Cowardice in Battle: Can We Trust Our Allies?

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/10/28/cowardice-in-battle-can-we-trust-our-allies.html

When Japan attacked the United States in World War II, they knew that the U.S.would eventually have an overwhelming superiority in material terms, yet they were confident of victory. Why? The Japanese leaders pointed out that the Japanese had the warrior spirit, and would prevail in battle, while the Americans, they thought, would run and hide, and meet certain defeat, well before American industry could come to the rescue.

Of course, the Japanese could not have been more mistaken. Even when outgunned and outnumbered, the Americans proved to be every bit as brave and dedicated as their Japanese enemies. The tradition of American valor in combat has continued unbroken from 1776 until today.

Not everyone has the warrior spirit. In recent weeks, we have seen the Iraqi army wilt in the face of brutal attacks by the terrorist army known as ISIS. Reports coming out of Afghanistan presage a similar outcome there. As American and British troops withdraw, there seems little doubt that the Afghan army will soon run and hide from the Taliban terrorists. Indeed, in large measure, they are already doing so, according to American soldiers on the scene.

All the while, Kurdish resistance to ISIS is so fierce that even Kurdish women are fighting in the front lines.

Why? Why are some groups of people courageous in battle, while others cower in fear at the first sound of gunfire?

Two factors come immediately to mind. When I was in the armed forces, I always knew that if I were wounded, even grievously, I would receive medical care for the rest of my life. (I was unaware that the Veterans Administration was infested with corruption.) If I were killed, my wife and child would receive compensation and assistance from the government.

The second factor was (and is) that I am convinced that the United States, with all its flaws, is a good and just nation. When we win, things are always better, both for us and for our defeated enemies, than if we lose. The principles of the Constitution are, and this should not be a statement taken lightly, worth dying for.

The Iraqi army collapsed under fire in part because its Sunni Moslem soldiers knew that they would get no support from their Shia Moslem government. If wounded or killed, they and their families would be abandoned, without so much as a 'thank you.'

In Afghanistan, the second factor seems to predominate. Afghanistan is not a unified nation, but an assortment of competing tribes that distrust each other, often for good reason. Its constitution is not considered, by its people, worth dying for. As a consequence, many Afghan soldiers (with some commendable exceptions), cower, hide and run, at the first sound of gunfire.

There was a time when I feared that Americans were losing the basic character of courage. While in the armed forces, I noticed that quite a few of the new recruits were of such poor quality that they were more of a burden than a blessing to the mission. On the other hand, I noticed that those who were good soldiers were more than merely good, they excelled. In other words, Americans could no longer be graded on a smooth scale from worst to medium to best. The medium was gone. Only the lowest rung of the ladder, and the highest, remain. I feel intense pride for our present day heroes.

I estimate now that about half the American youth are utterly unqualified for military duty, many for physical reasons such as obesity or drug use, but also, because so many of them are ideologically warped. Many of them actually sympathize with our enemies.

Someone recently stated, borrowing from the last lines of our national anthem, that we are the 'land of the free,' precisely because we are 'the home of the brave.'

Courage is not bravado. It does not boast, taunt, or persecute a defeated enemy. Instead, courage is the end product of faith, commitment and selflessness.

Courage cannot be taught, but only developed through a lifetime of tradition and context.

The next time we pick an ally, let’s apply some common sense.
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Socialism: the World's most Intractable Addiction.

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/8/socialism-the-worlds-most-intractable-addiction.html

Socialism as an economic and political system is inexplicably addictive.  Socialism addresses the scourge of poverty by saying simply, give money to the poor people. It addresses the problem of high prices by commanding sellers to lower their prices.  And when all the socialist remedies only dig the hole deeper, the last ditch resorts include raising taxes, confiscating wealth from those who produce it, and entrenching a class of voters who will never make the short-term sacrifices that are necessary for their long-term benefit.

Socialism has even more appeal when it is contrasted to our present economic system, the one we mistakenly call capitalism, but which is more properly referred to as “crony capitalism.”  A better term for that system might be, feudalism.  In any case, the present system as practiced is a twisted perversion of the free market system.  Compared to it, socialism starts to look good to those who are stuck on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

While socialism’s initial appeal might be understandable, what is not excusable is the persistent failure to recognize that socialism is not the easy way out of economic injustice, but is rather a fatal dependency on remedies that do not work.  Compared to truly free markets, socialism is a disaster.  Would that there were a truly free market to prove this.  Free markets have, alas, all but become extinct, and what now passes for capitalism is in reality a close cousin of socialism, even in the United States.

Is there a remedy?

It is no longer possible to simply do away with the century (and more) of clutter that has destroyed free markets, and to replace that clutter with the few basic principles that allow anyone— literally anyone— to have free and unfettered access to the marketplace.  Those principles include truly representative government, anti-trust laws, anti-fraud laws, and property rights.

The entrenched social powers are so firmly in control of our economic system that— and this is quite literal— a child can no longer start and operate a sidewalk lemonade stand in the US. In order to do so, the child would have to hire a consultant to navigate the government regulations, the legal hurdles, and competition from lemonade producers who can crush any hint of competition. 

In other words, to sell ten cents worth of lemonade, a ten-year-old child would have to have about ten thousand dollars in startup financing.  Think of it as the 10-10-10 rule. 

The problem extends upward from there, to many thousands of good business ideas that are never given a chance to succeed.

This inability to create new businesses without large investments up front would have, according to the founder of hardware giant Home Depot, prevented his corporation from ever having gained a foothold in the marketplace.

Make no mistake, large corporations, although many of them benefited from free markets when they were first begun, now oppose the very idea.  Partnering with big government, big corporations lobby for ever more oppressive regulation of business, knowing that that will stifle competition.

In doing so, they have persuaded millions of welfare recipients to settle for a life of indolence and hopelessness that is poisoning our society from within.

The real tragedy of this is that there are places in the world where there is a remedy. Argentina is a prime example.  When a social and economic system is in the early stage of collapse, the prospect for reform rises dramatically, as people become desperate to find a solution to their problems.  This brief window of opportunity has opened in Argentina.

Unfortunately, the window is all too often closed by those who instead of free markets, impose the harsh hand of raw power.  Sadly, this seems to be happening in Argentina and elsewhere.  Instead of more freedom, people tend to seek less of it, in the form of dictatorships.

The outlook is bleak.  Nation after nation, addicted to spending, taxation and overregulation is killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg.  Revolutions are inevitable.  Social collapse will follow, as will wars and rumors of war.

Still, even this outlook is not entirely bleak. There was a revolution in 1776 that, centuries later, still points the way to justice and prosperity.

We need a reset button.
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Parody: Obama’s Speech on Foreign Crises

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/7/19/obamas-speech-on-foreign-crises-parody.html

Hey dudes:

What a mess, huh? I mean some days I just don’t want to watch the news. Every time I do, I find out stuff that just messes with my mind. Like the IRS and stuff.

But you know, playing the part of president isn’t easy. I was told it would be, but it’s not as easy as I expected. Some of those golf courses are brutal.

Anyway, as many of you might know, since you are reporters, the world has a lot of crises going on. Some of them are serious. Like, for example, what’s with the Washington Redskins? Why don’t they just change their name, like I did mine—whoops, pretend I didn’t say that.

Then there’s this stuff going on in the Middle East, whatever, you know? I turn on the TV and there’s all this violence and killing and murder. Those people have no sense of respect for life. Oh wait, that’s the violence in Chicago and an abortion clinic. Forget I said that.

Why are all these Americans upset at having thousands of kids being brought into the US? It’s not like they’re being sent into my daughter’s school or nothing. Hey, they’re escaping violence in their homeland, gangs and murders and—darn it, somebody change that channel from Chicago news, already, I keep mixing things up.

We have serious crises to face, very serious. Why just the other day, Sarah Palin was accusing me of stuff. We can’t have that! She accused me of being pompous and arrogant. I’m too good to have anybody say that kind of stuff about me.

And then there’s global warming. You people have just got to turn off your electricity, stop driving cars, and stuff like that. I’ve been working very hard to stop global warming, and I’m succeeding. Pretty soon, none of you will be able to afford cars, heating and air conditioning, except me and my friends.

We have to get our priorities straight... Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend the gays.

Finally, let me say this. A lot of my critics, you know, those evil people who hate me—they have accused me of not being tough enough on Iran, Russia, and Elbonia. I assure you, that from now on, I am going to get very tough with them. In fact, I am recruiting an army, an entire army, mind you, of speech writers, who are even now in the process of writing some of the toughest speeches I have ever seen. They are using words—tough words, like, “unacceptable” and “I’ll get to the bottom of this” and stuff like that there.

When people hear those speeches, they are going to say, wow, that guy is really tough. And while they will be saying that about Vladimir Putin and not me, they will still be tough speeches. Not tough enough to offend the gays, but still, very tough.
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How Does One Person Take Power Over a Nation?

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/7/22/how-does-one-person-take-power-over-a-nation.html

As a young boy, I watched in wonderment on a military base, a single officer giving the command to stand at attention, and dozens of soldiers stood at attention. He gave the order to “left face,” and those dozens of soldiers faced left. He told them, “forward march,” and forward they marched.

I wondered why the soldiers did as they were told. I wondered how it was that this one officer could command them. Why was he the one in charge, and not one of the other men? Of course, my thoughts were not so precisely worded, but the questions have never left me. Indeed, over the years, the questions have only grown larger.

Years later, as I studied history, I wondered how it was possible that millions of Germans were commanded by one man named Hitler. He ordered countless numbers of his followers to their deaths, and they obeyed.

Likewise, a man named Stalin sent millions of Russians to their deaths, and they obeyed. On smaller scales, the question is raised again and again and again, as dictators rise in various places around the world, snapping orders that are instantly obeyed. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Vladimir Putin of Russia are only a few examples.

How do they do it?

I thought that the case of Adolph Hitler would be instructive, so I looked more deeply into it. Here was a person who, early in life, was as close to being the personification of a nobody as one can get. He tried and failed to get into art school. In World War I, he was an undistinguished army corporal.

Yet, in later years, he would snap orders to generals, even ordering their deaths if they disobeyed.  An assassination attempt failed because the would-be assassins made their plan too complicated, using a briefcase bomb instead of a simple pistol.

It turns out that Hitler did not really propel himself to power. The infrastructure of future tyranny was already in place for him, as it were, awaiting him. Devious men surrounded Hitler, accomplices in treachery. Chance seems to have played a major role. In short, a complex weave of events occurred. At any moment, those events might have taken a different turn, and had they, history would not even have recorded Hitler’s name.

My theory is that human society, and human psychology, is predisposed toward accepting tyranny.

We see this as far back as the days of the Old Testament, when the Jews decided to do away with their divinely ordained system of governance, and chose instead to be more like the ungodly nations that surrounded them. They clamored for a king, and they got one. Their first king, Saul, the bad king, was replaced by David the good king, and then by Solomon, another good king, but after Solomon’s death, rule by evil took over, and Israel was brought to ruin.

Had the Jews foreseen the inevitable result of their choice, they would likely have put up with their divinely appointed judges, as corrupt as those judges were.

It is because we are predisposed toward tyranny that tyrants rule.

The great exception in history has been the United States. Having suffered under a tyranny that was by no means as horrible as rule by men such as Ivan the Terrible, the Founders cobbled together an independent government that not only threw off the tyrant, but also, they hoped, would prevent any future tyrants from seizing power.

The Founders understood power. They understood how it is gained, and they understood how it is abused. They understood that the would-be tyrant must first be surrounded by lackeys, by men in the shadows, by opportunists hoping for favors. They understood the complex weave of events that must occur, and they devised a method whereby those events could never conspire to bring to absolute power any one individual.

For many decades, that system prevailed. Then it eroded. Gradually, year by year, the strengths which had under-girded our imperfect society began to weaken. Slowly, the safeguards against tyranny unraveled.

Today, we have in power that single individual that the Founders abhorred in principle. We have a man who came from seemingly nowhere, a man with no previous accomplishments, a man who refuses to divulge his college records – a man who has never so much as run a lemonade stand. He has never signed a paycheck, and indeed, never earned one from private enterprise.

Yet this man orders generals about, firing them at his whim. He presides over failure after failure, and he survives scandal after scandal. He flouts the law, violating the separation of powers, arbitrarily dismissing laws he does not like, and using illegal means to punish his political opponents.

Yet, despite all this, or maybe because of all this, Barack Obama snaps orders, and millions of people comply.

Why?

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Iraqi Apocalypse

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/6/14/iraqi-apocalypse.html

Iraq was a war in which we either should never have become involved, or alternatively, a war in which we should have invaded and subjugated the country in the exact fashion that our harshest critics decry as the brutality of oil imperialism.

Both choices were bad ones, but we chose a policy even worse than those two.

By taking the middle road, we are getting run over from both sides. We pretended that we could bring our democratic values to a region that has no basis for them, and then left, hoping that “democracy would take root,” without our continued, intrusive involvement.

That pretense was not only unrealistic, its results are worse brutality than that for which our accusers would have us pilloried.

The rationale for invading Iraq was twofold. First, it was about oil. It had to be. Oil is the lifeblood of our economy. Our society will collapse without it.

Second, it was about safety from terrorism. Saddam Hussein was actively sponsoring suicide bombing in Israel, and had already used chemical warfare against Iran. There was little information from inside Iraq to comfort us concerning weapons of mass destruction, the infamous WMD that were never found, but the possibility of which could not have been shrugged off by any sane person, especially when Hussein was pretending to have them.

Our entire involvement in Iraq cannot neatly be summed up, but there is one battle that comes close to characterizing all our mistakes. It was the battle for Fallujah, which was in fact, two battles.

Fallujah was taken and occupied by radical terrorists who converted it into a giant bomb factory, and who were killing any civilians who were even suspected of insufficient cooperation with the occupiers or their Islamist creed.

The first time Americans invaded Fallujah, we did so with insufficient forces and were driven back in defeat – at the cost of American lives. The second time, politics were put aside, and the invasion was accomplished with brutal force, with the aim of total subjugation of the city. It worked. An army of terrorists was killed or captured and the civilian population celebrated the defeat of their terrorist tormentors.

War is ugly, and the battle for Fallujah, despite our best efforts, was ugly also – nearly a hundred Americans were killed in the second battle alone – but at least the objective was worthy, and it had been accomplished.

After all that, it is unthinkable that the terrorists would regain control of Fallujah, but they have. They are now well on their way to seizing all of Iraq, and indeed, all of its neighboring nations, to include Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The unthinkable is happening.

This leaves us with choices that are all unacceptable, and with consequences that are now unavoidable.

We could re-invade Iraq, start over from scratch and "re-defeat" the terrorists, losing more American lives and squandering more American treasure at a time when we are already bankrupt.

We could give the Kurds in northern Iraq recognition as an independent nation and recruit them to resist the terrorists, thus infuriating our Turkish allies in NATO, an ally already undependable anyway.

We could stand aside and watch as Iran continues to send more of its own Islamist troops into Iraq to defeat its Sunni enemies.

We could warn the Iraqis to evacuate their captured cities, and then incinerate those cities, if necessary, by small nuclear weapons, thus preventing the terrorists from using those facilities against us.

None of these scenarios are acceptable, except for arming the Kurds, and indeed, none of them would be as helpful as we would hope.

The consequences of doing nothing is also unacceptable. To do nothing, is to allow a base of operations from which international terrorism will be exported worldwide. This terrorism will be unrelentingly aggressive and murderous. It will be on a larger scale than we ever imagined possible and funded by billions of petro-dollars, armed with the most potent weapons mankind possesses, including actual WMD and radioactive “dirty bombs” that leave entire cities permanently uninhabitable.

It will be manned by literally hundreds of thousand of fanatical, suicidal fighters. It will be led by extremists who insist on nothing less than worldwide Islamic dictatorship, a subjugation of people in its most violent and cruel form.

Ironically, the strongest, and only acceptable counter-measure we have is the one which Barack Obama seems utterly insistent on blocking: the development of oil reserves in North America, particularly involving the Keystone pipe-line.

Had the U.S. resolved 10 years ago to become energy independent, we would already have achieved that goal.

 Now, we will need another 10 years, but we must act with all deliberate speed to get there.

Oil will not be the panacea. It will not by itself solve the problem we face. It will, however, give us at least a fighting chance, the only chance we will have, to survive the horrors of unbridled terrorism which – make no mistake about this – are going to rain down death and destruction on our homeland.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in World War III. This is not hyperbole. We are facing a terrorist apocalypse. The cost to us will be horrific. Our choices are stark – total victory, or total defeat.
There is no longer any middle road. The sooner we understand this fact, the more likely we are to survive what lies ahead.
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Government Has No Rights, but only Powers

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/5/13/government-has-no-rights-but-only-powers.html

Here are a few radical statements that will shock many people on the left. I know from personal experience that many liberals are appalled by the principles spelled out in the next paragraph. I refuse to be held liable for any apoplexy liberals may experience by reading it.

The government has no rights, but only powers. Those powers are not the property of the government, but of the people. We the people loan power to the government, and we can revoke those powers any time at our sole discretion, without permission from the government. The Bill of Rights is intended to protect the people from the government, not to protect government from the people. The government has no right to privacy. It has no right to conceal its misdeeds, but indeed, it has an affirmative duty to reveal all of its activities to the citizenry. Rights belong only to the people. Those rights are granted to us, not by the government, but only by our Creator. Those in government are not our rulers, but our servants.

Such ideas are anathema to socialists, but they are solidly embedded in the foundations of the Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution includes the provision that no person “. . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. . .”

This is good and proper. This law restricts government power, and prevents its unjust use against the people. As with so many laws, however, it has been perverted. The rights conferred by the Bill of Rights are conferred not upon the government, but upon individuals, and especially in the context of protecting individuals from the government, not the other way around.

Instead of protecting our rights, the Fifth Amendment, one of the enumerations in the Bill of Rights, is now being used by government as yet another tool to suppress our rights.

Here is an example.

Lois Lerner is the IRS administrator who publicly proclaimed her Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress, because such testimony might tend to incriminate her— but Lerner is not entitled to conceal her official crimes as an agent of the government. Quite to the contrary, she has an affirmative duty to reveal them in full. Her refusal to do so is a complete reversal of the intent of the Fifth Amendment.

Had Lerner shoplifted from a department store, her Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify would be completely legitimate, because such a crime would, one presumes, not have been part of her official duties in the Internal Revenue Service. Had she shoplifted, she would have been acting as a private citizen, not as an agent of the government.

However, when Lerner used her power as a government agent to deprive American citizens of their First Amendment rights, she was indeed acting as an agent of the government. In doing so, she forfeited any claim to the Fifth Amendment right against testimony, because the government does not have a right to conceal its criminal action.

Recently, the Internal Revenue Service gave bonuses, at taxpayer expense, to employees of the IRS who failed to pay their own taxes.

Some of them had even been disciplined for misconduct. How could this happen? How could miscreants and tax cheats who work for the IRS get bonuses?

Part of the answer lies in their employment contract. IRS employees are protected by a contract which forbids the government from using an employee’s misconduct as a basis for withholding bonuses. Let’s repeat that. An IRS employee’s misconduct cannot be used against him in determining whether he gets a performance bonus.

This contract was negotiated between the unions, representing the bureaucrats, and the American people, who were represented in those negotiations by— by whom? Who in hell thought he was representing the American people when he agreed that employee misconduct cannot be a basis for denying a bonus payment? Do you believe that that government negotiator had the slightest concern whatsoever for your interests as a taxpayer? Think about that the next time the government takes your money to pay an IRS auditor who himself has not paid his taxes.

Such contracts are fraudulent and collusive. Clearly, the government employees union spends political campaign money to reward government negotiators who betray the trust of the people. Such contracts are therefore illegal, and any fair and just court would invalidate those contracts without delay.

Lois Lerner and the IRS are only the tip of the iceberg of corruption that has thoroughly saturated the government. Recently and infamously, it has been discovered that certain administrators in the Veterans Administration, in order to make themselves eligible for performance bonuses, delayed life-saving care for their patients, resulting in the deaths of several dozen or more of the veterans they were paid to protect.

I am outraged not only at the despicable actions of the administrators who, in effect, murdered our veterans for money— I am outraged by the excuses made for those who supposedly oversee the VA.

The question is being asked, did they know that this abuse was going on? That is the wrong (insert curse word here) question. It matters not one whit whether they knew. The correct question is, should they have known?

Were they doing their job of oversight? What, precisely, were they doing to seek out, discover, and/or prevent such abuses? My guess is that they were doing nothing. How else could people in the VA dare to have risked being caught with blood on their hands?

In an environment where Lois Lerner tramples the Constitution and gets a pension, what fear does any government employee have of being caught? Why don’t these people respect the law? Why don’t they fear being punished for murder?

No doubt, they too, have a contract.
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Equality is Unfair

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/6/30/equality-is-unfair.html

Some years ago, there was a panel discussion on television about equality. I am speaking from imperfect memory, but I do remember the main points. Specifically, some women were complaining that women are treated unfairly. The other women on the panel cited college admissions as favoring women, and the military draft as favoring women, and after a few other examples, they asked how women are treated unfairly.

The liberal women had a ready answer. ‘Why just yesterday,’ one of them said, ‘I was shopping for clothes, and I picked out a nice turtle-neck sweater. Then I happened to notice that the same, identical sweater was in the menswear department for a price that was twenty percent less. I asked a clerk what was the difference between the sweaters in the men’s department, and the sweaters in the women’s wear section. The answer was that all the sweaters arrive in bulk, and are arbitrarily distributed between the two departments, and that is where the pricing is done.’

‘Well,’ continued the liberal woman, ‘I think that this is unfair, and is just another example of how women are discriminated against. Why should women have to pay more for the same, identical item?’

It was the conservative women who now had the ready, although unrehearsed answer: ‘First, stores charge more for women’s wear because women will pay it. Nobody forces them to buy anything in the store. Men won’t overpay for their clothing, because they do not place as high a value on fashion as women.’ Second, and this is the show stopper: ‘What prevents women from buying their unisex clothing from the men’s department?’

