CULTURE – Page 5 – Ramparts of Civilization

May 28, 2016May 28, 2016

Memorializing Memorial Day

President Obama on May 22nd, 2016 in Hiroshima, took measure of the Memorial Day weekend to attempt to memorialize the tremendous loss of life that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 as the extreme spasm of a world lost in aggressive impulses without steadying institutional control.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.

Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.

He stated further:

And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

A horrible event occurred in Hiroshima seventy-one years ago, but is what President Obama describes really the means to assure the prevention forever of passive death of innocents in the face of ever more destructive technology? Was the absence of institutional control the reason for the advancement to actual use of an atomic weapon? Would more institutions and treaties to eliminate weapons present prior to a war provide the means to prevent war or development of such weapons? The tough historical truths are that global organizations such as the League of Nations were useless in preventing global conflict, and the atomic weapon, though no more objectively destructive in lives than any number of other catastrophic weaponry used before it, proved philosophically the precise tool to end the global conflict and prevent large scale conflict for the next seventy years.

The prevention of war and avoidance of death for countless innocents has too many times been left passively in the hands of organizations that looked at vigilance and strength as mechanisms for starting wars, not preventing them. President Obama sees the start of WorldWar II for America, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the climatic end of the war, the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, as equivalent evils of aggression against innocents. The avoidance of the concept of good and evil is an important foundation for all liberal progressive thought. It is important to see all conflict as primeval genetically driven aggression of individuals, requiring the continual regulation of more objectively minded institutions to suppress the baser reflex. Aggression is driven by animal greed, need for dominance, religious and nationalist fervor that clouds any rational human thought. The idea that a moral dilemma would arise, that would require recognition of evil, and the need to surmount and defeat evil intent, is alien to progressive thinkers like Obama. All versions of society are relative and need only understanding is what has been responsible for many of the darker periods of human conflict. The society that evolved the evil that led to the tens of millions of deaths prior to Hiroshima, was finally stopped by the society that marshaled its goodness into the overwhelming might of the atomic weapon.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke

The brilliant British parliamentarian Burke got to the core of human conflict that progressives like Obama always fail to grasp, that it is the value system, not the weaponry, that defines momentum to conflict. The individual soldier does not defend a series of treaties or a constellation of institutions, but a bedrock of ideas. The American Revolutionary left his home to defend the abstract cause of free will against a distant tyranny. The Civil War soldier on both sides felt he was defending his homeland against invasion, the southerner from the federalist north, the northerner against the rebel insurrector. The World War II soldier saw the spectacular evil of totalitarian society impressing its collectivist values against the individual freedoms to such an extent that genocides were institutionalized and remorselessly codified. The atomic bomb was achieved in a race between the defenders of freedom who achieved the technology by an chronological eyeblink over the evil, genocidal societies that would not have hesitated for a moment its use. The soldier defending individual freedom and free will, is there to defend, and at times die, for a concept larger than life itself, if it means that liberty survives for others to benefit and propagate. No treaty will have such power to defend against evil, or to assure its destruction.

On this Memorial Day we do not glorify the treaties that were designed to suppress aggression, or the wars that were fought to promote institutions. We memorialize the individuals who recognizing their own humanity, could grasp the greater values that life offers, and propel themselves to serve and at times sacrifice for the survival of a good that would many times outlive them. Wars are not won by old men protecting present realities, but by young men envisioning a better world they, through their sacrifice, personally can secure for others. President Reagan was the great communicator and visionary that President Obama could never remotely be, because Reagan could articulate this basic truth, and recognize this basic good. Obama’s moral equivalence only permits the seeds of future conflicts by creating passivity when vigilance and preemption is necessary. President Reagan understood what elevates men and women beyond their own survival instincts toward a greater truth that in the end protects us all from the slide to oblivion. In the larger sense, it is not sacrifice that is memorialized, but the individual life that briefly burned so bright for an abstract value that might possibly build a better, freer world.

God Bless all who serve. God Bless all who defend. God Bless all who feel the calling. We know what you have done for us, and we will never forget.

May 7, 2016May 7, 2016

Donald Trump – Novice Maximus

You have to give the man his due. Donald Trump entered the nomination process last June as a rejiggered Democrat non-politician running in the Republican Party nomination process alongside 16 other experienced, motivated, better funded and better prepared candidates – and with last Tuesday’s crushing of the final two pretenders in the Indiana primary – left all 16 in a pile of rubble the Trump bulldozer had cleared off the road. But not only the 16. He additionally has created a meme where the power structures forming the fifty year edifice of a conservative movement that had at the beginning of the primary season demanded that Trump declare loyalty to the party and not go off the rails with a third party run, were now fumbling to say if they would declare loyalty to him. The former Speaker of the House, who led the first congressionally directed conservative takeover of American political philosophy in 1994, Newt Gingrich, enthusiastically supports Trump. The current Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who was hostilely drafted to resurrect the conservative will of a corrupted leadership in 2015 and is the chairman of the party’s nominated convention, cannot bring himself to declare the undisciplined, unideological Trump as his movement’s standard bearer. The brother of the President of the United States who Trump declared lied to the American people regarding Iraq vows Never Trump. The former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, who championed the very Iraq policy that Trump says was a perpetrated lie upon the American people has come forward to support Trump. It has resulted in the 1996 loser of the presidential election Robert Dole to vociferously endorse Trump, and the most recent loser of 2012, Milt Romney to scheme to get rid of Trump. Down the line, governors and senators, congressmen and assemblymen, conservative think tanks and journalists, industry chiefs and regular tool box guys, wise thought leaders and talk show blatherers alike, are finding themselves aghast at the prospect of having to choose who they are, when they thought they already knew. The meme is a question – If you are for Trump or you are against Trump, what does it say about you?

The American style electoral process to this point has been based on a party structure that looked for candidates who would represent the party members values, and attempt to convince the rest of America, on the values fitting the currents times and events. It has been said and believed, all politics are local. The party’s strengths are formulated through retail politics of local leaders meeting the constituents, kissing the babies, and fixing the potholes. Successful local leaders then take their local resumes to achieve state offices and learn the art of compromise and debate, interest groups and budgets that prepare them for the national stage. At the national stage the lessons learned from a career of relationships with like minded people forms the party structure of a national vision that a fully vetted standard bearer must earn the right to represent, perhaps earning after having fallen short a time or two, and refining his or her understanding of the vision process to eventually be selected and succeed. This was the structure that was built to prevent the hijacking of the party vision by an extreme version or transiently enthusiastic impulse. The Pat Buchanons, Ron Pauls, George Wallaces, and Pete McCloskeys could not get through the obstacle course and subvert the party to their extremism. It was a protection against demagogues such as Huey Long or Douglas MacArthur democratically overwhelming the mechanisms of restraint.

However perfect the restraints, the parties would occasionally struggle to avoid falling in love with a relative novice, like Wendell Wilkie, Dwight Eisenhower, or Barrack Obama, on the basis of a single gift. Even then there was some logic. The Republican candidate of 1940, businessman Wilkie was a sacrificial lamb against the massive Democratic machine that controlled all facets national politics led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The party had nothing to lose in trying a non-politician against the ultimate politician. In 1952, Eisenhower’s singular gift was that he had adroitly managed the most massive military machine ever assembled and had helped save the entire world. That certainly made him hard to turn down. In 2008, the Democrat Party turned to a state senator who became a one term US Senator only so he could become President. As to his party’s nefarious recognition of his supposed singular gift, his eventual running mate and gaffemeister Joseph Biden crudely framed it, saying “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Donald Trump has exploded all the constraints by being Novice Maximus. He is not an industrial leader like Wilkie, he is a wheeler dealer business speculator. He is not a leader of men and women like Eisenhower forged in battle, he is leader dealer who sells to others his version of dealing, defining success and failure by how closely they adhere to the Trump model, firing non-acolytes in the Apprentice, or failing non-converts in a fraudulent “Trump University”. He has not captured the media by superficially looking and sounding nonthreatening to them like Obama, but rather overwhelming them and enslaving the media through ratings success their previous biases had prevented them from ever achieving. Trump, the Novice Maximus, towers over all previous models, converting individuals who would not remotely respect his bizarre politics into ‘Trumpeters’ for the cause.

And thus, the dilemma for anyone who has an inkling as to the principles that make this modern republic great. The Republican Party has positioned themselves to endorse a candidate who shows no identifiable message discipline or understanding, and is proud of it. This party of limited government influence on people’s lives is about to underwrite an individual that declares he alone will adjudicate whether a company moves their business, a person of muslim faith can gain entrance, another sovereign country will be forced to pay fealty, or that the country he represents will resolve to default on its debt. The Republican Party, wholly unable to control Novice Maximus in his inevitable drive to the party nomination, now asks its constituents who did not buy into Trump to ‘trust’ the party to be able to ‘control’ Novice Maximus once he has obtained the reins of power through ‘wise council’ and ‘checks and balances’. This type of logic has been ludicrously promoted before against of demagogic figures, the most disturbing historical example being the decision of the German right to believe it could ‘control’ Hitler by bringing him into government as Chancellor and having him mentored by Hindenburg. Obviously, Trump is no Hitler, but the Republican Party is not even remotely Hindenburg. Donald Trump refined modern social media control with the best propagandists of the 1930’s, and once in place of the ultimate bully pulpit, would be out of the reach of any stabilizers.

What to do? Vote your principles, and your desire for forward looking, rational answers to our many problems goes down to defeat. Jump on the Trump Train, and assure the complete destruction of ideological clarity to problem solving, while still going down to defeat, win or lose. For me, principles trump Trump. Losing one’s soul is not a reasonable price for defeating the less defined of two evils. The 1932 german patriot who held on to his humanity and civility and didn’t join the lemmings, at least didn’t have to live the evolving calamity soulless.

April 30, 2016April 30, 2016

Checking The Box

The Ballot Awaits - What will you do? — The Ballot Awaits – What will you do?

Voting is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. The vote represents the compact a country’s people hold with its government to follow the agreed upon constitutionally ordained mandates, laws, security, and strategic investments. It is the pat on the back for positive performance, the weedwacker for removing governmental congestion,troubled concepts and inadequate or corrupted leaders. The great arsenal of democracy is the ballot box, converting the performance chart into measurable, digestible time frames that allow an engaged citizenry to control their future.

The zenith of the American voting process is the vote for the Presidency. Every four years, the country puts its prospective leaders through an onerous process that vets each prospect’s capacity to articulate a vision, respond and modify to others’ criticisms, and engage and hold the attention of a majority of Americans who see the future as they do. Its an intense process, and it should work at a level of outcome worthy of the great democracy it serves.

Yet, for years, the process has appeared significantly out of sync with the voter, and has time and time again positioned candidates that seem incomplete or unworthy, and that leave the voter with a choice of selecting the lesser of two evils. Progressively, the Presidential vote has come to voting against someone we feel will be damaging to our future, rather for someone who positively represents our views and our vision. For the past thirty years, this has been particularly an unsavory process for the conservative or libertarian voter. The Republican Party, positioned to represent the world of the individual initiative and limited government, has put forth candidates who are further and further removed from this philosophical pact. It has demanded the conservative go into the booth, hold his or her nose, and vote against the other party rather than for the republican candidate, to protect a rapidly diminishing societal compact with those two pillars the party claims to be fundamental.

This year, the wheels have completely come off the wagon. Short of a radical change in events, the two party nominees will be Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Clown against the Criminal, and a huge segment of the Republican Party’s base are left with the impossible choice of voting for intolerable options, or abdicating their responsibility as the ground troops of democracy and staying out of the Presidential vote all together.

The Republican Party is wholly responsible for this approaching debacle. Every four years, the process of selecting candidates has leached out the more principled conservative candidates on the premise that a principled conservative could not possibly appeal to the greater population. The Voter got Bush instead of Kemp, Dole instead of Graham, Bush instead of Forbes, McCain instead of Romney, and Romney instead of Perry. Each time, the consensus candidate either significantly let down their conservative base of support once elected (in case of the Bushes), or got clobbered by the ideologically purer democratic alternative in the general election. On multiple occasions, the base got back of the floor and organized off year election victories and with the exception of 1994, had their elected legislators turn their back on the ideological struggle and give in to the statist Borg.

2016 was going to be different. This was to be the year in which the executive election ideology would match the legislative thrust, and the conservative voter could go into the booth and positively pull the lever for our version of an ideologically pure candidate. Perry, Jindal, Walker, Rubio, Cruz, Fiorina. All are gone or nearly so, and the man left standing is Donald Trump, the anti-ideologue whose base instincts would fit securely into the Democrat Party’s vision of leading society through correct beliefs rather than correct facts if he had determined to run under his life long party, rather than his recent epiphany that he must be a Republican. Certainly a surprise to his children, who didn’t even have time to change their party allegiance in order to vote in the “other” party’s primary in New York for their father.

