The
107-country Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967 prohibits nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons from being placed or used from Earth’s
orbit. What they didn’t count on was the U.S. Air Force’s most simple
weapon ever: a tungsten rod that could hit a city with the explosive
power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. used what they called “Lazy Dog”
bombs. These were simply solid steel pieces, less than two inches long,
fitted with fins. There was no explosive – they were simply dropped by
the hundreds from planes flying above Vietnam.
Lazy Dog projectiles (aka
“kinetic bombardment”) could reach speeds of up to 500 mph as they fell
to the ground and could penetrate nine inches of concrete after being
dropped from as little as 3,000 feet
The idea is like shooting bullets at a target, except instead of
losing velocity as it travels, the projectile is gaining velocity and
energy that will be expended on impact. They were shotgunning a large
swath of jungle, raining bullet-sized death at high speeds.
That’s how Project Thor came to be.
Instead of hundreds of small projectiles from a few thousand feet,
Thor used a large projectile from a few thousand miles above the Earth.
The “rods from god”
idea was a bundle of telephone-pole sized (20 feet long, one foot in
diameter) tungsten rods, dropped from orbit, reaching a speed of up to
ten times the speed of sound.
The rod itself would penetrate hundreds of feet into the Earth,
destroying any potential hardened bunkers or secret underground sites.
More than that, when the rod hits, the explosion would be on par with
the magnitude of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon – but with no fallout.
It would take 15 minutes to destroy a target with such a weapon.
One Quora user who works in the defense aerospace industry
quoted a cost of no less than $10,000 per pound to fire anything into
space. With 20 cubic feet of dense tungsten weighing in at just over
24,000 pounds, the math is easy. Just one of the rods would be
prohibitively expensive. The cost of $230 million dollars per rod was
unimaginable during the Cold War.
Like lawn darts, but with global repercussions.
These days, not so much. The Bush Administration even considered revisiting the idea
to hit underground nuclear sites in rogue nations in the years
following 9/11. Interestingly enough, the cost of a single Minuteman III
ICBM was $7 million in 1962, when it was first introduced ($57 million
adjusted for inflation).
The trouble with a nuclear payload is that it isn’t designed to
penetrate deep into the surface. And the fallout from a nuclear device
can be devastating to surrounding, potentially friendly areas.
“Someone dropped a penny from the Empire State Building again.”
A core takeaway from the concept of weapons like Project Thor’s is
that hypersonic weapons pack a significant punch and might be the future
of global warfare.
School
District 51 Board of Education members voted unanimously Tuesday to add
a $26 million premium to the $118.5 million bond measure that voters
approved this month to fund a new middle school, district-wide repairs
and technology upgrades.
Chief Operations Officer Phil Onofrio told board members that market buyers would not accept a bond at face value.
"The
market will not accept non-premium bonds at this point, because
premiums give bond buyers protection against increases in interest
rates," Onofrio said.
Onofrio said at minimum, the board must authorize $17 million in premiums in order to sell the bonds.
But
by issuing the maximum premium and in addition to accrued interest, it
would bring the bond total up to $150 million while still staying in the
parameters of the ballot language, Onofrio said.
Board members also unanimously voted to use the additional $26 million to first pay off the debt on R-5 High School.
The
premium will impact property taxes by about $3 a year, Onofrio said,
bringing the average annual cost of both the bond measure and mill levy
override on a $200,000 home to $113. The school district initially
estimated both measures would cost the owner of a $200,000 home $118 per
year.
Board members said they wanted to include the community on how to spend any remaining bond money.
"I
think the hard work about this bond and mill is just starting and I
think we have to be very deliberate and very open about what we're going
to spend this money on and why," said Board President John Williams.
"We need to walk forward pretty deliberately and openly about what we're
doing if we don't want to have to wait 20 more years to build another
school."
Board member Tom
Parrish said the board must be concrete and deliberate about how it
spends any bond money above the items listed in the ballot measure.
"I
think at some point because of the additional revenue that is coming
out of this we have to look to the community to ask what should we do
with it," Parrish said.
Board
members brought up ideas including a new elementary school in Fruita,
all-day kindergarten and replacing Grand Junction High School.
Board member Doug Levinson echoed the need to involve the community in any decisions on capital projects.
"Before
we do anything we're going to make sure we have buy-in from the
community," Levinson said after the meeting. "If we do anything that
compromises the trust people have put in us, we've screwed ourselves for
15 years and we can't do that. And I think everyone's pretty adamant
about that."
The biggest traitor in Washington D.C. might be none
other than Senator John McCain. Disturbing information continues to
emerge about his direct ties to Muslim terrorists and the London bomber,
and how he’s owned and funded by Saudi terrorists and George Soros.
Ever since Trump got into office, McCain has done everything in his
power to subvert the President of the United States, which is a federal
crime. As McCain continues to garner the sympathy of many Americans who
still falsely believe he’s a Vietnam “war hero,” it’s time that we
finally set the record straight about the unbelievable things McCain did
during his time in the military, before McCain dies and nauseating
tributes are made about his “service” in Vietnam.
It’s important to note that due to McCain’s familial ties to high
ranking Naval commanders during his time in service (his father and
grandfather were both four-star admirals), the majority of McCain’s
massive catastrophes and scandals in the Navy were completely buried,
and his military records sealed.
We reported several weeks ago
how John McCain was solely responsible for the horrifying atrocity
aboard the USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier on July 31 1967, where
McCain’s cocky maneuver of doing a “wet start” of his plane would go on
to kill 134 sailors, in the deadliest loss of life the Navy has ever
seen. But because of McCain’s daddy being a 4-star admiral, the entire
incident was buried, and the Navy never officially put blame on anyone
for the tragedy. Astonishingly, McCain would not only be allowed to
continue serving in the Navy, but would go on to be responsible for the
deaths of numerous other men, in a scandal that has been successfully
buried for decades.
USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier
Three months after the bloody tragedy on the USS Forrestal Aircraft
Carrier, John McCain was sent on a bombing mission over Hanoi in October
of 1967 when he was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese,
where he’s go on to be a prisoner of war until 1973. After being
released from captivity, McCain would use his POW story and veteran
status to rise to political prominence, where his image as a “Vietnam
war hero” would go on to propel him to be elected as a United States
Senator.
John “Songbird” McCain is welcomed back as a hero by President Nixon
But a “hero” is the last thing that John McCain was or will ever be.
What most people don’t know is the massive government scandal that
McCain helped hide, as he’d go on for decades to tirelessly work to bury
stunning information about American prisoners over in Vietnam who
unlike him, didn’t return home. Using his position as a senator, McCain
would be behind the scenes quietly pushing and sponsoring federal laws
that would keep the most damning information about our POWs buried
through classified documents.
The secrets that John McCain has sought to hide about Vietnam
POWs are massive. Despite sworn testimony by two Defense Secretaries of
“the men left behind” in Vietnam, McCain continued to push the massive
lie that there were no survivors, much to the horror of POW families who
were frantic to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones.
