What Hat?

I don't understand your hat joke, and I don't believe I've ever heard anybody say that before about Michigan. Is it an Uncle Ken original?

People commonly use the words "proof" and "evidence" interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Evidence may or may not lead to proof, but it seldom leads to disproof. A criminal court does not find an accused person innocent, it either finds him guilty or not guilty. Not guilty doesn't necessarily mean the guy is innocent, it just means there is not sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty. There is legal proof, there is mathematical proof, and there is scientific proof, but when most people say "proof" they mean none of the above. What they really mean is "proof to my satisfaction", which is basically belief. If they believe it, it's true as far as they're concerned. Take the Loch Ness Monster, for example. People have searched the loch back and forth with various kinds of sonar equipment and have never found the monster. That doesn't prove that the monster exists, but it doesn't prove that it doesn't exist either. All it proves is that, if it exists, they didn't find it. I doubt that anybody's belief or non belief in the Loch Ness Monster has been affected by any of this.

I don't know what all the Bircher were accused of back in the day, but nobody has ever been able to prove that they did anything wrong. That doesn't mean they never did anything wrong, it just means nobody has been able to prove that they did. I'm pretty sure that one of the things they were accused of was being a Communist front, but so were a lot of other organizations. It's possible that, since the Birchers were calling so many other groups Communist fronts, somebody thought it might be fun to accuse them of the same thing. My experience with the Birchers was that they were mostly in the publishing business. Some of the larger chapters may have actually done something real, but our little group never got that far, all they did was talk about the subject. Our little chapter didn't last long, maybe a year. After that I was in the "home chapter", which means you pay your dues, they send you literature, and you don't have to go to any meetings.  After another year or two of that, the literature started repeating itself, so I quit paying dues. I had nothing against these people, I just couldn't see the point of paying for literature that I had already read.

When I joined the army, I took an oath to "obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me". I never promised to obey any unlawful orders. We were told that, if we believed an order to be unlawful, there were two ways to handle it. If obeying the order would likely cause death or injury to someone who didn't deserve it, or if it went against our moral or religious standards, we should refuse to comply and report the matter to the next higher authority in our chain of command. If obeying the order would likely cause some material property damage that could be fixed, we should obey the order under protest and still report it to the next higher authority. Since the president is the Commander in Chief, I'm not sure to whom you would report an unlawful order that came directly from him, but there must be somebody.