Instead the party of individual initiative and limited government will be represented by the very candidate who has publicly declared these concepts an anathema to him. The result has been a sense of doom and withdrawal that are normally foreign to the conservative voter, usually the most committed and engaged supporter of the constitutional process. One can vote for Trump and pretend that what one believes doesn’t matter in governance, or stay out of the election and allow Clinton to be rewarded for a life of insolent behavior, statist, collective ideology, and lousy performance. Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal editorial of April 28, 2016, refers to this sullen recognition of what she calls the Moment, when the lack of an out is expressed as a psychological wounding. The Republican Party,clumsily looking to expand its appeal rather than firm up its convictions, set up the primary process so that an outside demagogue could parley minority anger into a majority delegate position. The Party is now desperately attempting to imply the conservative voter must once again “hold their nose” and vote to prevent a supposed worse outcome, or risk the shuttering of the party.

The final defenders of the Ramparts are being labeled the NeverTrump clique and are being set up to either be a hypocrite to their principles, or permit a final closing of the door of a vision of a country once uniformly seen as a place of opportunity, self responsibility, and societally moral relations. Well, a stark future awaits, and unless something unexpected happens, it is not clear a way out of Peggy Noonan’s Moment can be formed out of the madness.

A difficult, tumultuous summer and fall looms.

April 17, 2016April 17, 2016

Ssshhh! …Still Some Clear Thinking Going On…

General Petraeus in Field - Roberto Schmidt getty images/cnn.com — General Petraeus in Iraq *photo* *Roberto Schmidt getty images/cnn.com*

The political discourse these days is so trivial, hyperbolic, and lacking in thought that we might wonder if we are undergoing staging for a reality show rather than vetting potential Presidents of the United States. The idea that there might be a philosophy of engagement for the most powerful nation on earth or an identified self interest is anathema to the candied brains of the current front runners. The Democrat front runner sees the Libyan fiasco as a great accomplishment. The Republican front runner wants to get rid of NATO and demands fools gold from other allies to maintain positions in the world that long have been critical to the nation’s self interest. The current President uses political calculus rather than in-depth analysis to attempt a policy of retrenchment. As a result, his concept of retrenchment waffles between red lines and withdrawals, disdain for his enemies capabilities and inept, pinprick reactionary responses to threats. Is there anybody left who has thought this through?

Well, there is someone. Someone who could have been President, but ruptured his bond with integrity and took himself out. General David Petraeus, who served both Republican and Democrat Administrations and was the strategic genius behind the Iraq surge that finally won the Iraqi conflict, only to have it dissolve with the forced withdrawal of his carefully and painfully won stabilizing force. The general committed political hari-kari when he exposed three classified documents to his biographer mistress, who as an intelligence officer additionally had classified document clearance. It resulted in a very public humiliation by the Obama Administration by Petraeus, who was forced to resign as CIA Director, and a Justice Department prosecution that led in 2015 to 2 years probation and a 100 thousand dollar fine. The four star general’s career was over, and the unique means of his political demise takes on special focus when weighed against the massively larger security breach that was brazenly propagated by Secretary of State Clinton. Ms. Clinton, who could very well be our next President.

It is David Petraeus, not Hillary Clinton, who is banished to the wilderness. We should remind ourselves however who General Petraeus is, because the old war horse has a soaring intellect and much yet to teach, if we are willing to listen. David Petraeus was in the top 5% of his 1974 graduating class at West Point, the top graduate of his 1983 class at the 1983 US Army Command General Staff College, and subsequently earned a MPA and PhD in International Relations from Princeton University. As a commanding intellectual, Petraeus proved equally adept at the real testing ground of soldiering, becoming a commissioned Army Ranger, promoted to commanding a battalion of the famed 101st Airborne Division, a brigade with the 82nd Airborne Division and eventually the commanding major general of the 101st in the second Gulf War combat assault on Baghdad, Karbala and Mosul.

What tied Petraeus’s unique balance of intellectual depth and combat assertiveness into success was the depth of his own philosophical development in concepts of counter insurgency. Petraeus saw counter insurgency as requiring creation of security and stability by the twins of tactical force and political compromise, achieving the trust and the buy in of those he was asked to defend. Nowhere did he succeed more profoundly then when he was asked to command the surge of US forces in 2007 in the desperate attempt to salvage the floundering US effort to pacify Iraq. Recognizing the Anbar Awakening for what it was, Petraeus presciently identified the appropriate winners and losers and supported his winners until they could assert their own control. The success of the surge was so dramatic, that the key issue of the 2008 presidential campaign was lost to then candidate Obama. By 2010, the Obama Administration, noting that Iraq was so pacified that US Army deaths due to monthly training accidents exceeded combat deaths, declared a stable Iraq as their Greatest Achievement, and promptly threw it all away by not renewing the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. All of the hard work and sacrifices of the American effort in Iraq came to nothing as the black anarchy of death rapidly seeped into the vacuum.

Obama requested Petraeus’s help in Afghanistan and then the CIA in an effort to contain Petraeus rapidly rising political star, before Petraeus removed himself as a political foe through his own foible. Nobody was more relieved then Obama.

Petraeus might have been the next in line of the perfect citizen soldier statesmen, such as Washington, Grant, Marshall, and Eisenhower that helped this nation out of its doldrums in the past. Instead his personal vanity led to foolish weakness that has deprived us of this generation’s great leader. Petraeus thankfully has not given up on helping format a way out of our current international morass. In a Washington Post OpEd, Petraeus helps suggest the principles in countering the plague of radical Islam, that could direct future Administrations to a restoration of stability in this most unstable world. His Five Big Ideas in the OpEd reflect Petraeus’s philosophical underpinnings he has previously described for breaking sclerotic impasses and achieving Institutional Change: First: Get the Big Ideas Right. Second: Communicate the Big Ideas Effectively. Third: Oversee Big Idea Implementation. Fourth: Capture the Lessons Learned, Refine, and Repeat the Process. The current opinion piece mirrors the foundational Big Idea concept. Petraeus defines the Five Big Ideas as :

Recognition that ungoverned spaces contribute the agar dish of chaos that draw radicals and allow them to flourish.
Radical Islamists will not confine their attacks to their lairs or strongholds.
The U.S. can not absolve itself of responsibility as the singular world leader capable of coordinating a counter insurgency
The path to success will be comprehensive, multi-faceted, involve allies and friends, and not just precision strikes and special operations.
Victory ( and Petraeus does not see U.S. self interest in something short of victory) will require sustained U.S. effort for extended periods, defined by conditions on the ground, not enforced timetables.

What the general is describing is nothing more than the reversal of the last seven years of U.S. strategy of leaving the chaos of the world for others to solve, and retrenching to the role of leading from behind. Such strategy has led to propagation of Syria’s catastrophic collapse, Iraq’s dissolution, ineptly permitted by a puppet government of the Iranian mullahs that lost the Anbar to the ISIS monsters, sacrificed the Yazidis, offended the Kurds, and seek to destroy the Sunni , and the Libya, Mali, Somali, and Nigeria calamitous infernos of Mad Max warscapes. I could easily see where it might be long past time to reverse such strategy. Unfortunately, the political discourse would suggest we may be willing to elect even more wrong way thinking approaching at its extreme, real bone headed logic.

