Worrisome Predictions for 2023

Roman street vendor in Pompeii

In our western, vastly declining world, it is depressing and scary to make predictions for 2023 because we never know what other variables may intervene that may skew our reasonable forecasts based on current facts.

Several podcasters have made projections recently as we approach the end of 2022.  Some of the predictions are based on common sense, available data, economic trends that don’t seem to add up, others can be found in plain sight, and others are based on events that are unfolding as we speak.

Several medical doctors have predicted that vaccine deaths will accelerate, and infertility and stillbirths will “explode” around the world. This is certainly based on statistical data coming from various countries that have reported a drastic decrease in births, including South Korea and death statistics. Whether there is a correlation between Covid-19 vaccinations, increased death rates, and infertility or stillbirths, that remains to be studied over time.

Larry Scott Spiegelman, MD., OBGYN in South Florida said that studies on infertility looked at sperm counts before and after vaccination and found absolutely no change. “And to date nobody has shown any signs of infertility as a result of the vaccine up to 42 days after receiving a full dose.”  What about after 42 days? The Truth About COVID-19 Vaccines and Infertility | Resource | Baptist Health South Florida

Following the dictates of the Paris accord, It is not difficult to see that Europe is committing government-sanctioned societal suicide by destroying the fossil fuel industry that provides them with the energy necessary to run a developed economy.  They are also destroying fertilizers and the farmers’ ability to grow food.

The climate change globalists consider domesticated animals too flatulent and, to reduce the methane gas, humans should kill off as many farm animals as possible and eat fake meat or insects.

Crop failures and food scarcity are on the horizon when all fertilizer producers, including those in Ukraine, are taken out of production.

The Russian-Ukrainian war added more fuel (no pun intended) to the European fire of destruction of the fossil fuel industry, oil, and gas.

BASF, one of the largest conglomerates in Germany, is moving its operations permanently to China where energy is cheaper and plentiful. https://www.ft.com/content/f6d2fe70-16fb-4d81-a26a-3afb93e0bf57

The nuclear industry and the hydroelectric power generation are also taking a hit, replaced by wind and solar energy generation which does not even come close to providing the Europeans and other developed nations with what they need in terms of industrial and home energy.

Inflation will accelerate, a no brainer, based on the expensive energy and shortages of so many goods and services and the inability to produce and deliver goods across the world in a timely fashion.

Money, including the U.S. dollar and the petrodollar, will be replaced by government-mandated digital currency which will control where you spend your money, how much, whether you are a compliant-citizen, and your social score is good enough.  

You will be allotted gas credits each month, based on how far you are allowed to travel in your current car which may or may not be electric but it will have a kill-switch; how much money you can spend on medicines, which doctors you may see, whether you will be allowed into a hospital or not, which schools you may attend, and where you can work.

You will be taxed at higher and higher rates, whatever the government and their “banksters” will decide, and you will be allowed so much for food per day, based on caloric intake permitted by your job. Rationing of money, goods, and services will be controlled by government with their fingers on your digital currency.

The escalating inflation will trigger more government bailouts/handouts for collapsing industries like the Teamsters Union. Biden used $36 billion from the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion corona virus relief package signed into law in 2021 and gave it to the Teamsters Union to prevent severe cuts to the retirement incomes of 350,000 Teamster workers and retirees, a very convenient bailout for his supporters harmed by the very inflation Joe Biden’s policies have created. President Biden releasing $36 billion to aid pensions of union workers (cnbc.com)

More fuel scarcity will be caused by Joe Biden’s policies and the climate change industry which will demand climate lockdowns based on consumer behavior and social scores.

There will be more population revolts across the globe against governments that have stolen elections like in Brazil, angry that gasoline and natural gas are expensive and in short supply on purpose. Revolts will also flare up more against new pandemic-induced lockdowns.

There will be more pushbacks against social platforms like Twitter and Meta who still suspend access and the freedom of speech of conservatives and libertarians.

Twitter employees, behaving like the immature and entitled children that they are, have suspended President Trump, the most powerful president in the world, from their social platform, but allowed the Ayatollah on Twitter.

