore Beilin, aka Irving Berlin.  Since Muhammad declared music to be sinful, the Muslim contribution to music has been zero.  

On the other side of the coin, how do the two religions compare in crimes against humanity as opposed to contributions to humanity? Here, there is no question that Muslims are far ahead of Jews. No group of people have been more murderous than the followers of Islam. While it is true that the followers of Karl Marx have caused an impressive amount of mayhem, they were not fellow Jews. The Torah and the Talmud do not command Jews to forever wage war against unbelievers, as the Koran does for Muslims.  

I use the word “forever” even though the Muslim holy war, jihad, will cease when Muslims make Islam “prevail over all religions, howsoever those who associate others with Allah in His Divinity might detest it.”  After 1400 years, Muslims are still only about 23 percent of the world’s population, so they continue to soldier on. Last month, September of 2023, there were 104 attacks in 22 countries that killed 550 and injured 482. Six of those attacks were suicide bombings.

Those numbers are from thereligionofpeace.com and I shudder to think what the final October numbers will be.

Since the spectacular jihad attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, there have been over 41,000 such attacks. Last year, 2022, “there were 1993 Islamic attacks in 52 countries, in which 9002 people were killed and 6715 injured..”  I couldn’t find the totals since 9/11/2001 on The Religion of Peace website, but those numbers would just reinforce the overwhelming evidence that the only thing Muslims are good at is killing innocent people.  

So, let us return to the question: would the world be better off with no Jews or no Muslims? I think the evidence is overwhelming that the Koran got it exactly backwards. It is the Muslims who are the worst of people and the Jews who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.  

p.s. A note on my personal bias. When I was a kid, I wanted to play the clarinet like Benny Goodman and had a crush on opera star Roberta Peters, both Jews.  Seventy years later, I still want to play like Benny but I’ve ditched Roberta in favor of Julie Budd. She’s Jewish, too. 

Sources:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_Nobel_laureates

https://www.newsweek.com/imams-called-death-jews-trump-jerusalem-announcement-776941

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-nobel-prize-laureates

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=2022

Toward Understanding the Qur’an, Sayyid Mawdudi translation, verses 98:6, 98:7, 3:110, 5:82, 9:33. 

Reliance of the Traveller, f40.0, Music, Song, and Dance, pgs. 774-776 

Note to readers: Amazon had this as the top critical review until December 1, when it was removed. There had been six who had found it “helpful.” I can only speculate as to why it was removed, but, regardless, it is censorship.

Book review: “A Concise Guide to the Quran – Answering Thirty Critical Questions,” by Ayman S. Ibrahim, 2020, 176 pgs. $19 Amazon. Reviewed by Peter Burrows 10/4/2023 

Ibrahim was born in Egypt and raised in a Coptic Christian family. He grew up surrounded by Muslims in a society steeped in Islam.  His public schooling had heavy doses of Islamic history, Arabic and Quranic scripture.  He has two PhDs in Islamic Studies, one from Fuller Theological Seminary (USA) and the other from University of Haifa (Israel) He is Professor of Islamic Studies and director of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Bottom line: Professor Ibrahim is very knowledgeable, which makes him extremely dangerous because he teaches that Islam can be reformed into a nonmilitant, nonthreatening religion — and he is wrong! 

Initially, I thought this was probably a matter of economic necessity.  After all, I doubt there is a professor of religious studies in North America who is allowed to teach the truth about Islam. (I hope somebody proves me wrong. Hillsdale?) But then, on page 116, he reveals a distressing and dangerous misunderstanding of Islam: 

“In the spring of 2018, I led a group of American students on a teaching trip to Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn has the largest Muslim population in the United States. Many of my American students had never entered a mosque, so I decided to take them to a mosque in the city. I also wanted them to hear about Islam from a Muslim. I hoped to break their fear of the unknown, in this case, Islam and Muslims.” 

Two things are wrong here: (1) A proper understanding of Islam should INSTILL a fear of Islam and Muslims; (2) Learning about Islam from a Muslim, especially an imam, is the worst way to learn about Islam.  

I can only conclude that Professor Ibrahim either has huge holes in his knowledge about Islam, or else he is simply incapable of seeing the truth about Islam, for whatever reason. Islamic law, Sharia, dictates that Muslims must wage war, jihad, against unbelievers until the world is ruled by Islam. If it requires lying to the non-believers in order to achieve this goal, lying is obligatory. No Muslim can question this. 

