bfaure – Page 15 – Ramparts of Civilization

July 12, 2015

The Age of the Globians

It is such a stressful time for those traditionalists among us that have considered the 2600 years since the Greeks brought forth the birth of western man as a rational and contemplative individual a journey of great achievement. The tract of progress that in the proceeding thousands of years has been fitful and at times violent, but ever forward. Schools of philosophy and logic. Concepts of democracy and republicanism. Rights of property and the rule of law. Principles of free speech and freedom of faith. Objectivity of learning , and the method and rigor of science. Obligations and privileges of citizenship. From the 6th century BC onward, the concepts have been at times celebrated and at other times attacked, but the ramparts of civilization have held fast against the multiple threats of hedonism, anarchy, and revanchism by totalitarian tides.

Unfortunately, our current age is under attack, and this time the enemy is from within. It is possible that the maturation of western ideals is now in its progressively senile old age, and the practitioners of modern western thought are suffering under a form of cognitive dementia. The syndrome is rudderless globalism, and the advocates a new ethnic group I am coining the descriptor, Globians.

What is a Globian? You might recognize the Globian in Chief referenced above, but this time, a thousand words speaks a picture. In this progressively post western world that the Globian aspires to, nothing less than the total transformation of civilization from the focus on the individual, to the comfort of the collective is desired. The Globian strives for the re-ordering of what was once considered unalienable, and the process to get there moves on many fronts.

History The Globian works to detach society from the chronological connection to its past. The concept of history is not to be about understanding what happened, but defining how it is to be remembered. Ask a globalist regarding the dates of the American or French Revolution, the first man on the moon, or the Civil War and you are likely to get a bizarre answer. Years have no meaning to the Globian because past history is seen as imperial, hegemonic, and racist. The connection of one event to another chronologically has no meaning because the history of man until recently has been seen as elevating the individual while denying classes of people. History is remembered only as it fits the narrative. For instance, take President Obama’s insistence that the inspiration of the civil rights march of Reverend King across the bridge in Selma Alabama was the stimulus for his parents getting together and conceiving Barack Obama – except that the birth of Obama was in 1961 and the march at Selma in 1965. Or that Texas has been a difficult state for the President, because as Obama stated, “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” This would be a pretty big shock to the 150 years of democrat domination of Texas, from Sam Houston to Sam Rayburn through Lyndon Johnson and Ann Richards. The Globian narrative holds no event above another as they were all events of force or oppression and therefore no need for clarity as to their relationship to each other. History is parallel, and to the Globian the historical perspective of the Maori as important as the nation state.

Values The Globian sees a value tradition as representative of societal prejudice. The Globian is therefore entirely comfortable in the West throwing out the concept of marriage as being between a man and woman as reactionary and prejudicial, while being equally comfortable with an islamic radicalist throwing off the roof any individual believing otherwise. Values of property and ownership seem archaic as they imply unfair advantage between peoples. In the Global village, resources and production are cohabited – if you own that, you certainly didn’t build that. The victim in a crime event may actually be the criminal, as his or her environment may have been such that they were drawn to violence or theft, and the victim instead the criminal, for owning the unfair advantage of wealth, skin-tone, or oppressive ancestors. Cultural values have to be leveled – splotches of paint thrown against canvas in anger reflect the same cultural value as carefully tendered art; hip hop poets measured against Shakespeare. Religious standards are arbitrary – Jesus can be immersed in urine or lain upon a hammer and sickle, but Mohammed can not even be drawn.

Borders The Globian is offended by arbitrary borders. Borders seek to maintain for one people the bounty against another people, not the marker for a common set of principles or aspirational beliefs. The nation state was founded to separate intermingling and diversity and must be progressively done away with to produce a universal equality. Therefore concepts of citizenship are arbitrary. Legal and illegal immigrants are assigned the same rights and privileges of citizenship. A nation’s borders are turnstiles for migration, but the migrant may accept the bounties of the society without needing to accept any of its laws as binding. The dissolution of borders progressively create one global village.

Rule of Law The Globian sees laws as organic processes, not principles agreed upon. The Constitution is a “living” document to be interpreted like any other time limited expression, requiring accountability and constant adjustment if it proves limiting. Laws are inherently flawed in they require agreement through legislation. The Globian prefers extra- legal regulation, as regulations can be extended far beyond the limitations of agreed upon laws, and changed as necessary to fit the “sense” of the law, rather than its precise delineated meaning. Regulations additionally can provide universal control over individual pursuits, as these are antithetical to the global need to have a common uniformity of opinion. Laws that don’t fit the narrative need to be overturned, a laborious process. Regulations can be applied infinitely and without consent of the governed. Globians see government as the answer for the needs of the governed, and regulations as the universal tool of governing.

Humans The thought of humanity as having been ordained divinely with dominance over the earth is abhorrent to the Globian. To the Globian, inanimate and animate objects hold equal sway. Humans therefore need to respect the snail darter, and their damage to Mother Ghia borders on sacrilege. Fresh water is not to be dammed or reservoired as water is meant to flow to the sea. Modern humanity is driven to kill the earth, plundering its resources and unfairly dominating its other species. Humans gouge the surface of the Earth with mines, and scar Her viscera with fracking and drilling, for no other purpose then to produce the energy for humanity’s artificial comfort and the earth’s climatic demise. Man as Lord over Nature is intolerable and unsustainable, and as its expression is so poorly distributed, must be stopped.

Science the Globian needs to science to be “settled” where it fits a narrative, and be rejected where its does not. Science, since the Enlightenment, the unprejudiced objective means by which man has been able to question the known and discover the unknown does not work for the Globian. Science’s job as expressed by the Globian is to codify the Globian narrative, not to question it. What good is uniform regulation of climate if people continually question the “science” behind it? Why should the humanness of a fetus be questioned, if the discovery of its humanity would lead to questioning of the right of society to ignore its personhood? The Globian needs Wind power to be good, and Carbon to be bad, sexual education for toddlers to be good, and vaccinations to be bad. The Globian wants science to regulate not illuminate and makes sure that contrary voices are labelled heretics.

The Globian in short, lives in a world of hypocrisy in my mind. They are coddled in their modernity, but reject it for others. Being post modern hypocrites, they can fly private jets to give speeches to other globians to demand humans walk or ride mass transit. They can decry racial intolerance while excusing the most extreme examples. They insist others are held accountable to laws while ignoring those same laws themselves when it moves them. They celebrate diversity, while driving people more and more into a generic uniformity that looks to squash all creative resilience. In short, they want a global communal village, but one that suppresses the best impulses of thousands of years of developmental human rational thought, and they want it for everyone else.

The Globian age has momentum. What it doesn’t have is -integrity. Hopefully, at some point our unique need to be ourselves, will provide a more rigorous resistance. After all, throwing out 2700 years of progress for a few decades of loose values hardly seems to be a good trade.

