Category: CULTURE

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The Coming Fall?

Ruins of the Roman Forum

Civilizations inevitably have a rise, a golden age, and a fall.  The most famous documented in literature is the story of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, as Odoacer of the Goths determined to remove the last vestiges of the seats of power of the empire from its thousand year presence in the capital Rome.  Odoacer did not have to achieve a massive battle conquest; the empire’s rulers had fundamentally run out of people willing to die trying to defend its reason for being,   A vast core set of shared societal principles that had led to the dominance, greatness, and expanse of the empire over hundreds of years, and immunity to periods of unstable and incompetent leaders,  had eroded to a point of imperceptibility.   Citizens living among great citadels and shrines to the past had no residual perspective of how they came to be, or why they should be maintained.  It simply took a gentle but concerted push to turn the whole rotten edifice over.  We are left only with the fragile ruins and the distant echoes of what stood before the civilization grew tired of itself.

Perhaps our modern American civilization is in the initial stages of a similar coming collapse.  The last four years in America have presaged our current anarchy in the streets with a pattern of anarchic actions of our elite institutions against the very foundational principles of a representative democracy based upon their singular hatred of the uncouth ‘barbarian” elected to lead the country and the archaic reactionary impulses  he felt he was elected to enact.  The President has bludgeoned the elites usual means of dominance they have built up over decades  organized around coordinated communication of  prescribed narratives, bureaucratic indifference to the affected, closing of diversity of thought in the educational academy, and the instillment of conflict of interests between societal groups to best leverage their subservience.   The President has proved a particularly difficult opponent in that he uses no accumulated intellectual principles to respond.  Admittedly proud of having written more books than he has read, President Trump instead relies on  animalistic instincts based upon visual cues and gut reaction he gains from the crowds of supporters that embrace him.  It has left him exposed to the highest level of outrage and hatred from those whose righteousness can not accept someone so impervious to their pressures.  The result has been an unceasing effort to destroy Trump and the dangerous contrarian voices he energizes.  The war to destroy has been from the first moment he showed political traction, and the combined power of all the elite institutions have worked to crush him.

Taking advantage of his naive understanding of politics, his opposition, the Clinton campaign,  worked with the entrenched bureaucracy to inject a narrative of treasonous actions into the political bloodstream.  Working with allies in the press and higher ups in the Obama administration,  a false and ludicrous narrative was built through opposition research to suggest a Russian influence in the Trump campaign that wasn’t there, and then married it through to a nefarious and coordinated  campaign by the Obama administration, emboldened by concocted fraudulent FISA court documents, to spy upon multiple Trump  campaign officials, including likely, the candidate himself.  This criminal action sought to undermine a democratic election, and failing that, evolved into a doubled down process attacking every facet of the Trump administration through a false collusion narrative corruptly supported by the FBI, sustained doggedly by an adversarial press, injected with steroids by a two year special prosecutor farce, and finally, when that failed,  a final move in for the kill through a “whistleblower” linking routine Trump loose talk to a crash  impeachment and attempted removal.  To their stunned surprise, the Kraken remained standing, and, given the bountiful economy, an even more formidable opponent for the next election.

Then came the economic gift from the gods of retribution, the Wuhan virus.  Powerless to stop the worldwide pandemic, Trump panicked under enormous pressure from elite ‘experts’  and closed down the economy to prevent spread.  Cratering the recovery of the most wide spread distribution of individual economic success in the past sixty years in the world’s largest economy, the actions simultaneously allowed opposition leaders to strengthen and fortify the damage by top down arbitrary and ruthlessly efficient lock downs.  Month after month the definition of ‘non-essential’ was expanded to assure devastating destruction of private enterprise and enhance opportunities for further government and elite dependence on basic survival.  When the societal stresses grew great, the brew was ripe for an eruption, and the powder keg went off with the Minneapolis police arrest and obscene killing of a black male, viewed by the whole nation.  The perfect storm of a presumptive hate crime and a massively restless population from the lockdown led to mass looting and destruction.  The police, being the very symbol of oppression and societal  racial sin evidenced  in the crime, were powerless to respond, and their large city democrat bosses took advantage in stoking the flames of hatred and unrest.  Soon a coordinated effort to allow anarchists to stoke the chaos, feed by unseen hands of guidance and financial means, swept across the country and world, subsuming the initial protests’ righteous clarity and purpose, and injected a darker and more sustained streak of premeditated societal breakdown and chaos.

Here we stand.  Were Trump to somehow achieve a miraculous escape from the trap set for him and win the coming election, one most assuredly is looking at a logarithmic expansion of the virulent and violent response to his very existence as President.  If the democrats  succeed in the sustained effort to destroy Trump and are rewarded for their four year criminal and unprecedented effort to eliminate an opponent, their reward will be achieved on the backs of radical elements that seek to destroy the foundations of the republic and replace it with their own authoritarian vision.  Either way,  the seeds of civilizational collapse are deeply planted in the fallows.

Societies inevitably require a certain set of shared values, and this society is increasingly seeing such shared values rent asunder. The majority of people who understood the history of the republic, the challenges it faced, and the triumphant overcoming of its flaws time and time again predicated upon the tenets of its founding as the ultimate unifier, are rapidly being replaced with generations who orient opinions on feelings and emotions, not rationally objective principle and truth.  Are there enough of us to pull it all back from the abyss?

The ancient Romans who cared about civilization are reaching across the mists of time to say, sustain, sustain, or soon become the past.

 

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Freedom in the Age of Covid

 

photo   Getty Image

Like a tsunami wave, the current Corona virus pandemic has swept unimpeded across countries, oceans, and continents upending the comfortable cultural patterns of civilization and pointing dead center at the world’s economic stability.  The pace and severity of the virus spread has placed many countries under siege, and the public willingness to accede to previously unheard of governmental restrictions in both personal and economic activity threaten the long cherished concepts and dictums of individual liberty.  The core document of the United States, its Constitution, with its associated first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, has   been the underpinning of protecting our citizens’ free will and access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The current crisis is like no other; it is neither the devastating but locally focused  effect of a weather  disaster or terrorist incident, nor an extended war taxing the country’s resources and perseverance . In a unique way, it is the toxic mixture of both.  It is uniquely positioned to convert us rapidly and without prudential review into a brave new world progressively alien to respect for traditional freedom.  At the same time, counterintuitively, it has destabilized long held assertions that an ever shrinking world due to technology requires   universal acceptance of new “freedoms” of unimpeded travel, blurring of borders, and uninhibited trade, with a supranational governance to assure the protection of these “rights”.

President Trump has been accused of being slow in recognition of the impending pandemic, but he was, in late January, against much criticism, the first to restrict international travel to and from China.   Wuhan, China was the epicenter of the virus’s origin and spread and the Chinese government did everything it could to squelch early recognition of the new disease and any effect on its world position or economy.  The United States position on flight restriction was termed “racist”, but the lack of restrictions in  two countries tightly linked to China’s Belt and Road strategy to increase world economic reliance on China resulted in unimpeded numbers of infected Chinese workers into Tehran, Iran, and subsequently Iranians and Chinese into Milan, Italy. The result was a delay in the propagation of the virus in the United States and a dramatic explosion in Iran and Italy.  The spread of the virus has now extended to 177 countries, effectively , the whole globe.

The ideal of easy and ever faster and efficient international travel seems a bulwark of liberty, allowing the individual inexpensive and unrestricted access to new markets and new opportunities.  Jet travel after World War II made the concept of difficult and expensive ocean travel obsolete .  Increasing international familiarity and responsibilities brought about by the conclusion of the war made global perception more and more attractive.  For fifty years, ever more integrated travel, trade, and markets made possible by  associated technological advances brought increased attraction to the idea that national borders and citizenship restrictions stood in the way of progress.  The positive effects of trade on improving global standard of living brought with it the ever more aggressive attitudes of extra-national governance on national sovereignty, economic “fairness”, and climate disguised as “improving” the global human condition.

The Brexit movement and the subsequent election of Trump were the first such indications that not everybody felt that losing their ability to control their   citizenship privileges and freedom to choose their destiny was a good idea.  Fierce debates and media driven civil wars broke out in both countries particularly focused on restrictions to unimpeded immigration and the importance of borders to a nation’s identity. Massive dissonance led to a delay in implementation of Brexit in Britain, and 3 year long effort to destroy Trump, culminating in a failed Impeachment effort.    The virus brought sudden clarity to border and immigration issues.  Specifically, Trump’s long standing disdain for unrestricted immigration and its effect on American sovereignty and economic health, suddenly seemed prescient.  The borders argument is now front and center  to control of the  virus spread, to the extent that Mexico is now closing its borders to Americans, and states to other states.  The other globalization arguments are close behind, with more concern about unabated free trade and its affects on local populations survival and the country’s reliance on unfriendly global powers for critical economic resources.

Internal to most countries, the virus has resulted in a secondary assault on personal freedom of action and dramatic governmental decisional primacy on society.  As the virus’s spread progressively required principles of isolation and quarantine,  governments assumed control over decisions regarding civil liberties long ago secured through hard won societal efforts.  The resistance to “social distancing” became increasingly an anti-societal act, until governments advanced even to “stay at home” declarations, and arbitrarily determined which businesses were “essential” and could remain functional and which were deemed “non essential” and had to close, no matter the economic damage.  The entrepreneurial core of America and main driver of employment , the small business, was crushed in the wake.  Within weeks of draconian health care decisions for country wide soft quarantine in place, the massive economy of the U.S., 25% of the world’s economic capacity, teeters toward a path risking a depression.

Loss of freedom in individual health and economic decision making, warranted or not, with resultant effects to the economy, has led to a second wave of massive governmental intrusion.  A 2 trillion dollar stimulus package, 10% of the the country’s entire GDP, was pushed through Congress within a week and signed by the President, securing company bailouts, checks to individuals, loans to businesses, and massive unemployment support.  Given the dire consequences of an extended economic shutdown, it is understandable the government felt the need to act in a dire fashion.  The long term effects of such a massive federal intrusion on economic activity and the resultant massive effect on the debt being passed to future generations, has untold potential effects on personal freedom.  To bring the perspective of scale to such an intrusion, consider the perception of the otherwise unfathomable scale of a trillion –  a million seconds of time  take over 11 days to complete – a trillion seconds, over thirty one thousand years.  The society is now committed to massive debt that will bind personal choice and tax policy to a forever anchor on choice.   It will take downstream perspective as to whether such massive government intrusion was worthy, and the massive suppression of personal initiative by governments reversible.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”  

                                                                                                                                                                                   – Ronald  Reagan     

Extraordinary times often take extraordinary measures – that is fully understandable in the uncertainty of the times.  The worry is that the instinctual  concepts of personal freedom and free once so deeply woven into the fabric of society has sustained significant damage from decades of casual acceptance of security and comfort over risk and reward.  The corrosion is creeping into how we react and respond to, how innately we feel, the progressive conceptual loss of our freedoms, and what we are willing to do to protect them.  The consent of the governed is the key to the whole decision tree.  Think long and hard about where we are at, and where we are going.  Once the dust has cleared, you will see, there’s quite a bit on the line.

 

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Freedom Digs In for the Long Haul

Millions march for freedom in Hong Kong -photo attrib. ABC News – Go.com

The quant notions of individual liberty and freedom of expression born out of the Enlightenment manage to resist extinction in the most unexpected of places. In a world where the mature democracies have grown tired of the responsibilities and maintenance the actualization of liberty requires, fresh examples of the yearning of a free people to control their own destinies and secure pursuit of happiness blossom like spring flowers in the tundra. Iran, under the oppressive theocracy that demands submission, sees a never ending stream of brave actions by common citizens who risk the thuggery of suppressors, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government and its purchased enforcement arm. Venezuela, starved and humiliated by a gangster regime that has outsourced its further existence to the military autocrats of Cuba , yet somehow finds the strength to protest and persevere against the gang of socialist pretenders that hoard the levers of economic activity and basic survival. Now Hong Kong, a former colony of one imperial overlord, released only to be progressively subsumed by another, larger and more oppressive overlord, has decided to take the lessons learned from the first to stand up to the second. The desire for all to live a life of free will is currently finding its most fertile soil for nurturing in places that have had but a brief taste of its possibilities, once felt beyond the reach of this most “western” of ideals.

Hong Kong learned the hard way what freedom could mean. Existing for a 150 years as a colonial outpost to secure British imperial commercial ambitions of the vast mainland of China, could for the most part as expatriate Chinese only live indirectly in the glow of British concepts of juris prudence, democratic governance, educational opportunity, and international free market capitalism. Compared to the third and fourth world economies surrounding it though, Hong Kong populated almost entirely by Han Chinese, incorporated the enormous industriousness of their makeup and a world class harbor into the opportunity afforded by the British Empire to form one of its most successful and prosperous colonies. As a consequence of the legacy of this relationship, almost half of the 7.8 million people inhabiting the Kowloon Peninsula and surrounding islands maintain some form of British nationality and a quarter of a million are British citizens.

The concept of ‘colony’ even in the hands of a benign imperial administration is inherently artificial and pathologic, and ultimately as China finally found its bearings and national footing in the 1980s, the perpetuation of a colonial stain on the mainland was an overt insult and increasing anachronism of previous eras. The British had negotiated in 1898 a 99 year agreement from the Chinese to administer Hong Kong, and with the impending end of the agreement, China was in no mood and a contracted Great Britain in no position to perpetuate the arrangement. The British negotiated the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997. No one asked the local residents their preference. What was to become of freedom minded Hong Kong under the thumb of a communist overlord? The British negotiated a salve that put forth the concept of “one nation two systems” that the Chinese government agreed to respect for 50 years. The value of such a buoyant economic engine and financial center oriented to the outside world appealed to the Communists of Beijing who had under Deng Xiaoping determined to inject a contorted capitalism into China to speed up its modernization while maintaining rigid control of society and dominance of its one party rule. The British were gone, and progressively the Chinese mainland looked to assert its dominance and progressive control of the profit drivers. The wild card no one took much heed of was, how much the local population had grown over the years to treasure its institutions of limited governance and personal freedoms. Genetically Chinese or not, the Hong Kong citizens had somehow absorbed the concepts of representative limited government and rule of law as not quant British relics but bedrock universal rights.

The inevitable has happened, as the Chinese authorities look to reel in Hong Kong into the subservient relationship the mainland Chinese have with their rulers, the people of Hong Kong refuse to play along. In the latest iteration, the communist appointed Chief Executive Carrie Lam has attempted to force through an extradition treaty that would give the mainland the ability to determine ‘unwelcome elements’ in the Hong Kong citizenry and extradite them to the mainland for communist inspired justice. The obvious consequences to the freedom loving citizens of Hong Kong made this attempt a bridge too far. Risking all in a world where increasingly governmental surveillance makes coordinated demonstration an extremely dangerous enterprise, democracy leaders in Hong Kong have managed massive protests that have paralyzed the government and raised the stakes extremely high to the authoritarians in Beijing. An even partial victory risks the freedom virus spreading onto the mainland Chinese cities and a potential return of Tiananmen Square instability; a crackdown a universal condemnation or worse. Freedom is a fundamental threat to any government forcing its citizens to live under less artificially, and the Chinese communists have held their position with ruthlessness when necessary.

The brave Hong Kong protesters soldier on, joining their compatriots in Iran, Venezuela, and other corners of the earth that have sought the liberty that mature democracies take for granted, and often are foolishly willing to give away. We live in interesting times, where the true bedrock values of freedom and liberty may need to be reinjected in our own psyche by the courageous and committed exemplars in places that have barely known such freedoms.

As Deng Xiaoping may have presciently, but inadvertently expressed – may a thousand flowers bloom…

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Between Something and Something Else

Are the magnetic poles about to flip?

 

The enormous central molten core of the planet Earth knows not of our trivial machinations on the surface of this spaceship through time, but has served us without fail.  Pulled at by the huge forces of gravity, molten iron simultaneously pulled crushed and surged under impossible pressures,  sends out streams of convection currents created by extreme heat that convert the earth into a giant magnetic dynamo, both creating electromagnetic poles on the planet while simultaneously doing epic battle with killer solar wind radiation out in space.  Radiation that, as a consequence never reaches us, supporting life and vitality otherwise doomed without its protective effect.  All this has occurred undeterred, as it is written, for billions of years – except every once in awhile, say every half a millennia or so, the dynamo decides to metamorphosize unpredictably and have the magnetic poles travel, and at some point flip, such that, north becomes south and south, north, and the known world must adjust.  Humans have not been capable of recording the effects of the last time it happened – recorded human history has always noted a north and a south and reflected accordingly.  Since 1900, the magnetic north pole has been drifting north and eastward, and has particularly accelerated of late, such that has it has left north Canada far behind and now lies near the true geographic pole.  Are we headed toward a more perfect alignment of north and south, or a dramatic flip of directionality that would turn everything upside down?   There is great unease as to what might be the consequences of a crucial protection so long fixed, determining a whole unpredictable future.

As the magnetic pole goes, so goes our civilization.  There is great unease right know as we seem to be heading north and south simultaneously on so many fronts.  Civilization has experienced these inflection points before.  What does one make of the spasm of the French  way of life that convulsed in revolution in 1789, standing on the shoulders of the Enlightenment and the measured American Experiment that had produced the Declaration of Independence and People’s Constitution, overthrowing a thousand year way of life in an effort to declare the sovereign Rights of Man, yet by 1792 declaring a year Zero, with the obliteration of all societal strata that had come before, climaxing in  the crushing of religious hierarchy and beheading of the monarch.  By 1799, after years of self immolation and terror, the seeds were set for the return of power to the elite, succeeding only in exchanging the king for an emperor.  Edmund Burke, the British Parlimentarian, reflected from England that the French spasm seemed to him rudderless and ignorant of foundation, seeking the destruction of one set of institutions with no conceptionalization of another , resulting in chaos and calamity:

“In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures… [there was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy… [in religion] the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from Atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed..”

Are we at such a tipping point?  from the projection of historical scope it would seem ridiculous. The world by the year 2019 has never been more in continuity, more free in action and opportunity, more prosperous, more environmentally respectful, and free of disease.  Food and water has never been more plentiful and available; information more universal and accessible.  The massive effort by free people to avoid by fearfully violent struggle and sacrifice the twin tyrannies of Fascism and Communism has proven successful beyond all measure with two thirds of the world successfully liberated and the residual third trying to identify the magic elixir.

Like a great magnet tipping upon itself however, the seeming clarity is awash in an unstable field of doubt and indecision.

America, birthed on  British political genetics imbued upon the rule of law determined by free citizens, is in a bipolar frenzy.  It is simultaneously strident for the rights of unfettered actualization of any self formed view of gender expression, yet schemes  to corner and restrict free expressions of speech.  America seeks to restrict citizens to rigorous regulation of what they eat, how they get to work, how much of their productivity is theirs  and how much communal, and how they must sublimate their desire for stability in family and morality, while propagating the expansion of all rights of non-citizens to ignore borders, work rules, contribution to health and welfare, felons to vote, and criminals to demand the understanding of victims.  America is positioning to simultaneously  support a socialist firebrand for the position of president of the greatest country of free will and enterprise in the history of  the world four short years after electing the populist firebrand who pledged to stand athwart any tendency to undermine the country’s two hundred year legacy of self determination and equal opportunity.

Great Britain three years ago voted in epic fashion to throw off the bureaucratic shackles of a European overlord and restore self determination.  Three years hence, the elected elite has proved incapable of accepting the verdict and seeks through delay and obfuscation some comforting shackle that neither achieves freedom or union, but to live instead in a perpetual purgatory of passive acquiescence to the worst of all positions for a once great nation – insignificance.

The international intellectual community continues to shill armageddon scenarios in place of measured reasons on issues such as anthropomorphic global warming (the earth will end in twelve years unless we do something), micro aggression ( an adult can not possibly stand up to any environments where safe space is not guaranteed), and capitalism( man is not capable as Burke would say of flourishing, liberated from the rapacity of blinding passion, inner anarchy  and appetite).  The intellectual need is rather an adolescent drive to belong, to adhere, to function as a collective where views are settled by others and there is comfort in knowing someone else has thought it through for you.

The many more examples of the wobbling of our magnetic core are too numerous for a short tome, but they are ever more present and the world feels them whole.  We seem to have left one place, and are seeking another, but can not relate why we left or what we hope to find.  The many features of a stable, forward looking civilization was recognized by Burke as requiring a fealty and understanding of the past, and for that we are woefully deficient. How did we come to our morality, our sense of right and wrong,  our recognition of the right to life and of living with free will, while engaging with those around us who hoped for the same thing? We seem caught in the throughs of a fulcrum about to flip on itself, either to once again right itself, or enter a whole new and unstable physics.

Jefferson over 200 years ago defined the human civilized core to be a simple construct of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  Is it possible that we at some point will catch ourselves and restore the greater meaning to existence that makes it possible to recognize once again our existence at all?  At our core, the protective umbrella of this powerful and magnetic dynamo known as civilization wobbles uncontrollably and seeks an unknown country.  We best find our roots, and hope for the day when our compass is restored and true north is once again where we always knew it would be.

 

 

 

 

 

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New World Disorder

Massive Protests in Caracas, Venezuela
              AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos

Don’t look now, but there are some very unhappy people with the state of the social revolution in Venezuela.  As Ramparts has reported before, the Venezuelan revolution of late has been more fueled by hunger than the socialist philosophic concept of equality of outcome, though it is a foregone conclusion that, at this time, everyone is equally hungry.  Normally two to three million people spilling out into the street for something other than an international sport victory is not a promising sign for a country’s ensconced leadership, but El Presidente Maduro and his ruling thugs are a particularly hardy and resistant bunch.  There remains something unique about socialist dictators, in that they seem immune to the typical pressures that would normally cause a more democratically elected leadership to think the time to resign was imminent.  The means of daily survival are critical ingredients for control – the more scarce the ingredients, the more dependence of the population on the rapidly diminishing resource.  The secondary lever for all such socialist autocracies is control of the military, with troops well fed and troop leaders well pensioned.  For autocrats like Maduro, the twin images of omniscience and omnipotence must always be present to maintain the veneer of confident immunity to “risks” to the glorious revolution. Maduro must present the synthesis of the Man of the People and the Man of Steel.  Kevin Williamson of NRO may have devised the best description ever written of inevitable transformation of these would Stalins:

In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap’n Crunch. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro does look a sight in his beauty-pageant sash and Mr. T-worthy gold chains.

Inevitably as the peoples’ hunger grows and their desire for spectacle and fear for authority diminishes, the sashes and gold chains, the generalissimo outfits, no longer have their projected power.  Venezuela, the South American country most closely aligned with concept of societal success prior to 1995, with a deeply educated  and prosperous middle class,  in twenty short years under the socialist schemers of Chavez and his pale imitation Maduro, has been plunged into the abyss of total breakdown.  The only functioning market is the black one, and the most legitimate vote undertaken by Venezuelans in the last five years has been the vote of three million citizens with their feet as they left the country hoping to salvage their tattered lives, once supposedly liberated by socialist visions, now intensely focused on simple survival.

Maduro has walked his tightrope with tenacity, but cracks are widening and the chance for real violence, and potentially  Ceausescu style violent overthrow grows.  The growing crisis has many risks beyond the ruling Venezuelan Politburo, and the countries are finally belatedly  attempting to do the right thing.  The United States this week pulled diplomatic recognition from Maduro’s ruling clique and recognized instead the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guiado.  Guiado himself is somewhat of a stand-in for the Maduro opponent, Leopoldo Lopez, under house arrest since opposing Maduro in 2014.  The second important step the US took was offering Maduro safe passage out of the country.  Dictators always have to weigh the continuing ability to horde assets from the country they lead, while risking the grotesque amounts they have already shepherded out of the country into safe havens. Trying to hold onto both of course risks ending up with neither, and falling into the hands of a very, very angry mob.

As the street protests grow in intensity, so does the dimwittedness of the leftist elites in the United States, who cling to the notion that this once more horrendous example of the epic failure of the socialist vision to improve anything for anybody, is evidence of the need to take another try and get it right.  Socialist utopian visions cling to the notion that the missing ingredient is the vision minus the corruption, only to be blind to the obvious that it is the vision itself that is corrupted.  For the idealistic mental snowdrifts that are newly elected US Representatives  Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and other examples of the young American generation’s citadels of lighter than air intellect, the United States remains chief corrupter by its success with a capitalist model, and desperately needs an enforced cleansing, towards the world of Venezuela.  The more cynical older generation representatives of the socialist dream like Bernie Sanders and the Hollywood elite, look instead for a more staid revolution, that would preserve their ability to get theirs, but secure the redistribution of wealth and eliminate individual incentive from, as Williamson so craftily describes in his NRO article , as the “Kulaks” .