The look on the liberal women’s faces was a poorly concealed “duh” of red-faced embarrassment. (Footnote: Red-faced is not to be confused with the now forbidden name of a football team. However, if I have offended anyone, well, grow up already.)

Warning. Please turn off your “sarcometer” before reading further. I will not be responsible if sarcasm-overload burns up your sarcometer. Very well, let’s proceed.

It seems to never have occurred to the liberals on the panel that some problems can be resolved with individual actions. In the liberal mindset, it seems that every unfairness in life should be remedied with a government program, a new federal agency, higher taxes, more regulation and less individual freedom. Why, after all, if individuals were allowed to solve their own problems, then there would be a decreased need for government, no need to raise taxes, and—and—and well, why the planet would explode. Anyone can see that.

As I said, this took place years ago, and since I can rarely find my car keys on the first try, I am sure that I may remember some of the details wrong, but the key still starts the car, if you get my drift.
I’m not done. I wish the panelists had asked more questions, but since they did not, I wish to pose them to our more liberal readers. (I warned you to turn off those sarcometers. This is your last chance.)

Why are department stores allowed to have separate departments for men’s clothing and women’s wear? Is this not segregation? Does this policy not make some unfair assumptions about men and women? Does it not discourage cross dressing? Cross dressing is a fundamental right you know. George Washington actually wore a wig, and frilly cuffs on his shirtsleeves. That proves it.

The next question is related to the foregoing: Who should make the decision as to where department stores place their men’s clothing and their women’s attire? That such a vital decision should be left to the whim of cold-blooded corporations is a travesty. Their flimsy excuse is unacceptable, which is ‘this is the way customers want it.’ Who do the customers think they are, the government? Where in the Constitution is it specifically permitted for customers to make their own choices? The word, “customer,” does not even appear in the Constitution. Nor should it.

Fortunately, the liberal left is making inroads to defeat this unfairness. Same-sex marriage is now legal. In at least one state, men can use the women’s dressing rooms, restroom and even showers, in public accommodations (except in mosques, of course). Oh, and by the way, this paragraph is not sarcastic.

I wish it were.
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Strange Bedfellows – Vladimir Putin and the American Right

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/4/23/strange-bedfellows-vladimir-putin-and-the-american-right.html

Sometimes, politics and policy require uncomfortable alliances. Perhaps the best example from recent history is the close cooperation between the western allies and the Soviet Union in the war against Hitler. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill certainly knew that their Soviet partner, Josef Stalin, was no real friend. He was always poised to stab in the back anyone who let down his guard.

The alliance was necessary, however, because without the millions of Soviet soldiers who were fighting the Nazis, Hitler’s Germany would have been vastly more deadly to the British and Americans defending against it.

Today, another Stalin-esque dictator leads Russia. His name is Vladimir Putin, and it seems obvious that his intention is to restore the empire that once was the Soviet Union.

For years, he has carefully put in place the elements of his plan: securing a naval port in Syria, and playing the US off against Iran, while parading the Obama administration about by the nose.

Just as Hitler persuaded Chamberlain that Germany’s seizing of territory was in the interest of “peace in our time,” so also Putin has seized Crimea while Obama looks on in confusion and helplessness, trying in vain to find where Hillary put that “reset button.”

In the midst of all this, Putin seems to have become somewhat of a folk hero on the American right, the strangest of strange bedfellows.

He has done so in the way that Jesse James and other infamous outlaws gained secret admiration by members of the public. No decent person in his right mind would admire a thief and cold blooded killer. Nor, indeed, was it the criminality that people admired. In order to make a hero of Jesse James, a false image of him was crafted in dime novels. He became seen as a courageous victim of the evil railroad empires and fighting back in the tradition of Robin Hood. Once that image took hold, and the murders of innocent people overlooked, then the false image of Jesse James became an icon of American culture.

Likewise, Putin is a cold blooded killer, one who rose to the top from a cadre of KGB agents known for their ruthlessness and cunning. It is not these characteristics, however, that the American right has come to admire. In order to make him more admirable, Putin needs a villain, a “railroad empire” that is victimizing innocent Americans.

Along comes Barack Obama, violator of the Constitution, liar of the year, and betrayer of Benghazi, among other wickedness. Unlike Putin, who has not invaded Nevada, Obama is an up close and personal villain. His crimes threaten us all. We could well lose our freedoms because of him and his ilk.

Americans hate a villain, but if there is one thing we hate worse, it is cowardice.

It is in this regard that Putin seems strangely preferable to Obama. This cowardly American is always whining that his problems are Bush’s fault. He is always promising to “get to the bottom of” a series of scandals, after which he makes lame excuses or implausible denials, mainly because the foundation of these scandals lie in his own corruption and incompetence.

He is constantly warning America’s enemies that “there will be consequences,” when such threats are obviously meaningless, and indeed, the consequences never occur. The global laughter is barely concealed; not even our allies trust this empty shirt.

Putin, by contrast, is quiet. As Teddy Roosevelt might have described him, he speaks softly but carries a big stick. The image of Putin is that of a man who does not make threats, but does carry them out. We have not heard him blame his predecessors for his difficulties. We have not heard him make vain promises to resolve scandals. We have not heard him bluster and threaten, but only seen him act boldly and with resolve.

No, Putin is not a hero, not by any means. Indeed, our disdain for Obama is that he incorporates all of Putin’s flaws with none of his strengths. Obama is a Putin wannabe, but one who can never “make the trains run on time,” one whose policies continually make matters worse, while he denies this obvious fact.

Obama is why American militiamen confronted the armed thugs from the Bureau of Land Management, when the government tried to enforce an unjust law against rancher Cliven Bundy.

Message to Putin:  We applaud the way you rub Obama’s nose in his own messes, not because we admire you, but because you illuminate the fact that Obama is a dire failure who needs to be opposed and replaced with a conservative, pro-American leader. Obama will not prevent you from invading Ukraine, but if you ever decide to invade Nevada, we will introduce you to the Second Amendment.
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There is so Little Respect for the Law Because . . .

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/4/29/why-there-is-so-little-respect-for-the-law.html

 

It is often said that we are, after all, a nation of laws.

Aren’t we?

Not quite.

Can we really be a nation of laws when:

 

1)      nobody adequately understands what the law is.

2)      laws are passed that no one who voted for them has ever even read, much less understood.

3)      the government itself violates its own laws with impunity.

4)      the president continually and unilaterally changes the law for personal political cover.

 

1.  Nobody knows what the law actually is. Judges all the way from the bottom to the top disagree with each other. Supreme Court decisions are many times split five to four on important cases. This violates the most fundamental principle of good governance, which is that laws should be understood by the ordinary citizen. Court decisions should not be lotteries. They should be predictable, merely the fine tuning of details, not massive overhauls. Courts should apply the law to specific cases, not make laws, nor interpret them in ways that were clearly never intended by the legislature. Laws passed by popular referendum should be respected by the courts, and never overturned unless there is some extraordinary necessity for doing so. Judges should base their decisions on what the actual law is, not on their personal opinions of what the law should be.

 

2.  Legislators vote on laws without ever having read what they are voting on. The most egregious recent example of this is the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama-care. Not one— repeat, not even one— of the legislators who voted FOR this law ever even read it. Not one. Congressmen John Conyers publicly ridiculed those who demanded that Congress should actually know what it is doing, by saying, quote:

 

I love these members that get up and say, Read the bill! Well, what good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?

