CULTURE – Page 7 – Ramparts of Civilization

May 3, 2015

Stumbling Toward the Failed State

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

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 The initial incoherent response by the mayor to give the rioters “space to destroy” to vet their emotions quickly was superseded by the governor calling out the National Guard and the authorities instituting a curfew.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

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

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

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

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

Shakespearean tragedy indeed. As the Great One said:

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

Baltimore Riots 2015 nationalreviewonline — Baltimore Riots 2015
nationalreviewonline

April 25, 2015

Liberal Fascism Tests Its Reach – Who’s Watching?

Big Brother Watching 1984 — Big Brother Watching
1984

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Brother is Watching 1984 — Big Brother is Watching
1984

February 1, 2015

A Brief Treatise on the Clash of Cultures

The idea that the bending of cultural “truths” have exceeded the capacity of a civilization to absorb them is not new. For the cultured Roman citizen such as Cato the Elder, the progressive influence of the Greeks in Roman culture, particularly the Bacchanalian festivals with their sordid lack of inhibitions, horrified him, Cato seeing the Greeks as a “worthless and unruly tribe.” The concepts of the universal catholic culture was felt to border on idolatry by northern European thinkers in the 15th and 16th century, leading to the rise of Protestantism. Exemplified at its cultural extreme by Puritans and Quakers, and its aggressive eversion to the papist influence, the reformers led to several hundred years of bitter wars, capped by the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, destroying a third of Europe’s population in the most cataclysmic cultural clash until World War II. The current western world continues to evolve from the countercultural revolution of the 1960’s , in which the accepted norms were rejected by a generation that eventually injected itself into every aspect of cultural life, from education to government, from concepts of individual freedom to collective security, and from religion to sexuality.

Yet the extremes of cultural deviation are always about who owns the center. In western culture, the center has fundamentally been based since the Age of Enlightenment on acknowledged truths of rational science, and the idea that progression of civilization is based on building on the foundations of the previous one. In America, the marriage of these two ideas was put forth in the concepts of the articles of civilization, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the individuals who codified them, known as the Founders. For several hundred years, the reverence for these creators and their expressions of rational structure to manage the various expressions of a society formed the center of the civilization. The immense accomplishment of these founders proved resilient to the enormous strains applied to the ‘center’ concept by dangerous cultural anachronisms such as slavery, nativist racism, economic depression, and world wars.

Today’s culture however no longer accepts the adjudication of the center. The sexual revolution demands that concept of family, developed over tens of thousands of years, be overthrown for the particular desires of the individual. Islamic radicals seek the destruction of all who will not submit to their cultural version, and the annihilation of an entire people, the Jews, who as a religious culture, are fundamentally in sync with their monotheistic vision. Environmentalists see human beings themselves as the destructive element that must be made subservient to the more important concept of the Mother Earth, to the extent that individuals must be forced into lifestyles that revert to times when the concept of individual had little meaning. Politically correct speech determines who can be offended without an acknowledgement of their virtues, and which group’s virtues stand above any accepted discussion of their virtuousness.

The schism affects every facet of our societal interactions now. A movie that examines the character of an individual who sees himself as defending the center against barbarism, “The American Sniper,” is considered heresy by many who have not even seen it. The main character is a “coward,” a “racist,” “a hate filled killer,” those who have interpreted the center as a defense for the many “crimes and abuses” put forth by western civilization. Yet, the movie about to become the most successful movie regarding the concept of warrior of all time, and, to the incredulousness of those who see it as a homage to white western racism, a popular movie even in Iraq. To those who see the center as the enemy based on its immunity to the extremes of behavior and cultural mores, the movie has instead stirred the discussion regarding central themes of civilization independent of victim groups, such as good versus evil, civilization versus barbarianism, defense of society versus anarchy.

The modern culture is devoid of any formative basis for discussion of virtue, having thrown out the central philosophical tenets of religion, individual rights, and governance out with the peripheral strains that our more diverse society and scientific discoveries have placed on the core beliefs. Ask the modern western citizen as to elements that underrides their core freedoms, and a blank unknowing stare envelops their face. This citizen will deny the presence of a Supreme Being, without understanding the need philosophically for such a Being to explain the actions of an irrational existence, and the necessity of defining fundamental, universal good and evil. They will demand rights that don’t exist, while casually giving up those rights that exist to support their freedom to demand. They reflexively state that all ‘men’ are equal, without understanding that the carefully understood philosophy is that All Men are Created Equal, thereby making possibility the equality of opportunity, and the free will to accept or reject the opportunity.

It is not clear whether our current need to define all lifestyles, actions, and thoughts as having equal weight and import will overthrow the carefully tendered considerations and hard won concepts of thousands of years of human development. If they do, they will succeed at destroying the rational and positive impulses of cultural evolution that led to our current world that respects but does not deify individuals, balances progress against the gold standards of tradition, and has elevated the process of each individual’s life to most stress free, secure, and personally expressive in human history.

The center is a good place to return our civilization, founded on principles of multiple avenues of peaceful resolution, but active defense of the rights of man. As a culture in free fall, the safety net not available to the many cultural expressions that proceeded us is the template of both rights and responsibilities so carefully cultivated by our ancestral founders. In the chaos and entropy of our modern fractured society, the way to enlightenment has been with us all along. It is our duty to use our measured intellect again, to rediscover our abandoned center, where the soul of our civilization resides.

January 17, 2015January 17, 2015

Appeaseology

Western Leaders Show 'Solidarity' in response to Paris massacre — Western Leaders Show ‘Solidarity’ in response to Paris massacre

“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air”

Margaret Thatcher

“Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement is not surrender”

Chuck Hagel

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history, is the most important of all the lessons of history”

Aldous Huxley

The stark sequelae of the practice of appeasement leading up to the cataclysm that was the second world war has made the word appeasement a central focus of every consideration to determine how to confront tyranny since. The crystal clear lessons of Prime Minister of Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain’s decision to allow the Nazi gangster regime to devour Czechoslovakia in trade for a temporary etherial peace has remained the example for all time of the legacy of appeasement. Since the events of 1938-39, western democracies have been more sensitive to the risk of the label of appeaser being applied to them, to avoid the stigma of their actions being interpreted as ignorance or weakness. The consequences, however, of ignoring history’s painfully learned lessons are no less dire in today’s modern world than they were in the simple fascism of the 1930s when state driven fascists bluntly developed their capabilities in easily recognizable uniformed, organized military forces.

The basic structural elements of weakness in recognition, preparation and confrontation native to appeasement remain every bit as trenchant in the need for understanding in today’s world as it did in the seeds of destruction planted by inaction prior to world War II. The power of last week’s march in Paris, where a common defense of the principles of free speech was trumpeted by many world leaders (sans America) and millions of citizens was visually stunning, but vacuous. It crumbled the minute the French President Hollande left the synagogue where the Israeli Prime Minister was about to speak, afraid to be associated with any expression of opinion that did not fit the meme of political correctness on the just the subject he had marched to defend earlier. To the tyrannists, no better signal of the hollow nature of the “outrage” could possibly have been sent. They could see that Hollande did not equate terrorism that Israel lives with on a daily basis with that of the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre, though the terror cells responsible for both hold nearly identical credos and objectives.

What are the common foundational elements of ignorance and weakness that form the perverted logic resulting in appeasement, and are we once again heading down the road so presciently defined by Winston Churchill in 1938 with the current islamofascist threat? Ramparts takes a look at the science of Appeaseology.

The Falsehoods of Grievance :

The need to appease on the basis of perceived grievance is a common element put forth by all appeasers. The Nazi gangsters were forgiven their neanderthal tactics on the consideration that they had been aggrieved by the world. The territories they sought were, after all, filled with German speaking and germanic ancestral peoples forced to live under the unnatural flag of oppressive foreigners like the government of Czechoslovakia. Much the same, today’s Palestinians are forced to ceed their natural rights to the land to the occupationist Israelis, the once seamless islamic caliphate to the usurping Christians and Yazhidis of Syria and Iraq, and the arab nation to the vestiges of French and British colonial abuse. If only the rightful heirs to the land would be restored, the need to be belligerent would rapidly dissipate. Modern western European liberal thought particularly remains inextricably linked to this form of Appeaseology.

Engagement and the path of Least Resistance:

The belligerent character of aggressors is a sign of their immaturity in the realm of diplomatic give and take. Belligerents simply want to be respected and taken seriously. By constructively engaging them and showing your willingness to be reasonable and non-obstructive, you will show them the benefits of mature human behavior and the sincerity of your good will. Such behavior builds progressively trust and peaceful compromise. Though the risk of nuclear weaponry in the hands of Iran may seem volatile, their self respect and pride from being able to have the technical capacity to create such weapons and the national will to develop them is understandable, and willingness to deny them such capacity reactionary. They will appreciate the good will and recognize their role in needing to maintain stability. Nazi impulses were similarly seen as a temporary aberration of a civilized nation, that once engaged, would respond with the innate tempered civilized outlook of the great german nation evolved over hundreds of years. Putting up roadblocks to “evolution” would simply delay that behavior from the German nation.

Universal truths are relative and potentially insulting:

The tremendous rallies in the support of free speech last week in France are pledges only to the concept, not the reality of individual rights. Sarcasm or provocative expression anathema to another culture is the ultimate instigation to belligerence and hostile actions, as viewed by the politically correct modern appeasers. President Obama expressed this view best when he stated at the United Nations : “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Of the insult to every other culture that Islamofascism insists upon, subjugation of all other religions, enslavement and prostituting of their young, destruction of their religious symbols, erasing of their cultures, and elimination of their representative voice, Obama is ignorantly incapable of appreciating such realities as counterintuitive to his argument.

