Beating a Dead Camel

I know, I know I am beating a dead camel about where Barack Obama was born. But I was recently curious about whether Stanley Dunham, Barack’s mother, had ever traveled to Kenya. In this search I came across the following interesting article that makes a compelling case that she had been there and that this is where our 44th President was born ... revealing things that I had never before seen. If you can open your mind dear reader, peruse it, you might be enlightened: Israel National News.

The assertions therein, combined with the fact that his college applications have never been made public, his curious Social Security number ... together with the above sales sheet for his book “Dreams from My Father” certainly make an interesting case that Obama’s handlers did a very professional job obfuscating this Constitutional-relevant fact.

This possible revelation obviously makes no political difference now that Obama is out of office. But, to me, the need to inform history supersedes the razzle dazzle that America has been subjected to during Obama’s presidential campaigns. Facts eventually persist ... no matter the level of pooh-poohing or partisan blowback. Maybe, this revelation won’t be generally accepted for fifty years ... but  the truth will out whatever it really is. Maybe even our Constitution will be amended to remove this birthplace structure in retrospect.

Dreams

I just ran across a 56-minute video of Barack Obama discussing his book, "Dreams from My Father," at the Cambridge Public Library in September of 1995 ... see: Video. Please watch it ... it is a worthy hour investment. This reference also contains a video of a discussion of this Obama lecture as it relates to Frank Marshall Davis being a father figure for Obama (the first video). I recommend that you watch the second video first and then, if interested, go back and watch the first one second to see if you can agree with its observations.

But it is the second video that is most important in my mind as it gave me a few insights into this man's being ... a man who has been at the helm of our country for the last seven years. Here are a few of my thoughts that I derived from his lecture:

- I now believe that Obama did in fact write this book ... as opposed to the rumor that it was ghost written. He may have had lots of editorial assistance ... but it was clearly an Obama original.

- Obama was then an older student at Harvard Law School ... after he had been a community organizer in Chicago and traveled to Africa. Perhaps this added to his gravitas and helped propel him to edit the Harvard Law Review without the usual requisite law writings.

- I also now believe that Obama is brighter and more articulate than I have given him credit for in the past ... not as articulate as those who lade his Teleprompter, but certainly glib and perspicacious.

- It also seems obvious that Obama is a complex and layered personality ... much more layered and hidden today than he was back in 1995 ... possibly a product of the many handlers that have shaped his political career during the ensuing 20 years.

- To me it is also obvious that race has been the idee fixe in most of Obama's political decisions during his presidency ... driven by the kind of incidents to which he relates in the book passage he reads in this lecture. This obsession seems the basis of many of Obama's poor presidential decisions.

- At one point in the video Q and A, Obama makes the point that white America today lives in a mainly black culture. I concur, but feel forced to add that, up until about 1960, the opposite was true. It was the final liberation of American blacks that more balanced justice  ... but also flipped our culture ... not always for the betterment of our society

Three Ideas

Here are a few ideas I have that I would love to have adopted ... or have the time, money and energy to implement:

How to eradicate the Asian jumping carp – It would seem that the fact that these junk fish leap out of the water when disturbed by the vibrations from an outboard motor is their vulnerability.  They are mostly located in Midwest rivers but are feared to be moving into the Great Lakes (see: CBS News Story).  Before they do in mass, I would think that flotillas of outboard-motor boats with large expanses of above-water outrigger nets could traverse back and forth through their habitats … catching them therein … to be dispatched and converted in a nearby fish fertilizer plant. I don’t believe that it would take more than a few months of such harvesting to totally cleanse a given area … and the resulting fish fertilizer can be sold to offset part of the cost of this cleanup.

How to discover who wrote President Obama’s two books – Bill Ayers has just released a book titled, Public Enemy, Confessions of an American Dissident.  It is widely suspected that Ayers was the ghost writer of Barack Obama’s two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.  One need then just get an electronic copy of Bill Ayers’ book and the same for Obama’s two books.  Then one can apply a sophisticated authorship analysis program (see: SSRN Paper) to test the text of these books for similarities.  This can provide a measure of confidence as to whether any of these books have a common author.  This could be very revealing.

How better to calibrate salt in recipes – Cookbooks very often call for a pinch of salt (or other spices). This is a very imprecise measure.  I propose that this instruction be modified by the terms: two-finger pinch ..., three-finger pinch ..., etc.  A five-finger pinch might approximate a half a teaspoon whereas a two-finger pinch is just a smidgen.

Wagging the Dog

(From a wag on local talk radio yesterday.)  "Mitt Romney put his dog on the roof of his car ... Barack Obama put his dog on the roof of his mouth."

"With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."   quoted from Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama