We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident

On November 19th, 1863 in his dedication speech at the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Abraham Lincoln concluded with these words, “… and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The question we seem confronted with today is do we, as a nation, still believe we are a government for the people?

We came into being as a rebellion against the aloof government of Great Britain where we had no direct say in the laws we were expected to obey, and a King who had little interest in the colonies except as a way to reduce his debts from wars with France, both here in the colonies and in Europe.

Does our government continue to provide the natural freedoms we articulated when we declared our independence from the motherland?  Do we have life, liberty, and the chance for happiness?  It seems the answer clearly depends on what you believe are your self-interests, as well as your belief in the rhetoric of the political parties who seek the power to govern and the wealth that comes from such power.

As we separated ourselves from Great Britain it seemed most people accepted the idea of a weak central government and stronger rights of the several colonies.  When that proved unworkable, we wrote a constitution that outlined the limits of a stronger central government.  Over the years we have changed in our expectations of equality and the Constitution has changed as well.  With each President, the power of the Executive has grown and the checks of that power by the Congress and the Court have been rather an exception than a routine.

The expectations of the citizens have changed as well.  We now ask more and more of the Government, yet seem to have less and less appreciation of what those demands entail.  The politicians we elect are more than happy to play to those demands to maintain their positions of privilege. In bending every which way to meet the demands of the loudest voices do people who run our governments (local, state, and federal) remain “for the people?”

As I watch the “hands-off” approach of the Democratic party to the civil unrest, the decay of the cities, and the rhetoric of the senior leadership of the DNC about those who support the President as “domestic terrorists,” it seems obvious what people the party seeks to represent.

Then again, if we choose to talk about civility, we have the President who seems to relish the whirlwinds and dust devils he kicks up daily as he uses the office to bring attention to himself.  The question I face is what is the personal cost as I have to choose between the lesser of two evils?

On The Wrong Side of History

The other day The Honorable Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out something or other about those who work for President Trump being on the “wrong side of history.”  I had to pause for a minute or two so as not to spit out my coffee over that deep thought.  This statement, coming from a representative of a generation who believes they needn’t study history and can rewrite the past to reflect the political thinking of today is truly laughable.

By all indications from the media who we all know they are the Guardians of Democracy (‘cause that’s what they keep telling us), the millennial generation has set themselves up as the truth givers of America’s morality, even if it means denying biological fact and indoctrinating children into the suitability of alternative sexual orientations.

You know who is on the wrong side of history?  Those who would corrupt legal processes to gain and maintain power.  They are the people who cry loudest about the abuse of power while rallying the mob to corrupt those legal processes so they may gain the power themselves.  That is unless they win.  Then they get to write the history as they would like.

If you would like a good example of how this works, I recommend watching the first episode of an old HBO series called John Adams.  In this episode, we see the Sons of Liberty, led by Sam Adams railing against the British, while his cousin John attempts to walk a centrist line based on the law.  In this scene, John Hancock calls for a British Agent to be tarred (and feathered).  That is how mob rule works.  Not so much different now then it was then.

The question for all of us in society today is who will be the heroes of tomorrow since the great moral questions and the political climate is really about control of long-standing political privilege and power.  Will it be those outsiders who attempt to use a corrupt system to turn it against itself, or will it be those party loyalists who appeal to the mob?

Transitions

Over the course of almost seven decades on this earth I’ve seen countless transitions in our society.  Some are memorable, some are laughable, and others are best put behind us.  Let’s review.

I was born at the beginning of the 1950s.  We were at war again, this time in Korea as we faced the threats we envisioned from communist expansion.  Here at home, we had Senator Joseph McCarthy attempting to improve his political fortunes by rooting out the communists in our nation.  For some context on this, in the 1930s communism was all the rage among the social elites of Hollywood and the Ivy League.  Joe played on the fears of the nation and the threat of nuclear war to ruin the lives of many good people in an effort to root out the threat of communism to our society.  As we learn in our history various industries created “blacklists” of people who had voiced their support of communism in the pre-WW2 era and during the war when the Soviet Union was an Ally.