There is real thinking out there. If the country is willing to overlook completely profligately amoral and sustained behavior from its leading candidates, could it possibly overlook a brief lapse in a career of brilliance for our nation’s sake?

Where have you gone, General Petraeus, Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you woo,woo,woo…

March 27, 2016March 28, 2016

Miracles

In the darkest times, when it seems that the world has fallen from grace, and the way out has been obscured so densely that hope appears extinguished, miracles can occur. We live in such times, but these are not the first of those times. Finding a way out of the morass is often predicated upon pressing onward, and having faith.

Evil feeds upon the angst and weakness that lies in the absence of faith. It looks to declare the absolute certainty of a future, to remove all hope, and to force compliance. Faith secures the ultimate freedom, elevated from the native fears and doubts that can bring such turmoil to human existence. The faithful don’t need reassurance, because the present holds no sway over an ultimate truth.

The tests are everywhere among us. A muslim shopkeeper seeks to bridge the cultural divide with simple respect for those who see things differently, and is killed for his generous spirit. The President of the United States participates in a press conference with a Cuban dictator, standing by passively as Raul Castro denies keeping any prisoners of conscience. The long hand of the current Russian czar snuffs out any opposition to his worldview. Innocents are brought to slaughter to serve as examples of evil’s inevitable march.

A transcendent faith is the gift of that day so many years ago when the tomb was visited on the first day after the sabbath, the stone was found shunted aside, and the inhabitant of the tomb was nowhere to be found. Those that gazed in and were dumbfounded showed expected human reactions, worrying where the body was taken and who would have removed it. The truth was of course greater than any perceived before in human existence, in that the truth was amongst them as they wondered, and had been all along. Those of the greatest faith could see the truth, and those who would doubt but were open to a better world, could still receive the truth.

The realities of our days bring doubts, but not certainties. The faith that good will triumph over evil speaks to the enormous power of good and the inherent weakness of evil. In good is the future of enlightenment, love, and paradise. In evil, lies the empty blackness of a world devoid of meaning.

The miracle of Easter morning is not only that it happened, but that it happens continuously, through the breath of spirit that infuses people with the strength to carry on through the darkness, and never given in to those who would surrender or desecrate our goodness.

Have faith. With it, all things are possible.

Happy Easter.

March 12, 2016March 13, 2016

America In Transition

Fully Automated Robotic Assembly Line in a Tesla Factory - smashgear.com — Fully Automated Robotic Assembly Line in a Tesla Factory *photo/smashgear.com*

It’s an emotional time when one is transitioning from what was, to what will be. America, as a result, appears to progressively be an emotional wreck. The economy sloths along at an anemic 1-2% growth rate with job growth being led by service industries such as call centers. The most powerful military in the world has devised rules of engagement that defy any engagement that would secure any meaningful outcomes or strategic advantage. The political parties are in tatters, with candidates promoting populist nationalism, serving up extreme versions of the past in an attempt to preserve what is no longer viable. The foundational principles that have adjudicated so many other previous periods of upheaval are helpless to buttress an increasingly ignorant population that has only the vaguest notion of what they are. What passes for public discourse is increasingly more reactionary, emotional, and agitated, defined by the slogan, What Do We Want (fill in the blank), When Do We Want It? NOW!!

Its enough to make you want to simply sign off. That would be denying however any hope for civilization, and we of course, in our own little way, are defenders of the ramparts of that very civilization, so a little more introspection and looking for silver linings are called for.

The first thing is to recognize that we are at the end of one order of civilization, and yet to discern the elements that will begin another. In the chaos of watching things fail that no longer work, it is easy to believe you are seeing change at work, when you are simply watching the last tired efforts of a society to desperately hold on to what it knows. The current President thought he was bringing the Change and the Hope, but the reality was that trying to make people’s behavior bend to your will was a worn out idea that was bound to fail. Something new is indeed coming, but we need to understand what is likely gone forever and let it go, if we are going to be able to respond and potentially flourish in a new world. The answer is leveraged in a return to, and a celebration of, critical thinking, and the challenge is to raise our consciousness to that reality.

Personal Privacy: The concept of personhood as mysterious as an unbreakable code and unique as a fingerprint is about to disappear. Almost every fact and nuance about each of us is available electronically to those who would look, and is progressively given up by many freely without the least concern. We are a data cache to large companies, governments, and social exchanges to the extent that our behaviors, thoughts and reactions are comprehensively known and open to manipulation. Social exchanges such as Facebook have discovered people are only too willing to put the most intimate information out into the cloud to any one who wants it. The health information of essentially every modern society is on an electronic platform, and what you eat, drink or interact with, are increasingly owned by the society rather than the individual. Governments such as China see themselves as the ultimate owners of every citizen’s thoughts, and have become world leaders in surveillance cameras, internet monitoring, and even proactive policing (predicting and preventing the “crime” before it occurs).

There is no sense to arguing the information is yours any longer, the question is, will we be willing to protect our individuality, our personhood against unwanted invasion or manipulation. You can’t be comfortable with the loss of some fundamental liberties, and be squeamish about losing others, without losing them all. A higher definition of liberty and personhood is in order, and the fight for the next generation is to recognize what is at stake.

Labor as a Means of Personal Freedom: A physical job used to link directly to personal opportunity and freedom. It provided the stability of predictable income, health care and future pension that allowed the individual to either maintain or position oneself for advancement. A relatively small group of people had the pride of ownership and production, and the risk/reward equation that came with ownership. For most people, the job was simply the byproduct of a stable life and other pursuits. Now, the very concept of “job” is disappearing. Manual labor, the capacity to contribute to production of goods and services, that would provide the economic means to eventually secure those goods and services for oneself, is, for most of the planet, the relic of a bygone era. Robots are substantially more productive than people in assembly work, mining, and farming. Computers reduce the value of human data interpretation, with their ability to summon and source massive amounts of data in infinitesimal amounts of time compared to humans. What will most people do, when there are fewer and fewer jobs for them to do? This has been the primary impetus of our current anxieties about immigration, free trade agreements, and loss of industries to other countries. The very number of jobs in the world are diminishing, as the ability to more productively outsource to machines increases. No amount of tariffs or taxes as proposed by current candidates are going to protect jobs that will be increasingly performed by machines no matter how onerous we make their transition to other countries. Governments placating people with safety nets will only delay the critical thinking required to recognize what is at stake. What will more and more people do when their productive value is progressively outsourced to machines? Critical thinking regarding what brings value to lives, not protectionist tactics, will be necessary to imagine a way forward when industry labor is no longer the source of individual productivity.