 

Such outrages by the legislature are a slap in the face to the American people, and a blatant disregard of what representative government means. This dereliction of even the most basic duty of the legislature is so extreme as to defy description.

 

It gets worse. Many members of Congress cannot answer simple, direct questions about what the Constitution says. Congressman John Conyers told a reporter that the “good and welfare clause” gives Congress the authority to force individuals to buy health insurance.

 

There is no such clause. There is a general welfare clause, but it does not erase the rest of the Constitution. Other congressmen are quoted as saying such things as, most of what we do around here is unconstitutional, and, if I voted only for laws that are permitted by the Constitution, I would not get reelected.

 

In other words, we are no longer a republic.

 

3.  The government itself violates its own laws with impunity. One of the most obvious violations of constitutional representation is the fact that laws passed by the Congress routinely exempt the members of Congress from the burdens imposed by the laws they inflict upon us. It is inconceivable that the American people tolerate this, but too many of us do. Many more examples exist. The Tenth Amendment is perhaps the one part of the Constitution that is so frequently violated that in effect it has died of neglect.

 

Operation Fast and Furious is another example. The Department of Justice had been proclaiming that much of the gun violence in Mexico was due to weapons smuggled from the US. When this proved not to be the case, the DOJ itself began smuggling weapons into Mexico, so that they could point to them as demonstrating the need for violating the Second Amendment guarantee that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

 

Hundreds of Mexicans died as a result, along with at least one American Border Patrol agent. The DOJ has defied all subpoenas to release its documentation of this illegal operation.

 

4.  The president continually and unilaterally changes the law for personal political cover.

 

Again, the Affordable Care Act provides the most glaring examples. This law was so poorly-crafted that it is unworkable. The constitutional remedy for this is clear. Congress must change the law. Instead, Barack Obama repeatedly ignored or overrode vital components of the law to avoid the inevitable embarrassment of its failure. Barack Obama is not the legislature. He has no legal basis for violating the separation of powers, despite his flimsy excuses for doing so.

 

Cliven Bundy may or may not be in violation of one or more of the encyclopedic laws and regulations that were passed with no one ever having read or understood them. The laws which he is accused of violating may or may not be just and fair. It is clear, however, that the use of armed force, with the open threat of lethal violence, to seize his property, is the inevitable consequence of a government that increasingly seems to recognize no limits on its own authority.

 

It was done on a pretext, probably involving official corruption by Nevada senator Harry Reid. We may never know the full story, because it seems that so much of what government does is illegally concealed from the public.

 

We are no longer a nation of laws.

 

We are not supposed to be ruled by overlords, but rather, we are supposed to govern ourselves. That principle has been completely forgotten by those who are now in power. We are no longer ruled by law, but instead by an elite class of oligarchs. Not until we the people take back the power and authority that under the Constitution are rightfully ours will the law once again be respected.

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This is What Happens When Clowns Run the Circus

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/3/4/this-is-what-happens-when-clowns-run-the-circus.html

What did we expect? What did anyone expect? How could clowns possibly conduct foreign policy?

The last Democrat president to practice statesmanship was Harry Truman. His last two secretaries of state were George C Marshall and Dean Acheson; both had achievements and resumes that make Obama’s appointees to these positions look to be the rank amateurs they are. Neither Hillary Clinton nor John Kerry can hold a candle to them - both are politicians, not statesmen by any stretch of the imagination.

Truman took office at the most critical moment of World War II, facing the most momentous decision with which any president has been burdened. He ordered nuclear bombs to be used against Japan, a fanatical enemy which was using suicide bombers to kill thousands of Americans. It was a decision which could well have gone terribly wrong. Had the bombs not been used, a land invasion of Japan could have cost a million allied casualties, and the outcome could easily have been a Russian occupation of Tokyo, just as in Berlin.

If the bombs were used, but failed to detonate, the technology could have fallen into enemy hands. Given that very little was known about radiation poisoning, American troops could have been sent into contaminated areas, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, disfigurements and subsequent birth defects at proportions unimaginable.

This was not a time for political calculations. It was not a time to plan the next election campaign. It was not a time to play politics for personal advantage.

Contrast this to the Obama administration, where every decision is based on winning the next election, and where every one of those decisions is predictably disastrous to our national interests.

Libya, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Egypt, and now Ukraine, populate the list of Obama failures. Enemies of the U.S. who once dreaded our every word of warning, now openly laugh in our faces. Allies who once came to our side, confident in our leadership, now distrust us, and go their own way, to our detriment.

This is what happens when clowns run the circus. What did we expect? What did anyone expect?

The Chronicle of Negro Charles

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/3/8/the-chronicle-of-negro-charles.html

One of Paramount’s highest-grossing movies of 1972 was titled, The Legend of N-Word Charley. No, it wasn’t. The title contained the actual N-word itself.

The title appeared on posters all over America, and openly on brightly lit marquees in nearly every theater where it played.  And no, there were no riots, no outraged community organizers demanding the word be removed, no theaters burned to the ground. Charley was, after all, portrayed as the hero of the film. Black people in droves paid to see this movie, seated alongside whites.

It is a sign of the twenty-first century how much things have changed.

In writing this commentary, I thought about whether, I, too, should use the actual n-word, not vituperatively, but literarily. I finally decided against it. Next, I considered dancing around it. No, that too would invite the ire of those who might (and surely would) object.

Imagine! I, who have fearlessly stared down ferocious man-eating tigers in the jungles of India, armed only with my bare hands, am afraid of a simple word. Okay, I just made up the stuff about tigers, but I would rather face that, than to say the n-word. Okay, almost.

Look, I understand that there are two sides to this story, and indeed, many sides. On the one hand is the free speech issue. On the other side is the issue of bigotry in its most harmful forms.

Were it but that simple, the controversy could easily be resolved on the basis of compassion and decency.  There is no reason for anyone to gratuitously say something hurtful to a fellow human. All decent people understand that. It is simple common sense.

It is no longer that simple. 

It has gone way beyond common sense. It is a controversy that has resulted in books being censored by school libraries, such as the classic novel, Huckleberry Finn.  In that work of fiction, the protagonist white boy, “Huck,” helps a protagonist black man, the escaped slave, “Jim,” to flee northward. The n-word is used frequently throughout, but never disparagingly by the heroes.

What is telling about this censorship is that the censors were utterly unconcerned about whether the word was used disrespectfully. It was used in the necessary context of the milieu in which the novel is set. Rather, the objection is to the very word itself, the word, regardless, end of story.  And if you disagree, you are a racist pig, deserving of the worst punishment of all, which is, to be called a racist pig.

The precedent was thus set and enshrined. A word’s meaning and context had become irrelevant.  The “word-nazis” could ban a word, merely on the basis that it was the word that they banned.

Matters then proceeded to become even more complicated than before. It seems that while white folk were berating each other for any use of the n-word at all, black folk were co-opting it, using it liberally among themselves. It is a word commonly heard, or at least overheard, when black people are talking among themselves, calling each other by one or another variant of the n-word, sometimes in anger, sometimes jovially, but in however friendly a manner it might be used between black people, white people are not allowed to join in.

Don’t you dare.

To do so is offensive, racist, and may well provoke serious violence.
We are not done. As complicated as it is, it gets even worse. The National Football League, the one with a team called the Redskins, is now reported to begin banning the n-word on the playing field.

