30 April 2013 -

The trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist, has gone to the jury.  The stark depiction of his repeated murders of babies has stunned even this most jaded of men.  I won’t call him a butcher because that would wrongly associate him with the honorable and honest people who put food on our tables.  Instead, I call him a high priest in the religion of abortion in America. 

His evil tendencies were enabled by the liberal intelligentsia in our government, courts, and salons of learning.  These elite thinkers started with the eugenics movements of the early 1900s, passed Roe v. Wade in 1973, and today use the Gosnells of the world to snip through all moral constraint on the abortion table.  Their doctrine is clear.  They long ago elevated secular humanist rights over life and death, trying to divorce society from the moral constraints of Judeo-Christian standards.  They then strenuously preached these rights until Supreme Court justices found their arguments more legally convenient than were the fundamental rights of life.  Finally, they expanded the rite of abortion until Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) suggested that a newborn baby should not be considered human life until the mother and the doctor say that it is.  Such perverse power corrupts all who participate.  Many a Kermit Gosnell, as well-paid high priests in lab coats, now regularly administer grisly sacrament rites to the desiccated witches of the left and their elite intelligentsia sycophants.  Soon, the jury in Philadelphia will decide if we will pass even more of our children through the pagan fires of Moloch or again defend what used to be God-given moral standards for the legal protection of human life. 

Another way to approach the issue. 

Neither in a religious nor medical sense do we know when a human fetus becomes a human being.  Medically, we can’t come close to making such a determination.  We can’t even precisely assess the earliest moment when a particular unborn child will survive outside the womb.  Therefore, when abortion must be considered, it is never a medical decision alone; it should always be, first and foremost, a moral one. 

Using religious terms, we don’t know when, during pregnancy, that our spirit enters our mortal body and we become a living soul.  Using more religious terms, I would never presume to establish such a moment using anything but revelation from Him who gives life.  As far as I know, Christian revelations throughout history declare that life is sacred and that God demands that we use the power to create and take life only in certain, carefully prescribed ways.  I understand now more than ever that we are never more accountable to God than when we create mortal life.   

Mortality is, nonetheless, mortality.  This life is imperfect in its passage.  There are circumstances when the decision to take the life of an unborn child is the least horrible of the inevitable consequences of this mortal coil.  But, those circumstances are so rare in our medically-advanced society that they shouldn’t be used to justify liberal abortion laws.  Therefore, when abortion is used as the remedy for the non-life-threatening consequences of prior errors in judgment, it is just another mistake piled on the first one.  If I am going to err when I try to resolve previous mistakes, I want to err on the side of life.  Always.  

26 April 2013 –

Odds ‘N Ends

It was April 1980.  It was my first duty assignment in the Air Force, at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.  Janny and I were driving in Las Vegas.  The radio was dialed onto, of course, a country music station.  The DJ said that the next song was a new one by George Jones and was sure to be a classic.  He then played, "He Stopped Loving Her Today".  George Jones had not had a number one hit on his own for several years.  He was long past the incredible impact in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties of hits such as “Why Baby Why”, "White Lightning", “Tender Years”, “She Still Thinks I Care”, and “Walk Through This World With Me”.  They had exalted into the peerless pantheon of country singers.  Booze, drugs, a wastrel lifestyle, they all purtnear killed “No Show Jones” in the ‘seventies.  No matter, I cried when I heard him sing through the little speaker in our ’74 Dodge Diplomat.  We had his voice again to soothe us.  George Jones died this morning in a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.  He was eighty-one years old.  God Speed to you, Mr. Jones.  Good parents will always condemn your lifestyle.  Angels will always sing your songs.   

It has been ten days since the Boston Bombings.  Our legal system has set itself in motion.  We have dealt with one of the perpetrators.  We have the other in custody.  Now, what do we do as a people?  We need to put our flags at full mast again and get on with life.  Too many flags still hang at half-mast throughout Houston and, I am sure, throughout the nation.  Our enemies who seduced these young men into committing their evil deeds look upon the extended lowering of Old Glory as submission.  It tells our enemies that we care more about mourning and wringing our hands than we do about defending ourselves.  Let’s get on with it.  Let’s correct our communications barriers within our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.  Let’s refocus on the unholy war that is about us.  Then, let’s seize and do away with our enemies.  That requires a flag that flies undaunted. 