Enormous amounts of government documents indicate that hundreds of
prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when President Nixon signed
the peace treaty in January of 1973. Only 591 in Hanoi were released,
among them, Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
After the war, President Nixon promised the Vietnamese a $3.25
billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political
conditions.” But there was a catch to this promise, where Nixon had
included that Congress would have to approve these funds; approval that
never happened. Furious that the American government had double-crossed
them, Nanoi decided to keep the remaining hundreds of American
prisoners, because their ransom money (post war provisions) never came.
CIA whistleblowers said that the government wanted to keep these
missing men a secret, because as more years passed, it became more and
more difficult for the government to admit that it knew about the
prisoners that were left behind. Years later, CIA officials admitted
that their intel indicated that the remaining POWs were eventually
executed by the Vietnamese, as they were no longer useful bargaining
chips.
After the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office was publicly shamed by internal
whistleblowers that there were in fact still men in Vietnam being held
as POWs, the pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally
forced the government in 1991 to create the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs,
to investigate these allegations. John Kerry was made chairman of the
board, and McCain became its most pivotal member. In the end, this
committee became part of the debunking machine, and McCain would become paramount to sweeping the entire atrocity of these forgotten POWs under the rug.
But what people don’t know is John McCain’s vital role in keeping
this story about these abandoned POWs hidden from the American public,
as a traitor who completely turned his back on his brothers-in-arms who
had remained in captivity by the Vietnamese.
In the 1990s, legislation was proposed to Congress called “the Truth Bill” that
would’ve provided complete transparency about these prisoners and
missing men. But the Pentagon and McCain bitterly opposed the bill, and
it went nowhere. People were predictably outraged over the bill being
shot down, so in an effort for McCain and crooked Pentagon officials to
cover their asses, the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared several months later.
This bill eventually became law in 1991, but would only create
a bureaucratic maze, making the truth for the families completely
impossible to discover. The provisions of the law explicitly states why
the Pentagon and other agencies are justified for not releasing
information about prisoners held in captivity. Later that year, the
Senate Select Committee was created, and McCain and Kerry would work
together to bury the last renaming evidence on the missing men.
The American Conservative reported on the other ways McCain screwed
over the POWs, by authoring a crippling amendment to the Missing Service
Personnel Act, that stripped away the obligations that commanders were
previously held to of speedily searching for missing men and reporting
these incidents to the Pentagon. The American Conservative reported:
“McCain was also instrumental in
amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened
in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, ‘Any
government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file
of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or
whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in
Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.’ A year later,
in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill,
McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to
the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal
penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to
speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the
Pentagon.”
“About the relaxation of POW/MIA
obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, ‘This
transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to
Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact,
“would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn
military commanders into clerks.'”
“McCain argued that keeping the
criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to
find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument
to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to
conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of
approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live
POWs.”
What’s even more sick is how McCain demonized the two Pentagon
chiefs’ sworn testimonies who testified under oath about the men left
behind, while insisting that all the evidence — to include documents,
witnesses, satellite photos — be completely buried. He would go on to
paint the entire story as an “unpatriotic myth” calling the testimony of
anyone coming forward Vietnam’s POW’s the “bizarre rantings of the MIA
hobbyists.” To this day, McCain regularly vilifies those who try to get
their hands on these classified documents (that he’s worked for decades
to conceal) as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and
“dime-store Rambos.”
Ironically, the very same man who who for decades has been propped up
and hailed a POW war hero and crusader for the interests of other POWs,
is the very same man responsible for their deaths. It’s absolutely sick
how this man, despite his murdering and treasonous and crooked antics
for decades, is to this day regarded as a “hero” in the minds of
millions of Americans. It’s finally time that we set the record straight
on who John “Songbird” McCain truly is before he dies of brain cancer,
and nauseating tributes are made about his “patriotic service” to our
country.
ARCHITECT OF MASS VOTER FRAUD: Hollywood Producer Tells Stunning Story Of How Obama Stole Election In 2008
Obama went out of his way to convince
Americans there was no voter fraud going into the November elections and
that Republicans are making a lot of noise about nothing. This video
shows that he is not only a liar, but quite possibly the architect of
mass voter fraud in America…
“Democrats don’t consider voter
fraud to be bad. They don’t consider breaking laws to be bad, because
they have moral relativity. You’re stupid. They know better than you do
about what’s best for the country. So if they cheat, steal and lie,
they’re doing it for the better of the country.”
This is a stunning story that only proves what the Democrats are capable of when it comes to elections.
Bettina Viviano started her own film production company in 1990
after serving as vice president of production for Steven Spielberg’s
Ambling Entertainment. Her credits included the second and third “Back
to the Future” films, “Cape Fear,” “Land Before Time,” “Schindler’s
List,” “Always,” “Roger Rabbit” and the third “Indiana Jones” film. In
2008, she got a call from one of her clients and best friends who is a
director got a call from someone who worked in the Bill Clinton White
House and worked for Hillary. She asked if Viviano wanted to make a
documentary about voter fraud in the Democratic Primary. Vivian recalls,“My mother was a Hillary supporter, so for whatever reason, I said ‘yes.'” It wasn’t long after she started on the documentary that she recalls,”
Almost immediately we saw the Obama-Saul Alinsky, create chaos, ACORN.
It was possibly…I mean, I am scarred for life. I will never forget it. I
will never forget the death threats, the vandalism, the theft, the
phony documentation, the falsification of documents, you know the
threats…I mean, these people are appalling.”
Bettina Viviano on Barack Obama:“They chose him, I have an email
from Donna Brazile back in 2004. I mean they had chosen him that far
back, and they weren’t going to let her get in their way. He was gonna
be the candidate, no matter what anyone The problem is, you can’t
enforce the laws against the DNC because they’re a private party. And we
tried.”
“We actually thought that since we proved that Obama stole the
election that they would say, ‘Okay, you’ve proved the fraud, we’ll give
it back’, but we were reporting it to the DNC and the Nancy Pelosi’s
and Howard Dean’s who committed the fraud. So we were basically
reporting it to the people who did it. We watched Hillary stepping down
which was all orchestrated.”
The Clintons were the original “birthers,” Viviano told WND in an interview in Los Angeles.
“Everybody who has called this a conspiracy from the Republicans or
the tea party, they need to know who started it – the Democrats,” she
said.
“It was Hillary and Bill, and it percolated up from there,” said
Viviano, who had access to the campaign through a documentary she
produced on the claims of delegates that Obama and the Democratic
National Committee were stealing the nomination from Hillary.
Viviano said that she was on a conference phone call during the
primary season in the spring of 2008 in which she heard Bill Clinton
refer to Obama as ineligible for the presidency.
In the course of the phone conversation with Hillary delegates, she recalled, Bill Clinton spoke of Obama as “the non-citizen.”
“In the world we were in, with [Hillary’s] super-delegates and
delegates, it just was, ‘He’s not legit – that’s the end of it, period,
end of story.’ It wasn’t up for discussion,” Viviano said.