What would have happened if Iran had attacked the U.S. and President Trump would not have been able to communicate with the American people on our own social platforms? Have these Twitter employees, behaving like their office is a day care, gym, coffee shop, yoga meditation, and sandwich bistro, thought about the countrywide consequences of their hatred for Trump?

People are going to continue home schooling, as the quality of education in the U.S. is getting worse, and the transgender revolution is destroying the family and morals.

As inflation spikes and food shortages will become more common, people will do more home gardening, bartering for food, swapping seeds, swapping services, and building more community gardens than are currently in use.

Mike Adams predicts that the dollar might be replaced with Goldbacks and junk silver. Goldbacks are notes which contain a certain minimum of gold foil imbedded into the currency which will not have a face value and are issued with different state names on it. https://www.apmex.com/product/204989/1-utah-goldback-aurum-gold-foil-note-24k?msclkid=914e821026ae143e3f06e18a35151466&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utam_campaign=CPA%20-%20Gold&utm_term=gold%20backs&utm_content=Goldbacks

Junk silver represents coins circulating before 1965 which contain 90% silver. Their value is based on the content of metal and not on the collectability or condition. They have value but collectors are not interested in them as coins.

Finally, another worrisome prediction involves the scarcity and distribution of medicines and medical equipment, which will affect the overall health and survivability of the population in general.

 

Energy, the Inept Socialist Way

The sunshine and balmier weather is giving some American people a reprieve from having to use so much energy to heat their homes as prices escalate due to the draconian measures the Biden regime had adopted on his first day in office – executive orders that shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, off-shore drilling permits, and drilling on federal land.

We had been an oil exporter during the Trump presidency, but we have become an oil importer from Russia during the Biden regime. This is not a good time to become dependent on such a  bellicose country which is now helping escalate the price of gas and fuel around the world.

Poor neighbors such as Romania have found themselves having to pay 450 euros for a month’s electric bill when the country’s average salary is 350 euros. How are poor people supposed to keep warm or find affordable fuel for their cars? Is an energy crisis looming?

Eastern Europeans are no strangers to energy crises or shortages. Cold winters and the inept Communist Party central planning brought power shortages, heat, electricity, and rationing of gasoline at the pumps. Americans have not had to deal with such problems in recent memory.

Drastically cutting back on energy and banning private cars in Romania, for example, in the frigid winter of 1984-85 did little to deal with the shortage of energy supplies. Mismanagement by communist apparatchiks, who did not know how to properly run the “socialist economy” and did not really care, reduced imports of everything and increased exports of gas and oil and Romania did not have enough energy and electricity for its own citizens.

The draconian measures to save energy, a severe lack of electricity, hot water, and heat in the communist concrete and steel blocks and very cold apartments (still in use today), factories, public buildings, frigid government stores, caused so much illness and death among the population, some of whom froze to death. 

According to David Funderburk, former Ambassador to Romania during the extremely cold winter of 1984-85, one in three babies died or were born severely malformed; many babies died in neonatal units when the incubators were unplugged to save electricity.  Old and young alike died from a scarcity of food and heat.

How did so many people live in cold and drab concrete 5-9 story apartments that were poorly built, heated, and electrified? The tyrant and his communists in power wanted to create the new socialist man and a new society, built back better, so he called for the destruction of private homes. If people were forced to abandon their homes overnight and herded into such high-rise and small space apartments, the state commissar could keep a better watch and a heavy boot on their necks, thus more easily controlling the citizens’ every move. The “new socialist plan” called for seizure of their lands for “the common good” and hundreds of thousands of private homes, with more space than the communist apartment blocks, were bulldozed.

The poor villagers and former farmers became dependent on the socialist state practically overnight. They could no longer get firewood in their village for heat or cooking, they had to beg the totalitarian state for their rations of timber, supplies of rationed gas, and supplies of rationed electricity.

