President Obama, in keeping with his big O plans, is reported to be mulling over a “zero option” for Afghanistan post 2014. His entire presidency will be remembered for it’s big, fat zero ideas, so this idea is to leave zero troops in Afghanistan, assuring that our efforts and sacrifices there were really for naught (hint: that means nothing). Here’s a USA Today story on this “zero option”. There’s not even a whiff of a strategy or mention of US interests, it’s merely reacting based on personal animosity toward Hamid Karzai, which this White House thinks justifies using US troops as a personal tool to get even with Karzai. Don’t expect any big strategic plans from this crowd. In Iraq his minions failed to get a status of forces agreement ironed out, leading to a precipitous American military abandonment, so this “zero option” continues the Obama leading from behind motif – nowhere to be found. We sacrificed thousands of American lives so that President Obama can pave the way for the Taliban to return to power. Hooray, for American leadership, right….. I am so embarrassed to have these clueless fools representing our great country. That often used to say, that while America plays checkers, the Russians play chess comes to mind, except with this administration checkers seems to be way beyond their strategic-planning capabilities.
Pledge to read the Declaration of Independence
Hillsdale College started a pledge drive to encourage Americans to read the Declaration aloud with their family and friends this 4th of July (announcement here). Hillsdale College offers many interesting free online history courses to build on your understanding of our American heritage. I’ve been working my way through the History 101 series (Western Heritage- From the Book of Genesis to John Locke) and each lecture is an hour or so and definitely worth your time. It put the advances of western civilization in a logical timeline, so you can begin to see that our American ideological underpinnings come from a lengthy history of man’s, sometimes faltering, but relentless nonetheless, steps forward in the quest for individual freedom. (Info here).
Here’s a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the Our Documents website (here):
*IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.* *The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,* When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. ———————————————————————— /The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:/ *Column 1* *Georgia:* Button Gwinnett Lyman Hall George Walton *Column 2* *North Carolina:* William Hooper Joseph Hewes John Penn *South Carolina:* Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Arthur Middleton *Column 3* *Massachusetts:* John Hancock *Maryland:* Samuel Chase William Paca Thomas Stone Charles Carroll of Carrollton *Virginia:* George Wythe Richard Henry Lee Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Harrison Thomas Nelson, Jr. Francis Lightfoot Lee Carter Braxton *Column 4* *Pennsylvania:* Robert Morris Benjamin Rush Benjamin Franklin John Morton George Clymer James Smith George Taylor James Wilson George Ross *Delaware:* Caesar Rodney George Read Thomas McKean *Column 5* *New York:* William Floyd Philip Livingston Francis Lewis Lewis Morris *New Jersey:* Richard Stockton John Witherspoon Francis Hopkinson John Hart Abraham Clark *Column 6* *New Hampshire:* Josiah Bartlett William Whipple *Massachusetts:* Samuel Adams John Adams Robert Treat Paine Elbridge Gerry *Rhode Island:* Stephen Hopkins William Ellery *Connecticut:* Roger Sherman Samuel Huntington William Williams Oliver Wolcott *New Hampshire:* Matthew Thornton * Page URL: * http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=2&page=transcript *U.S. National Archives & Records Administration* 700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20408 • 1-86-NARA-NARA • 1-866-272-6272
Filed under American History, Education
The Pretty in Pink American Foreign Policy
Ran across two more pieces on why we need to maintain our nuclear arsenal, so I’m not a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. “Obama’s Nuclear-Zero Dream” (National Review piece here) written by Jack David (Hudson Institute bio here) explains why President Obama’s “nuclear zero” world exists only in fantasy and he explains the suicidal nature of the president’s proposals. Mr. David lays out the history of our nuclear weapons capability and the nuclear disarmament efforts since the advent of the nuclear age clearly and he speaks with the weight of someone who has spent many years studying our nuclear capabilities, both offensive and defensive. Also worth reading is Mr. David’s 2010 spirited argument against the nuclear-zero voices that keep pushing the United States to unilaterally disarm and rail against maintaining our nuclear capabilities, in a Wall Street Journal piece ( located on the Hudson Institute website), “The Dangerous Fantasy of a Nuclear-Free World” .