In 1952, the nation elected retired General of the Army and President of Columbia University Dwight D. Eisenhower to begin a period of relative calm, albeit with frequent nuclear attack drills at school.  We, as a nation, began to put Senator McCarthy behind us, but its damage had already been done and those identified as communist sympathizers were ostracized.  There also lurked, just below the surface, the issues of racial discrimination and abuse of the minorities in the nation.  We had a large standing military with permanent bases in North Africa, Europe, and the Far East.  The great transition of that decade was the gradual replacement of the New Deal generation leaders in positions of power under Roosevelt to the young Turks who had served in the World War.  Names like Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and John F. Kennedy began to emerge as power brokers on the political stage.  The 1950s are characterized by critics as a “gray decade” where there were no great social upheavals, but that is a false characterization.  The men and woman who had won the World War were busy building their families and chasing the American Dream.  They began the migration of families into the suburbs that continue today.  At the same time, the NAACP successfully challenged the standing policy of “separate but equal” that made the Negros second class citizens despite the amendments specifically passed after the civil war to create a state of equality.  For the record that judgment was “Brown v Board of Education.”

With the election of John F. Kennedy, we see the passing of the torch from one generation to the next.  JFK and his wife were the clear favorites of the social elite and the media fawned over his rise much as English storytellers celebrated King Arthur and Guinevere.  In fact, with his inauguration, Washington DC was crowned the new Camelot.  For three years we had TV tours of the White House and common people across the country strove to emulate the new King and his Queen.  What the media and the nation didn’t pay too much attention to was the role the FBI played in suppressing political dissent and racial equality as J. Edger Hoover kept track of people he deemed dangerous.  Also, the President seemed to stumble from one crisis to another in his foreign affairs.  First, he approved, but failed to support, an invasion of Cuba, then we had a confrontation with the USSR over placement of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Ballistic Missiles in Cuba (in response to ours in Turkey), next the beginnings of the racial struggles of the blacks in the southern states and his rather slow reactions to condemn the political leadership of the states, which were predominately Democratic.  Like Arthur, his reign was destined to be cut short, but the movements of the time went forward under Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Under President Johnson, we saw an increase in civil rights protest and violence in the South, but in Washington, the Republicans supported the President and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by roughly a 70% to 30% in both houses.  With a few exceptions, the nay votes were mostly by geographical rather than party lines.  The sixties also saw the development of more violent extremism in civil protest over the war and civil rights.  The baby-boomer generation was coming of age, but not yet prepared to replace the generation of the depression and world war.  In fact, it would be another 30 years until that the Greatest Generation would pass the mantle of the Presidency to the baby-boomers.

As the 1960s progressed we heard a lot about the peace movement, but as today the name was mostly an illusion.  The members of the movement weren’t all that peaceful, in fact at times they were violently anti-war.  Despite them, my generation created some great music as we moved away from the swing and country music of our parents into rock and roll and rockabilly of Sun Records, the Motown sounds of Detroit, the harmonies of the Jersey boys and West Coast surfer and car groups, and then the English invasion.  Along the way, the President, Secretary of Defense and his political advisors thought they could micromanage a war and the Asian communists would cooperate.  That war cost LBJ any hope for reelection in 1968 and brought us Richard Millhouse Nixon and the beginnings of the open media condemnation of a particular politician/political party.

One of the things an unfunded war, a race to the Moon, and the great social experiments (the Great Society) of LBJ did was to fuel an economy where inflation began to skyrocket.  By the time Jimmy Carter assumed the office of President we saw interest rates on loans and mortgages routinely sitting in the mid-teens, and prices rising on almost a daily basis.  The government, under Nixon, Ford, and Carter attempted to get control of this issue by setting price controls and price guidelines.  From my perspective, they seemed to do very little to actually improve an economy that saw the large manufacturing enterprises of textiles, clothing, steel, and automotive begin to move their plants overseas where the labor was cheaper.  This was all done with the approval, or benign consent, of the government (both Congress and the Executive) who gave little concern over the individual lives that would be impacted.  