And the communist lackeys did not stop just at destroying people’s homes. They destroyed their village churches and city churches, some of whom had withstood hundreds of years of history and turmoil. The totalitarian socialist state recognized 14 denominations but they called them cults.  (Armenian, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Lutheran, Reformed, Islamic, Jewish, Old Rite Christian, Pentecostal Evangelical, Presbyterian Evangelical, Seventh Day Adventist, Romanian Orthodox [the largest denomination], and Unitarian).

The communist tyrant did all this because he wanted to force the “passage from the bourgeois-landlord society to the multilaterally developed socialist society.” In this process he destroyed priceless historical monuments that could no longer be replaced. Destroying history, art and architecture, he destroyed the people’s identity, memories, and connections to their shared past, good or bad.  

In a not so distant future our American children will find themselves in a similar position when their connection to the past history will be forever altered or completely severed by the hordes of woke mobs. Right now they are just changing historical names of buildings and streets, removing classical books from libraries and bookstores, and destroying statues. Eventually they will erase their shared past completely and create a deceptive one.

After the destruction of so many churches, religious persecution followed. Children and grandchildren of religious figures, active churches members, and some of those who occasionally showed up for religious services, were discriminated against and some were jailed under trumped-up charges. People were charged with “serious misconduct of the socialist ethics and of the political and moral behavior” of the new socialist man.

If young people had relatives who had hunted down communists in the early days of the Bolshevik takeover of the monarchy, they were labeled in the socialist society as pariahs and nobody would marry them or their children. Dossiers followed them for the rest of their lives.

In 1972 and 1981, as part of a “good faith” offers, the socialist tyrant allowed equal shipments of Bibles translated into Romanian. Of the promised 20,000 Bibles, around 200 were actually delivered to churches. The rest of the Bibles were poorly recycled into toilet paper made at a factory in Braila. I had some of that toilet paper in my hand one day – words from the Bible were still visible on the badly recycled paper. That is what Christianity and its Bible meant to the communists and still does today.

Small mountain villages, where the communist party had not fully inserted itself and forcibly collectivized the farmers, experienced their tyrannical handprint anyway– there was no electricity, heating oil, gasoline, running water, or medical care. Church services and people’s modest homes were lit with candles or oil lamps. Heat came from firewood when available. The sad reality was that my paternal and maternal grandparents only lived 24 miles and 6 miles respectively from the seven largest refineries in Eastern Europe at the time, yet they only got electricity sometime in the mid-seventies.

Do we really want to go this painful route of scarcity, high prices, and rationing, in the name of green energy, solar and wind, that is not enough to service a large economy and 340 million people?

Western nations like Germany have learned a hard lesson from expensive and unreliable green energy, and are quietly and slowly reverting to fossil fuels as their brown-outs and high prices have taken a heavy toll on their respective economies.

 

Kill Switch in All Cars in Five Years

Since 1992, billionaire globalists with money to burn, have been actively seeking to remove us from fossil fuel cars to save the planet from global warming/climate change/climate crisis Armageddon which U.N.’s Agenda 21/2030 has been actively seeking to do.

Since we are in love in America with the open roads and the freedom to travel by car, another no-no globalists seek to rectify while they fly around the world in their personal jets, sail in their huge yachts, and drive the most gasoline-guzzling vehicles their fat bank accounts can buy, we have been reluctant to buy their smart cars.

Elon Musk managed to sell Millennials and some baby boomers on the idea of the EV Tesla.  Millennials and rich liberals have been plunking the $80,000 plus to buy a sporty-looking Tesla EV car or SUV, especially since the energy is “free, non-polluting,” and it comes from an endless supply of fairy dust.

Biden’s infrastructure bill is going to rectify decades of mistakes environmentalists have made in pushing their green energy agenda. According to former Georgia Representative Bob Barr, the regime’s infrastructure package comes with a well-hidden present, a kill switch in cars. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/11/30/build-back-bummer-bidens-spending-spree-includes-a-kill-switch-for-your-car-n1537903

This kill switch will “passively monitor” impaired drivers, but it can be accessed by third parties such as law enforcement, a government agency, a company that decides that you must be watched, hackers who are up to no good, and even a foreign power.