David Lawrence posted a short blog piece at the American Thinker website, titled, “Don’t Slash Our Nuclear Weapons” with this perfect President Obama policy description:
“We need peace through strength, not surrender through clichés.” Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/dont_slash_our_nuclear_weapons.html#ixzz2XhmuK5Eu Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
From rogue jihadi bands of fighters to world leaders around the globe, they smell American weakness emanating from this President and the sycophantic nincompoops he surrounds himself with. He now has a dole of far-left doves fluttering about him, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice with peacenik quacker, John Kerry, to pontificate out of both sides of his mouth. He picked the yes-sir, yes-sir, three bags full champion, Chuck Hagel, to turn the military into one big group therapy session, where the focus is on personal sexual relations and GI Jane’s feminist aspirations. And to figure out our Mid-East mirages he picked the “gone native” Arabist , John Brennan, who is so enamored of everything Arab and reminds me of the British Lawrence of Arabia crowd, who drew the modern-day Mid-East map, ignoring the shifting sands of ethnic and religious hatred. They studied the Arab world, they lived among Arabs, they spoke Arabic, but they became tools for Arab interests rather than their own and this is the exact problem with Brennan.
Filed under Foreign Policy, Gladius Maximus, Military, Politics
Little scraps worth keeping
On facebook the other day I saw one of those prevalent political signs posted by a “friend”, who is really a friend of a friend of mine, who is a fantastic quilter. This “friend” I thought was a quilter too, so I friended her. This “friend” appeared quite animated over the Texas abortion bill, leading to quite a flurry of “pro-choice” postings lambasting the “pro-life” stance. Now, I have posted conservative comments many times online and in fact, back when I first started using the internet I became a frequent poster to the Excite message boards and someday (not today) I hope to elaborate on just how that experience ended up (bad beyond belief). Today, however, I want to make a few comments or pose a serious concern I have about people jumping on hot button political issues without a moment’s hesitation. Being a woman, a mother and a grandmother and growing up in the midst of the feminist movement, I feel justified in offering a few thoughts. This “friend” posts a relentless stream of liberal and far-left lunatic slogans and I did comment on one about stereotyping conservatives and I posted a comment on a pro-abortion banner, but after a little thought, I decided not to engage in a back and forth and removed my comment. This “friend” doesn’t want to discuss any political issue anyway and I doubt anything I could say would influence her opinions. She appears to be locked down tight into the talking points political insanity – the us vs. them mindset.
Whenever the liberal left runs into a brick wall, like in the case of abortion, where advances in medicine lay lie to their central argument of viability of the fetus, that formed the pillar of their argument in the 70s and 80s, they repackage their messaging to deflect from the real issue. The political slogan that caught my attention proclaimed in loud, large red letters: “WANT ABORTION OUTLAWED? HOW MANY UNWANTED CHILDREN WILL YOU ADOPT?” and it brought to mind this long-abandoned viability argument. There’s a complete lapse of logic in this argument this banner proclaims that needs to be addressed. So, let’s start with the obvious main issue. What exactly is abortion? If this banner is to believed outlawing abortion produces “unwanted children”, so it’s saying abortion eliminates “unwanted children”. Back when the push for legalized abortion gained force in America, the abortion argument centered on this very question of aborting “children”. The pro-abortion faction pushed their cause by centering their argument on the” when does life begin” question and made the case that a baby wasn’t a baby until it was outside the womb and viable, meaning could sustain life on it’s own. Medical advancement in the intervening decades pushed that ”viability” argument back into the second trimester of pregnancy and to adjust for this, the pro-abortion activists altered their talking points to a “pro-choice” messaging platform. Now, if a baby born at let’s say 23 weeks of gestation could survive outside the womb, then that is a viable human life, right? Of course it is, that’s why the pro-abortion crowd switched all their political dogma to a “pro-choice” message filled with endless repetitions of the phrase, “we want abortion to be legal, safe and rare”, to deflect from the central issue of just what is being aborted. The science makes it clear that there’s no definitive point when they can declare viability and thus the “human life” question is a hot potato abortion proponents decided to sidestep. Each pregnancy is different and the viability of each baby varies, which makes it risky business to engage in a scientific debate on viability or to try to set a viability timeline.