We will need to watch carefully over the next weeks as the usual snakes in the grass position themselves to take political advantage of Venezuela’ desperate straits.   For the long suffering people of Venezuela, hopefully there is a way out of the mess without further catastrophe and violence,  that gets them their freedom back.

In dark times,  one always looks for the Angel in the Whirlwind.

 

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Good People All, This Christmas Time…

As Christmas Day approaches, our post modern world argues about whether the lyrics of a holiday classic must be censured to remove the potentially ‘hurtful’ lyrics from contributing to unsafe environments.  If you are not familiar with the specific controversial song, you might have thought the offended class were referring to the callus injury  of grandma inflicted by a poorly driven reindeer, or perhaps, a thievish grinch.  But no, the scarlet letter this season  has been pinned on a song by master song writer Frank Losser, who looked to hide his devilish intentions to inflict unwanted sexual advances upon a defenseless female by invoking the cruelties of the weather and fool her into submission. Apparently, a  nation must be chastened by its previous willingness to enjoy “Baby, Its Cold Outside” without an accompanying explanatory document as to its inappropriateness.

If such silly arguments take away from you  some of the beautiful sheen of celebrating an important day in our civilization, I would like to reintroduce you to a different song that reflects a more innocent time.  Before gift exchange, family clashes, and the ramblings of a ‘woke’ society, Christmas did have a different level of significance.  It is not entirely clear when the typical communal celebrations of the winter solstice were reoriented to coincide with the Christian feast day of the birth of Jesus, but there were rumblings long before St. Nicholas had his penchant for handing out gifts associated permanently with the same day, and resigned us all to a frenzy of consumerism.

Before the song styles of the secular holiday, there was a desire to provide a musical link to the Christmas miracle for common people that lay beyond the liturgical expressions of sacred music evoked only in sacred venues. The traditions beyond the church walls extended to local festivals and communal songs that were passed generation to generation telling the story of Christmas as laid out in the Gospels through a common humanity. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke spelled out in poetic detail the circumstances of God’s love for His Creation expressed through the birth of a Divine Son in the most humble of places.  The Christ Child would come into the human world through human birth  far from the comfortable and safe world of elite or connected of the time. The gift of the Christ child to remove for all eternity the calamitous fall from grace of the original creation Adam, would not occur in a luscious garden, a magnificent temple or a luxurious palace, but in the unguarded, vulnerable bed of straw of an animal manger, that every common person of the limited means circumstantially could directly relate.  The tale of the Nativity – the Virgin birth, the faith driven acceptance of both parents of the extraordinary circumstances of the pregnancy, the support of Angels, the guidance and visitation of Kings to worship the miracle — relay a particularly beautiful environment for a musical creation worthy of the written prose.

It is thought somewhere in the 12 century in the area of Wexford, the musical genesis of telling the Nativity story specifically through a celebratory song, or carol, was borne.  The Mixolydian Mode that forms the basis of the song’s structure revolves around a medieval chant tonality that extended in a diatonic scale’s three whole steps and a half step from G to G7, resulting in a warm yet somewhat otherworldly quality. It seems somewhere before the 16th century the English verse was translated to Gaelic, but the English roots of Wexford led to the version we most know today as it was put down formally on paper in 1684 by Bishop Luke Waddinge who connected the words to traditional music in a little song book  called “A Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs” further expressing the purpose of the collection as “composed by a Devout man, for the Solace of his Friends and Neighbours in their Afflictions.”  The collection of carols, including the carol now referred to as the Wexford Carol, is known as the Kilmore Carols. In 1928, the organist in Enniscorthy, Dr. William Henry Grattan Flood, published the modern version we know today, and hear the ancient and modern coming together to recreate the unique spiritual rapture of the Wexford Carol  :

Good people all, this Christmas-time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done,
In sending His beloved Son.
With Mary holy we should pray
To God with love this Christmas Day:
In Bethlehem upon that morn
There was a blessed Messiah born.

Although the Wexford Carol is performed by many artists of both sexes around the world, it never sounds more central to the Christmas miracle or releases its otherworldly power better than when it is inflected with its Irish roots.  The Kilmore Carols are performed in Wexford traditionally by a male choir of six voices, but the beautiful words married to elegiac music have  never been more beautifully linked then when they received the treatment of  Wexford’s own world famous Irish tenor, Anthony Kearns.  Mark Steyn brought the story of the Wexford Carol and Kearn’s beautiful version to his Christmas show several years ago, and made the ancient carol ring anew.  Enjoy the framing of the carol and Kearn’s ability to bring the 12th, 16th, and 21 centuries into a beautiful communion.  And that is my Christmas gift to you – Have a Merry and Blessed Christmas!   (Addendum: the video has been disabled on Ramparts, but the You Tube link will take you directly to the video in its entirety)

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Tumult

Jair Bolsanaro has just capped off a most tumultuous month.  Surviving an leftist assassination attempt in September, 2018, the former Brazilian army officer and long time congressman has blown through a primary, then, run off election,  with a crushing defeat of his socialist opponent.   Brazil,  a country that has been dominated by socialist populist rule since its military dictatorship was overcome in the 1980s,  has been drawn to Bolsanaro’s message of a nationalist socially conservative agenda of privatization, gun rights, and law and order.   A surge of support from Brazilians tired of seeing corruption and stilted progress dominate the government of their massive country,  has now catapulted a traditionalist conservative to the very pinnacle of power.

Beginning with the stunning Brexit win in Great Britain in the summer of 2016, followed by the ascendancy of the Trump phenomena in the United States, the world has been rocked from its globalist moorings by election reactions of democracies towards more nationalist overtones.  No continent cohabitant with democratic process has been spared.  A supposedly unified Europe has seen strong elective resistance to trans-national European Union overlords, in Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Austria.  North America has seen nationalists win in Mexico, and most dramatically, the United States.  Now, South America, watching the real time suicide of a once prosperous Venezuela under the boot of disastrous socialist autocracy, has seen its largest country radically swing away from any dalliance with the virus that has strangled the Venezuelan prosperity.