In the 1980s we saw the President enter into a period of deficit spending as he began the process of rebuilding and modernized the military, which had borne the brunt of government spending cuts as the previous administrations had diverted funds to social program and attempted to gain control of a stagnant economy and growing inflation.  The Reagan administration’s position was if you could encourage the expansion of industry the money would ultimately trickle down to the poorer workers.  Of course, this was branded as foolishness by those who knew better but had never been responsible for actual job creation. By the end of the decade, President Reagan had won a cold war that had been going on since the end of the Second World War.  The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of trying to match the economic power of the U.S.  In 1990 we had moved from a world of competing superpowers to the last remaining superpower.  It was a position that would not last long.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we began another transition as we sought to downsize the recently bolstered military to divert funding to social programs.  Unfortunately for Iraq they misread the tea leaves and thought they could gain the oil of Kuwait while we were distracted.  I suspect they thought the same old dual superpower standoff would protect them.  They were wrong.  What they presented was the perfect tank war the US had built its conventional military to fight.  They used Soviet tactics and equipment and we had Air-Land Battle doctrine we had trained to for almost 20-years.  It wasn’t even close.

The next transition was the 1992 election where we passed the mantle from the Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers.  I think anyone looking at governments over the next 30ish years would be dismayed at how poorly the Baby Boomers have handled the governing of this nation.  Whether it is the relaxed sexual standards or the loss of faith as a central basis for morality, we have been less than brilliant at setting a course for the nation that offers it hope for success.  With the ascendency of the Boomers, we have brought with us all the ME ideas that have led us, as parents, to demand participation awards for just showing up.

In the 90s we saw the further refinement of personality politics where the faux moral outrage of one political party fueled the impeachment efforts and division of purpose.  It was to become the springboard for the personality politics we enjoy today.  I can only assume it also serves as the basis for today’s faux moral outrage of the other party since as Newton discovered for every force exerted on a body there is an equal and opposite force. (3^rd law)

Along the way, we have discovered a new enemy fueled by the fundamental Islamic faith, whose followers are willing to die to advance the visions of their faith.  I am not sure how this new zealotry will continue, but the terror networks they create are next to impossible to destroy by conventional state diplomacy.

What my generation passed along to its children is, unfortunately, disrespect for civil discourse and the impressions that only those who agree with you are worth listening to.  We see these lessons every day in the new electronic global village our technological skill has created.  It is an environment our children have grown up with and are much more skilled at manipulating than its inventors of my generation, but it seems to be working differently than its inventors imagined.

We have also indoctrinated our children into the belief that youth have a unique wisdom that surpasses that of the older generations.  Perhaps that comes from the same place as the participation trophies?

As we approach this upcoming election it does not appear the boomer generation is ready to pass the torch or Gen X/Millennial crowds are all that ready to assume it.  What is clear though we have transitioned from an age of cooperation within government to one of open hostility between opposing political beliefs.  Serving their own interests, the media is happy to engage in rumor-mongering rather than factual reporting if it serves to further their corporate and personal political agendas.  In an electronic age speed rather than accuracy is the standard for most news outlets.

I wonder, what and when will be the next transition?

I Wonder?

I’m so old I remember when both mainstream parties held a spectrum of political views ranging from conservative to progressive.  The Republicans of the Northeast were different from those of the West.  The Democrats of the North and North Central states were significantly more liberal than those of the Southern States.  In my opinion this all began to change when the parties introduced the primary system to ostensibly allow a greater voice to the members, but then the political activists took charge of shaping the primaries and the party platforms.  Now we seem to have two parties racing towards the extremes with decreasingly little concern with middle of the road solutions.

Years from now when the Millennials are old and complaining about how that younger generation just doesn’t understand the struggles of life and the decay of society what will they be posting on the thought machines of the day?

Will they be identified by some aspiring thought leader/social influencer as the “Greater than the Greatest Generation?” Will they replace the one our great social influencer Tom Brokaw knighted for their role in surviving the great depression, winning a globe-spanning war, fought the communist threat to liberty, recognized social inequity, expanded the social safety nets, and created the most robust economy in the world for over 60 years?

Will this Millennial generation actually learn from the lessons of the past or will they duplicate all the mistakes of our generation?

Unfortunately, from my vantage point, it appears to me they are falling into the same traps my generation fell into.  Whether they recognize it or not they are being herded along, like so many sheep, by those who view the society our generation has built as evil and destructive.  Each day it seems we move just a step closer to the doom portrayed in the post-world war writings of George Orwell.  The newest crop of social influencers seems to happily climb on board with vilifications of opponents, by the politicians and celebrities who are clearly in it for the fame, wealth, and the power it offers and in so doing accelerates us down a path of division.