Oh, it continues to get more convoluted even than that. The problem in the NFL is not that white players are insulting blacks. The problem is that black players are openly using the n-word toward each other where everyone can hear— sometimes insultingly, sometimes as a so-called (get this) term of endearment.

As this real life parody gets more tangled, it is the black players who are offended— NOT by black players using the n-word, but by white management censoring the word. In sub-section three, sub-paragraph (a9z), footnote E=MC squared of this objection by black players, white players continue to be forbidden to use the n-word, but for black players, this censorship is an affront to their culture.

Not done yet. It gets worse still.

The NFL owners, at the behest of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a racial diversity association, are also proposing banning the n-word in locker rooms. They are banning it, not only for the players themselves, but for any rap music being played on radio or recordings. Mind you, they are not banning the music because it is misogynistic, not because it refers to women by the B-word (is it still permitted to say bitches?), not because it calls them ho’s (whores), but because the music uses the n-word.  That’s why.

One could list many more absurdities in this controversy. Advocates of the censorship against whites have claimed that the n-word was “forced” upon black people by white people. It is claimed that black people now “own” the n-word, and that white people have no right to use it. It is said that “this is not up for a vote.” White people do not have a right to have any say in the matter.

White people must, without objection, bow down to these demands, and say nothing. That is an order, white boy.

An issue that once could have been resolved by courtesy, has gotten so far out of hand that any sensible resolution is now out of the question.

It is no longer a matter of, as the late Rodney King lamented, “Can we all get along?” We can’t. It is now a matter of political power and brute force. Do as I say and shut up.

By the time you read this, I will not be surprised if it is burned in a fire because it contains the N-Word—not the word itself, but the word, “Word,” with an “N” in front of it. No doubt we will be forbidden to say N-Word, or any substitute for it at all, not even “daffodil.”

It’s racist, you know.  After all, what word isn’t?

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Sniper Attack Was Just Practice—the Real Thing is Coming to Your House

Originally posted at
http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/3/11/sniper-attack-was-just-practicethe-real-thing-is-coming-to-y.html

In April of 2013, a well-organized, professionally executed sniper attack was launched against a PG&E power substation in California, by persons unknown.  The attack did not bring down the power grid, but that is small comfort to the experts in this field. That is because the attack was apparently a dry run, a practice exercise, for a much larger attack, by numerous teams operating at the same time, sometime in the future.

Few people appreciate how easily a skilled and determined organization could make this happen. The entire nation could lose electric power, and the damage might cripple our national power grid for years to come. This is not hyperbole.

Anyone familiar with the giant transformers that are used in power plants well understands the danger. Those transformers, unlike the ones you commonly see on power lines, are each custom made by hand, [in China!] and are enormously expensive and time consuming to produce, deliver and install. They are easily destroyed, even by simple overheating. The sniper attack was aimed at disabling the cooling fans.
 

One estimate is that, if the US power grid were to suddenly be crippled, the effects might be so long lasting, and so devastating, that within a year, ninety percent of all people in the US would be dead. Yes, that’s right, dead.

However apocalyptic that may sound, it is not scare-mongering. The United States is no longer a nation in which ninety percent of the population consists of self-sustaining farmers living off the land. Only about one percent of Americans live on farms, and most farms are heavily reliant on the power grid. There are not enough oxen to plow the fields that feed us.
 

When the power grid goes down, it will take everything with it, including rail transport, the water supply, communications, military defenses, factories—and very much more. Major cities contain only enough food to last a week, and not much drinkable water. With no food coming in, people will have to forage, and that means looting on a massive scale.
 

All of a sudden, the survivalists will not be seen as lunatics anymore. Even they will have great difficulty getting to their hidden bunkers unseen by looters, but if they can last a month or so, they may well be among the very few long-term survivors of a world that will have seen a sort of Armageddon.
 

Once the power grid is down— and it will have gone down suddenly, unexpectedly and catastrophically— all communications will abruptly be cut off. Your telephone will not work, nor will your cell phone. Gas stations will quickly run out of fuel, and the refineries will not be able to replace the lost gasoline. Within a few days, we will be living like the settlers of the mid 1800s, except without their survival skills.

The irony is, there actually was a large scale destruction of electrical power lines in the mid-1800s, caused by a solar flare—but the only serious result was a loss of telegraph stations. That was pretty much all the advanced electronic technology there was at the time.
 

Today, by contrast, electric power is literally life and death to us. Anyone who has been in a major power outage knows how terribly it affected their lives, and how much worse it would have been had not food and water been brought into the affected areas in time to prevent starvation.
 

The only advice one can give is if you are not into the full blown survivalist thing, at least store up a few days’ worth of food and water. Be prepared to defend it against looters and prepare yourself spiritually for the anguish that is to come.
 

Here are two video reports if you are interested in learning more.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25072628/attack-pg-e-substation-sparks-concerns-about-possible

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3050908849001/former-energy-secretary-on-vulnerability

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How Health Care is Poisoned by Government

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/5/29/how-health-care-is-poisoned-by-government.html

Conservatives frequently advocate for the privatization of government services and, while that’s a good idea, it’s not enough. Even the smallest involvement by the government can poison the best privatized system. My own experience may shed some light on this.

About a year ago, I went to a hospital emergency room, doubled over with abdominal pain. I was admitted to a ward upstairs, and kept for three days while tests were run. I was diagnosed with an infection, and a couple of other medical problems that were discovered incidentally. After treatment, I was eager to get back home, and finally was released from the hospital.

After a small co-pay, I was happy to see that I would not have to pay any part of the multi-thousand-dollar hospital bill. My insurer is Tri-Care, a government funded program for military personnel, including retired veterans such as myself.

A year later, I received a notice from Tri-Care, which stated that the hospital cannot bill me personally for the care I received, but that Tri-Care will not fully pay the hospital either.

Technical reasons were given, but from what I understood, someone at Tri-Care had ruled that not all of the treatments provided by the hospital were medically necessary – at least not in an in-patient facility. I’m not sure what percentage of the bill the hospital was paid, since the insurers explanation was long and complicated.

Since I am neither a medic nor a lawyer, I cannot take sides in the dispute between the government and the hospital. On the one hand, I am reminded of the criticism that the government cannot reduce the costs of medical care, but it can refuse to pay those costs. On the other hand, I am reminded that when hospitals expect the government to pay the bill, they have an incentive to provide unneeded services, so as to maximize their profit.

I do not think the hospital did that, but in borderline cases, the temptation can certainly be there. With legal litigation always a possibility, the incentive is to order more tests, not fewer.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the hospital gave me excellent treatment. On the other hand, I’m glad that someone in the government is guarding taxpayer dollars. On the third hand, if you have one, the hospital will probably be forced to give future patients less thorough care than they gave me, or go out of business.

The recent scandal at the Veterans Administration (VA) clearly shows that a one hundred percent government run healthcare system is guaranteed to reduce care, increase costs, create the environment for criminal fraud, and get innocent people killed in the process. And no, I do not need yet another inspector general report to draw that conclusion.

What about the other extreme? What if the government paid none of the costs of medical care? Well, we all know how horrible that would be. The steps leading up to the hospital door would be littered with the corpses of people who had sought care, but could not pay for it. Cold-blooded administrators would form “death panels,” and only the wealthy would survive such a system. We all know that, don’t we?

Of course not, but first let’s look at our middle-of-the-road solution, one in which the government and the private sector have formed a so-called partnership.

This partnership began in World War II, when the factories of war employed millions of Americans. In order to keep down the material cost of war equipment, it was against the law to give pay raises to workers. Corporations wanted to do something to make their employees more happy, and so they “gamed the system,” although much more mercifully than the VA administrators gamed their system.

 The corporations got around the “no-pay-raise” law by offering free health insurance to their workers. While this seems to have been a good thing, it was actually the poison pill that helped get us into the health-care mess we are in today.

Prior to the war, when Rosie the secretary got sick, she went to the doctor with her meager paycheck in hand. The doctor tailored his health-care strategy for Rosie to fit her budget.Rosie had every incentive to scrutinize her medical bill, and keep the cost low. The doctor also was motivated to provide the best care within Rosie’s means. It was far from a perfect system, but in general, it worked well enough for most people.

Once Rosie became the Riveter, and had health insurance, things changed. If the doctor ordered an extra test or two, “just in case,” Rosie did not have to pay for those tests herself. The insurance company paid. Costs, predictably, began to rise.

While this system seemed at first to be a free market at work, it was not. The health insurance benefit at work was provided to circumvent a law, a government regulation. Rosie could not, because the government forbade it, tell her employer, “Just pay me more, and I will find a cheaper, better health plan for myself.” No, Rosie had to accept the group plan, or get nothing. The government involvement was small at first, but the snowball had begun rolling.

The key to it all was that, even with minimal government interference, incentives had become skewed toward higher costs. Other medical decisions had already been taken out of the hands of the patient and the doctor, and placed under control of insurance companies and government bureaucrats.

Today, there is no more free market in the health care system. Every nook and cranny of it is either directly or indirectly affected by government regulations, regulations not designed to benefit the patient or the doctor, but to benefit the regulators and the politicians.

Even the VA scandal is not being addressed to benefit the patients. If it were, then the problem would be solved today, not waiting for yet another—another—inspector general report. The scandal has been well known for decades, and nothing was done about it, not until it became politically expedient. What is being done, however, is not going to fix the system, but will only provide cover to the politicians.

The VA scandal is a harbinger of catastrophe yet to come. Once a complex system has become poisoned, the poison will continue to work its ravages until either death or a cure results.

The cure is not to issue “vouchers” to patients. To be sure, that has now become the deal with the devil that cannot be avoided, but the cure is to get the government completely out of the health-care industry. Completely. Issuing vouchers will simply require the taxpayer to fund health care for deserving veterans. It will require government oversight. It will put private hospitals in the no-man’s-land between ordering too many tests, and therefore having payment refused by the government, or on the other hand, ordering too few tests and getting sued for malpractice.

In the short run, there is no way out of this. In the longer term, there is a solution.

Many will object to the only solution, sometimes on specious grounds, but sometimes quite sensibly. Even so, it’s the only way out.

People will object, for example, out of concern for the grievously wounded war veteran who faces a lifetime of very high medical bills. The government medical system has already been shown to fail these men and women in too many cases. Fortunately, American citizens have stepped forward, volunteering their time and money to pay for the gaps in care that the government refuses to pay. There is the Wounded Warrior Project, for example.

Fox News host, Bill OReilly, for another example, organized Americans to raise money for a motorized wheelchair called the track chair, designed to enable patients missing some or all of their limbs to get about, even in outdoor terrain. Why doesn’t the government pay for these chairs? They seem to have money for health care for illegal aliens and terrorists – why not for our wounded warriors? It’s just another example in which the government provides funds, but only to what helps politicians.

On the other hand, if the government does get involved, matters will be made worse, not better.
The health-care system has become so complex that instead of seeking a perfect solution, we must seek the least bad one. The government is so thoroughly corrupt that it will never promote a real solution.

The goal, whatever happens before we reach that goal, must be to get government completely and totally out of health care, and while we are at it, out of the schools, out of mail delivery, and out of every conceivable area where the Constitution does not explicitly require it.

That will be a bitter pill to swallow, but not a poison one.
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The 37 Consecutive Miracles that Produced America

(Written September 21, 2012)

A few years ago, I recall that a rocket scientist was asked about a particularly complex technology that had recently been successfully tested.  The scientist (I cannot remember the exact context) replied that for the technology to work, it required “thirty-seven consecutive miracles.”

He was not referring to religion, but to the fact that so many things could go wrong (see Murphy’s Law) that in order to achieve success, every last detail had to go exactly right, at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right sequence.  Otherwise, the testing would be a catastrophic failure.

Another example in which absolutely everything had to go exactly right, at exactly the right time, is the formation of the planet earth, as it is described by modern science.  From the moment of the creation of the universe, many thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (so to speak) had to fall in exactly the right places, in order for the universe to form our earth.  And that was only the beginning of a long and complex series of events that are so unlikely, that many people believe they were orchestrated by God.

And even there, we are not finished.  If one believes that the universe is a giant pinball machine where events crash about for no specific purpose, then no matter how unlikely something is, the mere fact that it did occur is sufficient, and therefore, no meaning or purpose is necessary to explain it.

But human nature is centered around purpose.  That purpose may be rudimentary, such as the gathering of food.  However, for most of us, we believe in what is referred to as a “higher purpose,” even a divine one.

When one traces human history, one is amazed at how many consecutive miracles it took for America to form as a nation.  Had any one of them gone wrong, we might be a China or an Arabia, with little or no regard for the values we cherish.

Those miracles range from the Greek victory at Thermopylae, to the Magna Carta, to the rise of Christian teachings of human rights, and to seemingly every minute detail of science, technology and even the vagaries of weather which sank the Spanish Armada.  Change but one of these many events of history, and the rise of the American Republic may well never have happened.

Yet they did happen, and they are evidence of divine guidance in human affairs, a guidance which brought to the world a nation that has been a beacon of human rights to all nations.

But suddenly, something has gone wrong, terribly wrong.  The core ideals upon which America was founded are being abandoned, undermined, and replaced with their antitheses.

We once were a nation founded upon the idea that the government is answerable to the people, that it must protect our freedoms, and that its powers are limited and specific.

Today, we see instead a government that hides behind closed doors, passes laws without having read them, and continually expands its powers in violation of the Constitution.

We have been down this road once before, when during the Jimmy Carter administration matters went terribly wrong.  But then we recovered.  We elected the right man at the right time, and President Ronald Reagan led the nation from the brink of disaster to an era of prosperity.  It seemed to many at the time that divine intervention had once more bestowed upon us thirty-seven consecutive miracles.

But matters have again brought us to the brink of ruin.  A president who shows no respect for the ideals of limited government, a government restricted to its enumerated powers, is running amok.  He has increased the national debt to the level of bankruptcy.  He openly declares that he will pass his agenda with or without the cooperation of Congress, as if he alone decided the national agenda, as if he were not president, but dictator.

If the universe we live in has no plan or purpose, if there is no Creator from whom we derive our rights, then America may well go the way of the dinosaurs.  Some future eternal nightfall may be barren of any memory of the Declaration of Independence, devoid of the ideals embodied in the Constitution.

But if there is a God, then let us look forward to the next thirty-seven miracles, each of them occurring at the right time, in the right place, in exactly the right sequence, to effect a resurrection of a nation that is foundering upon the jagged rocks of ruin.

It took miracles to produce this great nation.  It will take miracles to restore it.  Thirty-seven of them would be a good start.

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The Fifth Amendment Shields You from the Government, not the Government from You.

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Here is why Lois Lerner has no entitlement to Fifth Amendment protection:  The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, like all the items in the Bill of Rights, is designed to protect the citizens from the government, not to protect the government from the citizens whose rights were violated by the government.

It is absurd for a government official to violate the Constitutional rights of citizens, and then to hide behind that same Constitution for protection.

Therefore, when a government official knows of any illegal acts by the government, that official has an affirmative duty to report that misconduct, even if it incriminates the official.  The official is not entitled to protection from accountability for acts committed while abusing their government position.  That would reverse the intent of the Fifth Amendment.

Lerner should be imprisoned for any crimes she committed, and deserves no Fifth Amendment protections.

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Consequences

Originally published in
The Bold Pursuit, March 2014

How many clichés are needed to express what we feel, as we witness the descent of America? A train wreck? The fall of Rome? The cowardice of Darius?

 

 

Darius' flight at the Battle of Gaugamela

 

It should now be clear to everyone that the emperor has no clothes. Obama’s string of policy failures is astonishingly obvious to all but the deniers. His domestic crown jewel, ObamaCare, is destroying a health care system that needed reform, not demolition. His economic policy is to spend money we do not have, to borrow more than we can repay, and to print fiat money that is less valuable with every new round of printing. (“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero.” [Voltaire, 1694-1778]).
 

Obama’s foreign policy has weakened America and its allies, while empowering and emboldening our enemies. Events in Libya, Iran, Syria, and now Ukraine (among a dismally long list of others) have revealed to the world that Obama is a craven coward, one who speaks loudly, but carries no stick. Like a loudmouth who makes bold threats, and then runs squealing at the first sign of his opponent’s clenched fist, Barack Obama is the modern version of the Persian emperor Darius, who “led from behind,” who ordered thousands of his soldiers to their deaths, and then fled the battlefield in terror when Alexander (the not yet Great) outflanked him.
 

As Putin the Terrible calculates his next flanking move on the global chess board, Obama continues to make empty threats about supposed “consequences,” evoking from our enemies neither respect nor fear, but only derision and laughter. Checkmate. Our former allies, disheartened by Obama’s treacheries against them, are quickly abandoning us.
 

The danger in all of this is that eventually, the middle-ground options will disappear, and only the extreme options will remain available. The middle ground, negotiations from weakness, will be pointless. The extreme options are surrender or war. Surrender will be unacceptable. War will be disastrous, but inevitable, and the only question will be, will we win that war, or lose everything?
 

How did such a dreary condition come about? How did the nation of The American Revolution, the Great Depression and the Greatest Generation become a nation ruled by drug-addled former hippies who promised to halt the rise of the oceans? One can well argue that more than half of Americans believe in political tooth fairies.
 

Astonishingly large numbers of us “hope” for “change.” Too many of us fall for vague promises of saving the planet, enforcing income equality and taxing the rich to pay for futile dreams. Too many of us believe that confiscating guns from law abiding citizens will protect us from criminals.

Obsessions with Hollywood celebrities have given them a platform to persuade voters that the unconstitutional freedom of same-sex marriage is more important than the constitutional freedoms of free speech, freedom of religion, and property rights.
 

Perhaps we have cursed ourselves. Perhaps it is too late to prevent the looming disaster. We are reduced to the faint hope that from the ruins of a once-great nation, there will emerge a brighter future.
 

As Obama might have warned us, there will be consequences.

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A Danger of Cosmic Proportions

(originally published March, 2014 in)
The Bold Pursuit
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There is a growing conflict between the opposing world views of global warmists and climate-change skeptics that threatens to politicize science.

A recent public comment by an esteemed scientist, Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, host of the renewed television series, Cosmos, gave an indication of how severely this conflict might be waged.  Dr Tyson stated that in science, certain scientific facts are so firmly settled that no time should be wasted on hearing challenges to them.  The straw target that was used was the “flat earth” argument.  While this author agrees that the flat earth argument is absurd, Tyson’s assertion might be interpreted to imply that the mainstream scientific establishment itself might claim infallibility when its most cherished precepts are challenged, even when the challenge is based on reason, fact and the scientific method.  Dissenters could be dismissed as “flat earthers,” subject to ridicule and censorship.

Tyson himself would not likely promote this implication, as indicated by his quote, “We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.” Despite Tyson’s disavowal of this practice, the politicization of science has become a very real danger.  It occurred in the old Soviet Union, and there are accusations from both sides of the political spectrum that it is occurring now in the United States and other western countries.

A prominent example of this involves the phenomenon of climate change.  While everyone might agree that the earth’s climate regularly changes, the political argument is that social policy must be adjusted on the basis that climate change is (1) harmful, (2) caused by human industry, and (3) can be remedied by very intrusive government regulation.  The argument is acceptable, when both sides can be heard.  It is not acceptable when the opposing side is branded by the other as “deniers,” a clear reference to Nazi sympathizers.  It is not so much the name-calling, but the implication that the other side must be regarded as inherently evil and therefore must be silenced, that poses the danger.

Creationists are considered by many secularists to be in the same category as “deniers,” and their argument has been effectively squelched in public education.  The censorship has gone beyond merely preventing fringe creationist views from being printed in textbooks.  It has gone so far as to censor, in some quarters, any and all challenges to natural-materialist doctrine concerning evolution, even when those challenges are presented by established scientists.

While science should not be democratized, neither should it be “doctrinalized” in the manner it is becoming.  The risk of locking out the next great advance in science is only increased when censorship replaces open discourse.

 

Dr Tyson makes a good point when he says that science is “true whether or not you believe in it.”  As history has shown, however, sometimes scientific “truth” is not what scientists have said it was.  When dissenters are slandered, even when flat earthers are slandered, it is not science that is advanced, but ideology.

Obama Announces Mandatory Executive Action Solutions to Solve the Global Climate Problem Without Congress, the Courts, or Elections (Parody)

Originally published on

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

on The Bold Pursuit

Mah feller Merkins -- oops-- Ah mean, mah homie boys, wassup?

As everyone knows (except racists, homophobes and non moslems) the world climate is getting changier—sometimes colder, sometimes hotter, and sometimes even samer.

If something is not done, and right now, then matters will get even worse. Sea levels will rise, trees will grow faster, and golf courses will be destroyed.

All my life has been a preparation for this crisis.  Let me explain.

First, I destroyed the Weather Underground. Then I intervened in Syria, and after that I handled the crisis in Benghazi.  Then I warned Putin to stay out of Crimea.

When the IRS crisis arose, I immediately fired the guy who was scheduled for retirement, and as soon as he retired with his full lifetime pension, I replaced him with another guy who won't answer questions.

I promised to get to the bottom of that fake crisis, and I assure you that I will, just as soon as OJ finds the real killers.

Then I hunted down and killed Osama (no relation to me, I hope), with my bare hands and that solved once and for all the problem of world terrorism, as you can all see.

I also solved the problem with me sending guns to the drug cartels in Mexico so I could use that crisis to repeal the Second Amendment, and while we're at it, the others as well. 

Finally, I made sure that all veterans seeking care at the VA Hospitals got timely treatment, unless they didn't, but that was Bush’s fault, along with everything else.

So, as you see, I am the one man who can solve the global warming/cooling/neithering crisis, which will cause the seas to rise or fall or both. 

My comprehensive program to end all CO2 emissions includes shutting down all industries that I don’t like, and then after that, well, that’s all there is to it.

See how easy that is?  When other countries see how nice we are, then they too will impoverish their own nations by shutting down all industries that I do not like, and then we will all benefit because although the climate will keep going just as it always has, nobody will know about it, because I will control all the news.

Well, time for golf.
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