At the turn of the century, there was a brief communal awareness that perhaps the world had, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seen the “end of history”, with global coordination of borderless trade positioning governments to remove the concept of borders altogether.   A dominant military superpower in the United States allowed bureaucrats to resist developing national power structures in favor bureaucrats who would reign by regulation rather than martial projection of power.  The need for national exceptionalism was to progressively give way to global universality dominated by an intellectual elite that would bypass the need for borders by eliminating the cultural uniqueness that in their mind supported inequality through border separateness.  Globalist thought saw borders as an anachronism, and therefore, encouraged removal of any impediments to immigration, to further blend the cultural soup into an indistinguishable compote.   A post religion, post language, post inequity world was in sight, where martial energies could be directed toward global dragons such as “climate change” and “redistribution”.   The wrenching effect on individuals of enforced cultural change, derision of time honored traditions, and a feeling that their way of life was wantonly considered an  “acceptable” sacrifice on the altar of a ‘better’ future never entered into globalist calculations.

The first reactionary slap was the fundamentalist violent recoil of radical Islam on 09/11.  Despite the transient collective national response to the attack, the left almost immediately sought to demonize an aggressive national reaction , and sought to invent a rationalization that would seek global bureaucratic “legal” recourse to terrorism, rather than military destruction of terrorists.  Despite the enormous associated risks, global bureaucracies stuck to  the stated goal of unfettered immigration, regardless  of the obvious risk to their citizens  of additionally allowing the virus of radicalism, terrorism, and destruction of rule of law to proceed apace.  With the election of Barrack Obama, the bastion home of the clarion call for sovereignty, limited government, and individual freedoms, the United States, was now positioned to lose its exceptionalism, and be assimilated to the future, like its European forebears themselves.

Historical dissonance once driven too far into an unnatural human posture, inevitably leads to reactionary strains, and we are in one now.  The only consensus that currently exists is that there can be no consensus between a increasingly globalist, social uniformity championed by the left, and a large and growing reactionary pull back toward traditional virtues and competitive national stories.   I can’t see that this division, so intensely demanded by the proponents of each future, will somehow end in comity.  The recent hysterical outrages claimed by the left, and the progressive successes on the right in the ballot box only intensifies the divide.  

Unfortunately, a chasm is developing, and the first violent outbursts and simmering hatreds are beginning to find root.  Violence at the periphery from the disaffected is increasingly finding its way to more and more dramatic expression.  The left has never accepted the idea that the “arc of history towards social justice” could ever be thwarted.  The threat of violence has been the left’s tool for ultimate submission of those who do not see the future the way they do.  The reaction in the not so distant past to the violent tendencies of the over reaching left, has been in past times an equally over reaching right.   We will see if the skill set of such men as Trump and Bolsanaro prove up to the task of ably setting things right, without resorting to pulling as far right as the left has pulled left.  If they are not savvy enough, pressure pot may boil over, and we all might unfortunately end up looking back to this tumultuous time, as the quiet before the storm.


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How Did We Get Here?

A respite from this blog for a few weeks to recharge my creative juices hasn’t made the world seem to be an any more enlightened place.  We are seeing across the world a progression in dissonance and downright strife when anything short of a passive acceptance of another’s world view is expressed.  Express free speech against the grain and you are banned from speaking in universities or physically harassed.  Reveal a thought or collection of thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, or You Tube that manages to offend others and risk erasure from the social medium.  If your thinking survives the initial onslaught, a phalanx of labeling invectives are hurled against you in an effort to humiliate you into silence.  Have a reputation for alternative views, and you risk violent harassment in public when you sit down to eat, or socialize with friends.

At a political level, socialist governments designed to redistribute wealth, horde it among a few elite, and can’t even distribute the most basic in sustenance.  Democracies are held hostage by parties that cling to power rather than solutions, and can’t marshall  even a tepid  response to the simplest challenges .  Dictators….well, they at least, dictate.  Overwhelmingly, regardless of foundation, all governments are progressively corroded by corruption and clogged up with incompetence.

And yet… the world has never had more globally available sustenance, opportunity, reduction of poverty, clean air and available water, health care, and general aversion to war to resolve conflict.

Maybe we have lost our collective minds.  Why must the  world that has positioned itself for the future so well,  submit to our need to bollux it all up so?

Loss of Civility 

It starts with our current inability to recognize that  the rules of civil discourse developed over thousands of years served a purpose.  Being considerate of others – provided the environment for a basic respect for their discourse, and your willingness to listen.  Think before you speak-implied an effort on your part to organize thoughts, reflect upon your past experiences and understandings, before assuming your view.  Agree to disagree – submitted a pact of understanding that ideas are always in flux, and you absorb from others and mature your own opinions.  Courses in civics, how various views are elucidated, how discourse is organized, how problems are solved in a civil society have lost favor with a modern tendency to consider one’s own views superior at face value to all others.  Civility is a foundational cornerstone to returning to a public discourse that converts our modern advantages into the building blocks of real progress.

Loss of Responsibility

The collective no longer expects the individual to hold up his end of the donkey.  The modern charge is for security, not responsibility.  The loss of freedom , the ability to effect one’s own life journey and outcome by accepting personal responsibility, is not mourned in the rush to level the playing field and reduce risk injected by individual choice. With the loss of responsibility has come the plague of incompetence.  Roads crumple, bridges collapse, and projects lapse because it is always someone else’s responsibility to confirm the decisions made.     Yet, the great advances of the last several  hundred years have come out of individuals take risk, taking owner ship  and pride in performance and competence,  and being incentivized for it.  It is the freedom to fail, that has lifted the great majority to succeed.  The gift of freedom, so casually tossed aside by those who are ignorant of its enormous power,  forms the way forward out of  the current malaise.

Loss of Morality

In a twentieth century where the world almost eliminated itself in horrific slaughter, morality died.  The recognition that a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, existed  required the combined will of all that was right and good. Creating  such supreme sacrifices to ultimately prevail exhausted the human capacity for objective morality. A religious world became an irreligious one, where residual religion retreated to relativism,  or in the case of Islam radicalized into death cult lunacy.  People have accepted progressively relativist arguments regarding abortion, spiraling crime rates, and sexual and drug promiscuity, ignoring the moral questions in favor of the relative — if it feels right, it must be right.