For example, my generation railed against a war that cost America 58,000 lives and the after-effects, which have impacted the entire generation but go willingly along with wars that were okay with the press when the cost didn’t seem too high.  Now we are in another war without end, with no apparent way to get out.  If the President does anything the opposition will point out how dangerous that is and how unsafe the world will be.  Far easier to just keep spending the money and the lives.  For the newest generation coming of age this war doesn’t seem to be nearly as critical as making sure the right minority groups receive favorable press coverage, the majority religions and races are vilified for their dominance, the right people are let into the bathrooms of their choice, or if drag queens can read to toddlers.

Ask yourself are there fewer terror groups, or less hatred of minorities today than when my generation rose up in civil protest?  We fielded our own extremist groups, just as the millennial generation is doing, but in 50 years what will they look back on as actual accomplishments?  We had the weather underground setting off bombs in protest of the war, they have Antifa beating up people in the streets of Portland in protest of differing political opinions.  We had the freedom riders and protests in the South to end segregation and racial hatred, today they have the talking heads on television telling us we are all still racist and owe African-Americans money for what the slave traders of Africa and slave owners in America did.

Our politics are still dominated by boomer generation leftovers.  On the one side is an individual who made his wealth in private enterprise, on the other are people who made their wealth through the largess of government and their political connections. 

Like so many Pied Pipers of Hamelin, they offer a utopian world to the youngest generations now coming into adulthood.  They are describing how they, and they alone, know how to save the planet from itself or how to reduce the populations of continents living in despite poverty by funding their abortions.  Offhand, that sounds a lot like a call to return to the progressive idea of eugenics where the global elites believe it is their right and responsibility to limit the births of those who can least afford children (see: Margaret Sanger).  Of course, the moral superiority of those destined to rule the world is beyond reproach, but to a simple person like me, it seems pretty racist.  But then I remember when we were dismayed by the Chinese state policy of one child and the resultant death of so many female children.  Perhaps the new science of non-specific gender identification will make reproduction irrelevant and everyone for at least one last generation can be asexual and no children will be born, thus solving at least one social issue and one environmental problem.

They say hindsight is 20/20, but in the modern world who looks back to say, well that was a stupid idea then and I think it will be a stupid choice now.

I wonder?

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, But We Do

A statement originally made in an advertising campaign for the United Negro College Fund, the thought was brought home to me today as I watched the twitter fights regarding the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, gun rights, AR-15 ownership, and God.  Unfortunately for us we have a lot of wasted minds, which is only made worse by our desire to reject God.

It seems obvious we no longer study history, civics, or religion and as a result almost anyone younger than say 45 with access to twitter knows next to nothing about the creation of our nation and the age of enlightenment.

Things We Should Ban – Because They Kill People

I’ve been thinking about this whole gun ban thingy and I’ve got to agree we should ban anything and everything we have that kills people or incites people to kill other people.  I think this is the only sane approach to saving human life.  So here is my list of things we must ban, loosely assembled into categories for easy choosing:

Transportation: airplanes, automobiles (including gas, diesel, electric, hybrid, self-driving and individual control), forklifts, buses, trucks, trains (including high and low speed, monorails, incline, subways and vacuum tube), tanks, motorcycles, spacecraft, boats, ships, balloons (including both helium and hot air), dirigibles (or rigid balloons), scooters, bicycles, and stilts.  I’m not certain about teleportation, but I seem to remember at least a couple of scrambled molecules so for right now, to be safe it too should be banned.

Recreation:  Mountain climbing, swimming, sun tanning, hiking, racing (both as a by-product of the restrictions on transportation, and foot racing), tennis, baseball, football, cards, drinking alcohol, eating tide pods, smoking (including both legal and currently illegal substances), hunting, archery, shooting, and chess (unless you are under a certain age).  Soccer is probably okay because no one really gets hurt, they all fake their injuries to draw a yellow or red card against their opponent.  Viewing soccer, on the other hand, must be outlawed.

Professions:  Soldiers (sailors and airman included here and covered under transportation), doctors, nurses, pharmacists, construction (including both skilled and unskilled labor), postal workers, manufacturing, farming, forestry, police, fire, EMT, manufacturing, panhandling, protesting, transportation (see: transportation), government (including politicians, bureaucrats, and workers), data processing, college professors, K-12 teachers (and administrative support), beauticians, manicurists, internet surveillance watchers, coders, publishing, and veterinarians (just to be on the safe side).