Michele Thomas, a Hillary campaigner from Los Angeles, confirmed to
WND that she learned from “many people who were close to Hillary” that
Obama “was not eligible to be president.”
Thomas led a nationwide petition drive among delegates to force a
vote on Hillary’s nomination at the convention after then-DNC Chairman
Howard Dean announced her name would not be put into nomination and
Obama would be declared the winner by unanimous acclamation.
Viviano said that it was understood that Bill Clinton would
eventually go public with his contention that Obama was ineligible for
the presidency.
“He, I believe, was frothing at the mouth to tell the truth about Obama,” she said.
In the meantime, she recalled, the former president would make ironic
references in public in which he “teetered” on revealing he position.
“He would go on camera,” Viviano said, “and jokingly make comments
about, you know, ‘Is Obama qualified to be president? Well, if he’s 35
and a wink, wink, United States citizen, I guess he’s qualified.’”
She claimed, however, that Bill Clinton’s intention to unequivocally
state to the public that Obama was ineligible was stopped in its tracks
by the murder of a close friend of the Clintons, Arkansas Democratic
Party Chairman Bill Gwatney, just two weeks before the Democratic
National Convention in Denver.
Gwatney was killed Aug. 13, 2008, when a 50-year-old man entered
Democratic Party headquarters in Little Rock and shot him three times.
Police killed the murderer after a chase, and investigators found no
motive.
The Clintons said in a statement that they were “stunned and shaken” by the killing of their “cherished friend and confidante.”
Viviano said a campaign staffer who was close to Hillary, whose name
she requested be withheld for security reasons, told her Gwatney’s
murder was a message to Bill Clinton.
“I was told by this person that that was ‘Shut up, Bill, or you’re next,’” she said.
The campaign adviser, according to Viviano, said that despite the
intimidation and threats, Bill Clinton was prepared to speak out about
Obama’s eligibility
“And then,” Viviano said, paraphrasing the staffer, “they went in and said, ‘OK, it’s your daughter, now, we’ll go after.’
“And then Bill never said anything.”
Others in the campaign who believe Gwatney’s murder was a message to
the Clintons think it had to do with the fact that Gwatney was resisting
an effort by the Obama campaign and the party to intimidate Hillary
delegates into voting for Obama.
But Viviano argues that California delegates also were rebelling, and
she says her source told her the same story two years later.
Since the 2008 campaign, Clinton has insisted publicly that Obama is eligible for the White House.
He weighed in on the issue in an April 2011 interview with ABC’s
“Good Morning America,” when Donald Trump was urging Obama to release
his long-form birth certificate to the public.
“If I were them, I’d be really careful riding that birther horse too much,” Clinton said. “Everyone knows it’s ludicrous.” – WND
Watch Bettina tell Jerome Corsi her story here:
Watch the clips rom the groundbreaking documentary “We Will Not be
Silenced,” and WND investigative reporter Jerome Corsi’s ongoing
investigation of Barack Obama. Democrats explain how massive voter fraud
was committed to ensure a win for Barack Obama:
In the 100 years since
Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and
private property has left a long, murderous trail of destruction
A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Grutas Park, Lithuania.
Photo:
ZUMA PRESS
By
Stephen Kotkin
A century ago this week, communism took over
the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist
movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long
before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the
reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were
different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but
flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.
Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic
condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents,
like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions
that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of
indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I
as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers
for overseas markets.
But a century of communism in power—with
holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the
human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again
and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has
brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since
1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina,
Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at
least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of
demographers.
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass
deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model
established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It
has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of
people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation
as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.
A communal Chinese farm in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward.
Photo:
UIG/Getty Images
For these epic crimes, Lenin and Stalin bear personal
responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim
dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants. But
we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to
kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they
embraced these ideas. Anticapitalism was attractive to them in its own
right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward
countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.
The
communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great
anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.
In
February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his
generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of
St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its
allies. The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced
an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the
elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or
political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had
already happened among political groups in the cities.
That fall,
as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection
involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup
not against the provisional government, which had long since become
moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was
dominated by other, more moderate socialists. The October Revolution
began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left,
whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then
walked out of the soviet.
The Bolsheviks, like many of their
rivals, were devotees of
Karl Marx,
who saw class struggle as the great engine of history. What he
called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced
in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx
envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was
destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism. As he and
his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of
1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of
private property.”
Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks
renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march
Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions
set about trying to live in new ways. No one, however, knew precisely
what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a
characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What
socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not
know, we cannot say.”
But one thing was clear to them: Socialism
could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property
with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois”
parliaments with “people’s power.” In practice, however, scientific
planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time.
As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the
state.
The process set in motion by the communists entailed the
vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest,
internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.” The dispossession
of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who
gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view
outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a
corrective mechanism.
The declared goals of the revolution of
1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy
capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain
those goals.
In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw
upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret
police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the
countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried
out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto
peasant land ownership.
Russian Communist Party supporters participated in a march in Moscow on Defender of the Fatherland Day, Feb. 23.
Photo:
Serebryakov Dmitry/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
With the devastated country on the verge of famine, Lenin
forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution
for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist
purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.
With
Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more
than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily
by 1928. By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the
regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization.
Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible
systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.
Stalin
didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic
Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion. He
threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious
about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to
the rising rural bourgeoisie. He incited class warfare against “kulaks”
(better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for
mass arrests and internal deportations.
Stalin was clear about
his ideological rationale. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak
fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in
“America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet
country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in
industry, but in agriculture.”
And he never backtracked, even
when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet
another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those
few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.
The Soviet Union’s
awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries.
Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese
movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the
Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet
experiment as intrinsic to its success.
Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1952.
Photo:
Lyu Houmin/Visual China Group/Getty Images
His Great Leap Forward, a violent campaign from 1958 to 1962,
was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to
spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work
and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent
slogan of the time.
Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and
joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned
compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of
history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims.
After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist
wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he
declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”
Nor
did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of
overthrowing capitalism. With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol
Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into
the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They
sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.
The
Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted
Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese
minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to
pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.
All
told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the
population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass
executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some
regions, skulls could be found in every pond.
Marx’s class
analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from
“bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements
themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the
international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist
revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.
A Cambodian man prayed
during a ceremony in front of a map of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, March 10, 2002.
Photo:
Andy Eames/Associated Press
From Russia and China to Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba,
communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or
less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and
unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the
prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.
Communism
was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage.
Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40
million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms
of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.
But
as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly
shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the
egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries. Some repudiated the Soviet
Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to
the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps.
Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car
and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective
farms.
But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist
century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them.
Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to
action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive,
unchecked state.
A few socialists began to recognize that there
could be no freedom without markets and private property. When they made
their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather
than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates.
Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market
economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism
persists among some on the left.
It also remains alive, though
hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great
redoubts of the communist century. Both countries continue to distrust
what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property:
Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary
people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life,
civil society and the political sphere.