June 27, 2015

The War for the Future

In the second century BC, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, realized that in order to preserve his status and his great achievements, constant vigilance would be required, even after he was gone from this mortal coil. When you are in it for the long haul, one can’t allow the ramparts to go unguarded, or the miscreants will inevitably look to erode your position. Greatness, and great ideas, are unlikely to be gotten easily, and one must be a ferocious warrior for their defense. So Emperor Qin Shi Huang made sure no one would threaten his position, even in the afterlife. He assembled in his capital city of Xi’an an army of over 8000 warriors, led by generals, and armed to the teeth, accompanied by a full cavalry of chariots and horses. The army was there to eternally defend his position, his power, and his greatness. If some usurper wanted to war with his immortality, it was war they would get.

Well, its long past time we who man the Ramparts of Civilization assembled some warriors. If you are a consistent reader of this blog, you are likely aware of what has been the gathering storm over the last twenty years, and the storm has descended upon us in full fury, and become a war for the future. It shouldn’t have caught us unawares, but admittedly, we are ill prepared, as we felt our defenses were essentially insurmountable and inviolate. We were wrong, and the barbarians are at the gates.

Since the 1960s, a generation of attacks on the formidable fortress of liberties and rule of law that is the Constitution of the United States has progressively eroded its foundations. What once seemed eternal and impenetrable, has now found itself with massive holes in its edifice and its very future is in peril. If you think that civilization should be ruled by deliberative law and not by decree and the whims of the elites, you better pay some damn close attention.

The Supreme Court of the United States, considered since the founding, the apolitical arbiter of the law based on constitutionality and precedence, has joined the ranks of the barbarians. In three major decisions this week, the court found that a law passed by the legislative body is defined by its intent and not its specific meaning, that democratic processes do not move fast enough whenever the state has determined that a “fundamental” right exists even when it was not apparent it existed before, and that the state could determine the makeup of communities based on its vision of fairness. The thought of the framers that the third branch stood to thwart, to check, the other two branches deviation from the constitution, was pounded to sand.

The specific”laws” and “rights” upheld were not of issue. What was of issue was the checks and balances system that made this particular democracy a citadel for freedom, individual rights, and limited government. The Constitution held that if the wording of a law or its expression was unconstitutional, the law was to be rescinded, and the deliberative process to be again undertaken to secure a constitutional law. By policing the law’s specifics, the rights of individuals to vote for representatives who would uphold their individual rights and hold them accountable by the laws they developed would be secure. According to the Supreme Court, a law is now only established by its intent, and its specifics can be adjusted in any way the state determines efficacious. How does one make sure one is in compliance with such metastasizing laws? Who can now determine whether any of the expressed rights of the Constitution are secure, or they all exposed to the interpretation of the currents and personalities of the current day? Justice Scalia – the last of the Mohicans – expressed better than any in his dissent the fundamental principles that have been sacrificed to the altar of “fairness”:

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not.

Each of the decisions should be read in their entirety. The war is being fought now on every front. The government of the founders, the government that was declared as emanating from We the People, is under full assault. It is a government that can rule you by regulatory decree. It can determine whether your exercise of religion will be infringed by those that would have you submit to their versions of correct behavior, regardless of how it humiliates or degrades your view. It can force you to pay for the sloth of others, and can force you to ignore their misfortune. It can drive your education and your facts. It can declare science settled, and victories defeat. It’s your father, your mother, your cradle, and your grave.

The war has been fought for some time, and those that would make the founders vision unrecognizable have always been sensitive to your weakness in naively believing these fundamental beliefs were important to all. When you go to that voting booth, and it is at the voting booth that the armies of change are fundamentally engaged, you better stop voting Republican or Democrat, as they are two birds of a feather. It is time you seek those who are warriors for the founders principles, and those who are barbarians of change. Find such warriors, and put your money, and your vote, where your future might have just a breath of a chance. If you don’t, you will find our freedoms forever buried, like the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an, a museum exhibit to a past greatness long gone and buried.

June 14, 2015

And Then…There’s Europe

Fighting at the Donetsk International Airport

One has to feel a little sorry for President Obama. Here he is, trying his best to achieve a socialist utopia in the United States and try as he might to withdraw from the rest of the world – it keeps pulling him back in.

If one can recall 2009-2010, the President put in place the wheels for an eventual total withdrawal of American influence in the Middle East to allow the region to heal itself without further suffering caused by the obviously overbearing and malign American presence. Assuming a stable Iraq, he determined to fully withdraw from the Status of Forces Agreement that kept American boots on the ground. He announced the timing of American withdrawal from Afghanistan at the same time he announced a temporary surge of troops, thereby laying the ground work to force the Afghan government to parlay with the opposition Taliban. Most profoundly, when faced with an Iranian government teetering on the edge of collapse under the pressure of the millions of Iranian citizens pushing for change in the Green Revolution, he determined to stay disengaged with events so that he could get in the good graces with the mullahs and devise a long term agreement of cooperation that would “open” Iran to the rest of the world. Then there was that “red line” in Syria that wasn’t. And the Libyan over throw of Qaddafi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood election that was supposed to be part of the “Arab Spring”.

Okay, the Middle East thing has been pretty much a disaster, but at least the President could rely on smart diplomacy and a prosperous and stable Europe to achieve lasting stability after an appropriate reset with Russia. Despite the tensions of the cold war and the never ending hostility of the various hateful tribes of the Balkan peninsula, Europe had managed to go 70 some years without armed conflict, building itself into the democratic statist and socialist utopia Obama could only dream about for America, and securing an economic and diplomatic weight that could balance off more of that infamous overbearing and malign American influence, this time on the European continent.

Don’t look now, Mr. President, but a progressively unstable Europe may not have your back after all.

For a continent that has not known tank and artillery fighting since World War II, tank and artillery fighting have come to Europe. President Putin of Russia, sensing hesitation and weakness like a hawk senses a wounded field mouse, followed up his blatant territory grab of the Crimea from Ukraine with further land grabs in eastern Ukraine under the proxy of the self declared Donetsk People’s Republic. For some reason, the government of Ukraine took personally Putin’s attempt to swallow a third of sovereign Ukrainian territory and has fought back. For the first time since World War II, there is conflict in Europe that has already caused the deaths of thousands. Spiegel Online reports the absurdities of the new European border at Donetsk, and the progressively desperate situation for those caught on the wrong side of the line. The attitudes on both sides are hardening as the bodies pile up. European bodies. Putin’s escapades have not been limited to Ukraine. Similar land grab experiments following the model that a majority Russian speaking population in a portion of a sovereign country is reason enough to bring Russian military forces to assist in “Russianizing” – a pattern repeated in both Georgia and Moldova. Now the New York Times reports that for the first time since the cold war the US is pre-positioning heavy weaponry in eastern Europe. This time it is to support erstwhile NATO allies in the Baltics, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, who fear Putin is about to “Russianize” parts of their territory laden with heavily Russian speaking minorities. The possibilities for dangerous and untoward events are numerous.

Additionally, the Germans are beginning to express how “tired” they are for what seems like the twentieth time, the never ending requirements to underwrite countries in the European Union that can not pay their way as part of the Euro economy. Greece, 17% of whose GDP goes to pensions, is unwilling to undertake the severe austerity required to maintain the Euro against such social compacts, and instead asks for more German economic support and debt they can not pay back. To the Greeks, the Germans owe it to them. The Germans have been willing to suppress their natural position as Europe’s biggest continental power, given their history, but they are not about to give in to the Greeks forever. A “Greexit” is in the cards, i.e., Greece leaving the Euro, and the domino effect on other Euro countries in similar straights to Greece, could see the Euro implode. Germany would left holding the economic detritus, and their reactions could bring some long suppressed European tensions back from long forgotten to oh so hotten.