Tools:  All power tools, hammers, saws, rope, guns (muskets, rifles – both single shot and semi-automatic, pistols), bows and arrows, knives, hatchets and axes, swords, toasters, gas ovens, televisions, corkscrews, microwaves, lawn mowers (may fall under the power tool category, or in the South under the transportation section), screwdrivers, and files.

Finally, we need to outlaw Individual Choice since this is perhaps the biggest killer of them all.

A Few Thoughts on the Current News Cycle.

Random Thoughts Post Epstein

1.     The same government that promises to protect its citizens can’t seem to protect someone in a jail.

2.    I wonder how many elites who hung with Epstein are breathing a sigh of relief, and perhaps wrongly so?

3.    It amazes me that ABCNNBCBS is so blatantly obvious in their protection of Democratic politicians with links to Epstein, while wildly speculating about Republicans.  If they could just balance their coverage by treating each identically they could perhaps shed some of the FAKE NEWS moniker.  Unfortunately, they can’t seem to help themselves.

4.    If the talking heads (whoops sorry, subject experts) and talking heads (whoops again, pseudo-journalists) on TV can’t make up conspiracies they would have very little else to fill the air waves with.

5.    The only thing that could have made this whole Epstein suicide better than all the supposed failures of the Manhattan Correctional Center staff and administration would be if his feet had been weighted down in cement blocks.  But that would probably be just a bit too obvious.

6.    Sadly, Jeff wasn’t allowed to have a pencil and paper so he could have crafted a well written suicide note explaining his deep remorse for:

a.     Being a pedophile

b.    Getting caught again

c.     Knowing the Clintons

d.    All of the above

Is Disney Promoting Violence in Our Society?

Disney Theme Parks has opened and is opening soon, in Florida, a Star Wars-themed area in the Hollywood Studios park.  A relative of ours will work there, and so he and his mother got to preview the features of the park as part of the cast-members only days prior to full park opening.

As a part of his and her experience, they got to build a $350.00 lightsaber.  Since the lightsaber is a death-dealing weapon when welded by Jedi, isn't Disney promoting the violence of the Jedi as a force in the empire?

How can this be allowed by the progressive forces seeking an all-powerful empire?

I Wonder

In an industry composed almost exclusively of progressive liberals how many of their products are actually made to depict a vision of tolerance and love they so fondly talk about?
How many major studio films, made by those who would relegate the Second Amendment to the dust bin of American rights are actually made that don't glorify the use of "military-grade" weapons.
How many actors actually practice the values they decry the average American no longer has?
How many producers actually consider the values of the humans they employ?
And how many industry insiders actually hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others?
I am curious.

Is it Time to Wander Away?

Since I began my blog, eleven years and 1,184 postings ago, it has been a good release for me.  The hours I spent researching issues of interest, writing my opinions/ideas, and publishing them on a blog (typically read by a dozen people or so), has helped me find a rhythm in my day and perhaps understand the world around me a little better.

That all changed about a year ago when we moved to a community offering much more in way of an active lifestyle than what I involved myself within our previous hometown.  Now I find myself rolling out of bed to dress for a couple of hours of physical activity in games I had hardly heard of, or considered before the move. 

On a daily basis, we have wildlife coming to our door to remind us we should be guardians of this world, and the community embraces that belief.  Meanwhile, the world churns in turmoil outside the gates of this sanctuary.  Perhaps it is all an illusion, a dream I will awake from, but this community offers a respite from the bitterness and hostility we see in the nightly news.  The question I face is should I continue to write and share with others my opinions or abandon the idea of sharing and return to the approach I held previously of keeping my opinions to myself?

The world has changed from what I remember it to be as a child and young adult.  We no longer consider political discussion as something to be done in an effort to find agreement, it has become a club wielded by those seeking power.  Professional politicians and their activist supporters no longer view civility towards the opposition as a positive way to conduct themselves.  For example, throwing milkshakes at people is now considered as non-violent activism by the left in England.

We, as a nation, are fracturing ourselves into tribes.  For the first two hundred years of our existence, the nation struggled to unite the people.  This was not always done well, or even non-violently, but the goal was clear.  We attempted to grow into a united nation, evolving from “the many to become one” as we note on our coinage.  Now, we are quickly destroying that idea of one people.  In my opinion, this is created by small minorities seeking to dominate the debates of the nation, supported by a self-righteous social media who have chosen sides in the social issues.