But anticapitalism also served as a program for an alternative
world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be
realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations,
Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior
West. The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking
their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own
countries on the international stage. This revolutionary struggle
allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission
in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle
Kingdom.
Vladimir Putin’s
resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia
and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent. For its
part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing
promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under
Xi Jinping,
the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional
Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to
the West.
Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we
can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy
endure.
Osama bin Laden in 1988. (WTN PICS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
On the penultimate day of the Obama administration,
less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release
meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office.
“Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final
Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a
two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents
recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan,
compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents
captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made
public to 571.
For anyone who had paid even casual attention to the long-running
debate over the Abbottabad documents—a group that doesn’t include many
journalists—the ODNI announcement was cause for a chuckle. Closing the
book on Osama bin Laden? The final Abbottabad documents?
In the heady days immediately after the May 2 Abbottabad raid,
President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, had described
the intelligence haul brought back from Pakistan by the Navy SEALs and
CIA operatives as extensive enough to fill a “small college library.” A
senior military intelligence official who briefed reporters at the
Pentagon on May 7, 2011, said: “As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired
the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
Why would ODNI think it could get away with such an aggressive lie?
Why would officials there believe that they wouldn’t be asked to
reconcile the fact that they were releasing just 571 documents with the
repeated pronouncements that the Abbottabad collection was the largest
haul of terrorist intelligence ever?
The answer: The self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in
history” had spent more than five years misleading the American people
about the threat from al Qaeda and its offshoots and had paid very
little price for having done so. Republicans volubly disputed the
president’s more laughable claims—the attack on the Benghazi compound
was just a protest gone bad, al Qaeda was on the run, ISIS was the
terrorist junior varsity—but the establishment media, certain that
Obama’s predecessor had consistently exaggerated the threat, showed
little interest in challenging Obama or the intelligence agencies that
often supported his spurious case.
In this context, ODNI’s bet wasn’t a crazy one. No one outside of a
small group of terrorism researchers and intelligence professionals had
paid much attention to the fate of the bin Laden documents. The
likelihood that these ODNI claims would get much scrutiny in the middle
of the frenzy that accompanies a presidential transition was low. ODNI
dismissively swatted away questions about the absurd claims in the
release with absurd claims about the document collection itself: The
unreleased documents weren’t interesting or important, just terrorist
trash of little interest to anyone. The documents being withheld would
do little to enhance our understanding of al Qaeda or the jihadist
threat more generally, they said.
This is what the politicization of intelligence looks like.
* *
In the spring of 2012, with the Republican presidential primaries
nearing an end and shortly before the first anniversary of the
successful raid on bin Laden’s compound, Obama’s National Security
Council hand-picked 17 documents to be provided to the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point for analysis. (Obama’s NSC would later
hold back two of those documents. One of them, laying out the deep ties
between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, would complicate
Obama administration efforts to launch negotiations with the Taliban,
according to an explanation the NSC’s Doug Lute offered to West Point.)
The West Point documents were shared with Obama-friendly journalists.
Their conclusion was the only one possible, given the documents they
were provided: At the time of his death, Osama bin Laden was frustrated
and isolated, a relatively powerless leader of a dying organization. In
the summer and fall of 2012, Obama would use this theme as the main
national security rationale for his reelection: Al Qaeda was alternately
“on the run” or “decimated” or “on the path to defeat.”
In a powerful and comprehensive piece in The Weekly Standard,
editor Stephen Hayes delineates in detail how the Obama Administration
hid almost half a million documents seized from the raid on Osama bin
Laden's compound in order to perpetuate the lie that Al Qaeda was
defeated after bin Laden’s death, thus paving the way for Obama’s 2012
victory.
Hayes begins his odyssey into the Obama Administration’s
duplicity by noting that the day before Obama left the White House,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issue a press release claiming
the administration had declassified enough documents seized in the raid
to “close the book” on bin Laden. The release was even titled, “Closing
the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad
Documents.”
Yet
after the May 2, 2011 raid, Obama’s national security advisor, Tom
Donilon, said the documents seized were extensive enough to fill a
“small college library.” As Hayes points out, “A senior military
intelligence official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on May 7,
2011, said: ‘As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired the single largest
collection of senior terrorist materials ever.’”
Hayes writes,
“Why would ODNI think it could get away with such an aggressive lie? …
In this context, ODNI’s bet wasn’t a crazy one. No one outside of a
small group of terrorism researchers and intelligence professionals had
paid much attention to the fate of the bin Laden documents. The
likelihood that these ODNI claims would get much scrutiny in the middle
of the frenzy that accompanies a presidential transition was low.”
He continues:
In
the spring of 2012, with the Republican presidential primaries nearing
an end and shortly before the first anniversary of the successful raid
on bin Laden’s compound, Obama’s National Security Council hand-picked
17 documents to be provided to the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point for analysis. … The West Point documents were shared with
Obama-friendly journalists. Their conclusion was the only one possible,
given the documents they were provided: At the time of his death, Osama
bin Laden was frustrated and isolated, a relatively powerless leader of a
dying organization. In the summer and fall of 2012, Obama would use
this theme as the main national security rationale for his reelection:
Al Qaeda was alternately “on the run” or “decimated” or “on the path to
defeat.”
On
November 1, 2012, five days before the election, Obama intoned, “Thanks
to the service and sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform, the
war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is winding down. Al Qaeda
has been decimated. Osama bin Laden is dead.” Hayes notes, “The
president would tout the imminent demise of al Qaeda more than two dozen
times between those attacks and Election Day.”
Finally, this
past Wednesday, CIA director Mike Pompeo announced the release of
“nearly 470,000 additional files” from the Abbottabad raid.
Hayes
delineates how the documents show a much closer relationship between al
Qaeda and Iran than had been heretofore assumed. He points out that
Obama in his first term centered on how George W. Bush had allegedly
ruined the war on terror but the second term was focused on making a
deal with the Iranian government. He adds:
In a
manner of speaking, Barack Obama wanted what al Qaeda already had: a
mutually beneficial partnership with Tehran. Revealing to the American
people the truth about Osama bin Laden’s cozy working relationship with
the Iranian government might have fatally undermined that diplomatic
quest, just as the ongoing vitality of al Qaeda, amply testified to in
the bin Laden documents, would have contradicted Obama’s proud claims in
2012 that al Qaeda was “on the run.” So Obama, with the eager
cooperation of some in the intelligence community, bottled up the bin
Laden documents and ran out the clock.
And no, I’m not talking about an autonomous vehicle hitting a wall or
driving off a bridge. Instead, Tesla stock has taken a nose-dive and
crashed. Hopefully, their stocks have an airbag to cushion the blow.
Yikes, that’s reminiscent of a texting-while-driving-in-rush-hour crash.
Tesla’s share price took a dive Thursday morning as
Republicans in Congress revealed they were planning to kill off a US
federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
The proposed House tax bill calls for an immediate repeal of the
$7,500-per-vehicle credit: something that would have an immediate
knock-on impact for Tesla given that it only produces electric cars.