War with thousands of dead Europeans. Russian and American/NATO tanks facing each other. Europe in economic crisis. Germany once again having to look out for its own interests. And a dollop of islamic radical infestation from a collapsing Libya to stir the pot. The President has a transformation on his hands that has the potential to supersede all his other transformations. The mother of all transformations, as it were. Taking the overbearing and malign American influence out of the world may not have been all it was cracked up to be.

June 7, 2015June 7, 2015

Right and Wrong

The New York Times, in its role as public advocate, is making sure to vet candidates for President to make sure their darker edges are known to all. This week’s target, Marco Rubio. We learn the distinct disdain Rubio and his wife supposedly have for the law. It turns out presumptive President Rubio has, over twenty years, had at least four run-ins with the law. Three speeding tickets and running a red light. Certainly, if you won’t stop for a red light, what will keep you from ignoring the Constitution?

We are progressively engaged in a cultural revolution redesigning the age old tenets of right and wrong as a judgement of a person’s character. The traditional structure was clean, declarative and unambiguous. The Ten Commandments. The Way, the Truth, and the Life. To follow these declared life directions was to be secure of a place in heaven. Right and wrong had ultimate moral clarity. Thou shalt not kill. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The seminal concept was personhood. A person’s acts and the way he or she acted defined them as a person of rectitude or not.

Then things became more complicated with the concept of ownership. In a world where no one owned anything, and the mass of the accumulated wealth and property was assumed the divine right of kings, one didn’t need much in the way of secular laws. Things began to change however when individuals questioned the right of kings. We look to our British brothers for impulse for laws that govern our lives. The Magna Carta, the document signed between King John and British land barons at Runnymede 800 years ago this year secured the concept the kings needed to work within a framework of respect for the rights of individual free men – the securing of separation of church and state affairs , protections against illegal imprisonment, and agreement about the form and extent of taxation. The Levellers emerged in the 17th century during the English Civil War championing the rights of the non-landed individuals to achieve suffrage, equality before the law, and the right to own property. John Locke, the philosopher, developed the Leveller concepts into a comprehensive understanding of individual rights and rights to property that became one of the most important underlying principles driving the American Revolution. To prosper, you needed people to respect your achievements, a government that could not take the bounty of your labors without your willing consent. Laws no longer about right and wrong, but rights and limitation of rights required nuanced laws and continuous adjustment. Such adjustments needed careful adjudication and a proliferation of law specialists, lawyers, became critical to separate out competing claims.

So far, so good. The original intent of limited government and precise declarations, however, began to spiral out of control as the extent and diversity of ownership and mercantile transactions created the environment for expansion of bureaucracies. The Magna Carta fit on a page. The Constitution of the United States fit on three pages. By 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act signed by President Grover Cleveland required 24 sections and 9 pages – long, but readable in a single session and still a guide for all. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought a small book of nine title chapters and 1,106 sections, by which the expression of individual right protections, and equally importantly, the determination as to whether someone was technically following the law, was becoming progressively more laborious. It began to be rationalized that one needed laws to define laws – in essence a set of regulations to provide the detail that the increasingly more expanded and opaque laws could not provide. Thus forward through the formation of Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Tax Code, and the behemoth of behemoths, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, coming in at 955 pages, 10602 Sections and thousands of attachments driving the creation of over 90,000 regulations thus far. To know if you were right or wrong in your desire to follow the law, you had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, according to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House in 2010. Its fairly certain no individual can feel confident they are compliant with laws such as these.

Right and wrong has become a technicality. You can be right, and be technically wrong. You can be in the wrong and technically right. As the sign above indicates, it depends on who is regulating and who is enforcing. The society has become a dysfunctional mess, where the Secretary of the Treasury in 2008 was incarcerating people for not technically paying sufficient taxes by his understanding of the law, while he was not paying his own taxes. We have a former Vice President flying around in a monstrously carbon guzzling private jet exclaiming that it is righteous to tax people for clinging to their mode of transportation, cars, to an intolerable limit, to affect their wrong way behavior. We have a presumptive presidential candidate and her former President husband that see nothing wrong in the technical right to run a charitable organization as their private bank, with tens of millions of dollars of tax free funds pouring in to support personal lifestyle and minuscule amounts reverting to the charitable intent. In an equally dark vein, we have the horrid story of a murder victim in New Jersey, who attempted to abide by the law to legally obtain a firearm, guaranteed to her by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, to protect herself only after the state of New Jersey secured her a permit, find herself waiting months only to have the ex-boyfriend find her and kill her. The victim and the state were technically right to have followed an intolerable law, and now she is most certainly untechnically dead as a result.

We are living in a time where no one is on any level clear as to their responsibility before the law, or equality, clarity or fairness by which the law will be enforced. Millions of unknowable regulatory laws put every single American in the wrong for something, whether they are aware of it or not. It only requires an overriding bureaucratic government to determine the arbitrary enforcement of it. Try to live a righteous life, and on some level I assure you , you are getting it wrong.

Marco Rubio wants to be President. His wife was ticketed in the Rubio family vehicle for driving 23 miles and hour in a 15 mile an hour school zone. The fine was 185.00. They were in the wrong. They paid the fine. They knew the difference between right and wrong and made it up to society. Nothing arbitrary about it. That’s enough for me. Now, if only the New York Times would focus its attentions on the crimes of the century being transferred as we speak to our nation’s children as we as a society refuse to admit our wrong of letting our government buy us stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have. Maybe Marco Rubio, who pays his fines, is just the man for the job.

May 31, 2015

You Did Build That – That Was You

Fleeing for their lives, Syrian Refugees pour into Kurdistan

President Obama is proud of delivering the socialist mantra to entrepreneurs that their success in life was fashioned not through their own hard work, but ultimately through the critical contribution of infrastructure and faceless laborers who are owed the redistribution of the success. “You didn’t build that- someone else made that happen!”, the quote by which his admonition to capitalists and personal economic philosophic view was revealed. Well, when it comes to the current unfolding multiply layered international calamity that has transpired since President Obama took office in January, 2009, the verdict of history is already clear. You did build that, President Obama- That was you, and you alone.

President Obama made the mistake of confusing the potentially appropriate foreign policy argument that the international role the United States was playing had grown beyond its perceived national interests, with the argument that the United States role as global world leader in the twentieth century had nothing to do with world stability. In other words he had taken the socialist domestic argument and extended it to the international arena. The United States had not built world stability. Its very presence had exasperated natural regional aspirations and allowed the United States to “take advantage” of the rest of the world and reap undeserved benefits. The United States needed to recognize its role of being only one of many nations, and accept its consignment to “improve” the world through fairer redistribution of resources through participation in climate change and World Banking and Justice initiatives.

On the domestic front, the philosophic vision of the President has led to predictable economic stagnation, worsening of conditions for the most vulnerable, and progressive mountains of debt. On the international front, the vision is leading ominously to something substantially more serious.