Furthermore, as we abandon our beliefs in a higher power, and so many choose to place their faith in a single political party, we see the emergence of moralities that hold no tie to the long term causes and effects of an individual’s decision.  The conflicts in these choices of convenience seem obvious to me, but they are easily cast aside by those who hold them.  Let’s take, for example, the gun control debate.  Those who want to limit the lawful ownership of guns cite the violence of mass shootings but refuse to acknowledge where gun laws are stringent they’ve done little to control illegal use of guns within the inner cities where far more victims are wounded and killed.  We can’t discuss a loss of individual morality and accountability as a cause and are therefore driven to a position where the lifeless hardware is cited as the villain.

I am not sure what course I will take, but it is a problem I am glad to have for in the scale of all life’s problems this is one that is really low on the scale.

If Only

Acknowledgement:  I would like to thank someone I don’t know who felt compelled to comment on a post about Donald Trump for providing the genesis for these thoughts.

“If only we had a President who respected Congress and our laws.”

Yes, if only we had a President who like Andrew Jackson, founder of the modern Democratic party, so respected our laws and our nation that he worked tirelessly to kill off the Native Americans so his friends could take their land.

Yes, if only we had a President like Woodrow Wilson, who ensured we maintained the white/black segregation within the Federal government, and who with his enlightened friends like Margaret Sanger viewed Blacks as inferior, and should be shown their place.  Someone who brokered the Treaty of Versailles whose punitive agreements and division of Europe created the conditions for the Nazi party’s rise to power.  He also helped create the League of Nations but was unable to convince the Senate to agree with U.S. membership.  He was clearly a President of the people, as long as they were white.

Yes, if only we had a President like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who viewed his own imperial status as above the tradition set by George Washington to serve only two terms.  A President who attempted to pack the Supreme Court when it wasn’t ruling as he thought they should, and who at the onset of World War II imprisoned over 150,000 Americans simply because of the national origin.

If only we had a President like John Fitzgerald Kennedy who promised the anti-communist Cubans that the United States would support them if they decided to return to Cuba and fight Castro, and when push came to shove let them die on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

What I wouldn’t give to have a President like Lyndon Baines Johnson, who did little to support the equal rights acts passed by the Congress, but made sure he and his Secretary of Defense micromanaged a war that would cost 50,000 American lives.  Along the way, he created welfare programs promising a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but in reflection really just created a new class of economic slaves.

Man, Barrack Obama.  Now there was a President.  Coming into office as the first African-American he held the promise of unifying the nation like no one before him.  After eight years in office, he left creating greater racial and religious divide than anyone the KKK could have hoped for.  His respect for Congress was unequaled.  His party stonewalled 8-years of legislation and abandoned the traditions designed to encourage bi-partisan legislation.  His quote, “I have a phone and I have a pen” will stand as a testament to his love of the law and Congress.  A President who had no qualms about using the national intelligence agencies to spy on his opponents or even the average American.  A President who weaponized supposedly neutral agencies like the IRS and FBI to hunt down and destroy all those who didn’t share his vision of “Hope and Change.”

Oh, what it could have been like if we had just elected a woman who has more skeletons in her closet than she has shoes.  Someone who is directly responsible for the creation of ISIS with her support for the overthrow of two African regimes not led by religious zealots.  I am totally sure she would have worked with Congress and respected the laws she had ignored all those previous years.

Apparently, Civics is not taught these days so we can make the same mistakes over and over again.  If only we had a President who the press liked so we could ignore all his imperfections or a political party that was willing to accept the Constitution as the governing document for our nation...

Learn to Code

Recently, "Learn to code" became an internet trope (or was it a meme?). These new phrases are so confusing since their usage seems to change daily.

Of course, the recently out-of-work journalists to whom this advice was offered were all morally outraged and their still working colleagues rushed to their defense with the insightful claim "learn to code" is now actually a racist statement, unlike when it was used to tell the out of work coal miners during the Obama administration.  Back then it was just friendly, although it sounded a lot like snide, advice.  But that was in another time, and with other people who clearly had the miners best economic interest at heart.

Imagine my shock when in today's e-mail I received a solicitation from Microsoft to support an organization who promised to use my donation to help girls "learn to code."