Traditional Education Defining Advancement: Education has become the unholy home of artificial value and pseudo – self actualization. Increasingly exploding in cost beyond anyone’s rational ability to pay, at the very time that the ‘education” offered promotes the lack of any actual skill development, traditional means of education are becoming incapable of providing us with the critical thinkers to help solve our problems. Degrees lean more and more to dividing our knowledge base into expertise in victimhood, chaos theory, and manipulation of the masses, rather than rewarding critical thought and linking disciplines to provide creative outcomes. Requiring massive amounts of individual investment or societal support to fund further examination of our divisions – our blackness or brownness, our sexual variance or physical differences, does nothing for recognition of our common problems or contribute to their creative solutions. Forcing people to identify their intellectual development through a degree rather than an accomplished set of achieved insights or skill acquisitions has led to an enormous ignorance as to what provides real personal development. Education no longer requires rigid isolation to campuses where thinking becomes both expensive and able to be manipulated into a politically correct ‘groupthink’.

Government as the Collective Answer: The sense of loss of control and situational anxiety has led to people seeking the comfort of worn out concepts of the last century to protect them against change, particularly lashing themselves to the masts of an ever larger and more intrusive government. Once designed in America to support only actions that individuals could not do for themselves, government has become the dumping ground for every failure in insight. Designed to exist for our collective defense against attack, it now seeks to protect us against unconquerable foes such as changes in climate and equality of outcome. The result is a morbidly bloated government that promises everything and secures nothing except the pathologic maintenance of the status quo. We are now inexorably committed to securing our future health and well being through devices that were inadequate from inception, long ago destined for failure, and financially, catastrophically unsupportable. And yet we cling to the concepts because the alternative to government’s sclerotic approach is to require some risk of ourselves, and anxiety makes it easier to pass the responsibility onto an unborn generation. It won’t matter because the virus effecting all world order is the reliance on historical conditions that no longer exist and insight that long since failed. The beauty of the critical thinkers that fashioned the Constitution is that they built the perfect machinery to evolve a society, rather than codify solutions. We need a return to critical thought processes in our governance to cleanse ourselves of the last century’s loss of focus.

Nationhood: The concept of what makes a nation has been traditionally tribal. A tribe linked by language – Uzbeks forming Uzbekistan, Swedes forming Sweden, Japanese forming Japan – has conceptually been the means of nation building. Where ignored or artificially subverted, strife has resulted. Kurds have seen their cultural whole divided into multiple countries within each they are a restive minority. Catalonians feel little affinity with Spaniards. Yugoslavia was ripped apart by sectarian and religious differences once the totalitarian government fell. The United States was formed on a unique concept-a union of various peoples bound by a political philosophical culture founded on British juris prudence, British legislative governance and the British concept of freedom of assembly and speech. To best codify this political culture, the tribe became Americans and the binding language of freedom, English. The permanent nature of this union was never in doubt when America was seen as the beacon of freedom in a world of torment, and the nation was the undoubted economic superpower of the world. Strains are developing, however, after decades of flat economic performance, progressive assault on institutions, and a general laissez faire attitude regarding the vulnerability of hard won freedoms. There is a growing perception that there should not be an American “tribe”, and the nation should simply be a repository for whoever sees reason to subsist there. The critical thought that formed unique nationhood for America is no less critical today, if the idea that a nation of shared ideals rather than genetic commonality is to survive.

This year, America has determined to vote for the end of something, rather than the birth of a new beginning. The three top candidates for President will be 70 or older, by the time they would be inaugurated, and they are selling a clinging grasp of the past with promises of illogical economics, class and racial envy, and perpetuation of the status quo. All of which are doomed. It is understandable that a citizenry, poorly educated about its innate strengths, looks to others to be strong for it. It is a scary time for those who see human freedom and individual opportunity for what it is – mankind’s most successful means of maximizing our species’ capabilities and conquering our fears and darker instincts. Inevitably, the choice is ours. And regardless of what we think, history will not wait for us.

February 6, 2016

Reagan at 105

Ronald Reagan 1911 - 2004 — Ronald Reagan 1911 – 2004

February 6th is the 105th anniversary of the birth of the last great President of the United States. The fortieth of a line of greats, near greats, disappointments and even scoundrels, the reputation of Reagan has only grown in stature since he left the political scene in 1989. Greatness, as always, is not just a list of accomplishments. It is the sense, by friend and foe alike, that the real achievement of Reagan was that he was consequential in the lives of people in a way that left an indelible memory. Reagan secured renewal in America, which is an innate American characteristic flowering intermittently, permitting the country to throw off the pessimism and corrosion of previous versions, and restore the core beliefs that make this country like no other. Approaching another period in time when people fear that the country may be in a permanent decline, the search for another Reagan-like figure is driving the political process, as a general exhaustion for the divisiveness of the last 25 years progressively looks to unify behind a leader that believes in the infinite capability of a people that believe in themselves.

Reagan was the antithesis of the modern model for an executive of an organization as contentious and complex as the United States. The modern model calls for elite training, breeding in the corridors of influence, intellectual power, vigor of an executive personality at the height of its powers, and calculated ruthlessness. Reagan was born of backwater parents in Tampico, Illinois, and attended not Ivy League, but backwater schools, graduating with gentleman’s grades from little Eureka College, and striving not to become a captain of industry, but a reflection of the common man. The natural goodness that was Reagan resonated upon the fairly recent form of mass communication known as cinema, and secured in Reagan a belief that the stories told in the movies were characteristic in form to the real life stories that created the unique American society. To Reagan later in life, the cinema stories blended with reality, not because he was deluded by their contrived nature, but because he believed stories evoked the true, formational American psyche. Having essentially finished one career as celebrity, he then proceeded later in life to a second career of working the levers of power to respond to his beliefs that the success and influence of America was best appreciated in its people and their story. He didn’t see Americans as needing constant direction to prevent chaos and ill considered decisions. By the time he ran for President in 1980, he was already one of the oldest men to do so, but somehow his simple, principled manner and his unwavering confidence in the American dream blew through all generations as a bracing rush of fresh air and energy.

Reagan didn’t need to feel himself the smartest man in the room as more insecure men who followed him to the office did. He sublimated the concept of intellectual heft to the equally awesome power of personal wisdom and understanding of what motivates people to achieve great things. He did not need to demean people or ruthlessly use them, because he knew the gains would be short and superficial. He understood that true power resided in a country’s sense of self esteem and shared story. He crushed the opposition time and time again not by explaining to the people why trusting themselves would overwhelm any insecurity, and the people became his army that no opponent could hope to fractionate. When Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, he didn’t really need to tell them it was Morning in America. They felt it at the very core of their conviction, and they knew that he had renewed them.