It was quoted recently that the only two countries that it could be suggested under the Obama Doctrine to have developed improved relationships with the United States are communist Cuba and the leading supporter of international terrorism, the theocratic dictatorship of Iran. The rest of the world, sensing the effects of the vacuum left behind by the withdrawal of the steadying presence of US influence, has disintegrated into an appalling mess. China, noting the weakness of American resolve, has expanded its prosperity sphere into the international waters of the South China Sea and is militarily pressing against the sovereign lands of Japan and Vietnam, and looking to bully the Philippines and Australia. Russia, having reversed its attempt to create a modern diversified economy and having stamped out the nascent elements of democracy, now feels free to use its time honored hegemonistic tactics against its surrounding states of Georgia and Ukraine, and soon, the Baltics, risking seventy years of relative peace in Europe. The carefully tendered relationships the United States built up with Europe and the Pacific Rim countries, based on the fundamental trust they felt in being able to count upon the US at a moment of crisis has dissolved.

Nothing compares to the affect the Obama Doctrine has had on the Middle East and North Africa. The fundamental belief by all the players in the region that the United States would work as a stabilizing force and not leave allies exposed has dissolved in a pit of calamity. The US acted to demolish the tyrant Qaddafi in Libya without any plan to secure a stable outcome post removal. The country is now a warlord paradise threatened with the ultimate warlord ISIS being positioned to gain all of Libya’s oil resources, and with it, the enormous strategic position of a dagger to the underbelly of Europe. Egypt, the epicenter of the arab nation, and long time stabilizer under American support, is positioned as a pariah by Obama for throwing out the Muslim Brotherhood, and progressively finds itself under threat from the region’s instability. Syria, the crossroads of ancient civilizations, is thrown into chaos by the Obama Doctrine dithering on support, then rejection, then support, and finally rejection of both the hated Assad regime and it’s equally despicable Islamist radical opponents, particularly ISIS. Caught in the middle are the Syrian people, now approaching 500,000 dead and millions upon millions of refugees pushing into the few remaining stable havens in the region for protection and survival. Hell has come to Syria. Next door Iraq, declared by the Obama Administration as recently as 2011 as one of its greatest foreign policy successes, has crumbled to the brink of non-existence, and has potential to make the hell in Syria look like child’s play as Iraq degenerates into the front line of a massive Sunni-Shia fault line. With ISIS now at the gates of Baghdad, having brutally overrun one-third of the sovereign country, the government of Iraq, progressively a Quisling government of Iran, no longer counts on the US for any tactical considerations, only materials. The many Iraqis who trusted the word of the United States, that if they took the risk of supporting a modern culturally diversified state, they could count on US protection, have discovered the ugly reality. A must read.

And finally, the sublimation of American regional interests to Iranian ones with the decision to subvert the strong control that sanctions had on the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions. The pending agreement with Iran has reversed the policy of constraint, offered Iran economic freedom to pursue its aims in the region, and placed the remaining two American allies in the region, the world’s greatest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, and the region’s only stable democracy, Israel, in the Iranian cross-hairs. A conflict between these three behemoths wouldn’t stay regional for even an eye-blink.

It turns out, President Obama built this mess, and it’s the President’s legacy for the ages. When the next President is sworn in on January, 2017, he or she is going to have an ungodly mess to deal with, and will likely have to make the brutally painfully decisions that this President has carelessly tendered upon the next. The loss of American resolve, the loss of integrity of a nation’s word, the willingness to let the bullies win and destroy hundreds of years of human progress. Now that is one heck of a legacy.

May 24, 2015May 24, 2015

Remembering

Gunnery Sergeant Ryan Shane shot while trying to rescue a wounded Marine in the Second Battle of Fallujah- 2004 photo by Cpl Joel Chaverri US Marine Corps — Gunnery Sergeant Ryan Shane shot while trying to rescue a wounded Marine in the Second Battle of Fallujah- 2004
photo by Cpl. Joel Chaverri US Marine Corps

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
Joan of Arc

As this Memorial Day descends upon us, the tendency to forget the core of the day, and celebrate instead its release from the weekly grind is strong. In a democracy, however, in which the request to serve the nation and potentially give one’s limb or life for whatever dedicated purpose the nation’s leadership purports worth sacrificing for is a voluntary decision, the need to feel the day viscerally is critical to the nation’s existence. Each individual sacrifice is unredeemable loss. The important question is- is the national purpose worthy of the accumulated sacrifice? Without the belief that the nation’s goals are purposeful and just, can anyone expect to continue to maintain the level of profound dedication and quality of those who have served at the ramparts of this nation for over 200 years?

We live in dangerous times. But the determination by the nation’s leaders as to the need to confront dangers has been present since inception. Some times requiring sacrifice have been heroically worthy, others in retrospect, less than heroic, but to the individual asked to sacrifice, the belief in and love for comrades, brought dignity to the sacrifice, no matter how difficult it was to recognize the logic of the action. The military of the United States has been asked to sacrifice almost continuously from the nation’s birth to the present day:

American revolutionary War 1775-1783 25,000
Northwest Indian War 1785-1795 1056
U.S. European Quasi-War 798-1800 514
War of 1812 1812-1815 20,000
1st Seminole War 1817-1818 36
Black Hawk War 1832 305
2nd Seminole War 1835-1842 1,535
Mexican-American War 1846-1848 13,283
3rd Seminole War 1855-1858 26
American Civil War 1861-1865 625,000
Indian Wars 1865-1898 920
Great Sioux War 1875-1877 314
Spanish-American War 1898 2,446
Phillippine Insurrection 1898 -1913 4,196
Boxer Rebellion 1900-1901 131
Mexican Revolution 1914-1919 35
Haiti Occupation 1915-1934 148
World War I 1917-1918 116,516
American Campaign/ Russia 1918-1920 752
Nicaragua Occupation 1927-1933 48
World War II 1941-1945 405,399
Korean War 1950-1953 36,516
Vietnam War 1955-1975 58,209
El Salvador Civil War 1980-1982 37
Lebanon/Beirut 1982-1984 266
Grenada 1983 19
Panama 1989 40
Persian Gulf War Desert Storm 1990-1991 258
Kurdish Defense 1991-1996 19
Somalia Intervention 1992-1995 43
Bosnia 1995-2004 12
NATO Campaign Yugoslavia 1999 20
Afghanistan 2001-2015 2,356
Iraq 2003-2013 4,489
Cold War 1948 – present Undocumented
CIA Wars 1943- present Undocumented attrib./ militaryfactory.com

Over 1.2 million Americans have died in action since the nation’s inception. Millions more have been injured and maimed, their lives changed forever. To the individual serving his or her country, the purposeful sacrifice was no less heroic in the questionable principles or merits of the actions of the Great Sioux War or Philippine Insurrection as it would be in the visible threat and evil in World War II. Ultimately a country is judged by both the priniciples underlying an action and in the ultimate success of that action. To the families left behind, the loss is assuaged faintly ,but perceptively, if the loss was not “in vain” or “for a good cause.” To note that the individual did their job to the ultimate, but the nation’s leadership failed theirs, adds only pain to the already tremendous burden accompanying sacrifice. More and more, it seems the nation’s leaders are struggling to indicate the value principles of actions, and to see them through to the completion of the goals, assuring the sacrifices required might be worthy of their request.