Thankfully, I have been paying attention to the still employed social justice warriors in the media and I know this is clearly an anti-feminist and racist attempt to subvert the fight for social justice and would only serve to divert people from the grievance study programs so important in today's world.

Asking a girl to learn to code -- what an outrageous demand.  We are better than that.

What Guides Us?

You can chalk this question up to my former life as an Air Force Navigator.  Back in the day, I was trained to use the heavens to help me find my way.  This was a simple fact.  We did not yet have manmade navigation aids that covered the earth and there were large expanses of oceans to be crossed.

Those who had gone before me had learned to use the stars, the moon, and the planets to determine a precise location on the earth.  That knowledge learned from the hard lessons of past failures was passed to us who would be responsible for guiding the aircraft when the electronic aids man had built were not available or reliable.

For as long as man has crossed the oceans the Northern Star has provided a reference to the confirm they are going in the direction they should.

Today, as we turn away from heaven, I wonder. 

What guides us?

An Opinion on Utopia

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Tomorrow

I am so old I can remember when we thought tomorrow would always be better than today.  We were, for the most part, optimistic that the world could be great.  We could talk through all our problems, we could find common ground and solve the tough problems. 

We knew so much more than our parents, the ones who had lived through the great depression and fought a total world war, but then all the sudden the baby-boomer generation grew up and were in charge. 

As we became the governing generation we filled the schools with people who would spend their lives indoctrinating the young into the acceptable socio-economic beliefs of Marx and Engle.  We condemned war, at least until we had a chance to start them for ourselves. We celebrated the failures of the church and moved to ensure the smallest minorities in our society had the loudest voices in our collective culture.

While condemning the work of our elders - we created programs to teach our young that everyone who believed the right things were winners.  As our generation’s voices grew ever louder we moved from a society of us, to a society of us and them.  There could be no compromise, there could be only winners and losers. 

Along the way, we realized Captain Kirk and most of the men in Star Fleet were chauvinists (except for the redshirt away team members who would die anyway) and anyone who didn’t accept the extreme positions of the social justice warriors was a homophobic racist.

Today, the utopia we were told was just around the corner in 1969 seems even further away than it did back in those heady days of telling our parents to just take a chill pill.

Quagmire

Quagmire, noun, quag· mire | \ˈkwag-ˌmī(-ə)r

1 : soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot

2 : a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position : predicament

            Today’s word sums up both the geopolitical and military positions we (mostly our politicians) have driven us to.

            On the home front, we have chosen a Congress that seems intent, at least if we listen to the voices pushed by a bias media, of rendering bills of impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for a President they don’t like.  Looking at how Ms. Pelosi ran the house when she was last its Speaker I’m guessing those bills won’t take so very long to write.  But like the impeachment of Bill Clinton, it seems unlikely he will be convicted and removed by the Senate so at the end of the day it is really just political drama that will remove any possibility of productive governing.

            What we see in Europe, France in particular, is a groundswell uprising rejecting the globalist propositions the political elite have crafted to move us towards a one-world government mostly paid for on the backs of the working class.  President Trump was vilified for his decision to vacate our involvement in the Paris Climate agreement.  What France is going through today is a direct result of that agreement.

            Militarily, we are engaged in a war without end.  Jihadist terror organizations will exist as long as there are violent proponents who want to be in power but are not.  The question for the nation is both a simple and complex one.  We are in a war we cannot win, is it in our national interest to continue to fight or do we let the world burn around us?  If we chose the latter what are the likely national consequences for what has historically been a Judeo-Christian society?

            What is most complex about ending this war is how we do so “gracefully” so as to seem like we are making a sound military decision from a position of strength.  I think we probably lost that option some ten or so years ago after we overthrew the Iraq regime and then left, leaving Iraq to the Iranians.  I am sure others can disagree and suggest, just as they did in the 1960s if we just sent more troops we could make the other side seek a peaceful resolution.  You can color me skeptical.

            For those who reject the idea of “slippery slopes,” you can always choose the mess of quagmires.

A Question With No Answer

To borrow a line from JRR Tolkien, what follows the age of men?  As I sat with my coffee this morning, watching the sky lighten in the east I was struck by the two-edged nature of progress and how a good idea can turn disastrous in a twinkling of an eye, when compared to the estimated age of the universe. So, my question today is what will bring our role as the dominant species to an end?