Under penalty of apostasy, for which the divine punishment is death, no Muslim can befriend a non- Muslim. The fact that Dr Ibrahim has a dear childhood friend who is a Muslim only proves that this particular Muslim is probably a decent person. Probably. The fact that the Muslim friend hasn’t been killed for his friendship with a Christian could conceivably be because he has persuaded his would-be Muslim assassins that he is engaged in deceiving Dr Ibrahim and for proof, just look at what Ibrahim writes and teaches about Islam!   

Islamic law, sharia, is almost completely ignored by Ibrahim. He mentions sharia twice in the body of the text, and then only in passing, and once in the glossary. Sharia rules Islam and sharia dictates that any Muslim who has an opinion about anything in the Quran that differs from traditional scholarly opinion is an apostate, and apostates “deserve to die.” (Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manuel of Islamic Sacred Law, pg. 596)  

In addition, Muhammad warned: “Whoever speaks of the Book of Allah (the Koran) from his own opinion is in error” (Reliance of the Traveller, pg. 751.), and the Koran Verse 33:36 tells Muslims, “ it is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and his messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their decision.” (Khan – Al-Hilali translation.)   

Therefore, it is delusional to contend, as Ibrahim repeatedly does, that individual Muslims can have opinions that differ from sharia and that these opinions can lead to fundamental changes in Islam. He refers to such Muslims as “modern,” “progressive,” “liberal,” and that these Muslims can “legitimately” practice their own versions of Islam.  Such Muslims are either apostates or propagandists engaged in deceiving gullible infidels. 

He writes, “— one should be thankful for the modernist Muslim thinkers of recent years, especially in the west. They swim against the tide in opposing traditional Muslim claims. Their interpretation seeks to advance values of mutual respect, peacebuilding and religious freedom between Muslims and non-Muslims. They read Quranic statements about fighting non-Muslims, jihad, and violence as merely remnants of the past. They believe these statements are descriptive not prescriptive.” 

Precisely what we “should be thankful for” escapes me since the only thing these so-called Muslims have accomplished is to promote the deception that Islam is in fact peaceful or that Islam can be changed. Islam cannot be changed; it must be rejected. What these people are describing is not the religion of Islam. Perhaps some of them, such as Zuhdi Jasser, are sincere, but most are knowingly deceiving non-Muslims into accepting the cancer of Islam into their societies. 

In a couple of areas, Ibrahim’s scholarship appears to be severely lacking. He contends, for example, that the Satanic Verses were abrogated when they were eliminated. There’s a big difference between eliminating a verse in the Quran because it was not a revelation from Allah and abrogating it because Allah had a “better” revelation at a later date.  

He also seems to think that the doctrine of abrogation is debatable, which it isn’t. The Reliance of the Traveller on page 626 has as a requirement for being an Islamic judge a knowledge of both abrogated and abrogating verses. On page 752 the layman is warned not to interpret the Koran without such knowledge. 

To question, deny or ignore abrogation is a standard tactic of those who defend Islam. At least twice, Ibrahim cites abrogated verses without mentioning they are abrogated and therefore invalid, which is inexcusable. (2:190 which authorizes jihad only in self-defense, abrogated by 9:36 or 9:5; and 29:46, which says use only peaceful persuasion with People of the Scripture, abrogated by 9:29 which says to strive against them until they are “utterly subdued.”)   

He even claims some Muslims think that Chapter 9 may not belong in the Quran because it lacks the introduction that other chapters have. I have never read of such a doubt.  Chapter 9 is the penultimate and most militaristic chapter in the Quran, and for a Muslim to assert it may not belong in the Quran is apostasy on steroids.  

An especially distressing example of poor scholarship is his description on page 91 of verse 9:30: “The Jews say, Uzayr is the son of Allah, while Christians say, the Christ is the son of Allah —.” Ibrahim then writes: “Of course, no one knows who this Uzayr is.”   

When I read this I said to myself, “Which version of the Quran has this guy actually read?” One of the Qurans he mentions is the Khan-Hilal translation, a 1990’s translation published in Saudi Arabia, in which verse 9:30 reads, “And the Jews say: Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah —.” Another translation he mentions is the 1930 Pickthall translation in which 9:30 simply reads: “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah–” 

One translation he doesn’t mention is my personal favorite, “Towards Understanding the Quran,’ a translation completed in 1973 by the Pakistani scholar Sayyid Mawdudi. In it, 9:30 reads: “The Jews say Ezra (‘Uzayr) is Allah’s son —.” Of my four Qurans, only the 1934 Yusif Ali translation fails to identify “Uzair” as the Jewish prophet Ezra – who was NEVER worshipped as a son of God by the Jews, another proof that the all-knowing “Allah” needed an editor. 