To the elite of the country, Reagan’s simple faith in Americans and their ability to seize opportunity and trust themselves , was polyannish and ultimately irrational. Elites knew that most Americans could not be expected to understand the complexities of modern society and make good decisions. Real, altruistic governance would always be not so much a safety net as a it should be a hammock, designed to soften the blows and disappointments of life for those that could not possibly be expected to absorb and overcome failure. Reagan’s simplistic view of Americans having more in common with the concept of being American rather than the bonds to any individual group, suppressed grievances and blurred the political divisiveness that could build voting blocks. By the time an Obama positioned himself as a deliverer, Americans had subjugated themselves to smaller and smaller self interest groups, and the exploitation of perceived grievances allowed base instincts of envy and advantage to take rigid hold. Obama saw no value in shared success and people feeling self worth. Political power lay in making sure if there was failure, it was important to have someone who would clearly reveal for those who failed who was responsible – their neighbor, their fellow American. Obama’s over-riding impulse was to extend this attitude to the global perception of America, If there was instability and chaos in the world, America could be seen as a driver of such malfeasance, and she could make it up to others only by apologizing and getting out of the way. The self esteem of America and its people, renewed by Reagan and allowed to flourish for twenty-five years, required an Obama to restore the elites and crack America’s can do spirit.

Reagan unbelievably at 105 somehow seems younger than the tired contrivances that pass for leadership today. The restless rejection of the so called establishment candidates for president in Clinton and Bush seem to foretell however, a stirring of another renewal. If the country begins to sense there is real hope, not the nonsense of 2008, and that people will once again be given the chance to live their lives unencumbered by those who would crush their spirit for renewal, we may yet see a tidal wave of confirmation in the person who can define a path back out from the wilderness. If so, like 1980 and 1984, you won’t be needing to interpret any broken chads to know who won. It wont be a republican or democrat wave, it will once again be an all American one.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Reagan.

January 31, 2016

The Brokenness of Government

Venezuelans wait in line for food at a supermarket businessinsider.com — Venezuelans wait in line for food at a supermarket *businessinsider.com*

The world is looking like a progressively scary place, and it’s not from the usual bad guy good guy conflict. Its what passes for a government nowadays. Governance as defined by the dictionaries suggests a governmental body is to establish policies, monitor their implementation, and assume accountability,in order to provide for the prosperity and enhancement of the governed. Increasingly, real governance is the last thing these governments have in mind. The swelling size, scope, and grasp for power is their calling, and the people who have to put up with them are increasingly angry, and increasingly desperate. Media takes passively takes pictures and reports the presence of the increasing chaos and occasional violence, but is blind to accept the cause as a failure of the governing class for what it would mean for the perceived notion of an ideal society. The longer the disconnect remains in perception, the larger the risk of a real calamity developing.

The bloated government: World history has not seen an economy the size of the United States of America. For a country with an annual greater than 17 trillion dollar marketplace of prosperity, the government has progressively grown to install its brand of ‘fairness’ on the interactions through regulations. The original design of a limited government with checks and balances has been thrown out with an exploding executive branch, that thinks every decision an individual makes should be weighted on equality of outcome, and a legislative branch that has abandoned its role in assuring budgetary restraint and oversight guidance. The anger of the population is palpable this election season. A healthcare program built on monstrous legislation and ever more monstrous regulation fails on every conceivable level, but no one will do anything because it is a centerpiece of a president’s legacy. The nation’s debt balloons out of all conceivable proportion, having doubled in just 8 years weighed against the previous 230 with over 100 trillion in unfunded mandates, more worth than exists in the world, and nobody will do anything because they risk their re-election. Laws are that define governmental integrity, paying of taxes, respect for individual privacy, and care with the nation’s secrets are blatantly ignored by the governing class, and no clean up of the corrupting and corroding influence is undertaken, as the governing class protect their own. Bloated beyond all credible size, the government exists to exist, to redistribute, and to grow some more.

The Utopian government: Governments more firmly are designed to construct societies as utopians wish they would be, rather than how societies best function. The current free-fall in Venezuela is the Primus Inter Pares. Despite the explosion of national wealth and massive industry expansion brought by the discovery of Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, the inequities created between the poor and the flourishing middle class and nouveau riche led to the election of a uber-socialist government of Hugo Chavez, patterned after the equally utopian autocracy of Cuba. The nationalizing of the oil industry allowed the government coffers to fill directly, providing patronage money for electoral success through 2 cent a gallon gasoline, and essentially free goods, transportation, and housing for the poor. The inevitable collapse of infrastructure in the oil industry, collapse of oil prices, and explosion of the black market has led to only more delusional moves by the Chavez successor Maduro, and the doubling down of every economic malfeasance. The printing of money with rampant inflation destroying currency value has led to the monetary black market, price controls destroying any available goods, and increasing enforcement of these unworkable decisions by government backed thugs, a pattern seen over and over in countries like Zimbabwe and North Korea, but it has not distracted the Venezuelan autocrats one bit. Suffering is the daily bread of utopian paradise.

The Nanny State Government: When the European Union implemented fully the Schengen Area in 1999, it was to tell the 400 million Europeans under the union they knew the world better than any of their inhabitants. Designed to eliminate borders by eliminating passports, it put all trade and immigration under the province of a supra-national government in Brussels who wants to eliminate 2600 years of cultural diversity and create a european superstate. The single currency followed close behind with the adoption of the Euro, and the vision of vast continent of a like minded social compact gave the governors in Brussels ecstatic chills. Give Greece the Euro, and a Greek will become efficient and frugal, undifferentiated from the Germanic. Open the borders, and the immigrants will flow and provide low cost labor for the overseers, liberalize themselves, and become the Europeans of the tomorrow, joyous in the vision of a protected life, and immune to genetic callings of their tribe. The whole Potemkin Village is crashing down with the onslaught of a million undocumented immigrants from the Middle East and Africa with little to separate them but their desire to be brought under the nanny state economic safety net, and their complete distain for any contact with the European social libertine streak. The various governments have determined to ignore the severe cultural clashes that express themselves violently in assault, rape, and even murder and pretend this has nothing to do with the greater assimilation. The inevitable result is the rise of hard right movement predicated upon protecting their homes, family, and culture, but using the tools that echo the vigilante actions of times past with their inherent dangers.