Since the time of Homo Erectus mankind has developed tools to improve all aspects of their lives, but with each new invention there comes a down side.  As far as I can tell, with the possible exception of Velcro, there are no good ideas that can’t be turned into terrible abuses.

Someone discovers round wheels are better than square ones and we start down the path of using the wheel to make life better, but just a few millennia later we build gasoline powered cars and all the sudden we invent Global Warming where all the ice will melt and the seas will rise until the only cars left are those on really high bridges.

Alfred Nobel discovers the chemical compound C6H23CH3[1] and makes a fortune helping people blow things up.  Of course, it can also be used to kill people and he feels a little bad about that so he uses his fortune to create a set of prizes for people in the arts and sciences and allows the folks in Oslo Norway to pick someone who has done something good for peace.  Often though those folks pick people who’ve not so much improved the chances of peace but are making the politically correct statements about peace.

The world of the mind offers wonderful examples of good ideas that turn out to be really terrible in execution.  I think we can all agree someone with a mental illness should be treated and hopefully cured, but there is a problem.  First of all, who decides someone is mentally ill?  How do they go about diagnosing illness and the best options for curing it?  These are incredibly hard questions to answer with certainty as our history of dealing with people who don’t fit within the social norms has demonstrated.  We train people to supposedly be experts in the field, but what they know and how they use that knowledge is, of course, subject to their own biases.  The progressive thinkers over the past 150 years have come up with a whole myriad of good ideas on how to cure or deal with mental illness.  Their solutions range from locking them away, cutting out the bad part of their brains, sending electric currents through the brain to short circuit the bad circuits, providing drugs that will somehow compensate for the drug balances that are out of kilter, to totally ignoring the issue and releasing them to the streets where they can care for themselves.  So I wonder are we really any better off today with mental illness than when we expected people to be stoic and fit in, and if they couldn’t fit into society they were chained to a bed somewhere?

Now we have the internet of all things, which has become sort of the global town square where anyone with an opinion can climb onto his, her, or its soapbox and yell that opinion to the world.  Those who are of like opinions can join in until they form a group (or mob) and they can shout all the louder for it.  Those who disagree can stack up their soap boxes until they are able to form their own group (or mob) and yell all the louder that their opinion is right.  Sooner or later all this yelling is bound to have an obvious impact on those who listen to it.

We have scientists who are now working towards a day when men are not needed for reproduction, and of course we have the feminist movement where its radical elements are blaming men (and conservative women) for all the evil in the world.

Some of us Homo Sapiens believe global warming will destroy us, others believe insects will take over, still others think we will destroy each other through war and a nuclear exchange, and many of us believe the we will fall victim to mean talk and dissenting opinions. 

Whatever it is, I hope the next species decides the internet is not worth the hassle.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT

Will the Sun Rise Tomorrow?

As journalism transforms from reporting to opinionating each day brings with it a question, will the sun rise tomorrow?  It is so easy to get caught up in the rants of one side or the other, the hype of those who wish to inflame, the rhetoric of the celebrities who believe their opinions are supreme, or the journalists who push the agendas of the political parties they are affiliated with, that you have to wonder if the earth’s rotation will continue.

This morning I watched as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and the pond behind my home reflected its first light.  The quiet and calm seemed a wonderful start for what will undoubtedly be a stressful day as we prepare to fly tomorrow.

As I sat down with my coffee to read the news I was reminded that the world is in such turmoil that it is a wonder the sun even had a chance to rise.  Crisis after crisis, condemnation after condemnation, threat after threat.  That is what the news seems like today.  I don’t think it has ever been much different, but today we are immersed in instantaneous judgment that can be overwhelming.

Here are some things to consider as you sort through your day.

·      Nike has a new advertising campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick.  If you are into his brand of social commentary then buy their product, if not then don’t.  It seems pretty simple to me.

·      The Texas Senate Race – let me know how it turns out, but what kind of name is Beto?  Texas used to be a totally Dem state but party politics within the DNC has eliminated that.   

·      Plastic and chemical contamination in the ocean[i] has probably been at crisis level for some time, but since there is no real profit in cleaning it up it remains.  The Paris Climate agreement didn’t even talk about it.  Thankfully, California has banned plastic straws and the Pope has classified it as an emergency so that problem is solved.

·      Finally, why aren’t we demanding gender-neutral names for Cyclones?

I am betting the sun will come out tomorrow.

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch