Fighting for the Future

The house is quiet this afternoon so I thought I’d sit down to write for a while.  This is kind of a stream of consciousness post.

In news from the internet this week.

1.     The Democratic Party is seeking to change the time for the next State of the Union address from the evening to the afternoon so RBG won’t miss her bedtime.

2.    Speaking of Justice Ginsberg – she says she is good for 5 more years.  I guess she has already decided the DNC doesn’t have a prayer in 2018 or 2020 elections. 

3.    All the experts who predicted HRC had a 99% chance of being President are now certain the Democrats will sweep the mid-terms.  Personally, I’m feeling just a little better about the Republicans chances now.

4.    I guess someone has run up the government cost estimate for Bernie Sander’s proposal for “Medicare for All.”  If I read it right, it comes in at about $33,000,000,000,000.68.  This is without assuming allowances for graft, corruption, and greed.  Since we are about to bust the bank on Social Security and it is the kids who want it I say “Let’s do this thing!”  So what if we turn into another Venezuela?  On the bright side, it should end that whole legal versus illegal immigration problem as the attractiveness of coming to America disappears.

5.    Speaking of Venezuela – the rising star for the DNC is avowed Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first-time

candidate for New York’s 14^th District, widely supported by other first-time candidates, who seems to have benefited from all that a quality education at Boston University can offer.  Like most candidates, big on ideas, a little short on reality.

6.    People who view themselves as comedians continue to believe their political opinions are important and have expressed them in some interesting ways.  For the record, I didn’t find Carrot Top’s brand of entertainment all that appealing, but to each his own.  Pissing in public kind of falls into that same category.

7.     Trump Derangement Syndrome has now been classified by mental health professionals (and I use that term loosely) as Trump Anxiety Disorder.  They suggest counseling, group hugs, and binge watching of the historical documentary “Frozen.”

8.    John Brennen, former closet communist and former head of the CIA has voiced concern that President Trump is a Putin Puppet.  The communists (Lenin) had a term for sympathizers of their doctrine who lived in capitalist

societies like America, I think the term was “Useful Idiots.”  I think this works well to describe John Brennen.  I could describe President Trump in a number of ways, but a puppet for someone else?  Never.

In the words of Mel Blanc… “That’s all folks!”

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

As we settle into this new community we have been blessed with good neighbors.  They are friendly, a little curious, and maintain a fairly predictable routine.

George and Gracie stopped by this morning to meet Momma kitty.

Unalienable Rights

Today we are bombarded with all kinds of outrage and anger over all kinds of issues ranging from important to petty.  The internet of things and its social media portals are full of rants and counter-rants about things like free speech, gun ownership, equality of minorities (in both race and sexual orientation), the effects of mankind on the environment, whether the news is fake or real, the Donald, and what are the rights of people who like plastic straws in Santa Monica, California. 

I had a conversation a while ago about the morality of something and drew my position from the words in our Declaration of Independence. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The dictionary defines unalienable as “not to be separated, given away, or taken away.”  It does not define why something is unalienable, or who decides it is so.  Our founding fathers made it quite clear.  They believed the rights came from the Creator (God as one would define for themselves) and man did not have it in his power to alter those rights.  The conversation ended -- but it left me with a pretty big question.

As society begins to reject the idea of a Creator, as more and more people believe the idea of a God is irrational, as our society moves away from religion and a shared belief in a supreme being what makes any right unalienable? 

To carry it a step further, what makes any human interaction moral or immoral?  How do we decide what is and isn’t morally acceptable?

We pride ourselves on being a nation that believes in the equality of the law.  We have a court system that is supposed to act as a check to the legislative and executive branch’s abuse of power by holding them to the standards defined in our constitution, but one of the big controversies between the left and the right today is – should that actually be the case, or are the “right-minded” justices picked by the Democrats somehow endowed with a special wisdom to discern what is morally best for the nation.  Will these nine men, women (and perhaps someday non-gender identified) people become the equivalent of the gods of Olympus where they cast down their judgments of how society is to be?  Will they become the supreme power to decide what is unalienable and what isn’t, or are they already that?  But wait, they have no direct authority on the vast majority of the world, so who does?

I see this playing out before my eyes as one side condemns and the other supports behavior that was just a year ago morally abhorrent.  We, in almost the same breath, condemn the sexual abuse of children and defend the rights of a pedophile.  How can that be?  Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of the internet of things… it is like the public space in an asylum where outrageous debates used to occur, but it is louder and larger then we can really grasp and it is next to impossible to separate the legitimate voices of the sane from the insane.

For me, I will continue to keep my own council and rest easy with the acceptance of a Supreme moral authority who has provided me with certain unalienable rights.  But I do worry about those who choose not to accept my right to life, liberty, and happiness as anything more than what is given by the state, and who want the state to restrict those fundamental concepts.

Life with Gracie and George

This past evening Gracie and George stopped by to see what was up with our cats, Momma and Allie.  They stood by the windows for about 30 minutes, eventually calling another pair of Sandhill Cranes to come see the new furry things in the neighborhood.  Of course, the cats weren’t too sure what to make of the big birds and weren’t too anxious to get up close and personal.

I’d say for a first meeting it seemed to go pretty well.  The funny thing in this whole experience is how Allie is now the alpha cat.  Since we’ve had her she has always been the shrinking violet, timid and apparently afraid of her own shadow.  We had an older male named “Bama” who made sure she knew her place.  We had to put Bama down about a month before we moved, and in the process brought a semi-feral cat into the house.  Although this new arrival is bigger than Allie, there is no doubt as to who is the alpha. I guess with cats it’s, who's been here the longest.

Anywho, Allie was the first to venture out to the windows to hang with the birds and Mary Lou.  After a while, the cranes called for some of their friends to come to see the new neighbor sand another pair flew in. 

Mary Lou had opened a window so she could talk with the cranes and they both seemed to be communicating with her.  She would talk, they would listen.  I am not sure what they actually thought about her conversation, but at least they were polite and didn’t seem to get upset as she explained the problems with international trade, which has led to this latest dust-up with China and Europe.

Meanwhile, I sat in the living room where I could watch this all unfold.  Unfortunately, I never think about pictures until after the fact.  Next time I will try and remember the visual arts.

By the way, does anyone know how to repair Bossons Heads?  The ones I bought my father when I was a Lt. have seen a bit of rough wear and are in need of some filling and touch up.

Borders versus the Boarders

These days we regularly hear about the porous nature of our southern border.  Far more so than in history and the reasons are fairly simple to understand, but before we talk about them we should consider some of that history.  I know, I know, no one likes to consider what was as we talk about what is, but bear with me on this.

When we became a nation, we had the British colony of Canada to the north, one really big ocean (and the Gulf of Mexico) and a whole lot of land to the west filled with the natives we had not yet met or displaced.  True – there were a bunch of French guys running around trading with the natives and France and Spain kept swapping the land back and forth, but it was mostly empty so it wasn’t that big a deal for a nation trying to figure out what being a nation meant.

Then we began to expand, and Tommy J heard Napoleon wanted some cash to invade England and was looking to sell off the land he’d just gotten back from Spain.  Tommy J saw this as a win-win, so for the bargain basement price of around 5.5 cents a square mile we got land that formed most of what are now 13 states.  Of course, no one asked the natives how they felt about this, but that is another story.  At the end of the day we still had the pesky British to the north, an ocean to the east and south, only now the land to the west was claimed by Spain.