A prime example of the detachment of leadership from the need to understand what the sacrifices have engendered are the brutal and now thrown away sacrifices of Fallujah. The harrowing photo above captures one small but seminal event in the horrific Second Battle of Fallujah fought by US Marine and Army forces against Al Qaeda in November,2004. The progressive crumbling and mismanagement of the supposed American “victory” over the Iraq army of Saddam Hussein in 2003 became clear in the Anbar Province city of Fallujah. The peace was ruptured and a challenge to the American assumptions regarding Iraq was placed, with the Al Qaeda calling card of 4 burnt and hung American contractor corpses on a Fallujah bridge for all to see. The First Battle of Fallujah in April, 2004, by the Marine Corps rousted out the initial Al Qaeda forces only to turn over the local policing of the city to a Sunni division of the ‘new’ Iraqi army, the Fallujah Brigade, led by a former Baathist general Latif. Ignorant of the long standing hostility of the Sunni locals to the now Shia overloads in Baghdad, the Fallujah Brigade ‘defended” the city by allowing thousands of Al Qaeda insurgents to nest and take over the city under the leadership of Musab Al Zarqawi, a vicious terrorist warlord whose goal was the expulsion of Americans and the slaughter of the Shia and Kurd Iraqi segments of Iraq. The city became a place of horror to the subjugated, full of fascist Chechians, Somalis, and Syrians imposing their will and looking forward to Armageddon with the Americans. The need to destroy the new fortress of the growing Al Qaeda threat led to the second battle of Fallujah.

The Second Battle of Fallujah is considered some of the most difficult and violent urban warfare American troops have faced. The six months in between American intervention had been used by Al Qaeda to turn Fallujah into a deathtrap. The narrow alleyways of the ancient city were full of explosive devices. The stair wells of buildings were bricked to create dead ends were American troops could be slaughtered by hidden machine guns. The Al Qaeda troops were allowed drugs to stimulate aggression and super human strength to buttress their courage and sense of sacrifice. The battle was fought door to door, alley to alley, hand to hand in a gruesome dance to the death. The brave forces that faced the killing machine in Fallujah, lost 107 dead and 613 wounded to take back in brutal combat what they had given away just six months before. The two month action has been felt to rival the battle for Hue in Vietnam or the Pacific campaigns of World War II in ferocity. The Second Battle of Fallujah is a story of sacrifice – the picture above relates the purest form, a soldier under direct fire risking all and coming back for his wounded comrade, only to fall himself under the same torrent of enemy fire.

And what is it all for, such sacrifice? Fallujah, now stabilized in 2004 through such heroics, required more sacrifice in a Third Battle of Fallujah in 2007 with the Surge, before finally achieving with the rest of Iraq a measured and sustainable peace. But peace did come, and the sacrifices by so many could at least be measured in victory – until it was thrown away by American political leadership in 2011. Eager to prove the politics of American presence in the Middle East wrong, the Obama administration was willing to withdraw Americans and the risk the hard won gains of Fallujah and so many other Iraqi conflict sites for their own political satisfaction. The result is almost complete nullification of the 4,489 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, and the tens of thousands more scarred forever by their efforts.

Memorial Day is for remembrance. It is for taking a moment to demand that sacrifice not be asked of individuals when the national leadership is not up to securing those sacrifices for the long term. Those mighty warriors of Fallujah and so many other battlefields around the world had some measure of confidence that the nation shared their beliefs and would stand by their sacrifice to the end. As Joan of Ark said, to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate worse than dying. That’s true for nations as well as individuals. A nation without the strength of its belief in its guiding principle, is already as dead as the brave people it asked to sacrifice for it. The walking dead political class of Washington better take notice.

On this Memorial Day, a special thank you for all that have given so much and selflessly served their country, in particular my own father, who served his country in both the army and navy, denying only the skies above the contributions of his courage and patriotism.

May 16, 2015

The Wright Brothers and the American Way

The First Controlled Powered Air Flight - Orville at controls, Wilbur alongside December 17,1903 — The First Controlled Powered Air Flight – Orville at controls, Wilbur alongside December 17,1903

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, a fragile looking craft is nestled among the imposing rocketry, massive jets, and space capsules that catalogue man’s drive to free himself from his earthbound status and soar like the hawks and eagles. Made of spruce wood and muslin fabric, crisscrossed by bicycle wire, and supported with landing sleds, it looks like a glorified box kite. It is, though, the 1903 Flyer, the machine developed by two insightful bicycle mechanics from Ohio named Wright – by which all the other craft became possible. It is the alpha craft of sustained, controlled flight, and there is no more important relic in the museum.

The story of how this craft came to be, and the special nature of the geniuses behind its development, is the subject of David McCullough’s latest book, The Wright Brothers, and once again, McCullough has brought us a tremendous read. The two time Pulitzer Prize winning historian, now 81 years of age and himself a national treasure, continues to refine his biographic look at epic Americans, the real people behind the larger than life stories, and the thread of ‘Americanism’ that makes them an ongoing recognizable part of the nation’s unique story. McCullough’s Wright Brothers, are the Americans described by Alexis De Tocqueville – religious, modest, small town diamond-hard workers, who are humble, reserved, yet proud and capable of great vision. Their success is distinctly American, taking the hard truths of difficult problems, making them their own, and inevitably conquering them, when so many others with more advantage failed. McCullough, like the careful craftsman he is, doesn’t try to tell the story through others, but relies on the brothers’ own notes and letters. McCullough is a storyteller, not a psychoanalyst, avoiding the modern deviations and contrivances of modern biographers, who pretend to be able to understand their subjects’ states of mind and prejudices. McCullough does not ask you to like or not like The Wright Brothers personalities, only to follow their unbending will as they meticulously conquer earth bound gravity, and foster a revolution in man’s place on this planet. McCullough recognizes better than most, America’s unique philosophic foundation centers the idea that opportunity should abound for all men equally regardless of their individual circumstances. From such cauldrons of self confidence, unfettered opportunity and an inherent industrious nature, America has produced its Lincolns, Edisons, Reagans, and Wrights.

The Wright brothers, Wilbur and the fours years younger Orville were born just after the American Civil War. in which the nation was directed toward rebuilding and focusing on its future. This was the age of civilizing the hostile and unknowable world. Railroads conquered the difficult terrain to connect the continent. The light bulb brought activity and awareness to the dark hours, and electricity heretofore unharnessed power. The combustion engine drove the economy, reducing distances, powering agriculture and eliminating hunger, and providing work for millions. The Wrights were witnesses, and assumed a natural providence to it all. Their father, a bishop of one of the many sects of the Protestant wave of individual integrity and initiative that underlies the revolution, engendered in his children the balancing act of personal humility and faith, and competitive need to contribute to the civilizing culture any way God led them. Achieving the broad education of life as well as in depth foundations that high school provided at that time, the boys were confident they had the tools to understand and self educate as needed, and never sought a college education. They applied their intuition and industriousness first to publishing, then transportation for individuals through a successful bicycle business, all the while, absorbing the world around them. When hearing of the attempts by others to solve the millennia long quest to conquer gravity with air travel, the passive transport by hot air balloons restricted by the vagaries of wind direction did not appeal to them so much as the infinitely more difficult concept of individually controlled flight – flight occurring at the spontaneous whim and the premeditated direction of the individual desiring it.