Loss of Truth

The concept of the narrative has strangled the search for the truth.  Narratives are nefarious memes to enforce behaviors and squash the skeptic.  ‘Human caused Global Warming’ declared man as the dominant actor in the 3.5 billion year history of earthly climate change, not because the world had not been warmer or colder before man, but that humans were uniquely flawed and could only ‘save’ themselves by surrendering their modern mobility and trillions of dollars to a global elite that would redistribute it to “appropriate climate friendly” causes.  Facts have butted up against the hysteria, presenting a much more measured reality as to the complexity  of climate, but that hasn’t stopped the increased righteousness of those convinced by the narrative.   Decades of victimization designed to elevate the narrative of a genetically controlled otherness, whether race, color, or sex, has led to the narrative of intersectional oppression – literally the cumulative victimization obstructing the oppressed from succeeding in a world where the “fix” is in, needing the ‘oppressor’ to stand aside.  The facts of poverty, education gaps,  the incongruity of continued vast safety nets helping the ‘oppressed’ the least have no place in displacing the narrative of oppressed and oppressor. On and On.

We Got Here, Now What?

Can society restore civil, responsible, moral, truthful conditions of discourse?  The progressive anarchy would suggest we may need to return to a dark place to be shaken back to the classic foundations of a productive engaged society.  In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, a politician flawed in his crudity and venality may have applied a slight break to the runaway train.  His unwillingness to allow the narrative to dominate, his determination to provide conditions for opportunity and reward to individuals, may prove to provide more corrective than all the think tanks seminars passively pontificating about how the world should be, if only people would see the light.  This crass man responding instinctually is upsetting the apple cart and waking us up a little.  Now, if he can only somehow recover his long lost civility gene, when one is called for.

Probably too much to hope.


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Who’s Country Is It Anyway?

New York Times November 5th 1968

In significant quarters of the United States, the election of Richard Nixon was a cultural event.  An appalling cultural event.   Nixon was seen by many as an abomination of the symbol  America was supposed to project to the rest of the world in their chief executive position.  He was a dark, conniving destroyer of reputations, who saw communists where others saw progressives, and worst of all, had support of what he referred to as the “silent majority” — to liberal elites, the great reactionary underbelly of American life.  This sense of Nixon, epitomizing the cancer on progress as a people,  was forever memorialized by Pauline Kael, the entertainment critic for New Yorker Magazine, stating, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them”.  The cultural divide extended uniformly through the American Media and the country’s universities, who saw their burgeoning activism and progressivism threatened by the whims of an electoral college that had rewarded, in the defiance of the popular will, a person antithetical to all  they envisioned for a country in transition.  Finally, it was immersed in the permanent government, the Washington bureaucracy, that could not conceive of a cadre of Nixon loyalists infecting the levers of power, only 8 short years from the time their Camelot infused hero, John Kennedy, had supposedly banished Nixon to the political wilderness.  Yet there he was.  With his election , Nixon had overturned their world, and the clash as to who would control the narrative, and who’s narrative would prevail, commenced almost immediately.

Five years later, despite President Nixon’s seemingly immense electoral popularity, the permanent state and media, helped by Nixon’s many flaws, managed to take him down.  The President, who in 1972 was elected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, found himself only 20 months later, by August 8, 1974, without any residual  political support and had to resign, rather than face impeachment.  The attack that had exposed his fatal mistake, had both external and internal elements.  The American press, led by the intrepid reporters Woodward and Bernstein, had done the heavy lifting of telling the story of Nixon and his staff, but its was many years  later, when it was finally admitted that ‘Deep Throat’ ,the prime whistleblower who functioned as Woodward and Bernstein’s inside mole, was Mark Felt, Associate Director  of the FBI.  The deep state and press, sharing a mutual disdain for Nixon, had collaborated to bring him down.

Thus, the means for securing a vaccination against elections that threatened the accepted status quo- in essence, sustained, intense and disproportionate press focus on perceived vulnerabilities of an unacceptable president, coupled if possible with deep state cooperation and coordination — was realized.  For the next forty years, with variable intensity, the machinery was oriented towards reigning in Republican Presidents.  The exception was the Clinton experience, where the mainstream media, positioned to bury the “intern” story, was caught completely off guard by a new force to this point not recognized, the internet, with a new arm of investigative oversight less biased by traditional views of the world exemplified by a uniquely new reporter, Matt Drudge.

The years of the Obama Administration were the reconstruction of the Kennedyesque narrative.  Mr. Obama, a compelling figure who pushed all the right buttons — suave, progressive, intellectual — was feted for eight years by a compliant press the protected the image against whispered, darker reflections of a more imperious side – Fast and Furious, the weaponization of the IRS and other government agencies, the Benghazi debacle.  None of the narratives gained weight, or reached the White House, because the press, having learned from the Clinton experience wouldn’t let it, and the politicized Justice Department had determined the ends justified the means.  The end of the Obama Administration presented real dangers, though, to all that had been accomplished.  An unstable maverick in Donald Trump had managed to wrest the Republican nomination, and showed no indication that he would follow the civility of previous Republican candidates to avoid the risk of a war on culture.  At the same time, the Obama legacy was to be put in the hands of Hillary Clinton, a uniquely soiled candidate who encompassed the worst traits of her husband’s love affair with crony capitalism and innate dishonesty without the accompanying natural political instincts.   What to do….What to do.