Our intelligence community has confirmed, and the Administration has made public, that Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons against rebel forces.  Previously, President Obama declared that using chemical weapons was a “red line”, the crossing of which would require U.S. intervention of some sort into this civil war.  My decades in the intelligence business taught me to ask a seminal question whenever I analyzed events/crises in the world:  “What does this have to do with U.S. strategic interests?”  This is the question that is not being asked or answered as we threaten to enter this fray. 

Syria under President Bashar al-Assad hates the United States, is an implacable enemy of Israel, and harbors many jihadists and professional agitators who wish us ill.  The country has no natural resources vital to the U.S. economy, nor is its trade with us more than dust on the accounting floor.  In the UN, Syria votes against U.S. interests as much as any other country on earth.  Syria is an irritant because it sits between our allies, Turkey and Israel, sits next to Iraq, and is a surrogate for more important players in the roil of Middle East intrigue.  All of this is under the Assad dictatorship.  We certainly do not want to support the current regime. 

The next question:  “How would a regime change significantly alter our strategic position in the region?”  Simply put, not much would change.  The rebels are not western-trained, modern democrats who would institute western-style political and societal reforms.  They hate us as well.  They would assume control of a country that still would have no compelling strategic value to the United States.  The new regime would still hate Israel, still be cold toward Turkey, and still vote the same way in the UN as does the current regime.  The new government also would probably continue to allow the Russian navy to use the port at Latakia.  No matter who runs Syria next year, nothing of strategic significance will change.      

That said, why did the President impose a “red line” on us and the combatants in this war?  Now that he has done it, he will either have to renege on his resolve or enter into someone else’s civil war.  Those are no-win choices.  We either show the world we can’t be trusted to do what we say or we enter a civil war that will bleed us of men, money, and prestige for nothing we don’t already have.  Our President has taken the control of our instruments of national power and put it into the hands of people who hate us—old regime or new regime.  He is acting as naively and as arrogantly as any neophyte in international relations can do.  In the words of the great sage and prophet, Bugs Bunny, “What a Maroon!”  

25 April 1013 –

Below are some harsh statistics on violence in Black America.  We can reduce the violence, but, first, the first black President of the United States will have to set a better example with the friends he invites to our White House.    

The FBI’s “Crime in the United States: 2011” reports that there were 12,664 murders committed in the United States in 2011.  Fully half, 6,329, were Black, yet Blacks comprise only 13.8% of the total population.  The other-than-Black population in the United States had a 2011 murder rate of about 2.35 murders per 100,000 people, about the same as Finland and Luxembourg.  Black Americans were murdered at a rate of 15.5 per 100,000, 6 ½ times higher.  That rate fits up there with such garden spots of the world as Chad, Zimbabwe, DR Congo, and Nicaragua.  Importantly, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that since 2000, 93% of Blacks murdered were murdered by other Blacks.  If the rest of the U.S. population were to suffer the same murder rate as does Black America, the U.S. murder count would be about 48,000 yearly, almost four times what is now.

To focus on where Blacks are killing each other at such epidemic levels, let’s look at the murder rates in large cities.  Of the highest eleven murder rates in 2011, ten of the cities have a majority Black population:  Flint Michigan, Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, Newark, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, and Memphis.  In 2012, Flint, Michigan, 60% Black, was the most dangerous place to be Black in America, with a 64.9 murder rate per 100,000 population.  Detroit is 85% Black and ranked second on the murder rate list with 54.6 murders per 100,000 population.  These two cities, if they were independent countries, would rank third and fifth in the world in murder rates, up there with Honduras, El Salvador, and Cote d’Ivoire.   

In those cities listed above, and in most other cities with high murder rates, a significant majority of the murders are young black men killing young black men over gang, drug, and illegal gun trafficking issues.  The inner-city gang culture, fed by a 70% illegitimacy rate for Black births in the U.S., has effectively destroyed legitimate black society in our cities and replaced it with mayhem.  This is a horrible situation for all Americans.

I list these statistics to challenge our first Black President.  Is he recommending effective remedies for this dismal situation?  No.  He champions laws to restrict gun ownership by already law-abiding citizens.  But, as most police contend, such laws do nothing to staunch the flow of illegal guns to gangsters, many of whom are Blacks, in our inner cities.  Just as bad, he invites gangster rap “artists” such as Jay-Z to the White House for dinner and media coverage.  Jay-Z, né Shawn Corey Carter in 1969, is a major rap producer and “singer” worth at least $500 million.  Mr. Z makes his money producing and selling filthy-language rap “songs” that extol gun violence, drug use, and virulent misogyny, aka, inner-city Black gang culture.  Sadly, our President’s inviting this panderer of societal destruction to the White House tells everybody that he approves of the message and the culture of gangster rap culture and music.  Our President is doing nothing of substance to stop the violence in the Black community in our cities.  What kind of example is that for young black men who want to be the next Black President of the United States?  And, does the President really want his daughters to be referred to as B*****hes or W***res by the young men they will soon date?  As my grandmother told me when I was a boy, you are judged by the company you keep.  Shame, Mr. President, shame.    

24 April 2013 –

The media are reporting well on the events of the Boston Bombings.  We are learning much about the accused perpetrators, the Tsarneav brothers: events of the brothers’ lives in the U.S.; their journeys from the Caucasus to the United States;  the mosque in the Boston area where the brothers knelt alongside convicted Islamic jihadists; the older brother’s violent, misogynist ways; their parents’ return to the Caucasus; the brothers’ voicing of their jihadist motives for murders; and, not surprising to those who study Islamic jihad, the older brother’s six-month séjour in Dagestan, where he probably underwent terrorist training.  All this has come out in less than two weeks, and more revelations probably are on the way.  When I was a new intelligence officer in the Air Force, I got most crisis information from a 100 word-a-minute teletype machine in a special-access-only vault.  Now, the Information Age allows all to compile large amounts of data in a short time.  But, information never changes itself easily into actionable intelligence.  We still must parse the information in the right way to make the right calls at the right time to resolve a crisis.  We can do that and still maintain an open and free society, but we need the right strategy. 

The Boston Bombing has become a legal case and has entered the evidence accumulation and due process phases.  Now, many will pose the inevitable question: How can we stop such violence in our society?  Sadly, our politicians will answer the question by enacting misdirected laws.  A better response is that we shouldn’t focus our efforts on the terminal phase of jihadist terrorism.  We need to understand the base cause and motive of jihadist violence and then determine steps to prevent it.    

I base my assessment on a career in military intelligence.  Among the topics where I was compelled to become an instant expert, I studied the wheres, whys, hows, whos, whens, and whats of what many now call Islamic jihadist terrorism.  I suggest that Western civilization and Islam have been fighting a thirteen-hundred-year war for world dominance and that jihadist terrorism is the latest campaign by a determined enemy to achieve victory.  Accepting that view will allow us to devise a successful strategy for our war against terrorists.  Mine is not a politically correct attempt to communally establish peace with fellow world travelers.  It is a statement that western civilization must protect its basic principles of tolerance and individual rights or lose its freedom to a determined enemy. 

Islamic jihadists are not uniformed military units.  They do not represent sovereign nations as official combatants; therefore, the laws of war, which we wrote as a by-product in the forging of modern Europe, do not apply well to the modern battlefield. But, jihadists are indeed soldiers, in a war of their making and on a battlefield of their choosing.   They successfully apply one of the basic principles of warfare: They control the initiative and the tempo of the war.  We let them do so because we still don’t want to call our actions a war on bad guys. 

Bad buys?  Well, they publicly reject the tenets of our Constitution and of western society; yes, they are indeed bad guys.  As any student of Islam must admit, state sovereignty in the traditional, western sense—separation of church and state and the individual rights of the citizen—has no place where Islam rules or tries to rule.  Religion and politics are not separate forces in Islamic society. They are one and will continue to be so until Islam rules the world.  Terrorism is today’s violent application of political/religious jihad.  This is a war.  

Tragically, we fuel our enemies by channeling billions of oil and gas dollars to the abettors of jihad in the oil-rich Moslem world.   We are funding our own defeat.  Our nation’s most decisive strategic act should be to become energy independent and, thereby, staunch the flow of money to those who would dominate us. 

And now?  For too long we watch the news as if it were a bad movie, horrible, but not touching us personally.  The stark reality is that this bad movie will not be over when the late-night comedians start their monologues.  Few Americans were physically harmed by the latest bombings; but, our way of life is seriously threatened.  The United States has been under attack by Islamic jihadists, home-grown and foreign, for a generation.  Our enemies have a persistent campaign, and they are winning every battle they choose to fight.  We must admit that and compel our elected officials to put on their big-boy pants and defend our way of life.  

23 April 2013–

Wednesday before last, the Senate didn’t garner enough votes to pass a bill that would have expanded background checks for prospective buyers at gun shows and on the internet.  The bill would have left only private sales of weapons unfettered by federal government intrusion. The vote was 54-46 in favor, but 60 votes were needed under an agreement to avoid a filibuster.  Three of the five Democrat senators who voted against the bill were up for reelection in 2014 in states where gun ownership rights are well-supported.  No surprise.  Of the four Republicans who voted for the bill three are liberal Republicans from states where the Second Amendment is often treated as a quaint anachronism from a bygone era.  Again, no surprise.  Now, both sides of the aisle are proposing amendments to the bill in order to create something a majority of the solons can live with.  If the bill eventually passes the Senate, it will go to the House where it should face similar opposition. 

The debates and political posturing surrounding the Second Amendment are not over, not by a long shot.  Violence and crime, some committed with firearms, legitimately concern most Americans.  I contend that the reasons for most such violence are not found in the Second Amendment but in the dissolution of marriage, family, and the resultant erosion of societal cohesion.  It saddens me to be so skeptical of those who accumulate power; but, I fear that lawmakers who are willing to dilute the rights expressed in the Second Amendment as a facile approach to reducing societal violence—violence strongly correlated with the implementation of nanny-state policies—also will find no problem quickly diluting the rights expressed in the rest of the Bill of Rights for some other raison du jour.  A government that will gather personal information ostensibly for the misguided purpose of determining who can own a firearm also cannot be trusted to limit the use of that information only to issues surrounding the Second Amendment.  The Founders of our country were pragmatic realists.  They didn’t trust themselves or others with power.  They didn’t want anybody or any governmental institution to accumulate unfettered power.  They knew that power corrupts even the strongest and intelligent among us.  I contend that it corrupts many of our lawmakers and government employees today. 

I do not want anybody in any government organization to keep information of a personal nature about me; and, it is especially noisome to me that the government currently maintains so much.  It is amazing that government entities know how much other property I own, how much I paid for it, when I bought it, and what it is worth.  In my case, as a retired Air Force officer, the government also knows everything about my health for my entire adult life, my family relationships, and my movements throughout the world.  The government has my DNA, recently required in the military, and my fingerprints, also recently required in the military.  So it will be increasingly available through gun-purchase background checks and other intrusive laws such as Obamacare for all ordinary civilian citizens. 

Should I fear that all this information gives my government too much power to interfere in my life, but not enough power to protect me?  Does all this information about me on file in different government data bases make me a better citizen?  Other than following the flow of traffic at ten miles-an-hour over the speed limit on the highways of America, I already am law-abiding; therefore, I doubt it.  Did the information that the FBI already had on these naturalized Chechnyan youth with delusions of radical Islam dancing in their heads prevent them from committing horrific crimes with explosives and weapons in the streets of Boston?  Nope, it didn’t.  Therefore, those who act on what is in these data bases, in the name of keeping us safe or healthy, will only erode our liberties and give us little in return.   

7-8 April 2013 –

I want to respond to the recent liberal blather over guns in our society.  I respond even though I know that this recent crisis probably is just a convenient distraction from talking about the imminent crises in society: the staggering national debt and continuing government budget deficits that exacerbate the problem.  Fortunately, efforts to create more federal laws to restrict gun ownership seem to be stalled.  Maybe we can stop them completely with clear thinking and decisive action. 

The Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights is part and parcel of the Constitution of the United States.  The right of citizens, independent of government, to bear arms was one of the antecedent rights that far-sighted Founders insisted upon as a precondition to assenting to their new nation’s founding document.  The rights stated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution precede any authority given by our Founders to a constitutional structure of laws.  The right of citizens to bear arms, to be a people’s militia—a militia of one, if needs be—to defend personal liberty against government or criminal tyranny, is as fundamental to an American’s Liberty as is any other statement in the entire Bill of Rights.  To infringe upon it is to invite tyranny. 

That is the argument.  There is no other that even approaches its importance.  Nonetheless, advocates of restricting Second Amendment rights argue that the violence that men do in this life stems from the weapons in their hands, not from the evil or sickness in their hearts.  Advocates for gun restrictions never seem to pinpoint or address the ongoing societal and personal flaws that impel individuals to belch out wanton violence.   Their argument is lazy; and, its insistence on societal versus individual remedies abets government tyranny.  It squelches Liberty. 

Furthermore, we should define and control the lexicon of our argument.  For example, allowing others to voice the argument as a “gun control” problem is classic range-gate stealing of the frequency of the original signal of fundamental rights to a distant one of political tinkering for effect.  Once we use their terms, we are forced to waste time countering arguments about the wrong things at the wrong times for the wrong reasons.  Everybody loses using the liberal lexicon; but, we look the more foolish.  “Assault weapons” is another term that moves the focus from individual rights and responsibilities to scary nonsense.  A semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle, no matter how nasty-looking the plastic doo-dads are that adorn the newer models, is still just a semi-automatic .22 rifle.  Assault is an act by individuals; it is not the weapon they use.  Name the actor, not the prop.  The horror of mass killings is another topic that quickly should be deconstructed.  If someone kills ten others and then himself in a mass murder/suicide, most people want a cogent sound-bite to counter the seemingly senseless act.  Mentally-ill, suicidal people responsible for committing horrendous crimes seems most often to be the accurate description of the event; the weapons the sick people stole to commit the crime are not the casus horribilis.  Important:  Using the lexicon that best defines our freedom and liberties best assures our freedom and liberties. 

After thirty-four years of being in the management of violence, I can say with surety that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  Taking away fundamental freedoms will never guarantee peace and security without also imposing totalitarianism.  Then, there will be no right or wrong, no liberty, only compliance.  As I have said to my children from youth to adulthood:  Welcome to the fight.  I now add this:  The fight has always been for Liberty. 

4 April 2013 –

Odds ‘N Ends:

I have delayed writing long enough.  My excuse is lame; I have been traveling for the last three days from Kinshasa to Paris to Washington D.C., with meetings upon arrival in D.C.  But, I should have fought off jet lag and stayed up to take advantage of the rich opportunities that recent news has provided for sane comment.  This morning, I am sitting in Dulles Airport waiting for my flight to Atlanta and then to Houston.  My six-month contract in Africa will be finished upon arrival.  When I see my wife’s face, I shall be home.  Yes, I shall be home.   

Paul Simon's lyrical insight into popular culture is as relevant today as it was when he penned this line nearly fifty years ago:  “I get all the news I need on the weather report.”  It seems that NBC and Jay Leno, the twenty-year host of “The Tonight Show”, will part company next Spring.  Should it really matter beyond the shallows of entertainment and the impending profits of market share who is going to host late-night talk shows now or in the future?  Should their comic routines, selection and treatment of guests, or anything said on their programs, influence even one whit political action in the United States?   In essence, should we hold these entertainers in higher esteem than street performers or World Wrestling Federation steroid freaks?  My answer is a firm no.  But, my opinion isn’t as universal as I would wish.  Today’s pundits have spent a lot of time commenting on how politically conservative Jay Leno has become in his comic routines, especially compared to David Letterman’s almost open disdain for all things conservative.  They are not stupid.  They talk about it because they know that the voice of America is not in reasoned, carefully-crafted opinions of vital social issues.  It is in the comic routines and the antics of our entertainers.  Sadly, this shallow, bread-and-circuses approach to political thought is nearly universal.  Six years ago, while we were in Beijing, my wife and I had the opportunity to talk about the United States with college students from Beijing University.  Beida, as it is called, could be considered the Harvard of China.  When my wife told one student, who was challenging everything I said to the group, that he shouldn't believe everything he hears on CNN, the student said quite openly that he learned everything he knows about the U.S. from “The John Stewart Show” on television.  Sheesh!  Bugs Bunny was funnier and more informed than John Stewart. 

 I say often that my preferred form of entertainment, baseball, is far above this plebian coil.  I like to say that life imitates baseball, not the other way around.  I often use baseball’s rich metaphors to illustrate concepts of virtue, truth, and discipline.  And, Barry Bonds should never be the Hall of Fame!!  Ahem…refocus.   At the same time, however, I know deep down that baseball is just entertainment.  As beautifully comparable as my third son’s swing of a bat is to the sweep of an eagle’s wing as it dives to strike its prey, it still is just a swing.  As forceful as a Nolan Ryan fastball was in reducing sluggers to simps, it still was just a fastball.  Such art forms’ importance in life effectively ends when the game—the entertainment—is over.  If the greatest game mankind has ever devised and played can’t provide prophets to guide us, then television entertainers certainly can’t.   Turn off the TV and read a book—on baseball, if possible.