The actions of the extreme are a perversion of the culture, not a reflection of it:

The “lone wolfs” and terrorist cells that plague the world are outliers and perversions to the base message of Islam. Whether it is the monsters of Nigeria, Boko Harum, the absolutionists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Wahhabism, or the murderers of the ISIL caliphate, the Jew slayers of Hamas or Hezbollah, or individual “lone wolf” Soldiers for Allah such as the Boston Marathon Bombers or Major Hassan, the appeasement mantra is that this is no way reflects the base tenets of Islam, a supposed peaceful and tolerant religion. No different were the SS Waffen or the Jew beaters of the SA, obvious aberrations of the German nation to the appeasers who wanted to envision a Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Leibniz. Appeasers are capable of ignoring example after example of hostile actions because of the comfort they feel in the illusion of their contrived and fantastical image of their appeased subject.

The fires of extremism burn themselves out with the careful and steady management of appeasement:

Passions are the undirected energies of a rudderless culture, and as the culture is progressively brought into the family of nations, the passions will positively re-direct. Somehow by the West being patient and non-confrontational, willing to absorb a few spasms of violence, the progressive growth achieved by engagement will calm the instability. This irrational assumption that passion is not fed by fundamental belief flies in the face of all credible evidence In both the form of fascism of the late 30s in Germany and Japan, and the modern version in Islamofacism , the fundamental belief is that of a superior people denied its rightful place at the head of all peoples. The belief is not burdened by guilt, ethics, or any form of self controlled behavior. Each event that shows a lack of willingness to confront, reinforces the sense of that superiority. The fires are not burned out, but rather fed with the oxygen of each incitement without retribution.

It was briefly inspiring to see some blowback from the millions of French citizens who risked their anonymity to say “je suis Charlie Hebdo”. The proof however is in action, not intention. The modern governments of the West are filled with leaders who calculate and appease, rather than assess and confront. They are more offended and outraged by fantastical enemies such as climate change and lifestyle victimization then the ominous and fundamental threats to their civilization. We cannot count on our leaders, who are in love with their ability to socially experiment and control behavior, and willing to risk all that we have achieved. We need brave muslim leaders like General Al-Sisi of Egypt to continue to step forward and say no more. We need to have the average citizen of the civilized world stand up and say “Je suis Civilisation, J’aime Civilisation” – and let all know the appetite for appeasement is now at end. To the Islamofascists, our patience is at end. And with it, the unprovoked expansion of their perverted gangster world is at end. Its the end of our world or the end of their world, and we all know to preserve what is good in this world – its their world that must go.

Je suis civilsation — Je suis civilisation

December 20, 2014December 20, 2014

Freedom Loses Again

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand

What is freedom? Why did the United States for over 23o years declare the elevation of one’s individual capacity to determine his destiny without oppressive interference of others the primary definition? What is lost when the essential force for individual freedom sees itself as flawed for not recognizing another country’s capacity to set its on destiny regardless of personal freedom? What does it mean to the inhabitants of this country and those that exist under different definitions?

We are about to find out.

President Obama this past week overturned the settled philosophy of the 8 prior American Presidents regarding relations with the nation of Cuba by releasing three Cuban spies imprisoned for felonies such as murder and acknowledging the process for achieving formal relations with the government of Cuba. Having recognized in 1961 of the true political leanings of the young ‘revolutionary’ Fidel Castro, the United States attempted to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Castro retaliated by his willingness to bring the world to the brink of nuclear destruction in the October 1962 Missile Crisis instigated by young Castro accepting nuclear weapons from Russia aimed at the United States. The successive American governments have applied the concept of containment with variable success to the aggressive tactics of the Castro government, blockading it from formal trade, and encouraging the cuban exile population to work progressively toward the liberation of the island from the Castro regime. The fifty subsequent years have been essentially a cold war between Cuba and the United States, with Cuba progressively trading economic support from the Soviet Union to maintain its marxist totalitarian grip on the Cuba economy and people, and its willingness to act as a military proxy for Soviet communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s in places as diverse as Nicaragua, Granada, and Angola.

From 1959 onward, tens of thousands of Cuban refugees have attempted to escape the totalitarian government, risking life and limb on rickety boats to try and secure a meaningful existence in the United States, the passage to freedom a tempting mere 90 nautical miles away from the American coast. Many have made it. Many more have been drowned, eaten by sharks, sunk by Cuban gunboats, and turned around by American Coast Guard vessels.

What were they escaping? To the liberal Washington elites and Hollywood celebrities they were leaving a utopian paradise of free health care and societal equality, ruled by a leader in Castro charismatic in his affect, perpetually revolutionary in his appearance in military fatigues, and ultimately concerned only for his Cuban people being able to steer their own course without the oppressive domination of a whorish American capitalist caste. The level of cultural coolness and forever youngness was even secured on t-shirts and posters immortalizing the great leader Castro, and his right hand revolutionary, Che Guevara, the enthusiastic judge and executioner for revolutionary firing squads that purified Cuba from dissidents who didn’t recognizing the righteousness of the revolution. It is the personification of this idolatry that propelled the current President to the office of Presidency and the subsequent comfort with the ideals of the winds of change fomented by the Cuban revolutionaries.