The Adversarial Government: Governments reacting to any political activity to limit growing efforts to limit their scope or power are increasingly hostile and frankly dangerous. Individuals who looked to develop opposing political views in the United States to the prevailing government found their phones tapped, the tax returns audited, and their businesses hounded by governmental agencies. In Russia the would be czar has used a more effective tool of at least indirectly supporting the murder of political opponents through means as diverse and criminal as street assassination and radioactive poison. In China, the preferred means, is societal erasure, with massive prison sentences. In the nascent state of ISIL, the medieval means of drowned, burning alive and beheading are used with the joy of totalitarian zeal. These governments are no longer responsive to public pressures for they have assured themselves that they are too big to fail, too powerful to resist. In the world where government is your boss and not your servant ,the temptation to use available levers of power and hide behind the bureaucracy is great. On such assumption, revolutions are borne.

The Demagogue Government: The governments are progressively fronted by Demagogue Leaders. Appealing to the raw emotions of inequity and promoting the assurance of equality of outcome, the politics of leaders is to demand the increasing accumulation of powers in the hands of a single individual who will protect the people against the weakness of deliberative processes or the blind justice based on laws not emotions. From Obama to Trump, the promise is you can have what you want, you need only a leader who is willing to take any means necessary to achieve the end result. The checks and balances placed to prevent just such demagoguery is to be subverted and overwhelmed. In a society where the hard work of democracy seems passe’ and the idea of principles of governance antiquated to the speed of our current discourse, a strong handed leader seems the easy out.

We are entering into dangerous times with our eyes half closed. As a member of the diminishing group of people willing to discourse and legislate to a proper end, we need to be forceful in our defense of the constitutional concept. Listen before you speak. Read a book, and then another opposed. Think about our past, and reason about our future. Demand competence. Demand oversight of your government. Protect freedom of expression above all. Respect your traditions, and teach their value. Secure your future opportunity and guard it against all poseurs who would usurp it. And …make sure those who govern, that they do so only with the expressed assent of the governed and that they are under the same laws that govern all free society – none different, none selective. Hopefully, real push back, and the self correcting forces of an alert and engaged society will protect the world against the dark intent of predators and scoundrels.

Message: Go vote your principles, and if necessary, throw the bums out. Tomorrow is February 1st, and the future world we will live in is in our electoral hands, starting in Iowa. The world is watching carefully to see if there’s still a chance, that in the land that once was the beacon for hope for those under the yoke, good will still prevail.

December 20, 2015December 20, 2015

Impressions

The year in review - the year going forward image batangamedia.com — **The year in review – the year going forward** image batangamedia.com

The end of the year and the beginning of another always brings a group of lists. The ten best, the ten worst, the biggest trends, the new year’s resolutions, the people who have left us. The one predictable thing about doing lists that predict future events in the year to come is that they are almost always uniformly wrong. Our best understanding doesn’t remotely approach the effect of unknown forces, inventions, human responses and the ignorance of actions that truly define what happens. We can look back and chuckle at our awkward expert ‘nonsense’ when placed against the reality of outcome. Pollster Frank Luntz, who is still churning data through focus groups in 2015, predicted in 2002 that the inevitable democrat party nominee to challenge George W. Bush for the presidency would be “Tom Daschle, Senate majority leader”. Tom Daschle who? Noble Prize for economics winner Paul Krugman, persisting as an outstandingly wrong way prognosticator for the New York Times, put forth this whopper in 1998:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

The predictions regarding science and innovation are particularly spurious. Take Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold’s 1997 statement that “Apple as a company is already dead.” Apple of course is now worth three times the value of Microsoft.

Those of you who think the climate forecast can be accurately predicted a hundred years from now, might remember the 1970 Earth day predictions of University of California Davis Ecologist Kenneth Watt:

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Not exactly, Kenneth. But, in fairness, even Nostradamus didn’t get it all right. So, Ramparts is too smart by half to suggest the future, but it is fun perhaps to describe some impressions and directions and see what happens – if we prove right, we told you so; if wrong, we can at least claim to be as clairvoyant as a Noble Prize winner like Krugman.

Trump-mania will be a spent force : This is a dangerous impression to start with, if our credibility is at stake. The polls would suggest the Donald Trump as a political force continues to grow ever more so and all attempts to derail have simply strengthened him. But actual elections are why we do not have a President Giuliani, Glenn, Connally, or Hillary Clinton 2008. Trump’s major weakness as a political figure versus political celebrity is Trump. His strength from day one has been his steadfastness as an anti-immigration candidate, and it will be his downfall. Trump, to stay consistent, has had to throw ever wider circles around his anti-immigration invectives that started as reasonable, if infeasible stands regarding the southern border, into progressively ludicrous statements regarding, well just about everything. Bellicosity works when you are convincing those who need no convincing, but as the field of competitors progressively narrows and you need to convince the skeptical voter, the ignorant, conflicting statements you espouse become a progressive problem. Trump needs victories or second place finishes in Iowa or New Hampshire, or bellicosity rapidly becomes a spent force.

2016 will be the ‘hottest’ year on record: It is the last year of the Obama administration and almost all the legacies, from Obamacare to World Peace, are coming to an ignominious collapse. The final legacy is global warming and the billions of dollars linked to securing this legacy demands that no matter what the weather, the measured year temperature will have to be the hottest ever. The industry of settled science demands the narrative be preserved, and so it will be. Put your thermostats away, next year’s temperature is already known, and it ain’t going to be reported going down.

Attendance at major sports venues will be trending down: Big sports and big money have permanently bonded and the direction is ominous for the entertainment value of sports. Ticket prices continue to climb, team loyalty is drying up as teams are leaving for far more economic markets, and television access for the average fan will soon be pay only. Instant replay is killing sorts spontaneity and sports as an omnivorous consumer of are youth is creeping down to the middle school level. When the venue becomes contrived, and the outcome progressively economically determined, sitting in the stands will be a thing of the past. Why bother to freeze to death, when your team has no chance and the game ticket costs a week of salary? If the teams’ make money, whether you are there or not, the die is cast. The money will not be made on tickets supporting your team, but progressively on the internet fantasy teams. Why be committed to a team when everyone’s players can be on your team?

Europe, America, and Russia will all see at least one major terrorist incident: This impression is one of the sadder, but easier, ones. Europe and America are still enthralled with the concept of Frances Fukuyama’s End of History argument and the tragedies that have befallen them since are predictable in that history does not suffer denial easily. Unfortunately, when it comes to philosophic world views, Huntington’s the Clash of Civilizations looks like the more insightful recognition of the world around us. Until the liberal democracies wake up to the threat building against them, they will be vulnerable and prone to the next outburst, and it won’t be a little one. Russia will suffer its tragedy because it is overextended as a world enforcer, at the precise time the homeland is vulnerable and weak, buffeted by stratospherically low energy prices that are the primary nutrient to its one asset economy. Putin’s need to appear invulnerable will only increase his vulnerability. Unfortunately, I think 2016 will be a good year for the bad guy.