In spite of these puzzling gaps in the author’s knowledge, there are some parts of the book which are outstanding. I give Five stars to Part 1 in which he effectively refutes the standard Islamic narrative concerning the history of the Quran. He ends this section by writing, “Without a doubt, the traditional Muslim claims about an unchanged and unchanging Quran will eventually come back to hurt the Muslim cause.”  

Unfortunately, he doesn’t reach the same conclusion when answering his question number 26: “What does the Quran say about Jihad and fighting?” While he concedes the Quran ordains fighting, he dismisses the importance of this by claiming it’s only the literalists, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, who act on those verses: “But Muslims are not all the same. How do Muslims usually treat versus like these related to fighting non-Muslims?” 

How Muslims “usually” treat the militant verses in the Quran is irrelevant. They have a religious obligation to obey those verses and in Muslim-ruled nations this is unquestioned. The only reason those nations are not in open warfare with non-Muslim nations is because they know they couldn’t win such a war — yet. 

There’s much more I could criticize in detail, e.g., his attempt to deflect the reality of jihad by noting it can also mean an internal struggle for salvation, which is true but hardly relevant, or his contention that Muslims who advocate following only the Quran, “People of the Quran,” offer a glimmer of hope, as though the Quran isn’t bad enough.    

Bottom line: this is not a concise guide to the Quran but more a concise guide to wishful thinking about Islam. For a truly concise guide to the Koran and Islam as it really is, spend 20 minutes or so, Introduction to Conclusion (Appendices extra): https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/749 

Walmart:  Marxist Icon by Peter Burrows 7/19/23  elburropete@gmail.com  

When I was in college, over half a century ago, I took a course on Marxism.  I wasn’t trying to fire up any anti-capitalistic fervor, I just wanted to learn something about an economic philosophy that ruled so much of the world at the time, or at least was the pretense for ruling so much of the world.  

I say ‘pretense’ because Marxism has never made any economic sense. It’s a utopian vision utterly at odds with human nature. In brief, Marx thought that capitalism would so skew wealth and income toward the owners of capital that the working class, the proletariat, would eventually break the chains of their “enslavement” and expropriate the means of production, converting it all property to common ownership, making it public property.  

Freed from the exploitation of the capitalist class, there would “inevitably” be “an enormous development of the productive forces of human society.” Eventually, this would allow the goodness of human nature to prevail, pettiness would disappear and there would be an “inevitable” withering away of the state, which would completely disappear when society lived by the rule: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. 

www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm 

Not only does this assume that mankind is basically good, for which the evidence is decidedly mixed, but that mankind is overwhelmingly altruistic, for which there is absolutely no evidence. This means the “withering away” of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” might take quite a while, like forever.  

Marxism has thus become the means for a dictatorship OVER the proletariat, it’s only possible outcome. Indeed, most see Marx’s utopian ideal as an impossible dream. 

Or is it? 

Some years ago, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States began to thaw, and the two nations entered a period of detente, with all sorts of people-to-people exchanges, smiley faces, bear hugs and whatnot.  I particularly remember watching a show, probably on PBS, in which a group of visiting Russian businessmen, as such they had in those days, was being given a tour through an American supermarket. 

One of the visiting Russians pointed to some cans on a shelf and through his translator asked, “Why are there so many different kinds of beans?”   The tour guide, obviously chosen for abilities other than economic insight, became quite flustered and picked up a can and said something to the effect, “Well, it’s because this kind of bean goes well with that kind of bean.“  Oh, my. 

Think about it.  The supermarket owner has a finite amount of shelf space.  To use this space most efficiently, the owner wants to maximize his sales per square foot, or cubic foot, whatever.  Why would the owner put a particular brand of bean on the shelf?  Because people BUY it. If they don’t buy it, it is soon replaced by a different brand. 

There are brands of similar, but not identical products, throughout a supermarket.  There may be ten kinds of toothpaste, six kinds of bread, five kinds of frozen pizza, and on and on and on. The modern American supermarket is a cornucopia of wonderful things, things unimaginable to my grandmother.  (It’s rumored that when former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin first walked into an American supermarket, he looked at the vast sea of products and wept.) 