It progressively appears the old war horse of media narrative and deep state coordination was dusted off and pointed at Trump.  Unlike in Nixon’s case, no one waited to see how the election would turn before initiating action.  Too much was at stake, and no one would be able to trust the internet to cooperate.  Trump was a perfectly designed foil.  He had no political experience and no real organization.  His business life was riddled with shady characters, shoddy tactics, and international scope.  He was the perfect anti-Obama — rude, bombastic, and reactionary.  Not since the juxtaposition of Kennedy to Nixon, was the righteousness of the process so obviously clear to both media and deep state characters as the potential jump from Obama to Trump.  With such juxtapositions, the trust in the natural electoral process to do the right thing could not be calmly and passively accepted.  The first action was to somehow cleanse Hillary Clinton of her stunning malfeasance in her Clinton Foundation activities, laced with sloppy security breeches codified in thousands of destroyed emails on a private server — and the on going abeyance of the Obama Administration, and perhaps the President himself.   This required tortuous legal justifications by the Justice Department and FBI, that under a Republican Administration would have led to a Constitutional crisis —  interviews not recorded and not taken under oath, immunity provided preemptively, legal decisions to ignore the mountain of evidence and declare outcome prior to any legal process.  Despite the smell, the media accepted the outcome with satisfaction.  The second process was to turn the legal investigative engine upon the opponent Trump, taking the kernel of longstanding Russian interference with American elections and point a one sided lens upon Trump.  Cooperation with the Clinton campaign with acceptance of opposition research purchased by Clinton and then laundered like dirty money through government investigative organs to have it appear as clean counter intelligence,  appears to have required coordinated activity with both the Justice Department and FBI, and possibly National Security agencies.  Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the identification of a possible mole positioned by the FBI in the opposition Trump campaign.  Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, a former federal prosecutor, has outlined in devastating fashion, the two juxtaposed processes of investigation of Clinton and Trump, as near polar opposites by the same legal arms of our government.  After the stunning election of Trump to the Presidency, the narrative had to be put into over-drive, from one of Russian Interference to the quid pro quo of Russian Collusion, and from nearly the first day, the elected President has been under attack in a fashion positioned to overturn the election.

In my childhood, I remember the daily broadcasts of the Congressional hearings that pealed away Nixon’s defensive layers one by one, until the core conspiracy had been identified, vilified, and the outcome inevitable.  The combined pressure of external and internal forces is immense and inexorable.  Nixon’s supreme failure was the confluence of the elite institutions hatred of his persona and resultant success threatening the accepted meme, and the extent to which he used unsavory elements to fight back.  Trump’s own naivety may have been his best weapon.  Nearly two years of searching for evidence of ‘Russian Collusion’ has turned up nothing potentially for the simple reason that there may have been no there there.  The Trump phenomena did not rely on traditional campaign structures and was therefore was not sophisticated enough to contemplate an organized coordinative process involving Russians, hackers, and Facebook ads.  Trump was too busy utilizing a previously unconceived triad of threadbare campaign finance, old fashion rallies, and celebrity fueled twitter artillery.  Stunningly, he won, and the unseemly, unsophisticated attacks and subsequent dismantling of the progressive legacy have driven the permanent state and Obama holdovers to the precipice of madness.

The clarity as to what has transpired has only begun to be revealed, and a painful boomerang may yet strike heaviest on those who sought to artificially direct the outcome.  Unlike forty-five years ago, the country may not accept the logic to overturn the election, and those that hoped to control events in a constitutional republic, may find enough of the old pride to assure  a government of the people, by the people, for the people, has not yet perished from the face of the earth.

 

 

 

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2017 Hands Off A Potentially Historical Arc for Freedom To 2018

Old Year 2017 hands off to New Year 2018

Each year reaches exhaustion on the Gregorian Calendar at the same time midnight December 31st.  Since Pope Gregory in 1587 determined Julius Caesar’s calendar was sufficiently out of sync that an extra day was required every four years to leap the calendar forward and secure it appropriately with the seasons, we have counted our transition to the new year with similarity to our ancestors for 430 years.  Most of those years, the resolutions are personal, with an oath to do things differently,  a fresh start in life  upon the advancement of the calendar to the new year.  History, however,  is more continuous in arc and less amenable to rigid stops and starts.  Suddenly though , the end of 2017 has shifted the ground so dramatically  in Iran  that something similar to the real historical diversion made in 1989, may be upon us with the coming of the new year.  Maybe something truly heroic; maybe, at long last, the breath of freedom to a long suffering people.

IRAN          In 1979, the people of Iran were grifted out of their people’s revolution in overthrowing the autocratic Shah,  the autocratic dictatorship absconded by religious zealots and replaced with a theocratic one.  For nearly 40 years, the Iranian people have suffered under a small cadre of clerics that assume their brand of rigid male dominated society forcing all others into subservience will somehow continue to resonate with a population which is now 60% under the age of thirty and no longer willing to be denied their individual pursuit of happiness.  Like all religions with a dark, negativistic view of human interaction, the puritanical restrictions eventually morph into downright moral corruption and overreach that eventually cause fundamental collapse of the subjected’s passive acceptance of authority.

In 2009, President Obama, the so-called leader of the Free World, reached the lowest moral point of his Presidency when he remained silent during the protests of millions in  Iran’s Green Revolution as young people were massacred on the streets by regime thugs.  History records that he did so as he did not want to upset his fantastical plan to work with the mullahs in achieving a diplomatic pact that would place theocratic Iran in the position of dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia.  He was willing to deal away the heroic uprising, remove sanctions, restore billions of dollars to the mullahs, avert his eyes as the regime’s terrorist arm, Hezbollah threatened Israel, overran Lebanon, helped convert Syria into a human calamity, allow Iran to continue to develop ballistic weapons for nuclear delivery that could threaten Israel, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe, kill hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, and prepare for an active nuclear capability.  It is hard to underestimate how ugly this colossal misjudgment proved to be.

Now, seemingly  out of the blue to averted western eyes, the Iranian people are rising again to throw off their enslavers, and this time, it may be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.  The regime is full of viciousness and will not stand for a mortal threat to its existence, for each of these ‘religious” figures understand that there could be a ‘Libyan sendoff‘ for each of them should their authority erode and their role in murder , theft, and corruption becomes fully uncovered.  As 2017 ends, the clamp down on information escaping Iran by authorities makes the extent and potential success of what has erupted from the population difficult to discern.  What appears critical this time, is that the revolt of the people is across the width and breath of Iran, and transcends class.  Outgunned and up against a vicious reactionary leadership, there is little doubt that success if at all possible will more resemble the French Revolution of 1789  than the Velvet Revolution of 1989.  We at the ramparts, must watch and pray for the latter, but history suggests usually otherwise.  At least this time, the Iranian people will see an American leader who recognizes their struggle for what it is:

As 2017 leads into 2018, a historic fulcrum is upon Iran and its heroic people.  To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, oppressive authority withers two ways : gradually and then, suddenly.