The Arab Winter will claim at least one more government – Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia: Admittedly this is the most ‘out there’ impression, but the pattern has been established. The Arab Spring was the hope of the Middle East joining the modern world, but the early momentum collapsed into the dangerous chaos of the Arab Winter currently fanning out from the calamity in Syria. The ugly stepchild of the Arab Spring, ISIS, now threatens its Sunni providers in Saudi Arabia, and with the stalemate in Yemen and the collapse of oil prices, the sheiks are in a progressively intolerable vice. Their response to the absent American presence has been to build a league of 37 Sunni nations to ‘defeat terrorism’, but it is really pointed at their sworn enemy Iran, and one wonders if the forward projection will make them vulnerable from within. Jordan lives as long as Saudi Arabia can support it, and Egypt is at the same mercy. If the there is no American support, the edifice of power will likely collapse from within in one or more of these countries, and the Middle East will become an even more unstable place (if that’s possible).

The strong foreign policy candidate will win the 2016 American presidential election: The Trump phenomena reveals a progressive uneasiness in America regarding the future, and, God forbid, a significant terrorist event were to occur, that would seal the deal.The world abhors a vacuum and President Obama’s obsessive need to reduce America to an also ran, puts us squarely in the sites of those who would do us harm. The need for Hillary Clinton to tie herself to this progressively vulnerable foreign policy position will be her undoing, and it won’t be close if trouble occurs.

If Republicans do not win the Presidency, the party will split and cease as a national party: The wins of 2010 to gain the house and 2014 to gain the Senate have reflected back as a complete waste of effort to the conservative voter. The national party runs afraid of looking obstructionist and proved it again with a calamitous budget agreement that secured for President Obama and large business interests everything they wanted. The final strike of losing the Presidential election will be the third strike, and conservatives will never again associate themselves with a party of spending apologists. The threat that three parties will never knock the liberal agenda from power will be immaterial; the national Republican agenda has no respect for its base, and this with a loss, will be finally and justly reciprocated.

There I said it. And when you say it on the internet, you say it forever. Hopefully I’m no more accurate then the prognosticators that have had their impressions dashed upon the rocks of history. The negative nature of my future impressions deserve a real rock dashing. There just seems to be a sense that we are just hanging on, waiting for some sign that it is okay to be ourselves again, to be prosperous again, to be spiritual again, to be strong again as Americans. It won’t be under this sad wisp of a President. With a little luck, maybe we can survive his Presidency to thrive again under a truly positive force. America, it’s your last chance. Don’t be fooled by the demagogue or the liar. Anyone else, we got a chance.

December 6, 2015

Saving the World : 2 Degrees Celsius

COP 21 - Paris Global Climate Conference 2015 photp : 24heuresactu.com — COP 21 – Paris Global Climate Conference 2015
photo : 24heuresactu.com

The world is meeting in Paris to discuss great threats to world stability and civilization, and it has nothing to do with the ongoing calamity in Syria, or the recent slaughters in Paris or San Bernardino. The enemy is temperature – specifically rising temperatures – and the red line that the civilized world is willing to stand behind, to marshal all its resources, to form the greatest coalition the world has ever known to defeat the agreed upon greatest threat to the world we have known – is two degrees Celsius. Climate change in all its described forms has progressively flexed its muscles the last 30 years on the concept of global warming, and the assurance that despite the multiple thousands of periods of global warming intervals in the past, this period of warming is special, human caused, and inexorable. According to the missal, the world is warming out of proportion to every other climatic period, and the selected point of no return is 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution is to be government mandated regulation to save us from ourselves, and will require the greatest redistribution of wealth from private individuals to government coffers ever known.

The warmist in chief is the President of the United States, who has determined that the trends in warming are responsible for such defuse events as drought, hurricanes, economic downturns, and even terrorism.

“What we know is that — as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” Obama told CBS Friday. “And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people — are not able to make a living or take care of their families — that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.” – President Obama

The collected mass of sycophants in Paris will battle the rest of us who wish the world’s destruction by willing the world to accept the settled science. CO2, the trace gas, is the underlying satanic culprit having increased measurably over the last 100 years from the high two hundreds to 400 parts per million. CO2 of course is problematic in that it is an essential gas, critical to all living plants securing the means of making sugars through the process of photosynthesis making as byproducts oxygen and water, essential for all living animals. It is unfashionable however in that it is created by the greatest discovery for human individualism ever known, the identification of the byproduct of hundreds of millions of years of decaying organic matter forming carbon fuels. Carbon fuels have permitted the capacity of humans to live in hostile environments, develop economic vitality, achieve individual comfort, create fantastic inventions in transportation, plastics, medicine, and information that have forever changed the world. What carbon has done that can not be forgiven for, is creating a world of individual choice and initiative, and therefore, variation in outcomes between peoples. This has proved more potent than any of the egalitarian philosophies meant to defeat individual choice, fascism, communism, and religious totalitarianism.

The final weapon available to the statists is to declare all the usual weapons of freedom, common sense, objective fact, and circumspection inviolate. Despite the highly questionable sources of temperature measurement and the unfortunate lack of measurable warming over the past 18 years, now cloyingly referred to as the global warming hiatus, the continued alarm demands the painting of a future of sea levels 5 to 7 feet over current, massive droughts and increased weather severity, starvation, and wars. It is the language of religious revelation, defining man as an original sinner that unless deflected from his sinful course, will invite the coming of the Apocalypse, engaging the end of man. This was according to the prophet Al Gore, to have happened by 2015, but the prophecy has had to be discarded to a later date, because the climate did not cooperate with the alarmist projections. So now the red line, the projected timeline is 2050, with the world by changing its entire economic and political conceptualization, will slow the current warming of 0.89 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years under the arbitrary tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius.

The statists came close to grabbing global economic power with the 1995 Kyoto treaty, but the ludicrous goals proved too onerous for established economies, and emerging nations saw it for what it was, a removal of their individual striving and improvement. Every several years another attempt to own the future presents with massive governmental participation in world conferences, and now we have Paris. The rational development of strategies for cleaning water, cleaner air, and efficient management of resources is not on the docket. It is the need to own the future, and President Obama, so visibly deficient in managing every other tidal historical force, will go to the wall to own this future with the other statists who find the present world an untidy caldron of individualism, inequities, and uncontrollable initiative.

The statists never quit, until they own your future, and they will change the narrative until you believe, and finally submit.