The thought that we are monitored 24/7 for our own good just conjures up kumbaya thoughts of “safety” and “the government is here to take care of you if you behave.” If this kill switch is “passive,” it stays on the whole time and cannot be turned off. What the parameters are for deciding that a driver is off or impaired is not known. The kill switch is marketed to Congress as a wonderful tool to prevent drunk driving and within five years it must be built in every car manufactured. BARR: Biden’s ‘Infrastructure’ Bill Contains Backdoor ‘Kill Switch’ For Cars | The Daily Caller

The techies and the greens have been salivating to stop us from using fossil fuel cars for a long time, and to drive cars powered by lithium batteries (toxic and hard to recycle) and hydrogen fuel. “More than 30 public retail hydrogen fueling stations are online in California, with plans to install 100.” They are attached to existing gas stations to give people the false sense of security that they are just like fossil fuel cars but better. You can sleep soundly at night that your vehicle is only emitting water vapors.

The “net-zero” emissions pop up non-stop in the green tech narrative in the MSM and the climate “crisis” fear-mongering crowd. In their long-standing agenda, elitist billionaires want you to ride a train, walk, bike to work, school, and shopping, to give up your cars altogether, stop traveling anywhere, stop using meat, dairy, and eat their fake food.

The “cleantech movement” is primarily pushed by billionaires, green NGOs, and their useful idiots who volunteer to spread the message to the masses that the planet is dying, and we must fundamentally adjust society, kill heavy industry, steel, cement, kill harmful agriculture, rice production, the meat, and dairy industries, and replace them with synthetic alternatives.

By 2050, the green billionaires plan to eliminate fossil fuel use in all industries. Can you imagine the destruction to the U.S. economy and to your pocketbooks, not to mention the invasion of your privacy, freedom, and rights by a government emboldened to apply and use such a small item in your car’s computer as a “kill switch?”

Can you also imagine how little electricity you will have from solar and wind power when the energy of one natural gas power plant located on 4 acres of land must be replaced by 2,500 acres of large wind turbines? Will you have enough land left for agriculture, for food? According to Dr. Jay Lehr, “… the landmass of the contiguous 48 states is not large enough to fit all the wind turbines required.” And where will you place the solar panels? The simple arithmetic of wind power - CFACT

Without heavy subsidies from the federal government, none of these are competitive viable options for a population as large as the U.S. Prepare yourself to walk a lot and to have a limited mobility, closer to home, be cold in winter, be hot a lot in summer, while you are being watched all the time by your government.

 

 

 

The Climate Change Industry Changes the Energy Market

Countries and companies around the globe have spent trillions of dollars to stop the Earth from warming and the Earth did not get the message, it responded by cooling.  Not to worry, environmentalists who were blatantly wrong and tried to say that cooling is part of global warming, changed their golden goose agenda to climate change. Even though climate change is real, it is called seasons, critics of the climate change industry, of climatism, have been marginalized under the rubric of global warming heretic deniers.

The United Nations came up with a clever scheme to convince the world that the “Four Horsemen of Environmental Apocalypse, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and climate devastation” will annihilate humanity as we know it. The Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations, explained how they succeeded:

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

According to Dr. Steve Goreham, with the establishment of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, “climatism was born and controlling carbon has become a bureaucrat’s dream.”

World’s leaders, politicians, corporations, universities, and NGOs have been captivated by the climate change industry even though the theory of global warming has failed miserably and all the climate models were proven wrong. They declared war on fossil fuels and waged it with a vengeance at the expense of taxpayers and electricity users.

Suddenly using too much energy derived from coal, oil, and natural gas became a sin even though energy is the driver of global prosperity. Environmentalists have decided to deny the same opportunity for prosperity from cheap fossil fuel energy to millions of citizens of third world nations, forcing them instead into expensive solar and wind energy they cannot afford. Hydrocarbons became the black sheep, and billions and billions in subsidies were spent to make room for renewables.