To the Russian visitors, it didn’t make sense to have so many different brands when having one, maybe two, was so much more efficient, so much easier to stock.  What the Russians didn’t realize was that the store wasn’t being run for the convenience of the managers.  In competitive markets, stores succeed or fail depending on how well they “convenience” the customers. 

Indirectly, IT’S THE CUSTOMERS WHO RUN THE STORE! 

If I had been running the tour, I would have put my arm around the Russian and pointed to the nearest lady pushing a shopping cart and said: “See her, comrade? In Russia, you would call her a member of the proletariat. Now, if that proletarian lady doesn’t like the selection in this store, if she doesn’t like the prices, if she doesn’t like how she’s treated, if she doesn’t like the parking, or if she doesn’t like the ladies room, she will take her business elsewhere. She will fire us. 

“Multiple her by ten thousand and this store will close, we will all be looking for jobs.  The ten thousand customers won’t have a meeting at the soccer stadium and put it to a vote. They won’t have to go to that much trouble. They just won’t come here anymore. They will fire us without lifting a finger. 

“You know why they can fire us? Because they are free to shop where they like. We can’t tell them where to shop.  They tell us because THEY run things. Welcome to the dictatorship of the proletariat, comrade.” 

The next time you’re at a Walmart, take a look around.  There are thousands of products.  Walmart is constantly bringing in new products, changing prices, doing seasonal displays, putting stuff on sale, and on and on. It’s the world’s largest private employer.  They got that way because they bust their butts trying to keep the proletariat, aka the customers, happy. 

The irony is that neither Cuba nor North Korea, two of the last of the “Peoples’ Republics,” has a single store like your local Walmart.  If they did, you can bet the proletariat wouldn’t be allowed in. That store would be for the exclusive use of the ruling class.  Hey, around here you and I are the ruling class. Just ask Walmart. 

Or, for that matter, ask Anheuser-Busch how their sales of Bud Lite have been doing lately. 

Why aren’t oceanfront properties plummeting in price? Zillow’s White House crony, that’s why – by Peter Burrows 7/10/23 elburropete@gmail.com – http://www.silvercityburro.com 

For forty years we’ve been hearing dire warnings about how Global Warming (always capitalize a religion) is going to wreak havoc with humanity and cause exponential increases in droughts, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, crop failures, snowstorms, UFO sightings, and climate refugees — who will number in the tens of millions. (OK, I made up that bit about UFOs.) 

A key part of the Global Warming apocalypse is that the melting poles are causing sea levels to rapidly rise. New York City, Washington, D.C., Florida and many other coastal areas around the world will soon disappear beneath the waves. That part about Florida caught my attention a few years ago. It was right after I had had a medical procedure that mostly old guys experience and it was an epiphany of sorts: Soon, I will be no more. 

Coming to grips with this existential fact, I realized that I wanted to spend my last days somewhere warm, both because where I live now is too damn cold and also to get a little acclimated to my probable hereafter. Why not, I thought, move to Florida, find a spot that still has a little beach left, then just lie down and float away, another casualty of Global Warming. Beats a hell of a lot of alternatives I can think of.  As an added bonus, I wouldn’t need to spend much on a place to live, maybe nothing at all. Must be lots of abandoned beach homes down there as people flee the ever-encroaching, unforgiving waves. 

With that in mind, I googled online realtor Zillow and looked for properties in my number one Florida-fantasy destination: Key Largo.  Bogie and Bacall, don’t cha’ know.  Well, was I in for a shock!  Those damn fools down there apparently hadn’t heard of Global Warming because not only were they not abandoning their homes. they were asking MORE for their properties than they had paid for them! A LOT more! 

A place I really liked, right on the ocean with a sea-wall, was listed for $5.6 million. The owner had paid $2.4 million back in 1996, fully eight years after NASA’s James Hansen famously warned Congress about Global Warming. 

Some people just don’t get it! 

I mentioned this to my favorite Liberal, and she said anybody buying those Florida properties would be damned sorry, or something to that effect.  I could tell by the look on her face that she had no sympathy for such fools. (I wrote about all this an article, “Global Warming, where is thy sting?” You can find it at http://www.silvercityburro.com, 4/18/15.) 