At the time the only people migrating anywhere was us.  By us I mean the U.S.  We were welcoming people arriving by boat from Europe, still had people arriving from Africa (although not voluntarily), and had large families seeking new lands for their homesteads so we began to push west.  At the time the only people concerned with immigration were the British and Spanish as they tried to keep us from invading their holdings in North America.  Interestingly we fought additional wars with both of them over this whole manifest destiny and U.S. rights thing.  First the British in 1812, and then Mexico in 1846.  (Of course, Texas had its own war with Mexico, but that too is another story.)  After the Mexico thing, we got to thinking about actually defining our borders, so we and everyone else (except the native Americans) finally settled on them by 1850.  (I know there were interim agreements along the way, but it wasn’t until after the Mexican-American war that we actually sat down with the English to sort out the northern border all the way to the Pacific.)

Since we had all this land, not so many people, and the government didn’t give too much thought about drugs and whiskey (other than for tax purposes), the whole idea of border security was pretty much confined to the folks along the border.  Once we got that whole thing with the 49^th parallel sorted out we didn’t worry too much about the British (Canadians), and except for the Rio Grande occasionally shifting its path the Mexico thing was pretty stable as well.  Then we had a civil war and the issues of border security raised its ugly head as we in the North tried to make sure the South didn’t get any outside help.  “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” came from one of those efforts as Davy Farragut attempted to close down the port of Mobile, Alabama.

After the war, we all pretty well agreed on the idea that while borders were important, ours were pretty safe since it didn’t look like either the Canadians or Mexicans were all the anxious to invade us.  We put some big guns up along the coast just in case the pesky Europeans got some idea we were easy, but we controlled the European and Asian immigration through the major seaports of the east and west coasts.  This seemed to work pretty well for the next hundred years or so and then air travel came around and we had to add a bunch of immigration control to the major airports.  But the borders with Canada and Mexico remained pretty much as it had been with entry points every so often and agents mostly looking for contraband going in both directions. 

As an aside, Prohibition had pointed out the porous nature of our borders, but when we repealed the amendment we went back to everything was okay.  Both the Democrats and the Republicans pretty much agreed “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” or “we have better things to do.”

Then we declared a war on drugs and all the unlearned lessons of Prohibition and smuggling came back into play.  Along the way, slavery made a reappearance primarily in the sex trade, but also in some other areas like housekeeping for the rich people in the big cities.  With each new revelation, Congress did what it does and threw money at the problem, trying to figure out how to keep up with the entrepreneurs who were making millions in moving people and drugs from South America to meet the demands in North America.

One day fairly recently, the Democrats and their party looked around and noticed their historical base was disappearing as they moved further and further left in their socio-economic positions.  This meant they had to either change those positions or find a new base.  They’ve chosen to find a new base – people who’ve come to this country without following the legal process.  Republican’s call these people illegal aliens.  Democrats call them unregistered voters.  This fall it will be interesting to see what the majority of voters call them.

President Trump came into the 2016 election playing to the economic concerns of the average middle-class voter, promising to improve the economy, restore pride in the country, and build a wall to stem the migration of people from South and Central America.  So far, he’s done a pretty reasonable job of improving the economy, the pride question is still up for debate since ½ the country seems to be deranged in their hatred of him as a human being let alone as President, and the wall remains on his to-do list.

For what it’s worth -- I think building a wall will do next to nothing to stop the migration of people from the South.  The only way that happens is if the economic picture for Central America and Mexico improves so there are fewer reasons for the people to leave.  That, unfortunately, is a problem we can’t fix, and it doesn’t seem the authorities in the affected countries are all that eager to change the status quo.

So, for the foreseeable future, we will get millions of new boarders here in the land of opportunity.  If the democratic party gets its way they will all vote.  The question is will they vote democratic, or will they see other options as providing a better chance of improving their economic prospects?

An Opinion on This Week's Opinions

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This week the President traveled to Europe to play golf on his course in Scotland, chat up the Queen, aggravate the leadership of NATO and get the press all lathered up over his comments.  Before he came home he stopped by Finland to talk with Vlad about that Russia versus USA thing, again lathering up the press, and most of the professional politicians and political analysts (who really pass along opinions not facts) in the press.

This week opinions on the President range from shrugs by his supporters to the continuing cries for his impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors” against the Republic because he didn’t defend the intelligence bureaucracy when a reporter put the question to the President while he was standing next to Vladimir.

I imagine (which is a fancy way of saying I have an opinion), the week came off pretty close to how the President intended.  He was the center of attention, he pissed off the people he wanted, and he remains the center of a fractured opposition that has so many different agendas it can’t focus on a single target.

In World War II when Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) was developed and began directing gunfire they (and there are multiple they) had to come up with ways to defeat it.  For example, they found that throwing out tiny strips of aluminum would cloud the picture on the RADAR scope.  They called this technique “Window,” today we call it chaff. 

I tend to believe 90+% of what comes from the lips or fingers of the President is only semi-spontaneous.  I think 100% it has two purposes.  The first is to keep the spotlight of the world on him, and the second is to scatter so much chaff that nothing really hits home because of the short attention span of the press, his political opposition, and the population.  They go from chaff burst to chaff burst with their outrage, always just missing the real issues that brought him to office in the first place.

While homeland defense, nuclear security, border security and world peace are all admirable things they are also well outside the control of the average citizen.  A viable economy, with available jobs, affordable housing, and disposable cash are really the things that get Presidents elected.  In the words of Bill Clinton as he campaigned against Bush (the elder): (it’s) “the economy, stupid.”  During the 2016 campaign, the DNC (in the form of Hillary Clinton) abandoned the critical states where a stagnant economy was making life miserable choosing to focus on the grand social issues so important to those clustered in the urban Northeast and West coast.  Truth be told, I think Hillary just found it more comfortable hanging with her friends and campaigned based on the flawed opinions of her political analysts.    

Until the press, and more importantly the political opposition, begin to move away from their outrageous opinions and start dealing with the facts of what are important to the average middle-class citizen the grand show of Trump v the World will continue and the President has proven himself to be a master at orchestrating that three-ring circus, but that is just my opinion.

It's a Beautiful Day

Thank you, Fred Rogers.

As we continue to settle into our new home, the theme song from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood periodically runs through my head.  Fred came along well after my childhood, but certainly in time for my children.  His show was carried by Public Broadcasting and showed the power of federally funded broadcasting.  Along with Sesame Street, he influenced a generation of children, who are now parents themselves, but I wonder what happened to the lessons he tried to teach?

Where has the gentleness, civility, and compassion that were the focus of his lessons gone?  During his time, he was often the focus of “adult” humor, which focused on the childish nature of his show. Did we actually choose to teach our children that as they grow they must transition from the gentleness of a child to a ruder, uncivil nature to be an adult?  Were his lessons so transitory they are easily replaced by the next set of messages pushed by the entertainment industry?  An industry that has brought us the violence and vulgarity of what is now Hollywood’s stock in trade?  Or the social media giants of FaceBook and Twitter who offer us the ability to speak (or write) before thinking, with the assumption our voice is the most important of all the voices.

I think I will begin a nightly routine of chatting with Gracie and George as they seem to listen, at least for now.

Times Change, People Don't.

On Monday night, at just a few minutes past 9 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time, the President announced his nomination for the vacating Justice Kennedy.  Justice Kennedy was President Reagan’s choice and has served honorably on the Court since the 1980s.  He has turned out to be a critical swing vote that neither the left nor the right expected when, as the choice to replace the failed nomination of Robert Bork, he was confirmed by the Senate.  For those who might not remember -- Senator Ted Kennedy made it his personal mission to deny Bork the seat and began what has now become the acrimonious approval process we see today.

We have now reached a point where political action groups draft their support or opposition to the candidate based not on the credentials of the nominee but on who is nominating him or her, waiting only to fill in the right name.  Or, as we see with the Woman’s March, occasionally forgetting to fill it in before releasing their statements.