The Wright brothers took to solving the problem of flight much in the way Edison undertook his creations – insight was created by logically understanding the failures that would lead to success. Having read much of the available literature on aeronautics, they determined success lay instead in their own meticulous build of a knowledge of flight from personal observation. Hundreds of experiments and thousands of hours of unreimbursed work followed, starting with observations of birds and their tactics of flight, kites, then gliders, materials and environments that might be conducive to flight. As Wilbur looking back at the process of discovery put it, the key intuition they brought to understanding bird flight others failed to grasp was the process of dynamically controlling flight, not anatomical characteristics of birds conducive to flight. In other words for Wilbur, it was about the bird, not the wing. For the Wright brothers, the human pilot would have to be the bird, making continuous flight adjustments, not the passive inhabitant on a flying wing. Progressively, they combined their experiments into larger and larger gliders, that took the science of aerodynamics and added the control of pitch, roll and yaw to the pilot through the capacity to “induce” the wing to respond to the need by warping to turn or the rudder elevator to lift or dive.

The experiments lead to a glider craft large enough to support a human directing the glider, and the brothers realized they would need a laboratory where they could, unmolested, make the mistakes and adjustments and test them repetitively in ideal conditions. The key ingredient for gliders was wind, and the most predictable continuous wind on a massively large unimpeded space allowing for soft landing failures was oceanside. They discovered the outer banks of North Carolina through the US Weather Bureau, and the result was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and the dunes of Kill Devil Hills the launching ground to the immense flat beaches of the outer banks that would be their laboratory. In 1901 and 1902, the brothers performed glider experiments that led to sustained flight and impressive control, but when the wind died, the spontaneous flight died with it. As noted by others, a barn door could ‘fly’ if projected from a height. It would only be recognized to be flight if the barn door once projected towards the ground had the means of changing direction and restoring itself to height again, and reproducibly. The ultimate step would be powered flight, directed by the individual, not the elements, and by 1903, the Wright brothers felt they were there.

Wilbur Wright demonstrates a controlled turn on a glider at Kitty Hawk - 1902 — Wilbur Wright demonstrates a controlled turn on a glider at Kitty Hawk – 1902

The brothers were not twins, but worked so intimately together over a lifetime, that they seemed like a single organism. They studied their experiments together, fought over results together, and suffered in the harsh conditions of Kitty Hawk together. The one thing they didn’t do together was fly, for the dangerous conditions were such that they wanted assurance that at least one of them would be able to carry on if there was a tragedy in the course of flight. Progressive work on the problems of powered flight, including the means of propulsion, lead to advances in craft design including use of a wind tunnel to test, unique propeller design, and a light weight first of its kind aluminum engine to drive the propellers. With the moment of powered flight seemingly close in December, 1903, the brothers flipped a coin as to who would be the pioneering pilot, and Wilbur won. The first attempt on December 14th, 1903 by Wilbur was unsuccessful due to conditions with an aborted flight of three seconds causing minor damage to the craft. Unfailingly humble and consistent in their approach, the next acceptable flight environment was on December 17th, 1903, this time with Orville at the controls. Wilbur intelligently positioned a camera to record a successful flight and an assistant, John Daniels, snapped the shutter that froze in time one of the most famous moments in history, the photo seen at the head of this article. In the first recorded powered flight under directed control, Orville travelled 120 feet in 12 seconds, a speed of 6.8 miles an hour, at 1035 am, landing safely. The brothers alternated 3 more flights that day, the longest Wilbur’s 59 second flight over 800 feet that cemented Kitty Hawk as the birthplace of airplanes.

With the tall tales of so many pretenders, the tragic and at times pathetic failures of so many more educated and infinitely more financed, the immense achievement of the brothers took some time to become known and believed. Their innate desire for privacy and isolation didn’t help, but their confidence and pride in their accomplishment eventually led to opportunities to show others, and the fact that flight had been conquered by two obscure bicycle mechanics seemed to fuel the achievement internationally. Over the next years the Wright brothers and their updated Flyers would amaze international audiences of thousands and lead to record after broken record of sustained and controlled flight that was the envy of many other designers. More importantly, the achieving the unachievable cracked the ice forever on creativity, and within ten years the capacities of flight were exponentially expanded, to hours of flight, thousands of feet of elevation, and hundreds of miles an hour. Materials changed, uses changed, propulsion changed, and the fragile little flyer that lifted of the dune at Kill Devil Hills in December, 1903, soon became unrecognizable. The principles the Wright brothers had meticulously revealed, however, remain the universal foundation of all human flight, and are still apparent in the pilot seated in the ultralight craft of today.

The Wright’s story does not end in perfect glory and McCullough does not belabor the foibles of human pride and tragedy that interfere with a perfect ending, but Orville at least lived to see the concept of safe flight turned into a routine event for average people. The story of the providential shift of history achieved by unlikely people from unexpected directions has been the beautiful outcome of the American experiment, and the Wright brothers are one more example of what happens when people determine their own destiny, and drive their own ambitions. We are steadily heading to a country that wants to foster communal concepts of equal outcome, not equal opportunity, and the result will be millions of lost creative attempts to advance civilization. We don’t need a country that tries to determine how many bicycle mechanics are needed to best serve society’s needs. We need a society that stands back and allows bicycle mechanics, if they desire, to try and soar like eagles.

May 9, 2015

May 8th, 1945

World War II in Europe is over- Prime Minister Winston Churchill waves to celebratory London crowds

At 300 pm, May 8th 1945, the formal, unconditional surrender of the forces of Germany to the United Nations forces occurred, and the war state that had nearly destroyed Europe lapsed into a peace of sort. The million man armies of the warring nations on the continent stopped their organized efforts to obliterate each other, and for the first time since September 1st, 1939, the outcome was officially assured. For the 20 year old infantry man on the front lines on May 8th, the miserable sensation of potentially being the last man to die for his cause so close to the end of judgement mercifully came for a time to a close. As it did for the 24 year old captain, the 30 year old major, 34 year old colonel, and the 44 year old general. Now 70 years later on the 70th anniversary occasion of VE Day – the day the official end of the war in Europe – the few captains of those men that can say they were there, are 94 years of age and the men they led 90, and all the rest are lost to the mists of time.