Its share price fell more than seven per cent to about $296 apiece
from Wednesday’s $321. The draft law emerged as the Elon-Musk-led
automaker announced its worst-ever quarter, recording a $671m loss and
admitting it had not met its production target for its new Model 3 car,
producing just 220 of them against its 1,500 target.
The potential removal of these federal tax cuts has a significant influence on consumers.
In Georgia, for example, when the state legislature “cut its $5,000
tax credit” the sale of electric cars decreased from “1,400 a month to
just 100 a month in response.”
In other words, consumers care less about the environment and more
about their wallet. Tesla knows this. Their website even factors in the
federal tax credit in Tesla’s pricing.
The Bill has not went through Congress but “is seen as a blueprint
for the Trump administration’s tax shakeup” for further reform:
Scrapping the leccy car deal will increase US tax
revenues by $4bn, it is estimated. That’s a good saving seeing as the
Republicans are desperate to balance America’s books while cutting the
corporate tax rate.
Under the process the Republicans intend to use to pass their tax
reform bill, it is necessary for the country’s figures to balance – any
cuts have to be met with additional tax income. So far, the plan is
expected to cost the Land of the Free $1.5tr over 10 years.
While their stocks have decreased significantly, Tesla is not the only car company that will suffer.
Companies like Nissan and General Motors have their own electric car.
The latter stated, “Tax credits are an important customer benefit that
can help accelerate the acceptance of electric vehicles. Because General
Motors believes in an all-electric future, we will work with congress
to explore ways to maintain this incentive.”
Or, you know what you could do GM? Stop relying on the federal government as your business model.
They’ve already bailed you out once…now you’re relying on them for marketing and consumer strategy?
Maybe you should invest a bit more money on product and market
research, advertising, etc. instead of expecting a tax credit from other
people’s money to drum up sales.
No one–not a business or an individual–should ever become dependent
on the government; especially not a large corporation like General
Motors.
What is your opinion of electric car companies dependence on tax
credit for sales? If you don’t have a market, can you really expect the
government to create one for you?
In most of America, winter sucks. It is cold out. You don’t feel like doing anything, so you get fat.
Pipes freeze. Lips, noses, and cheeks get chapped and raw. Black ice
kills. Snow hats look cool until you have to take them off indoors and
then your hair looks shitty. It’s horrible.
As two people who grew up in the Midwest and New England,
Matt and I have both experienced the personal hell that is winter’s
awkwardly long, frigid embrace, but we had yet to figure out which,
amongst all of the 50 states,
could hold up the title as the state with the worst winter. And so
began an intense period of research and debate, factoring in everything
from weather patterns, average temperatures, and how effective and
quickly their department of transportation clears highways, to
interviews with locals and the historical success rates of their
winter-season sports teams. This is one of those things where you
probably actually want to finish last.
Anyway, feel free to tell us all the ways our list
is invalid in the comments. We’ll just be over here looking cool as hell
in our winter hats.
50. Hawaii
Aloha means hello, goodbye, and “who cares about pro sports teams when
the average temperature during the winter is 81 and we’re all over here
eating malasadas and making fun of you stupid cold haoles.” It IS kinda windy though?
49. Arizona
Occasionally, retired Kroger business executives from Ohio and their
Pilates-instructor second wives will accidentally move to Flagstaff and
get very sad and angry when they realize the average winter temperature
is somewhere in the 20s. But most of Arizona offers up that dry desert
day heat (it was 88 in Phoenix last week) that is good for arthritis and
any lingering guilt about leaving their first wives to deal with their
delinquent teenage kids back in Indian Hill.
48. California
There is no generalizing about the climate of a state the size of Italy,
except to say that SF’s weather rarely changes except during the weird
time during the summer when it becomes winter and everyone misquotes
Mark Twain; everyone in LA and San Diego just wear bikinis and surf to
work year-round (except during Sharknado season) and they don’t have
meteorologists in Fresno, so no one knows what happens there during any
season, much less ONE of them, but it seems like it can't be that bad.
47. Colorado
Yes, this seems like an odd placement for a state that clearly
experiences some serious snowfall, but the thing is, snowfall is a cause
for celebration here. Have you ever been to Colorado in wintertime? The
sun is shining, the winter sports are world class, and if people aren’t
(legally) high as balls, then they’re getting into some fantastic beer.
They even threw in a 2016 Super Bowl for good measure -- that’s “they,”
not Peyton Manning, who, rumored HGH notwithstanding, wasn’t able to
throw much of anything. Ditto his successors. But the Broncos
quarterback situation aside, Colorado has basically solved winter.
46. Florida
Seeing how it’s mostly a humid subtropical state
filled with the type of people who unironically adorn their cars with
statement bumper stickers and don’t blink for long periods of time,
Florida’s winters tend to be mild, as if actively trying not to make any
sudden moves lest their population get nervous and start throwing
alligators.
45. New Mexico
Did you know that New Mexico is basically Colorado? And I don’t mean
that as in they both tend to attract spiritually earnest people who
value physical fitness and have weirdly nice calves and prefer to be
outdoors wearing shawls with Native American symbols on them (though
that is also true). I mean, in the sense of topography, New Mexico and
Colorado both have high plains, mountain ranges, deserts, basins, and affiliations to green chile.
And though New Mexico gets warmer during the day,
you can still see why people from these two states tend to live charmed
winter lives/dislike each other, even as you struggle to tell them
apart.
44. Louisiana
You think they’d have Mardi Gras
in February if that wasn’t an ideal time for a party?!?!! Wait -- what
do you mean “it’s set by the church calendar to always fall the day
before Ash Wednesday?” Well, you think they would’ve petitioned the pope
for a change by now if that humid subtropical climate didn’t laissez
les bon temps rouler?!? Yeah, I have no idea either, I guess.
43. Texas
According to a quick eyeballing of the globe I keep in my office, Texas
is roughly the size of South America or something, and you can’t speak
on the weather in Ecuador like it’s the same as Chile, right? West Texas
is mostly arid desert where you can get the occasional blizzard that
shuts down Amarillo, forcing their lauded indoor football team the
Venom, to postpone games. East Texas is subtropical and humid even in
the winter, and they get that cool advection fog in Galveston where you
can’t see shit for days, and all of the ships carrying giant Texas belt
buckles to Mexico are forced to stay put.
Also, when I briefly lived in Dallas during my
youth, it once snowed 4in and I didn’t have school for THREE DAYS and
people were talking about killing their horses and sleeping inside of
them Tauntaun style.
With all that said, outside of the Northern Plains, the average temps
in Texas in the winter usually stay in the mid-60s during the day, and
that’s pretty damn nice.
42. Georgia
Psychologically it seems like Georgia should be safely out of the winter
pain zone, and often that holds true, but freezing rain’s nothing to
mess with, tornadoes somehow continue to be a thing even in February,
and when snow does hit, no city does “wow, we were woefully
underprepared for this” quite like Atlanta.