If the process of attempting to secure individual freedom for the Cuban people over 53 years of consistent foreign policy through containment proved to achieving no identifiable changes in the Cuban government’s relationship with its people what possible risk is involved in accepting the Cuban revolution at face value, and recognizing it as the legitimate aspiration of an entire people? What could be possibly at stake in similar efforts to restore relationships with similar minded governments currently hostile in position against the United States such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela?

Maybe one could ask men such as Rafael Ibarra Roque, imprisoned since 1994 by the Cuban government without trial for ‘sabotage against the regime” for speaking out against things he had seen as a Cuban soldier and citizen through a nonviolent group he formed called Frank Pais effecting to restore democracy to Cuba. One could ask Human Rights Watch, which has documented a systemic oppression resulting in thousands of executions, arrests without trial, formation of forced labor camps (UMAP’s), suppression of independent media and opposition political movements, government drug cartels, and prostitution. One could ask the Cuban exiles in Miami who labored for decades to restore the most basic of personal freedoms in Cuba for the family members they left behind.

And now it is gone, as the citadel of personal freedom and institutional democracy determines that respectful relationships with such tyrants will serve both countries better over the long run. We are left with the question with each of these over-turnings of our own principles what is lost in ourselves as we deny the fundamental importance of such principles? Will a President who cares more how we look to others than how we act among ourselves lead us to our own loss of freedoms? That depends obviously as to what it means to be free and our willingness to prevent those who would sell such hard earned freedoms for the veneer of acceptance recognizes once gone, they wont be easily if ever brought back.

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.
Ronald Reagan

Perhaps the freedom we lose, will be forever Cuba’s gain. Raul Castro, Cuba’s current leader and brother of Fidel thinks not. He is looking to the economic support of the Cuban Revolution, to cement its gains and prevent any change in the relationships with its people. Perhaps it will change Cuba’s belligerency. Then again, it was just last year that Cuba attempted to gain tactical missiles from North Korea to position against the United States, learning nothing in the intervening 50 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Cuba is not looking for change, but it will be hoping for change in the United States. As probably will Iran and Venezuela. It turns out when it comes to slowly dissolving the light of freedom, the Man of Hope and Change was ultimately the Man of totalitarians’ Hope , and our Change.

September 28, 2014

The Rule of Law

Attorney General Eric Holder - gettyimages — Attorney General Eric Holder – gettyimages

“No man is above the law, and no man is below it ; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor.” Theodore Roosevelt 1903

” I, Eric Holder, do solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” Oath taken by Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States February 3rd, 2009

On Thursday of this past week, President Obama accepted the resignation of Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States. So ended the controversial 6 year term of the country’s chief law enforcement officer, who spent as much time ignoring the country’s fundamental structure of law as enforcing it. To those who see activism as the highest calling, he is seen as a hero; to those who would seek equal justice under the law and respect for its unprejudiced adjudication, he is an abomination. What Eric Holder is not, is insignificant. Holder managed to infuse political activism so intensely into the Department of Justice that it may prove impossible to ever return it to its calling of enforcing the law that has been given it. The rule of law, and the protection it provides a free society, may be irreparably harmed.

What is the rule of law that has previously been considered the mandate of a free people? The definition has certainly been deliberated, and there is no single answer. The concept of law obviously requires a standard people find fundamentally just to their lives. Is a law for instance that serves to enforce servitude, physical pain, or premeditated inequity a law that deserves enforcement without pause? The laws of sharia, Krystalnacht, Stalinist Russia, and Jim Crow America come to mind. Martin Luther King, speaking of the logic behind civil disobedience, suggested in a free society, there is often the need to define the equity of a law by the willful breaking of it:

” I submit that an individual that breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” Martin Luther King 1963

The American Bar Association through its World Justice Project attempted to secure a universal meaning to the concept of rule of law that could merge the concept globally across societies:

1) A system of self government in which all persons, including the government, are accountable under the law

2) A system based on fair, publicized, broadly understood and stable laws

3) A fair, robust, and accessible legal process in which rights and responsibilities based in law are equally enforced.