Well, here it is eight years later and Global Warming, now called Climate Change (genuflect), has become a terrifying reality, so much so that the head of the United Nations recently made a not too subtle call for a stop to the use of all fossil fuels — NOW — to save humanity:  

“António Guterres lashed out at the fossil fuels industry following a meeting with civil society groups, the Associated Press reported. The industry, he said, is “trading the future” for money. Guterres urged them to move “away from a product incompatible with human survival. The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions… It’s fossil fuels – period,” he said.” 

Al Gore, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize back in 2007 with the UN in the wake of his climate crisis documentary, “An inconvenient Truth,” has also been hyperventilating about the dangers we are now facing. At the Davos Forum last January, he cited the increase in greenhouse gases: 

” That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.” 

Boiling the oceans!! OMG! You can be sure that caught my attention. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t moved to Florida back in 2015. I mean, I can think of better ways to go than being boiled. 

This is all very depressing, so in an effort to cheer myself up, I went back to Zillow to see just how big a drop in property values those beachfront-buying fools have suffered since 2015. A little schadenfreude. (I can be so petty.) Naturally, I started with Key Largo and — GASP!– doing your laundry in the boiling oceans down there in Key Largo is going to cost you mega bucks, a lot MORE than in 2015!  Here’s a couple of examples, but I urge you to do your own shopping. Very interesting! 

There was a two-story, maybe three story, at 48 S Andros Rd: 4 bd 4 ba, 3,024 sq ft for $3.5 million. Built in 1969, it sold in 2021, a mere two years ago, for $2 million.   

There is a much more modest place at 113 1st Ct,: 2 bd 2, ba, 800 sqft for $750,000. Built in 1964, it sold in 2019 for $334,000. (Zillow’s estimated value is $695k, which would mean in the last four years the value “only” doubled.)   

It was the same story wherever I looked in Florida: A modest little bit of new construction at 104 Ladoga Ave. In Tampa just listed for $12 million (6 bd, 8 ba 7,416 sq ft.) Zillow thinks it’s worth “only” $11,469,300. Mind you, this is a SPEC house. If that is a little high for you, there’s a nice condo at 5701 Mariner St in Tampa, unit 502, only $499,999 (2 bd 2 ba 1,424 sq ft) The complex was built in 1975, and this particular unit sold for $130,000 in 1998 and $189,000 in 2000.

If Miami is more to your liking, you will find the real estate market is just as insane. I saw an island property at 1384 S Venetian Way for only $12,900,000 and I think it was a man-made island. There’s just not enough beachfront property in the Miami area, so they have to make more, e.g., The Venetian Islands.  

Thinking maybe it’s just Florida that’s whacky, I looked to that model of sanity, California, only to find a new home on the beach at 24186 Case Cty. Malibu, with an asking price of $69,995,000 (5 bd/10 ba 10,527 sq ft.) This is another home built on speculation, and I have to think anybody putting this much money in a spec house must know the market pretty damn well. (Don’t you admire the seller’s clever price listing at just below $70 million.  Makes it look a lot cheaper. Right.)     

I looked elsewhere around the world for signs of waterfront sanity. No luck. I saw a sweet little number on the French Riviera for $27 million, nice view of the Med. In Tahiti, an “on the lagoon” property built in 1995 was asking $1.7 million. In Hawaii, there was a beach condo at 280 Hayoli St. (#B17,1 bd/1 ba 555 sq ft) asking only $375,000. Built in 1972 before Climate Change was a threat. It was sold in 2021 for $200,000. Maybe the buyer didn’t know about the rising oceans back then and is now trying to find another climate dummy to unload it on – for an 85 percent profit on a two-year investment.  Nice work if you can get it. 

Bottom line, I guess I’ll have to come to grips with the reality that I will not live long enough to enjoy the inevitable price collapse in Florida beach properties.  And, I know who is to blame: Barrack Hussein Obama. Some of you are thinking, “Are you off your meds again, Burro?” 

Not at all. I very clearly remember what Obama said in his victory speech in November of 2008, and I should have believed him. He said his election “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.”  And, folks, Obama puts his money where his mouth is: In 2019, the Obamas paid $11.7 million for an ocean-level estate on Martha’s Vineyard; and when it gets chilly in Massachusetts, they fly out to their $8.7 million beachfront villa on Oahu, purchased in 2015. 

That’s over $20 million of his own money. On the beach. The media doesn’t report on that, do they? They also didn’t report what Obama said right after his slow the rising oceans comment, and I sure wish they would have. It would have saved me a lot of trouble:  

“Verily, Florida realtors will continue to prosper and old wannabe-beach-bum climate-deniers will wait in vain.” 