41. Alabama
The people of Alabama asked the Lord that He make the climate of Alabama
suitable to play football outside year-round and He listened to the
people and granted them a mild winter climate for which to play His
game. Except up in Huntsville.
40. South Carolina
Outside of the Blue Ridge Mountains, most parts of the state will remain
free from snow for years at a time (if something’s going down, freezing
rain's probably the bet). The mild winters are needed, as there is
plenty more to worry about, such as hurricanes, sharks, and other South
Carolinians.
39. Mississippi
North Mississippi got hit with a little blizzard action this winter
(snow tornadoes!), and while that can certainly happen, it’s far from
the norm. And even when a cold snap does hit, people are generally back
to porch-sittin’, sweet tea-sippin’ weather in no time, which could
explain the reliably strong obesity rating. When you think about it, all
that fat is kinda wasted on a state with reasonably painless winters.
Send some north!
38. North Carolina
Few states have a mountain range that acts like a shield preventing strikes of shitty Midwestern winter weather. North Carolina
is one of those lucky states, giving it a relatively mild and tame
winter for its placement up the coast. So it makes no sense that their
state flag looks like the Indonesian flag with a small stripe of blue
instead of a picture of Dean Smith sitting in a Hickory-made rocking
chair atop the Appalachian mountain range with a big hunk of chewing
tobacco and a chopped pork sandwich.
37. Nevada
Other than in the northern reaches of the state, Nevada’s generally
pretty well protected from the worst aspects of winter. However, it is
NOT protected from packs of bros descending on it for Super Bowl weekend
(Chad only gets married once, right guys?!), then getting unruly with
the staff at the Hard Rock because they expected the pool to be open
even though it’s actually only like 49 degrees out. Then Brett (Chad’s
best man) ends up drinking 12 vodka tonics too many and picks a fight
with some guy who seemed small but turned out to be a flyweight UFC
fighter and shit just got ugly.
“Take me to another place, take me to another land,” isn’t something
you’re terribly likely to think to yourself during a Tennessee winter,
although they did get clipped by the January blizzard a bit as it made
its way towards the East Coast this year. But hey, when the cold does
strike, there’s always hot chicken,
which all publications are contractually bound to mention when speaking
about Tennessee in 2016, because it’s so hot right now. The chicken, that is. The weather’s usually mild. Which is how you can order the chicken if you’re a wuss.
35. Utah
Like Colorado, you can generally count on the fact that winters will be
packed with sunshine and access to world-class cold weather leisure
activities (2002 Olympics 4 life!). Unlike Colorado, there’s no
unfettered access to weed, and even high-ABV beers have their restrictions.
But hey, at least there’s always some white dude on the Jazz who can
actually ball to keep everyone happy (they’re counting on you Gordon,
NEVER LEAVE THEM).
34. Arkansas
Once in a great while, Old Man Winter will rear his ugly head in a big
way (as it did a few weeks ago), but generally speaking, people need to
be much more concerned about RAMPAGING FERAL HOGS!
33. Oklahoma
The panhandle tends to experience the most cold (hey, just like an
actual pan!), and the rest of the state typically has at least one
serious snow or ice beating per winter, though they typically don’t
linger too long. Bonus: on colder days, locals can humor each other with
clever lines about the wind sweeping down the plain. Actually, nobody
does that. But they don’t have to, because things are, more often than
not, OK.
32. Virginia
Generally speaking, the winters tend to be a little rougher the closer
you get to DC, which could speak to either geography or the
bone-chilling effects of Dan Snyder. The mountains (obviously) also
receive their share of snow, but they’re also quite beautiful and
serene, so that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Dan Snyder.
31. Maryland
If I had a dollar for every time someone has come up to me and said
“Let’s talk about Maryland’s climate, specifically in the winter,” I
would, as of now, have yet to collect any money. BUT THAT CHANGES TODAY.
Anyway, if you take 68 and go west to Cumberland and farther past, it
can get damn cold and snowy, but around Bawlmore it remains relatively tepid.
Also, has anyone ever looked at the shape of the
state of Maryland? It either looks like the NES Zapper gun from the
original Nintendo, or a broken meat cleaver that’s been boxed out of
oceanfront property by Delaware, of all states. Get your shit together,
Old Line.
30. Kentucky
Kentucky always sounds like a very warm place to Northerners, who
envision temperate climes where you can enjoy hot weather alongside your
Hot Browns while wearing lavish hats filled with bourbon. And then you realize that it’s basically southern Ohio.
29. West Virginia
John Denver once described West Virginia as “almost heaven.” However, he
could have just as easily described it as “almost definitely the place
you’re most likely to encounter terrifying driving conditions on I-77,
inebriated dudes whose breath smells like Gino’s baked spaghetti
haranguing you about Bob Huggins’ offensive sets, and the nagging
feeling that they could have come up with a more creative name for a
giant ski resort than ‘Winterplace.’” However, that would’ve really
altered the rhythm of the song.
28. Missouri
Far enough south to generally be removed from the worst of the worst,
yet the major metropolitan centers are juuuust far enough north that you
can typically count on a few wintry groin punches per season, which is
kind of what it’s like to root for a football team whose coaching tree
prominently features Andy Reid and Marty Schottenheimer. But at least
that Todd Gurley looks like a -- oh... shit. Right, that happened. That
sucks, guys. Pour one out for the Greatest Show on Turf. You’ll just
have to console yourselves with the Cubs of the NHL. Someone get this
state an NBA team so there’s more to do until it’s warm enough for Ted
Drewes and baseball again.
27. Kansas
Being smack dab in the middle of the country means you’re gonna have
smack dab in the middle winters -- sometimes the hammer will come down,
sometimes you’ll be like “hot damn it might hit 80 today.” This causes
Kansans to put particular stock in the unpredictable nature of their
winters, but that’s mostly because there isn’t that much else to talk
about.
26. Delaware
Whenever Delaware gets pasted with a winter storm, you can pretty much
guarantee some other, bigger metropolitan area got it worse, thus
leading no one to notice the plight of Delaware outside of people living
in Delaware. So, it’s basically a colder version of the rest of the
year for Delaware.
25. Nebraska
The Tom Osborne state doesn’t get quite the same Midwestern winter flick
in the privates that you might think it did, were you just pre-judging
it based on that one Alexander Payne film and a vague sense of where it
sits in America. Winters are actually downright moderate in western
Nebraska thanks to the moderating effects of the chinook winds coming
off the Rockies, while people in the east are forced to just hunker down
with their stockpiles of corn and watch old tapes of Coach Osborne
speaking on farm subsidies interspersed with quick clips of Eric Crouch scrambling for touchdowns.
24. New Jersey
Imagine getting on a train on a winter morning, everybody wrapped in
their puffy coats, salty and bleary-eyed. There’s one seat left… between
two dudes who definitely appear to be obnoxious, insufferable assholes.