At the conclusion of the European portion of the conflict known as World War II, the military colossus astride the world was not one of the ones present at the start of it. The U.S Army in 1939, the year of the European war’s initiation with Germany’s Blitzkrieg into Poland, stood at 178,000 men, the 19th largest force in the world positioned meekly in size between those of Portugal and Bulgaria. On VE Day, the United States had 12.8 million people in uniform and over 9 million of them in fighting forces across the globe. By the end, it could project 100 fighting divisions, 60 aircraft carriers, thousands of fighters and bombers, and probably the most devastating submarine service in the world. This massive force was linked to the greatest economic production capacity the world had ever seen, supported by the most effective logistics, and capable if necessary of taking the war to any corner of the world with overwhelming weaponry. With VE Day, those 8 million fighting men turned their martial attentions to defeating the last of the axis of evil, the Japanese Empire, with a horrific and staggering one million casualties estimated still to be necessary to subdue the fanatical mainland defenses of Japan, beyond the 600,000 casualties the Americans had sustained since entering the war three years before.

The picture above reminds us, seventy years later, that the outcome eventually achieved by the combined titanic forces of the allied nations needed to defeat the Nazi war machine, paradoxically revolved around one man, Winston Churchill. From the fall of France in May, 1940, until December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Great Britain stood completely alone in the way of the incredible German military behemoth. One must remember that by May 10th, 1940, the entire continent of Europe was secure in the hands of the Nazi warlord, and the other totalitarian military power, the Soviet Union, was six months into a nearly two year period cooperating with Germany as its ally in the domination of Europe through treaty. The scrap remnants of British and Free French forces had escaped destruction of Dunkirk by the barest of margins, leaving Great Britain nearly defenseless to a determined German assault. Great Britain, was alone and by most measures defeated, and everybody thought so. Everybody except Winston Churchill, who gambled that the seas that had always provided the buffer for Great Britain. might just allow a certain technical difficulty sufficient to forestall any easy land invasion of the island, and that the ownership of the skies could assist in the delay until Great Britain could somehow convince the Untied States that the means for self preservation lay with fighting the Nazis on the continent of Europe, not the coasts of America. When no one else believed, Churchill ringingly enunciated belief ,and his words served as power as significant as any division or battleship. He would not quit, and thereby Great Britain would not quit, no matter how overwhelming the odds. The counterfactual of a world without Winston Churchill easily could be discerned, with a prostrate Great Britain seeking to avoid invasion through a calamitous peace of enslavement with the Nazis, the Soviet Union soon to face its erstwhile ally now alone, with no counterforce nipping at its heels, and the United States, the buffers of oceans insufficient to successfully fight off the entire rest of the world. Instead what proved to be Great Britain’s finest hour was ultimately because of the pugnacious leadership of the descendant of the Duke of Marlborough channeling his ancient ancestor.

May 8th, 1945, brought to the end the 2000 year history of Europe as the helmsmen of world history, initiated with Alexander’s conquest of the East in the 4th century BC, through the thousand year dominance of the Roman Empire, the linking of Christendom to the remnants of empire marshaling forth the enormous energies of the warrior kings of The Holy Roman Empire, Spain, and France, the spark of the birth of the individual genius in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the power of the Industrial Revolution and the reach of the citizen marine of Great Britain, that brought the efficient transfer of goods, administration, and connecting language across most of the globe. On V-E Day a bankrupt and exhausted Great Britain was incapable of funding even a day of its own recovery, and the once formidable nation states of Europe forged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the previous devastating Thirty Years War , lay crushed under the combined weight of the sacrifice of multiple generations of youth and almost 80 million dead in the second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945. The decisions as to the helmsmen of future civilization and power projection instead on that day 70 years ago stood in the grip of the colossus of the New World and the Slavic Empire of the Eurasian continent, and the basic status quo remains to this day, with Europe incapable of projection of influential power by any significant means.

May 8th, 1945 asked America to take on the mantle of helmsmen for those that had made civilization western, and in the seventy years since, when there were ramparts to be defended, America was there. When the world needed an injection of technology, America provided it. When the world was in crisis and needed food and assistance America marshaled the resources. At this seventieth anniversary, one has to ask if America has succumbed to the fatigue of sacrifice and endurance required to be the helmsman of so long a tradition, with the contraction of America’s willingness to lead over the last six years. There does not appear to be any Churchill out there to focus our attentions on the task at hand.

May 8th, 1945, however, most especially brought that unique moment when there was almost universal acknowledgement that the forces of good had triumphed over a marauding evil. An evil so malign, that the most advanced structure of civilized social structure, education, and culture had succumbed to its dark forces, and that had come to within an eye-blink of dominating the entire globe. A world in which racial genetics, perverted science, and ruthless totalitarianism would have extinguished any whisper of the world’s diversity, creativity, and individual destiny. But on May 8th, the most technologically advanced pervaders of programmed death the world had ever seen, the Nazis, had Quit, and the world deservingly rejoiced.

May 3, 2015

Stumbling Toward the Failed State

The Baltimore Riot - 2015 Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images — The Baltimore Riot – 2015
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The looters frozen in time in the above photo have just swept a CVS pharmacy clean of goods as their particular expression of free speech to protest the circumstances surrounding the arrest and subsequent death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland police custody. Freddie Gray was 25 when he was arrested and subdued by officers on April 12th,2015 for attempting to flee police. He was chased down by officers and shackled hand and foot, and in the period of time from the arrest process and the subsequent 45 minute drive in the police wagon to detention, he sustained a severe spinal cord injury that led to his death one week later. The city of Baltimore erupted in violent protest, and the city authorities struggled to find a way out from the anger. The initial incoherent response by the mayor to give the rioters “space to destroy” to vet their emotions quickly was superseded by the governor calling out the National Guard and the authorities instituting a curfew. The states attorney Marilyn Mosby, without waiting for completion of the police investigation of the event or interviewing all witnesses, announced her own department’s initial investigation determined sufficient evidence to rule the death of Mr. Gray as a homicide, and charged six officers of the Baltimore Police force involved in the arrest with various charges, including false imprisonment, negligence, assault and second degree murder charges. She expressed her actions were a direct response to the riots, stating emotively, ” I heard your call, ‘No Justice, No Peace!’ ” and underscoring her intent to obtain “justice”.

Mr. Gray was arrested in the Sandstown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore, where, according to his brother in law as reported by CNN, his occupation to ‘support his family’ was pharmaceutical sales – of the street kind. In his short life he had 20 arrests and several incarcerations for various crimes including being a repeat offender of drug possession with intent to sell. He was already scheduled for an April 24th court date for repeat drug charges when he was stopped by police on April 12th and the subsequent tragic events occurred. His life parallels so many other urban blight stories that the particular tragic ending to his earthy contribution no longer shocks, so often occurring, as it might in isolation. The particular willful and uncaring negligence that may prove to have been present by the arm of societal order that interacted with Mr. Gray, is really a microcosm of the societal negligence that has secured the environment for such tragedies prevalent in so much of our modern society. Baltimore is just the most recent example of repeated examples of how we continue to stumble toward a failed state, by our continued willingness to ignore the underlying critical components of the toxic brew.

Mr. Gray’s neighborhood of Sandstown- Winchester is rife with the results of the poisonous potion of modern statist policies. Two decades ago, the neighborhood was selected for attention to solve the progressive urban blight that had seized the once ordered and prosperous region. Baltimore, for more than 50 years, has been in the hands of statist elites, linked by the terrible triad of democrat monopoly power politics, liberal programs, and self interested local leaders. The plan to ‘save’ Sandstown- Winchester was not absent of funds or effort – private investors looked to infuse 130 million dollars of ‘quality affordable housing’ cocooned by the usual government designs to provide direct government assistance and to improve health and education of the afflicted neighborhood residents. Schools were built, over a thousand homes were renovated. And the neighborhood collapsed even farther down into the terrible engines of despair – poverty, crime, and drug trade. After two decades of focus, the region is more hopeless than ever, and the calls in response to the recent violent outrage – is for more government programs and ‘targeted’ spending. And nothing, but nothing, done to restore employment opportunities, support individual initiative, or reward behaviors of self improvement.

The Shakespearean ‘hero’ of this tragedy turns out to be Mr. Grey, who was using his own wits to survive in such a neighborhood. As with so much of the statist impulse, the fact that he and others have continued the cycle of despair with such ‘opportunity’ offered them, leaves the elitists agog at the failure of collectivist logic to win the local inhabitants hearts and minds. As with all Shakespearean tragedies, the players of the tragedy are foreordained. Billions of dollars of failed urban investment lead the government to turn to billions more of failed investment. Generations of immobile inhabitants repeat the failures of the previous generation addicted to the triggers of continuing poverty, with broken families and out of wedlock children, no job experience and worthless educational processes, artificially supported and encouraged by governmental allotment. Government leaders that fight over the amount of governmental largess and the power that comes with it, rather than taking responsibility for the continuing and progressively failed societies they are supposed to serve. The increasingly distracted police force, that, incapable and unsupported in their role of restoring order and safety to the community, progressively sees the community as a threat and an enemy to be avoided, or subdued.

So is written another chapter of a book with no ending in our modern society. The local inhabitants without hope, strike out in anarchic fashion. The statist authorities look to blame race, poverty, police, and the society to prevent the focus on their own cluelessness or any attempt at reduction of their role as power broker. The police know no one really cares, and they become immune to their own contribution to the madness. And the civilization founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the individual pursuit of happiness through the unfettered opportunity to control one’s destiny, crumbles evermore.

Shakespearean tragedy indeed. As the Great One said:

Men at some times are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Baltimore Riots 2015 nationalreviewonline — Baltimore Riots 2015
nationalreviewonline

April 25, 2015

Liberal Fascism Tests Its Reach – Who’s Watching?

Big Brother Watching 1984 — Big Brother Watching
1984

The state of Wisconsin is known for cheese, the Green Bay Packers, and a pleasantly schizophrenic penchant of voters that sees no conflict with simultaneously electing committed ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum. What it hadn’t been associated with, until the election of Governor Scott Walker and the enormous battle over Act 10, the sequence of laws mandating political reforms in public unions, was the progressively darker side of American liberalism. The ugly fascistic side of American liberal thought, however, was well ensconced in the tactics of those who sought to derail Governor Walker, and the techniques now being uncovered progressively bring to mind the mindset of the 1930s and the horrors predicted by Orwell in his brilliant tome of thought police, mass control, and crushing of independent thought, 1984.

This week a vivid tail of state sponsored terrorism was revealed in the unlikely location of Milwaukee, Wisconsin that will test our country’s fealty to the principles of personal liberty, privacy rights, and free speech codified in the Constitution and part of the fundamental fabric of the nation’s consciousness for over 200 years.

The synopsis of events revolve around the stakes for winners and losers in Wisconsin’s epic battle regarding the power of public unions and their principal benefactors, the Democrat Party and the power of the individual citizen. With Walker’s election in 2010 the public union stranglehold on the governmental budget was put at risk by Walker’s revolutionary attempt to de-couple the public unions from their source of power, the permanent tithe the unions were able to enforce on the state taxpayer. Surging the percentage of state workers through twenty years and securing for them an ever more unsupportable entitlement by progressively making a larger and larger proportion of the budget non-discrecanary, the unions were buttressed by their partners in the power grab, the Democrat Party. Democrats saw an ever-growing dependent voter base and a seemingly inexhaustible cash flow from the state coffers to the unions and ultimately to the Party. The marriage of inexhaustible resources to evermore ideologically pure politicians made for an axis of evil that only a revolutionary approach could stop. The revolutionary was Walker, and no amount of recall elections, storming the capital, death threats, or hijacking of the legislature was proving capable of dislodging Walker or the elected legislature from achieving the de-couple.

In liberal fascism, however, there is no winning or losing on the ideas or the merits, there is only the eventual victory of ideology, and the fashioning of new state supported means of destroying Walker and his ideas with him took root. The legal machine, first in the guise of liberal judge injunctions, and then more ominously, in the form of a John Doe investigation of Governor Walker’s staff when he was County Executive for Milwaukee, expanded beyond all bounds was a potential atomic weapon. John Chisholm, the Democrat District Attorney for the county, exploited an archaic Wisconsin law fashioned to allow a secret review as to whether laws had been broken by government officials into a broad based multi-year siege on Walker. Chisholm’s conflict of interest, his wife’s position with the very public union Walker’s law would effect, was single minded in his desire something, anything that would smear Walker and take him down. The first John Doe investigation centered on the use of e-mail for political purposes from government computers, an investigation that if even handed would have taken down the majority of public officials in both parties. When the conclusions of the initial investigation could not be tied to Walker in any meaningful way, the investigation did not end, but morphed into evermore expanded and brazen attacks on individuals whose only crime was they supported what Walker was doing.

David French in the National Review Online this week describes the harrowing, Constitution busting antics of Chisholm and his enforcement arm, sponsoring middle of the night police raids by armed officers breaking down doors, invading private property, and threatening individuals with the moxie mirroring the tactics of the Soviet Cheka or German Gestapo. Chisholm has remained unapologetic and frankly thus far immune to any public outrage regarding the unwarranted trashing of people’s rights because they were members of conservative groups that supported Walker as their only “crime”. Megyn Kelly of Fox interviewed French regarding the ugly truths exposed recently:

This is certainly no isolated example of the progressive reach into extra-constitutional territory by the liberal elites of this nation led by the facioso in chief. Whether it is the weaponizing of the IRS to target conservative groups that could have proved a political competition for Obama, the ignoring of legislation that mandates immigration policy, or the harassing of the tea party, the extra-legal means of achieving ideology has spread from the executive on down to the local governments and universities. We are now seeing the banning of conservative talk on campus, the harassing groups such as jews or christians, climate change deniers or fracking advocates, that may be antithetical to the goals 0f the ideology, and the neutering of the military’s role from defender of the country to enforcer of the political correctness that infects and strengthens the ideology. With each day, the tenets of the obscure radical Alinsky, become the calling cards of the progressive elite that see their role to permamently transform, what they have been unable to change through reason and measured debate.

The Constitution remains the bulwark against the brazen tactics of these committed and righteous radicals. The Supreme Court may potentially take up the cause of the Club for Growth supporters that were so abused. This pattern of Constitution trampling has to be stopped in its tracks for the miserable miscreants it creates, and the intolerable actions they think they can get away with, because they believe nobody cares enough anymore. If it turns out that people have stopped caring, George Orwell may have known us better than we ever would have guessed, and this world will descend into a very,very dark place.

Big Brother is Watching 1984 — Big Brother is Watching
1984