4) Diverse, competent, and independent lawyers and judges

The overriding message is that the rule of law is not so much the law itself but its accountability and its equality of enforcement. Throughout Holder’s tenure as Attorney General, he proceeded to abrogate these two tenets that regardless of his personal views, he had a responsibility to uphold. The selective prejudicial enforcement or premeditated neglect of laws rather than the hard work of convincing a people of their apparent inequity and improving them was part of the innate hubris of this Attorney General. There were several profoundly disturbing events in his tenure that stand out in sharp contrast. Particularly remarkable was the dominance of race outrage as an alternative to the concept of civil rights. The civil right of every individual regardless of race, the centerpiece of assurance for the elimination of racial discrimination, was converted time and time again to perceived racial abuse, one directional toward alleged white on black injustice. The elevation of the Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, Missouri incidents by the Department of justice threatened to intimidate the equal protection under the law for all concerned, making a mockery of the concept of true civil rights. While propagandizing the idea of white on black violence, Holder ignored multiple other minority group injustices, the most profound of which was black on black violence, devastating community after community with little attention or concern.

The laws of immigration, designed to protect the country’s borders, and secure the concept of citizenship regardless of race, were habitually ignored by Holder and the administration, turning the process of achieving citizenship by accepting and respecting a nation’s laws, into somehow a racial injustice to those who would ignore the requirements of citizenship.

Holder became the first Attorney General in the history of the country to be found in contempt of congress, for obfuscating in the process of examination of the Fast and Furious scandal. The Fast and Furious program, in which the government deliberately ignored its own laws regarding the sale of certain armaments, participating in gun trafficking with criminals , in an effort to create a perceived environment of law breaking that would allow increased restrictions on the second amendment. The result was the deaths of untold numbers of Mexicans and several Americans for which the government remains, protected by Holder, unaccountable.

Holder continued the pattern of selective civil rights enforcement, with his department involved in the incredibly questionable investigation of reporter’s personal information without cause in an effort to identify the sources of “leaks” in the administration, and has put no effort in the policing of the administration’s own IRS that sought to use its powers to inhibit individuals participating in free speech the administration saw as counter to their aims.

Civil rights activism delivered with a point of view is of course the inherent right of every citizen but the adjudication of every citizen’s civil rights is the calling of a Department that calls itself Justice. For Eric Holder to have accepted the position with no intention of equally enforcing the laws that assure rights of all citizens while elevating beyond law the perceived injustices of a few, is a person to whom civil rights have no meaning. This country, that through the strength of its constitution and bill of rights achieved hard fought victories for the rights of all men, was diminished by his time in government. The damage done is incalculable to the real mission of equality and equal opportunity for all.

In a free society, justice blind to prejudice, firm to the law of equal accountability of the meek and the powerful, is the link that secures the future of a civilization. Those of us who consider this a foundational value, won’t miss Eric Holder.

August 9, 2014August 16, 2014

Barbarians at the Gates

ISIS deals with prisoner of war issues in Iraq - AFP Photo — ISIS deals with prisoner of war issues in Iraq – AFP Photo

To comprehend events, one must be willing to descend into the faint mists of time and history to possibly understand the here and now. The boundaries that define the modern country of Iraq are artificial drawings on a map that simplify a maelstrom of historical peoples, events, and passions that are the basest contributors to the whole known human story. The fertile crescent of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has been the birthplace of great empires and religions, and perhaps the most contested real estate on the planet. At the northern edge is noted to be the birthplace of man as a creature of record. Some three thousand years before Christ the tribes of the region founded the worlds first recognized governmental structure, the Semitic kingdom of Semites and Sumerians known as Akkadia, soon divided into Assyria and Babylonia. It is said that the Assyrian Semite Abraham traveled out of Assyria around 1800 BC to eventually become the father to the Hebrew peoples. By the tenth century BC, Assyria may have comprised the largest empire in then known world and provided the legacy of one of the great core language structures, Aramaic, influencing people from northeast Africa to central Asia. The Assyrian people became important contributors to the expansionist Greek empire culture and subsequently were influenced to assume many of the philosophic constants of the Greeks, in many cases becoming early Christians as did their Greek counterparts in the first through third centuries AD.

With the arab Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia in the seventh century, the centuries long process of this ancient culture having to subordinate and assimilate while trying to preserve its identity began. Through Islamic pogroms and Mongol invasions, Ottoman overseers, British protectorates and Baathist dictators, the identity of the ancient Assyrian culture managed to survive.

Until now.

The city of Bakhdida, also known as Qaraqosh, is the home of the Assyrian Christian population of Iraq and the gateway to Kurdistan. With a population of 50,000, it represents one of the last congregations of Christian influence in Mesopotamia and its existence as such is an anathema to a virulent strain of Islamic puritans known as ISIS. On friday, August 8th, Bakhdida became the latest city to be overrun by the ISIS horde and the consequences to an entire people who profess a different fate are dire. With tens of thousands of Christians fleeing the genocidal sickness that is the ISIS modus operandi, President Obama finally determined to take action in some form to address his administration’s developing Rwanda event. It was not the fate of the Christians or their Kurdish or Shia muslim brethren that stirred him so much as the plight of the Yazidis, a small sect connected to the ancient Zoroastrian faith of monotheism that precedes Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. ISIS forces have forced them into the mountains with the intent of starving them to death, or killing them in place, whatever opportunity presents. For the ISIS adherents, this is the holy work that should have been done centuries ago.