“It's in our interest - and we wouldn't be able to stop it anyway - for the poorer countries, which only are responsible for about 20 percent of the globe's pollution, to develop, but they should develop according to a different path, a different industrial prescription than we did.”  (Michael Oppenheimer on This Week with David Brinkley, 31 May 1992) http://www.princeton.edu/step/people/faculty/michael-oppenheimer/in-the-news/Correcting-Glenn-Beck-.pdf

Environmental NGOs lectured impressionable students that nobody should be drilling at all because fossil fuels destroy the planet, we should pay $10 per gallon like Europe, use renewables and learn to live modestly on solar and wind,  if we can afford them. If we must return to medieval living to save one of God’s creatures, then we should.  It is getting serious when even the oil producers have bought into climatism.

But environmentalists are not all equal. They want electricity to their smart devices that use more power than a refrigerator. They want tents, shoes, sunglasses, caps, and clothes made from hydrocarbons but they are protesting fossil fuels. They want their Priuses and electric cars but have no idea that the electricity to power them comes from hydrocarbons. Some enviro-denizens are Nimby (Not in My Back Yard) when it comes to unsightly wind turbines. Others are Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). And yet others are Nope (Not On Planet Earth). There is too much oil, “enough to deep fry the planet.”

Dr. Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, and author of Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, described the collateral damage from the war on hydrocarbons using Europe as an example of an “energy disaster unfolding.” He said, “there are 487 national climate change laws in 66 nations” and they are hurting the economies of those respective countries.

Europe is a basket case of subsidized and mandated renewables that has resulted in higher electricity rates for customers, causing electricity penury among some of the citizens of Germany. Giving renewables output priority, energy from other sources like nuclear, hydropower, and fossil fuels was scaled back.  Germany shut down nuclear power plants and Germany and France banned hydraulic fracturing. The market for electricity and wholesale prices became dependent on the mercy of weather and wind, regardless of demand.

There was a massive installation of solar panels in Germany even though Germany is not exactly the sunshine state.  Spain decided to use Diesel generation for its solar panels because the solar panel electricity was too expensive, 23 cents per kWh. The ugly wind turbines everywhere produced inefficient and undependable electricity.

Dr. Goreham also mentioned that some countries imported wood from Alabama to burn as electricity generator instead of dirty coal. The Green Revolution has been so expensive for Europeans that subsidies were dropping in every area, followed by layoffs in the renewable industry. The wind industry in the U.S. gets 2.3 cents per kWh in tax credit in order to compete.

Even though IPCC said that “burning biomass is carbon neutral,” the reality is that biofuels release as much or more carbon dioxide than coal does. And the trading of carbon on the carbon markets is failing. People can pay all the carbon footprint taxes in the world and it will not make a bit of difference in the actual CO2 in the atmosphere. It will just make the traders and the companies richer.

Dr. Fred Singer, physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, reminded us that the climate change industry does not take into account the CO2 emissions from operation and maintenance of renewables such as how often these devices must be replaced (solar panels, wind turbines, parts, lubricants), and the transmission costs. Wind and solar power does emit CO2 in the construction process, during the mining of the metals used, lubricants, etc.

Even the President blamed the low GDP on cold weather. Perhaps it is time for global warmists turned climatists to be exposed again.

Honest scientists say that we have enough fossil fuels reserves for centuries of use. In the world’s economy renewables should compete without subsidies, we should worry about the Smart Grid’s vulnerability from hackers, solar flares, and EMPs, we should conserve energy wisely, protect nature sensibly, and let the carbon credits scheme go into the trash bin of expensive hustles.

 

 

 

Serendipitous Journey

I was on a quest to visit the shrine of the quintessential American sport and President William McKinley’s tomb.  I have been mesmerized by the Roman-style display of “pane et circenses,” the festive “bread and circuses” atmosphere which is not unlike soccer in other countries and on other continents.  Nowhere, however, are sports such an integral part of the American psyche – they live and breathe football. Going to the shrine, the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio is a necessary rite of passage for sport-loving American enthusiasts and die-hard fans. Along the way, I embarked on a serendipitous journey into America’s past and present.