It’s only Cosmic Justice, folks. After all, I didn’t vote for him. 

China’s climate con: full steam ahead – COAL-generated steam, that is by Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com        6/30/23                                           

There was an article in The Guardian last April that typifies the reporting, or rather non-reporting, about China’s use of coal: “China-ramps-up-coal-power-despite-carbon-neutral-pledges — local governments approved more coal power in the first three months of 2023 than all of 2021.”  

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/china-ramps-up-coal-power-despite-carbon-neutral-pledges

The article bends over backwards to avoid criticizing China, noting that in 2020 China’s Xi Jlnping had pledged that China would be carbon neutral by 2060, as if a goal that far out was meaningful given the climate change “crisis.”  Furthermore, burning more coal is OK for China because as the last sentence informs us, “last year Xi said that coal will remain a mainstay of China’s energy mix that ‘would be hard to change in the short term.’” 

Nowhere in the article do we learn that China and GE have teamed up and have spent a lot of time and money designing more efficient coal burning generation plants.  Sounds like long-term planning to me, given new plants will have an operating life of at least 50 years. 

papundits.wordpress.com/2021/05/29/coal-fired-power-dying-not-so-fast-part-one-introduction/ 

Also, nowhere in the article does it mention that new coal-fired generation plants are going up all over the world, by the hundreds. Add in China, which has 2,363 coal-fired power plants and is building 1,171 more, and it’s by the thousands. 

papundits.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/michael-mann-you-cannot-be-serious/ 

Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that China’s coal consumption continues to grow rapidly. A few years ago, they were burning less than 4 billion metric tons a year and now they’re up to five billion metric tons. They burn more coal than the rest of the world combined, and their CO2 emissions are greater than the rest of the developed world combined. 

energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-trends-june-snapshot/ 

www.iea.org/reports/coal-information-overview/consumption 

rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-countries/#:~:text=China%20alone%20contributed%20over%2027,at%206.6%25%20of%20global%20emissions. 

Speaking of the rest of the world, see if you can detect any cut in CO2 emissions that resulted from the Kyoto Protocol treaty of 1992, or the Paris Agreement of 2015. (The Keeling Curve) 

https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/

The bottom line is that unless China reduces its CO2 emissions there is no chance that atmospheric CO2 levels will decrease. Add in India, where coal consumption is expected to increase by over 500 million metric tons in the next few years, and the CO2 Crusade is obviously a fool’s errand.  

Anyone brave enough to take the Chinese to task about this will be confronted with the argument that China’s CO2 PER CAPITA emissions are only half those of the US. When/if China’s emissions per capita equal that of the US, they will then say that what really counts is the CUMULATIVE amount of CO2 for capita put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Sigh. 

In addition, anybody who would criticize the Chinese about their CO2 emissions can count on being called a horrid-dirty bastard-racist-Gweilo-imperialist-oppressor, a charge that would have our “Climate Czar,” John Kerry, on his knees tearfully begging forgiveness.   

There are three reasons why China will be impervious to any criticism about their CO2 emissions: 

1. Even if the threat of CO2/Global warming is real, there are millions of Chinese who don’t have enough electricity to plug in a microwave oven, let alone a flat screen TV or an electric vehicle. These people need electricity, and the cheapest way to get them electricity is to build coal-fired plants.  If you think those people give a damn if Manhattan is under five feet of water, then I have a bridge to sell you, happens to be near to the soon-to-be-submerged Manhattan.  

2. Even if the threat of CO2/Global warming is real, renewable energy sources will do nothing to solve the problem and will only ruin the economies that try to substitute them for reliable, year around, 24/7, sources. China is only too happy to help the Western nations destroy their economies. This will make China’s manufacturing the cheapest and most dominant in the world, and of course, that means their military will also be the most dominant in the world. China is building coal plants and tearing down mosques, and we’re doing just the opposite. This is not going to end well for us unless we change our ways. Don’t expect China to change its ways.  

3. The Chinese do not accept the “science” that CO2 drives climate change. I detailed why in an article I wrote two years ago, “China’s Climate Con, Part 2”, reprinted below.  (Anybody interested can read part one at: https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/863) 

China’s Climate Con, Part 2 – 6/17/21 

Why is China building military bases on coral reefs in the South China Sea? Don’t they know that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is going to inundate entire island nations, not just coral reefs?  Are they crazy?   