But hey, it’s a seat, so you take it. Yet, when you sit, you get the
sense both of these guys regard YOU as the asshole. Now imagine that
morning lasts for a few months. This is winter in New Jersey, starring
Philly and New York as your asshole neighbors.
23. Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has something of a split winter personality. In the east,
you have more of the sharp-elbowed, horn-honking,
battery-in-your-face-even-if-you’re-Santa kind of winter depression.
Farther inland it’s a bit more of a Midwestern mentality, a kind of
“let’s hunker down and get through this” mindset that leads to stuff
like just cramming a bunch of French fries inside a sandwich because
you’ve basically given up, and losing count of how many pierogies you’ve consumed before deciding that must mean it’s time to start over and order more pierogies.
22. Vermont
Vermont has some seriously brutal winters, with most areas averaging
around 8ft of snow. But -- in the same vein of places like Colorado --
Vermonters actually seem to relish in the inability to drive anything
without chains. Partially that’s because Vermont also boasts the best
skiing by far of all of the East Coast, and partially it's because the
over-consumption of maple syrup can do some crazy things to a person’s
psyche.
21. Rhode Island
Unlike the issues in generalizing the climates of some of these large
states, Rhode Island suffers from the opposite sort of problem -- it
basically just gets a little bit of whatever Mass and Connecticut are
having. Also, you can’t enjoy Del’s Frozen Lemonades when your Kia
Sorento is buried under 28in of snow and they’ve completely shut down
295 AND the Providence Place mall.
20. New York
New Yorkers have a way of vacillating between bragging about their
comparatively mild winters relative to some of your other northern
metropolises (your Bostons, your Chicagos), and then switching into
“STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING NOW AND BEHOLD OUR PLIGHT” mode when some
serious weather comes their way. Meanwhile Buffalo’s
up there under some 30ft of lake-effect snow, just alternating between
hours-long shoveling escapades and quiet moments by the fireplace spent
softly crying about Scott Norwood while taking shots of Frank’s hot
sauce.
19. Connecticut
All of the brutal parts of the New England winter with none of the ski
perks. And yes, we’re counting Mohawk, Ski Sundown, AND Mount
Southington.
18. Washington
“It’s raining, it’s pouring, former Sounders striker Roger Levesque is
snoring” is an actual hit song in Seattle, written during the winter,
and fairly encapsulating everything you can expect from the climate up
there, especially when Levesque sleeps on his back.
17. Oregon
On the one hand, there’s no denying the beauty of magnificent Crater
Lake when observed via snowshoes. Or the thrills of snowboarding down
Mt. Hood or Bachelor. Or staring at the snowy peaks of the Three Sisters
mountains from the comfort of a rustic cabin in the high desert aglow
from a mighty hearth. Or taking a chance on either getting sideways rain
or 70-degree sunshine on the coast. On the other hand, that’s all
counterbalanced by Portland hipsters who bitch about the rain for five
months, yet refuse to buy an umbrella. Which is to say, Oregon winters
are breathtaking. Portland winters, on the other hand, are the kind that
inspire Elliott Smith songs. -- Andy Kryza, Senior Editor/Portland resident
16. Indiana
The Region (that’s the creatively named NW corner of the state bordering
Lake Michigan, for the uninitiated) definitely gets the worst of it --
without warning, a foot of snow will just decide to show up and punch
everyone in the face like a frosty Ron Artest. For a state that grapples
with this kind of thing on a regular basis, I-65, the state’s main
artery, has a knack for turning into an undriveable frozen windswept
hellscape to the point where the state actually shuts it down, forcing
traffic onto equally dubious state highways. If you’ve ever stared into a
barren tundra of a frozen harvested cornfield and thought to yourself
that this could be the beginnings of the apocalypse, well... you are in a
state known to serve up brain sandwiches.
15. New Hampshire
A general malaise creeps into the Granite State once they realize you
can’t race NASCAR when you’re getting 70in of snow, so instead New
England’s most sunburned neck of a state has to somehow get by by
looking through their collections of old Joe Lieberman campaign signs
and hoping Maggie Hassan’s state transportation department plowed and
salted 93.
14. Ohio
You’ve got the lake-effect snowstorms of Lake Erie along the Snowbelt,
which can dump LeBron levels of snow on the Cleve. You’ve got the
moderate cold of the central lowlands and Columbus. But then you’ve got
Cincinnati and it’s basically Kentucky's subtropical humid climate and
wall lizards, which are something most people think of in Florida or
Houston. So basically, Ohio is more like three separate winter regions,
divided in weather, but united in being upset about their NFL teams.
13. Illinois
Chicago winters are notoriously rough), but the people there have the
kind of warm and generous spirit that leads to displays of solidarity
like... fighting over whether or not a pair of plastic lawn chairs
constitutes indefinite rights to a shoveled out parking place
post-snowfall. Downstate things tend not to be quite as bad, other than,
you know, the fact that you’re in downstate Illinois.
Keeping Illinois from an even worse ranking: most of the time the
state’s pretty on-point as far as snow removal goes, and everyone’s pretty good at drinking enough during Hawks games that they forget about whatever recent trouble Patrick Kane's gotten into.
12. Wyoming
There is a case to make that Wyoming could be even higher up the list
considering that, even when it’s just dumping moose-sized buckets of
snow everywhere, it’s so damn pretty to look at the Grand Tetons that
you can’t possibly be miserable. Plus those crucial chinook winds that
bailed out Nebraska also tamper down the bitterest of the cold. It’s
basically like the handsome middle child of the West: not quite as
fierce and cold as its bigger old brother Montana, or as awkward as
Idaho, and somewhat ignorant of the fact that it’s even tangentially
related to the Dakotas.
11. Iowa
Every year in the winter, we inexplicably traverse by car from Chicago
to Iowa to watch an Iowa basketball game. One of these years, there was a
whiteout-style snowstorm en route, and a truck jack-knifed along 80 and
there was the biggest traffic jam in recent Iowa history, which we
managed to avoid thanks to Google Maps all of a sudden nervously
bellowing out that we needed to turn off onto some random farm road.
All of the Iowans we met took this in stride with a
suspiciously friendly Midwest-ness, possibly because Iowa has to deal
with a super confluence of shitty weather: snowstorms in the winter; 50
days of thunderstorms; an average of 47 tornadoes a year (in 2008 there
were 105). I mean, jeez, even Wikipedia calls their winters “harsh.”
10. Massachusetts
Boston winters were brutal enough to push my California-born wife to
hysteria and then eventually back to California, especially the random
late-April snows. And the whole state is nor’easter prone, which I
enjoyed as a kid because the Globe would run a graphic of the snowfall
next to a picture of Robert Parish and his height.
In terms of a divide, you get to pick your poison:
would you prefer slightly warmer winters on the coast with heavier
snowfall? Or brutally harsh Tom Brunansky-bat-to-your-ears cold in
Western and Central Mass with slightly less snow? Either way, the state
tends to do a good job keeping the Pike clear of snow so you can get to
the closest Newbury Comics and buy extra copies of old Dropkick Murphys
albums for your grandchildren, plus the Bruins and Celtics win enough
that you can just lie in the hammock in your partially finished basement
drinking Ocean Spray Cran-Grape juice and Bully Boy vodkas and watch
your bootleg tape of good Shawn Thornton fights until all the
nor’easters are over.