Not even the location of our hotel across from a cemetery dampened our enthusiasm – it was peaceful in a creepy sort of way, resplendent with resident Canada geese and ground hogs. We crossed four states on our journey, and, since my husband was driving miss Ileana, I slept blissfully through the state of Maryland of which I am not particularly fond – I get hives on account of its communist stance on everything.

Pennsylvania’s Amish communities amid the beautiful landscape of the Allegheny Mountains are God’s country - a lush and verdant paradise. The recent drought did not affect the area much – the fields of corn were tall and dense.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, baptized the Blue Star Memorial Highway as a tribute to the Armed forces that have defended the United States of America, displayed political billboards on the left side of the road and regular advertising on the right.

During World War II, the Breezewood exit 6 to the turnpike was considered a major stop-off for many servicemen on their way to Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The Snyder family had a contract to supply fuel to military convoys and became famous for bartering meals, gasoline, and rest to servicemen for Military Service Insignia Patches found inside the Gateway Inn.

Pennsylvania is coal country –Black Gold.  The economy depends on the exploitation of coal, the almost 50 percent engine of our national electric energy. Coal power was advertised frequently.  “Wind Dies. Sun Sets. We Need Coal,” said a billboard near Crystal Springs.

“Coal Powering America 24/7,” said another billboard near Somerset.

Less than a mile down the road, a sign touted in big, green letters, “Windmills Powering the Future.” It was ironic that the sign was placed close to six gigantic, barely rotating windmills. I am not sure how much wind there is in the area on a regular basis or how much energy those particular six generated. I do not know whose future windmills will power – perhaps some liberal village? It certainly is not enough for our large economy and I have not seen any wind driven cars.

In Donegal, PA, a billboard exposed the distortions and lies of environmentalist groups fighting the development of natural gas, a cheap and pollution-free source of energy - “You’ve been slimed! NoGreenSlime.com.” New Stanton, PA residents went after our President – “Vote Change! Vote Nobama!”

For 180 miles, the Turnpike revealed through its political billboards, the pain and economic suffering under this administration’s policies that are destroying the coal industry, the engine of our American energy.

Upon exiting and paying our $12.50 toll, I was pensive about the reality disconnect between the unemployed coal miners in Pennsylvania and the bureaucrats in Washington. Three days ago, on the streets of D.C., two young men were pushing glossy fliers in the faces of pedestrians, advocating renewable energy. I asked one of them if he knew where his home electricity came from – surprisingly, he did know but he did not care – his job paid $12 an hour and allowed him to buy necessities and gas to drive home. To say that he was misguided, it is an understatement. It was more a reflection of our insane educational system and effective socialist brainwashing which creates drones willing to shoot themselves in the foot.

Crossing through God’s country, I felt at home among the hard-working and polite Amish, tending to their immaculate farms and dairies. People like them and the coal miners have made America an exceptional and abundant place through their work ethic, responsibility, faith, self-respect, respect of others, and fierce independence.

The moment we crossed into Ohio, the road became rougher and all political billboards disappeared. Instead, political ads from both parties bombarded the local television channels.

Our next stop was Canton, Ohio with its 80,000 square feet of interactive pro-football memorabilia. The Hall of Fame Museum is home to legends, their plays and names forever etched into the memory of football fans.

The National First Ladies’ Library, located in an 1895 bank building in Canton and the 1840 former Victorian home of First Lady Ida Saxton McKinley, showcased first ladies and other notable women.

I was fascinated by President William McKinley for two reasons – his electoral campaign and his insistence on the gold backing of our currency. We visited his burial site and memorial library in Canton. The classical Greek Mausoleum is fashioned in the style of Hadrian’s 2,000 year old tomb which is now St. Angelo’s Castle in Rome. It was built from over 2 million bricks and pink Milford granite.