They probably didn’t see this 2011 article from Scientific American that details a grim sea-rise scenario, which today reads more like a Grimm scenario, as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales:   

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-nations-most-risk-climate-change/

That same year, a special edition of the Chinese Science Bulletin (October 2011) had eight articles about a climate project begun in 2009: “Research on tree-ring and millennium climate change in China.” The introductory editorial noted that “research on global climate change has been at the frontier of contemporary sciences.” That, and “whether the greenhouse effect produced by human activities is a major factor responsible for modern global warming.”     

The most important conclusions of the Chinese study were: (1) that temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (950 AD to 1250 AD) were “comparable to those in the current warm period over China,” and (2) that “the effect of solar activity on climate cannot be neglected in any period of the millennium.”  

Both conclusions were at odds with the idea that carbon dioxide, CO2, is the driving force behind climate change. Most importantly, the Chinese not only confirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period, MWP, they determined that temperatures in that 300-year period a millennium ago were as warm as today’s.   

The importance of this cannot be overstated. Since the MWP was not caused by increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, perhaps the same is true today. Thus, both the political establishment and the scientific establishment are desperate to eliminate the MWP. It reminds me of the old Soviet Union rewriting history by air-brushing out-of-favor people from official photos. Goodby Trotsky.  

The poster-child of the effort to eliminate the MWP is climatologist Michael Mann. In 1999 Mann published a study of the climate history of the Northern Hemisphere over the last 1000 years.  That study was both a political and scientific sensation because it purported to show that the MWP — drum roll, please —NEVER EXISTED!!  

Mann became an instant celebrity. His graph of temperature changes since 1000 AD was reproduced five times in the UN’s 2001 report on global warming.  This was the now-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, that showed flat temperatures for 900 years and then a sharp upward trend in the last 100 years or so, thus resembling a hockey stick.   

If you are unfamiliar with the ongoing controversy surrounding Mann’s research, you can Google up thousands of pages of material in only a minute or so.  After over 20 years, the fact that the ‘hockey stick’ is still controversial is proof of a hopelessly politicized scientific establishment, at least in the U.S.      

Not in China, however. The 2009 tree-ring study was only one of many that disputes the general CO2 hypothesis. A study detailed in Chinese Science Bulletin 58 in 2013 showed that sediment cores from two lakes on the Tibetan Plateau “clearly identified” the MWP and the Little Ice Age of AD 1350- 1850, which had also failed to show up in Mann’s ‘hockey stick.’   

Chinese Science Bulletin 59 published in 2014 detailed the results of studies on giant clam shells collected from the South China Sea that showed sea surface temperatures in AD 990 and AD 50 averaged .8C to 1.4C degrees HIGHER than sea surface temperatures in 1994 – 2005. The researchers said their “well-calibrated high resolution” findings “did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years.”  

The IPCC is the UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” and is essentially a political body tasked with proving that CO2 is causing global warming. Chinese research does not support that hypothesis, and while there is plenty of other research that also questions the CO2-climate connection, China’s is the most unassailable.    

This is because, rightly or wrongly, research done by a government has instant credibility with leftists, and leftists dominate climate science.  Also, China has no financial interest in promoting the use of fossil fuels. In fact, China is a heavy importer of coal and petroleum and can’t be accused of being paid off by the Koch brothers, or some such nonsense.  

Thus, there has been little or no criticism of China’s climate research in the leftist-dominated media. There hasn’t been any publicizing of it either, which is a disgrace. The politicization of Western science means that the Chinese are only a generation or two from world domination.  Maybe India and Japan can hold them at bay, but certainly not any nation that teaches “white math.”    

China won’t be burdened with such stupidity. Chinese science has persuaded Chinese leaders, most of whom have technical educations, that the Western CO2 climate-change hype is, in a word, bullshit. Hence, the coral reef build-outs, the continued push to build new coal-fired generating plants, both domestically and abroad, and lip-service only climate diplomacy.   

If you think they are making us look like fools, you’re wrong: We ARE fools.   

Sources:   

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N3/C3.php  

notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/evidence-of-mwp-in-china/ 

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N34/C2.php  

www.skeptical-science.com/science/the-medieval-warm-period-myth/  

judithcurry.com/2021/06/09/death-spiral-of-american-academia/ 

gineersnow.com/leadership/chinese-government-dominated-scientists-engineers