The western world has always struggled to get too upset about genocidal outrages against Jews and Yazidis, but Christians? That used to be another matter. There is no Richard the Lionheart to lead a Crusade, likely not even a George Bush the Earnest. The post-Christian western world does not connect well with the outrages committed by Islamic extremists, whether it is the lunatic fringe Boko Haram in Nigeria slaughtering entire villages of Christians and trafficking in human slavery, or ISIS with its religious cleansing fury in Iraq. Christian outrage and responding to attacks is so Seventeenth century.

But ISIS is working in the seventh century and doesn’t give a flip to modern mores. Having stunned most of Iraq, conquering oil fields and water supplies, drowning in money from bank robberies and sympathetic fat cat Wahabiast poseurs from the Arabian peninsula, and in possession of millions of dollars of sophisticated weapons abandoned by the Potemkin Village Iraqi national army as it fled, ISIS is a Tamerlane disciple of the twenty-first century, with the will to kill who doesn’t submit. The map shows an effective reality on the ground that suggests they are succeeding in their vision:

ISIS in Mesopotamia - CNN maps — ISIS in Mesopotamia – CNN maps

So the President of the United States finally acted. Not to save Christians or Iraqis. That would have required previous strategic thinkings and actions. No, the action is to prevent current genocide against the Yazidis, certainly deserving, but no more deserving than any of the other hundreds of thousands already crushed under the foot of the marauding 7th century jihadists. President Obama thinks he can pick and choose his genocides he determines to intervene upon. I suspect ISIS and Boko Haram will give him plenty of choices from which to choose.

What is there to do in this inevitable world calamity approaching? It is frankly too late to recognize what would have been the easiest solution in Iraq. President Obama’s political trump card was the withdrawal from Iraq no matter what the consequences, when twenty-thousand in country troops would have likely prevented this travesty. Imagine you are the warden of a prison filled with 500 dangerous characters and innocents alike. With just 20 guards providing organized control, you can maintain the security of the prison and keep the most dangerous inmates from killing you, or each other. The previous warden gave you after much effort a stable place, with effective control. But you are a much smarter warden, who believes the previous warden was a doofus, and should not have been allowed to have made warden decisions in the first place that did not sit with your world gestalt. You therefore instead announce you are pulling all the guards, opening all the prison cell doors, and putting the kitchen staff in charge of negotiating with the prisoners. Its pretty easy to predict what will happen, unless apparently you are President Obama. Now, if you want to contain the violence, restore the security, and protect the innocent, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than twenty guards to achieve a renewed stability and civility. And a lot of people are going to pay a very grave penalty for your naiveté.

What to do with a modern world that would like to believe we have grown beyond the barbarians that defined our human past-the Tamerlanes, Attilas, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers – that would create a single vision of humanity on the slaughter of nonbelievers? The Assyrians of Bakhdida would like to know soon, and hope its more than a few food packages and pinpricks. But if the western world cannot decide this is serious business, don’t worry. We may soon get first hand knowledge of what the Assyrians of Bakhdida are up against, at a location much closer to home.

March 23, 2014March 23, 2014

The Painful Journey Towards the Pursuit of Happiness

The middle class of Venezuela continues to daily protest their government’s destructive domination of their lives, despite overwhelming force. A Ukrainian battalion, completely surrounded by invading Russian forces that have stormed their base, parade, and in unison, sing their country’s national anthem. An owner of a small machine shop in Texas decides to assure integrity in democracy, starts a democracy education program called True The Vote, and brings the whole weight of a “weaponized” American government upon her head. A group of auto workers in Chattanooga Tennessee reject collective union representation at a Volkswagen plant because “we have good jobs with a good company, and joining the union risks those jobs.” A intensely conservative politician Rand Paul gets a standing ovation from the most liberal statist population on earth at the University of California/Berkeley , when he states the government should get out of the business of monitoring individual lives.

What’s going on? Governments the world over have assumed the post modern human has accepted the benefits of a collective community and the security it offers against hunger, inequality, and safety, and are finally willing to subvert their uncivilized instincts for utopia. Why don’t these people see the advantages of being taken care of and just accept the facts of life? Its that darn free will. It just keeps rearing its untamed head and refuses to submit. When Thomas Jefferson unleashed the power of language to define this very fundamental human instinct as unalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, he brought ancient truths to modern concepts of the individual.

In the depths of history, some 25 centuries ago, Greek philosophers already recognized innate genetics of the human animal. They saw that the power of intellect would have unpredictable consequences when herd tactics were taken by the strong upon the weak. Epicurus, the father of individual happiness, defined it as the human’s need to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Good and evil, moral tenets, found their place in Epicurus’s world as expressions of pleasure and pain – Good was pleasurable, Evil was painful. The achievement of pleasure, however, could submit to a painful path, if the ultimate outcome by undergoing a painful interlude would ultimately lead to significantly more pleasure. Although the ultimate expression of happiness might be found in a modest life devoid of controversy, the acceptance of challenge, even instability, however painful, could still provide the fuel for the achievement of a better life, as that individual perceived it. A world of “self control and determination”, not anarchy.

Epicurus got the opportunity to school other Greeks in his thoughts, as did the Stoics with their desire for order through the avoidance of moral corruption, and the Platonians for their desire to attain an ideal state devoid of the ephemeral pleasures of the sensate world. Diverging philosophies were all part of the individual acknowledging his own perception of the world around him and responding according to his intellect. Certainly this could work for several hundred thousand Greeks living on millions of acres of Greek lands. Can the modern man be philosophical about his individualism in a world where for instance in Bangladesh, 2,850 people compete for every square mile?

Pursuit of happiness. Sounds simple, but what profound strains of human existence it symbolizes. The Putins, Maduros, Khameneis and Obamas of the world continue to struggle with the notion that individuals can not cotton to these statists’ constant need to define what is good for you. The force of the statist impulse is overwhelming, but inevitably weakened by the individual intents of tens of millions of intellects that see real power in the freedom to determine one’s own destiny. In a world that seemingly has given up its flower of humanity to the strangling vines of security and safety, the inability of statist powers to stamp out this ongoing need to be human, and free, gives us all a tendril of hope.

February 2, 2014

People We Should Know – #25 Milt Rosenberg

For almost 40 years, when most of the world had converted what is considered entertainment into a certain kind of superficial fluff, the Chicago radio station WGN stubbornly held on to an anachronistic concept of entertainment that was unavailable in almost every other forum. From 1973 to 2012, in the evening hours on WGN a very special idea that learning and enlightening listeners through conversation could be a popular form of entertainment, was made possible by a unique man, Dr. Milton Rosenberg. For decade after decade, Dr. Rosenberg with a mesmerizing voice, commanding intellect and bottomless interest in a universe of conceivable topics captivated his audience with thousands of interviews with the famous and unknown, topics great and obtuse, side by side. The concept that quiet and in-depth discussions with individuals most knowledgable in their area of expertise could survive in a culture where the acquiring of opinions have progressively been based on feelings rather than facts and logic was revolutionary. It could not have been done without the special personality and abilities of Milton Rosenberg. The fantastic legacy of this program is one of the major influences that formed the logic for the existence of this blog, as is why Milt Rosenberg is Ramparts People We Should Know- #25.

Milt Rosenberg was already a distinguished professor when he started with WGN in a cultural affairs program that eventually became the program, Extension 720. With a doctorate earned in Psychology, Dr. Rosenberg had already been a teaching professor at distinguished universities such as Yale, Dartmouth, Ohio State and the Naval College, when he became a full professor at the University of Chicago and became involved in the radio program. The concept was a two hour conversation with an expert or investigator in the subject of the evening, followed by an hour allowing the listeners to call in and ask the host and the expert questions. The subject was ‘everything’, or as Dr. Rosenberg put it, “just about everything except pop psychology and poodle trimming.” Night after night year after year, listeners could hear in depth discussions from scientists, writers, reporters, historians, actors, and politicians, the growing influence of the program bringing prestigious guests as diverse as Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Bob Feller, MArgaret Thatcher, George Will, Mark Steyn and David Brinkley. It required Rosenberg’s magnificent mind and voracious study habits to make each interview an enveloping thought process, rather than a question and answer session with shallow questions and staged answers. It was brilliant, it was wonderful, and it was interesting.

In 2012 at age 87, Dr. Rosenberg’s program as a regular feature on WGN was finally terminated, and a special piece of American culture was thought to be lost. The wonderful thing is that despite Dr. Rosenberg’s advanced age, he remains a powerful intellectual force and is completely in tune with the times. He has seemlessly moved on to the current great foum of ideas, the internet, continuing to entertain people with wonderful conversations now available in podcast form sponsored by the website Richocet.com which is hosting the current Milt Rosenberg Show where Milt is continuing with ongoing wonderful energy and brilliance the ideas central to the original Extension 720. Even better, he is assuring that the almost 4 decades of radio history that encompassed his show will now be made available to current generations with a thirst for knowledge through conversation, by subscribing at 45 dollars a year to the library of all his previous radio shows. It is a treasure to go back and listen to a Henry Kissinger, a Martin Gilbert, a Margaret Thatcher at the height of their intellectual powers review the pressing ideas of their day, and for me has been already worth every dollar. I don’t now how long Dr. Rosenberg can keep it up, by I am certainly cheering him on as tries to preserve for all of us a vanishing form of discourse that can so enrich our lives. For his many years and ongoing efforts to bring the richness and diversity of learning and knowledge in a comfortable form to all of us, Milton Rosenberg is Ramparts People We Should Know- #25.

Milt Rosenberg interviews Martin Gilbert on the Life of Winston Churchill

January 26, 2014

Why Don’t We Care About Facts Anymore?

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The latest Harris polls have come out this past week regarding the state of the country’s confidence regarding the nation’s management and future and they are grim. Powerline reviews these polls in anticipation to the President’s State of the Union address and finds that Americans by an almost continuous ratio of three out of every four citizens feel the direction as to managing the large challenges of this country, whether the environment, economy, education, health care, jobs, or foreign policy, is poor. The conclusion is that this is one of the most comprehensively pessimistic index of American confidence ever. What contributes to such pessimism and drives the most self correcting government mechanism ever developed to drive a Lamborghini of countries off the cliff?

I think it is as John Adams once said – “Facts are stubborn things.”

The country has spent the past fifty years of its history increasingly turning philosophically to the measuring stick of Values rather than Facts to guide its direction. Values and what they say about us are infinitely more comforting then dealing with the harsh realities of facts. Values declare an ideal world as it should be and define a truth that does not require a carefully constructed argument based on facts. It is an unpleasant sensation to recognize that people should respond and how they react in reality to facts are dissonant. The very liberal but factually enlightened Daniel Patrick Moynihan discovered this almost fifty years ago when he made the mistake of critically assessing the social effect of government’s war on poverty on a specific group, the nation’s African American poor. As a disciple of Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan was determined to find the government’s aggressive effort to wrench the nation’s poor out of poverty successful, but found instead dangerously opposite trends in the reaction of the population to the “help”. The positive values in the civil rights movement overlaid with the timing of the war on poverty were assumed to create an environment of opportunity and safety net that would improve the situation for the average urban poor – but Moynihan was finding disturbingly opposite trends. The crux of the issue seemed to be the fact that illegitimacy and single parent families were exploding in what had been a population that had lagged but at least paralleled the rest of the nation’s population in terms of economic progress and family stability.

This wasn’t a liberal versus conservative argument. Certainly Moynihan as a staunch liberal wasn’t rejecting the concept of the nation providing a strong hand in helping its nation’s poor or overturning hard won civil rights. He was instead pointing to facts and the need to understand them in guiding policy. What he and other factualists were not prepared for was the spectacular blow back from value biased proponents that vilified the report, not for its logic, but for its argumentative ‘illegitimacy’. In the values world, the facts suggested an effort to “blame the victim”, and imply a racially tinged “promiscuity” to the urban poor that was opposite of Moynihan’s argument. Although many bright individuals saw similar trends to Moynihan’s observations, the corrective actions that might have helped generations of poor were stamped out by the a progressively entrenched group of powerbrokers that felt they ‘owned’ the values argument, and that being non-judgmental regardless of outcome was the appropriate judgment.

What neither Moynihan or much of the nation recognized at the time was this values movement, philosophically being non-judgmental about fact and result meant being progressive and politically correct, would overwhelm all the naturally corrective capacities of adjusting to facts.

Fifty years later, and trillions of dollars of right minded non-judgmental expenditure has left us with gaping holes in urban poor education, family stability, economic capacity, and confidence in the future. No set of facts are up to withstanding the blizzard of invectives regarding victimhood, accepting any socially dissonant behavior, or continuing to explode the budgets of failing programs designed to “help”.

This willful ignorance and war against facts and their basis to constructively correct actions is the foundational cause of this nation’s pessimism.

The values movement has metastasized in many elements of policy discourse, particularly the economic ones, as significant money is to be made from arguing victimhood. The enormous redirection of funds to “modify behavior” in order to “save the world from global warming” continues despite the overwhelming evidence that the so called “settled science” of anthropomorphically induced global warming has collapsed. The pouring of trillions into “stimulus” projects when economic fundamentals suggest the opposite effect to economic growth incentives is created. The crash of health care stability against the desire to make it more fair or equitable, rather than better. The value of democratizing populations that hunger for stability rather than unencumbered elections before any other societal stabilizers are in place. The throwing away of thousands of years of educational concepts on formative development for the desire for each individual to be allowed to ‘ seek their own place’ in what they are educated on, with its resultant disastrous effect on cultural literacy.

And on and on and on.

Facts are stubborn things. Human behavior follows fairly recognized paths that our social engineering efforts often helplessly thrash against. The country is growing increasingly pessimistic because it can’t discern a way out of this mess; it can’t see that good intentions unencumbered by factual adjustment lead only to further deterioration. We are trying to be good by trying to do good, with the opposite effect resulting and contributing to our fatigue. The cure would be in accepting facts to lead to improving the conditions that would lead to progress against society’s ills, rather than projecting value judgements that perpetuate their very existence. The cure would be in listening to voices that discern the balance between values and facts necessary to begin to build some confidence back into the system, and trust the correcting capacities of the system as it was designed, not as we wish to manipulate it. As Senator Moynihan presciently stated so many years ago, no one owns the facts.