9. Montana
Did you know that the Continental Divide can create distinct differences
in sunlight, wind, precipitation, and temperature, depending on whether
you’re in the eastern or western part of the state? Did you know that,
either way, all the insufferable celebrities who thought it’d be
“rustic” to own a ranch up there or whatever sure as shit aren’t taking
advantage of said property in January. Wait… maybe that’s actually a
positive?
8. Idaho
If you happen to live up at the top of Idaho’s chimney, up Route 2 by
Bonners Ferry or beyond even, wow. You basically live in Canada, and as
such, are in no way protected by those lovely chinook winds we keep
talking about, but might have an in on getting cheaper prescription
drugs, so it balances out. But because most of Idaho is not in fact in
that chimney, and is somewhat comparatively temperate to other western
climes, you get rich West Coast people coming out in expensive fur-lined
ski wear to use your facilities in Sun Valley. And if I’ve learned
anything from watching a combination of those Kardashian shows and HGTV,
rich West Coast people do NOT travel to places with brutal winters.
7. Wisconsin
Look, there’s a reason it’s practically state law that every block in a Wisconsin city or town must have a minimum of three bars
on it. There’s a level of persistently grey, soul-squeezing frigidness
here that can only be combatted with liberal doses of brandy Old
Fashioneds and Spotted Cow along with various forms of fried dairy
products. If you go tailgating at Lambeau when Green Bay’s buried under
feet of snow, you could be forgiven for surveying the relatively lively
demeanor of the local populace and think that everything must be
reasonably cool, but that’s just because all these people have been
intoxicated for 72 straight days, and it’s all going to come crashing
down eventually, likely in relation to some head-scratching playoff game
management courtesy of Mike McCarthy.
6. South Dakota
Your average high temperature during the winter months is four degrees
higher than North Dakota's. You are the champion of the Dakotas. Claim
your slightly less misery-bound throne!!!
5. Maine
More than 80% of Maine’s land is forests. There are entire huge
thousand-mile swaths of land that are uninhabited or barely habited, and
that is because northern Maine has winters that are only really spoken
about in Game of Thrones -- brutal and never-ending and likely on par with The Long Night.
The coast and the south where people actually live
have more moderate winters, thanks to the Atlantic, but the Mainer
attitude towards winter is a great one -- they all seem pretty fired up
to ski and sled despite not getting to eat lobster or blueberries for
many months -- and they tend to be much more upbeat than say, us
Bostonians, who always like to pretend that we’re getting it the worst
and thus are the strongest. And that attitude (and the general lack of
people in the real harsh stuff) prevents Maine and its Longest Winters
from pushing even farther down the line.
4. North Dakota
In Downtown Owl, Chuck Klosterman writes of a sleepy North
Dakota town in which the happenings are fairly mundane until a massive,
unforgiving blizzard sweeps through and (spoiler alert) kills all three
of the protagonists in different horribly depressing ways. The book is a
work of fiction. OR IS IT?
3. Alaska
Look, if you’re taking things from a purely “how bad can things actually
get, weather wise” standpoint, Alaska is obviously the number one
choice here. No other state has vast geographical stretches that can say
stuff like “man, I haven’t seen the sun in months” and have it be
literal rather than figurative. Any data you want to pull on snow, wind,
or cold will trump that of any other state handily.
But here’s the thing -- Alaska draws a different
type of human. Either you’ve got some Inuit blood flowing through your
veins and these types of conditions don’t remotely phase you, or you
have the type of slightly unhinged frontier spirit that leads people to
say “why yes, I would like to live in the place where even summer can
sometimes be kinda winter-ish” or “you know, this Sarah Palin seems like
the kind of no-nonsense straight talker who is 100% capable of running a
state.” You just can’t view this place through a traditional lens.
2. Michigan
Winter in Michigan begins well before Thanksgiving and stretches far
past Easter, which makes for four-to-six wearisome months of
always-gray, always-cold, always-drizzly, but-rarely-snowy-in-a-good-way
misery. Some other states may see colder temps or more snow, but
Michigan winters are unrivaled for their utter lack of sunshine. The
ceaseless cloud cover begins in October, and envelopes the state in a
daily sense of gloom that only worsens when the apathetic sun slouches
below the horizon at quarter-to-five.
For the Michigander, this is winter: you leave work
at 5 or 6, already in the dead of night, and fight your way down 94 or
96 or 75 or whatever Godforsaken stretch of highway. You can't even tell
if it is drizzling rain or snow, because the brown salt sludge that
sprays up off the road coats your windshield more completely than
anything that falls from the sky. Overnight, the road freezes. In the
morning you wake up and it is still dark. You scrape off your car, then
get stuck in traffic as the cars ahead of you gawk at the SUV that has
slid into the ditch. You actually look forward to a proper snowfall,
just to cover the dirt. Even then, you do not go skiing, because there
are no hills.
You do not look forward to outdoor winter recreation
because there is none. You might go bowling. You probably put on
weight. If you are lucky you might have a snowmobile, but it's a pain in
the ass to get out. More likely your asshole neighbor has one, and it
is loud. In early April you convince yourself it is spring because it is
Tigers Opening Day. You overpay for tickets to the game, tell yourself
45 degrees isn't that cold, and cheer when the sun peeks out at the end
of the fourth inning. That is the light at the end of the tunnel. Winter
in Michigan is a miserable, miserable time. -- Bison Messink, Deputy Editor/recovering Michigander
1. Minnesota
To think of the generally cheerful brood of Nordic-bred people being the
winners in any sort of a contest of misery seems downright crazy. But
for all those adorable don'tcha knows, we think something else is going
on. We think beneath that eternal Nordic happiness is some inner pain,
trapped below the surface like a Grain Belt dropped into an ice fishing
hole, a cauldron of hot anger ready to spill out like a cut-open Jucy Lucy.
How can you remain so upbeat when you get all the
winter weather patterns? Alberta clippers? Sure. Panhandle hooks? You
betcha! Parts of northern Minnesota see up to 170in of snow in a winter.
One hundred seventy inches! That’s like two and a half times the height
of Kent Hrbek!! It can get down to -60 degrees, a temperature at which
frostbite can occur in fewer than five minutes. There are no chinook
winds or moderating oceans to temper things outside of a small area by
Lake Superior. Your sports teams never win championships. All of your
good high school hockey players end up starring for NHL teams in other
cities. Ice fishing can’t be that cool, really.
And so we think that -- despite all appearances --
Minnesota does in fact have the most miserable winter in the United
States. So to all the Eriks, and Astrids, and Christens, and Bjorns, and
Brynjars, it’s OK to show a little displeasure at the clusterfuck of a
meteorological hand you’ve been dealt. After all, don'tcha know emoting
is good for the system?