Our 25^th President, William McKinley, was assassinated in 1901 during his second term in office, presumably by an anarchist. I am not so sure it was a random lone anarchist – McKinley’s insistence on the gold standard and his political and financial enemies may have played a part. President McKinley’s resting place was not dedicated until September 30, 1907.  He was a beloved Ohio son, war veteran, attorney, governor, and Congressman. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, appointed a committee to select the memorial from 60 entries and the winning design chosen in 1904 was that of Harold Van Buren Magonigle. The committee raised $550,000 and the ground breaking ceremony was June 6, 1905. The corner stone with a copper box containing data about President McKinley’ life exhibits the Roman numeral 1905. Theodore Roosevelt delivered the dedication speech. The importance of President McKinley and the support he received from the American people is underscored by the lavish mausoleum funded and built with contributions from nine states and citizens around the country and abroad.

President and Mrs. McKinley are interred in the polished dark green granite sarcophagi on top of the central pedestal while their infant children are on the north wall in the back. The sarcophagi, designed to appear as two pieces in a pod, were carved from single blocks brought from Windsor, Vermont. They are resting on a large black polished Berlin marble base ten feet square, cut from a quarry in Wisconsin. The stained glass inner skylight contains the 45 stars representing the states of the union in 1901.  The inscription on the freeze at the base of the dome is chosen from McKinley’s final speech in Buffalo, “Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord not conflict, and that our real preeminence lays in the victories of peace not those of war.” The monument is 97 ft. tall and has a full basement crypt. The exterior bronze doors were the largest ever cast at that time. The 9 ½ ft. statue located half way up the 108 steps was carved by Charles Hendry Niehaus from a photograph taken of the President a few hours before he was shot. A chair in the back of the statue is draped by the American flag. A bronze wreath encircles the top of the dome. (Stark County Historical Society bronze plaque, 1973)

William McKinley campaigned in 1896 on the platform of the Gold Standard – every U.S. dollar should be backed by 100 percent gold. His opponent, William Jennings Bryan, campaigned on the coinage of silver in a 16 to 1 ratio. Those who voted for McKinley were known as “gold bugs” and even wore bug lapel pins to signify their support of his platform. The gold “bug” pin with the representation of a beetle was easily recognized – everyone knew it referred to McKinley. McKinley garnered the popular vote with over 7 million and 271 electoral votes while his opponent received 176 electoral votes and 6.5 million votes.

McKinley’s campaign manager, Marc Hanna, perfected the idea of campaigning for the presidency without leaving home. Using his front porch, Marc arranged for special trips, publicity, money, and organization to bring party faithful on trains to hear McKinley speak. Hanna gave him advanced notice of who was coming and thus McKinley tailored his speech to the issues and concerns of the visitors. People from all over the country arrived at the Canton train station every day, bands played, and visitors marched to McKinley’s home on Market Avenue. This went on for 8 weeks and the locals were happy to accommodate the visitors. His opponent, William Jennings Bryan, traveled 18,000 miles during three months and spoke to an estimated 5 million people.  (McKinley’s Presidential Library and Museum)

McKinley, a war veteran himself, tempered the war mongers who wanted to protect their sugar plantations from the conflict between Cuba and Spain. He did not want to engage the United States into a war without a real threat. He did not ask Congress to declare war on Spain until the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. The Spanish-American War lasted 113 days and completely destroyed the Spanish fleet in Cuba and the Philippines. The U.S. emerged as a world power with the stigma of imperialism. The war cost the U.S. $300 million and added 124,000 square miles to the American territory. After the war, President McKinley signed on July 7, 1898 the annexation of Hawaii and Guam to the U.S. territories. The cartoons of that era portrayed Uncle Sam as a caretaker for these new “babies.”

How many innocent lives and trillions of dollars could we save today if presidents exercised McKinley’s temperance before declaring war? How many billions of dollars could be saved and months of constant bombardment by the biased media and expensive, mud-slinging commercials avoided if Hanna’s campaign method could be used again in a modernized version? Billions and billions of dollars wasted on pandering to the misinformed voters, smear campaigns of one’s opponent, and buying votes from illegal aliens and special interest groups would spread a lot of wealth to the poor and downtrodden. President Obama has been in campaign mode ever since he was elected, making him the perennial Campaigner-in-Chief.