I imagine we will see over the next several weeks the true impacts of our declining civility.  We’ve already seen Senators who oppose the selection publicly snub Judge Kavanaugh as they play to their fan base, and of course the talking points of the DNC reflect the typical “end of life as we know it” fear mongering that women will lose all control of their reproductive rights the instant he is sworn in.  It will be interesting to see if the Republicans and Democrats remain in partisan lockstep or if a few Senators will actually vote based on their true (informed) opinion of his qualifications.

Once again, I have to tip my hat to the visionary (now former) Democratic leadership of the Senate who, to overcome the Republican’s minority opposition, removed the historical right to filibuster and require a 60-vote approval for confirmation of judges have set the stage for a simple majority vote.  Thank you, Harry Reid.

Is Space Really the Final Frontier?

The opening line to Star Trek seems a good place to start as we consider our future.  The hopes and humanity depicted by Gene Rodenberry in his 1960s classic, and the franchise that followed is inspiring.  In his model of the Federation he shows the alpha life forms of a whole variety of planets working together for the greater good, but! 

For a story to be interesting it needs to have characters in conflict, for without some form of conflict where is the interest?  Just like the old westerns, there are the good guys, bad guys, and a reason for them to be at odds with each other.  Star Trek followed this classic format just like all great stories.  But life does not usually mirror art, so I have to wonder will we arrive at a point in our humanity where we emulate the grandness of the Federation?  Where we are always the good guys and the distinction between good and evil is simple and clear-cut.

There are those who see a unified earth with a benevolent central government seeking what is best for all humankind.  They are the same people who thought European nationalism led to the conflicts of the great world wars.  At the same time, there are those who look at the darker nature of humankind and see the almost unlimited power such an organization would have as being incredibly dangerous to the rights of an individual.  Those who argue for a strong world government are the same progressive visionaries who set out to create that organization, and thus end what they viewed as a central cause of war, namely the nationalism that led to empire building in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  After the first World War and then again after the second they created first with the League of Nations and then with the United Nations, a building block to end the rush to war, but something has gone awry. 

War has not ended, and at least for me, it is still next to impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys here on our little planet.  The good guys and bad guys are all a matter of perspective.  Didn’t the Klingons view themselves as the good guys, ultimately siding with the Federation as they battled those other bad guys the Romulans?

We see in the liberal-progressive movement the supposedly grand ideas about the better nature of mankind, but also a deep intolerance to anyone who doesn’t buy into those ideas.  (It is almost as if all the liberals suffer from the same human failings as those wayward conservatives.)  At the heart of the approach is how a government is responsible for the making life great for those who can’t make their own lives great.  It is, in a funny kind of way, interesting the historical definition of liberal has been altered to reflect the current intolerance to competing approaches to government.

In all the discussion of bigger government what I never see is an answer on how large it will need to be to overcome the human frailties of intolerance, self-interest, racism, and greed.  Nor do I see any discussion (other than tax the rich) on where the funds for this endeavor will really come from.  By the way, how much did it cost the Federation to create its fleet of starships to defend the empire?  Who actually bore the cost of that endeavor?  In the telling of Star Trek, I don’t think Gene actually laid out the financial structure that made money obsolete, but certainly not all planets were created equal from a natural resource standpoint, were they?  Were all those other “unnamed” members of the Federation expected to ante up the same amount as Earth, after all, we got to be in charge and only a few of them got to serve on the Federation starships?  Obviously, they had their own vessels but you never see them called to save the outposts near the neutral zone, do you? 

In looking at the society we’ve become -- I wonder if we are taking our ideas of society from the fictional stories we’ve grown up watching.  When we take our ideas of social utopia from fiction I wonder how much of human nature we are willing to ignore before it all comes crashing down from the reality of that nature?  After all, Karl Marx saw a worker’s paradise in the form of Communism, but the reality of the Soviet Union presented a far bleaker life for almost everyone not at the top of the political food chain.

There Must Be an Option

As I consider the problems we face in our society a single question always comes up.  What are the options to fix them?  There are always options, it is just that we frequently dismiss the unattractive or disagreeable.  It is always easier to blame others than consider the potential we are wrong, but that option is always available to those who think rationally about any issue.

In my professional life, I was an aerial navigator.  It was my job to guide an aircraft when there were only limited aids to establish a position and determine a course to arrive at the desired destination.  In that role, I always had to determine what options were available to me, and question whether I was making the right choices.  Failure to question myself, and double check my work could result in us not finding our way, missing our objective or landing safely.

Today, it seems as if most people are absolutely convinced of their moral superiority and the correctness of their positions.  I often wonder how many of them are really lost and only bluffing their way through the debate.  It reminds me of an old navigator joke.

A brand-new navigator is assigned to a crusty old pilot on a C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft. They are planning to fly from the east coast to Europe.  This is the navigators first trip.   As they prepare to take the active runway the pilot pulls his 38-caliber pistol from the holster and lays it on the center throttle console.  The young navigator asks “what is that for?”  The pilot says, “it’s in case you get me lost.”  At that point, the navigator pulls his own pistol from his holster and lays it on the navigation table.  The pilot notices this and asks, “what’s that for?”  To which the navigator replies, “I’ll know we’re lost before you will.”

Today we have a two-party system.  It has served the nation reasonably well for these past 230(ish) years.  But what happens when the parties become so committed to the minority voices they can no longer hear the cries of the majority?  The basic premise the nation was founded on was the rights of the individual must be protected, but we have now reached a point where the vocal minorities are demanding the rights of the individual must be subservient to their political desires, and the two (main) political parties seem incapable of quieting the voices pulling them to the extreme positions.

I see a number of options on how this will ultimately play out, but I am not sure any of them offer a clear path back to the Republic I was taught to love and protect.

Beyond the Slippery Slope

I am saddened so many have done such a miserable job in understanding our society, fostering positive changes to it, and imparting an understanding of its core values to the younger generations.  Anyone who has been paying attention over the past 30 or so years has watched as step by step we have moved from a cooperative government to one where vilifying the opposition is far more important than achieving the foundational concepts of the Constitution that created our nation.

On July 4^th, 1776 representatives from the 13 colonies released the Declaration of Independence, formalizing our split from King George and forever altering our fortune.  With the uncertainty of success far greater than the knowledge of the outcome, we set out on the path to becoming our own nation.

After a shaky start with a confederation, representatives of the 13 states came together again in 1787 to create our Constitution.  It has served us so well for almost 230 years but is now under attack from those who’ve given little thought to anything other than their own desires.  We have created a non-communication stream where opinion has replaced information, where emotion has replaced reason, and where the population is forced to pick a side and suffer the consequences – as those in opposition to that side have now moved from ad hominin attacks to physical intimidation.

As I settle into this new community I’ve had several conversations with residents and in the course of one of them the issue of “self-discipline,” or the lack thereof, of the young came up.  It got me to thinking.  Where does the idea that a child should have self-discipline come from?  It seems to me it is hard to expect a child to understand the need to restrain their actions if the parents and teachers don’t impart the idea of consequences to personal choice as part of their training?  I grant that for every gross generalization there will be exceptions, but on the whole, if we don’t train our children in the rules of a society the collapse of that society would seem inevitable.

I wonder, is that failure on our part to train our children to understand that words and actions have consequences become a root cause of our problems?

We have reached a point in our society where we have politicians calling for their supporters to engage in violence, and there is no condemnation from their political allies.  We see celebrities call for the killing of political opponents and there is no outrage from their fans.  We have private citizens now assaulting other citizens simply because they don’t agree with their political statements, and we see businesses publicly humiliate patrons because they don’t like the President.  Each of these events, if taken in isolation, is bad enough but taken together it really causes me to wonder.  Have we reached a nexus, where society will begin to return to a civil approach or will we sink into anarchy as the two-party system collapses and the extreme elements are left to pick up the scraps?