The abortion activists conveniently switched gears and changed their focus to declaring legal abortion a “right” and by convincing young women that this is their “right” to have sex with whomever they want and that the results are something that other taxpayers must pay for, because of course, it’s wrong to infringe on other people’s “rights”. If I don’t want my tax dollars used to fund ridding America of “unwanted children”, then I am at fault for these “unwanted children existing, not the man and women/or boy and girl, which ever the case may be, who brought this child into the world??? This banner screams for someone to point out an obvious fact. A pregnancy results from a man and a woman making a choice, in all but a few rare cases of rape. Okay, in a tiny percentage of cases we can assume that both parties were responsible sexual partners and used birth control to try and prevent an “unwanted child” from happening. And in another rare scenario couples face the choice of a child being detected with a serious birth defect or the mother’s life is imperiled by the pregnancy.. This leaves us with a glaring statistic that in 2009 the abortion rate had decreased, but was 227 per 1,000 live births, so that’s almost a quarter of pregnancies ended in abortion (CDC figures here). That neatly closes the “rare” argument. And yes, I am “pro-choice” too, that means you have the right to whatever “choices” you make and you are responsible for the results of your choices, not me. This is how “responsible” citizenship works – we must be willing to take responsibility for our choices.
The more interesting moral leap that hit me in this banner is how are people who are opposed to abortion responsible for the sexual choices that other people make? Here’s the absurdity of the whole “it’s my body and it’s my right” mantra – they’ve got a whining poster girl, Sandra Fluke, who attended prestigious universities, to attain a law degree, and is supposedly one of America’s brightest young women on the horizon. Yet, she bemoans that the government is responsible for providing her contraception. One should wonder why this smart young woman and her sexual partner(s), as America’s brightest young people (I am assuming she picks smart sexual partners) must turn to the government to subsidize their sexual activity. No, the pro-life folks are responsible for the “unwanted children” born to pro-choice women, which leaves me wondering, just what personal choices are these pro-choice women and their sexual partners responsible for?
This same “friend” had another blaring banner with an idiotic quote from Texas senator, Wendy Davis, proclaiming, “Lawmakers, either get out of the vagina business or go to medical school!” Well, yes, I would prefer to only have to worry about my own vagina, thank you very much and by the same token I preferred to take care of my own reproductive choices and my husband and I footed the cost of providing for our four children. When you are demanding other taxpayers foot the bill for your “rights” and then have the audacity to blame other people for the results of your choices, somewhere along the line there’s a huge gap in that reasoning. This lack of logic permeates our political landscape on both the left and right, but sometimes the total lunacy strikes when you hear a heartfelt speech like the one Chelsea Clinton delivered lamenting the lack of services that Planned Parenthood provides that her great-grandmother didn’t have access to (story here). Her great-grandmother was “forced” to give birth to Chelsea’s beloved maternal grandmother. Chelsea misses how her political indoctrination precludes any logical corollary that if her great-grandmother had opted for an abortion, then she wouldn’t exist today. She should be thankful her great-grandmother chose to bring her beloved grandmother into this world. It’s rather sad in a way to see so many politically brainwashed young people, who just jump on the virulent partisan political train and never sit and dissect the rhetoric or think about issues broken down into their essence. All I can say is that I have never known a pregnant woman who talked about her condition as it being a “fetus” and then as the pregnancy progressed to some imprecise “viable” point declared, “oh, it’s a baby now!’ It’s a baby from the moment you find out about it and that’s really why the deceptive language and subterfuge uses such loud, inflammatory rhetoric to get as many women throwing hissyfits as possible. Who wants to deal with a lot of high-pitched caterwauling by angry women screaming about their vaginas?’ Not me, I like to keep mine private.
My paternal grandmother ended up pregnant by a young man who had two young women pregnant at the same time. He married the other young woman and my grandmother gave birth to a truly “unwanted child”, my father. She married and left my father with her parents – my great-grandparents, who raised my Dad. My grandmother had only daughters with her husband, but she never wanted anything to do with my father or his children. My grandmother never once spoke to me in my entire life, even when I was in the same room with her. Many times my great-grandmother would tell my grandmother, “That’s one of Billy’s girls.” and my grandmother wouldn’t say a word. My great-grandmother insisted on making it a point to make her daughter aware of my existence and she later would say reassuring things that my father,me and my siblings were her grandchildren and as important as all the rest of her grandchildren. Despite my grandmother’s rejection, I sure am thankful she gave birth to my Pop and can’t imagine wishing she had opted for an abortion….. how bizarre is that idea really, wishing that you didn’t exist? Family situations are like the patchwork quilts my great-grandmother taught me to piece together – made up of varied pieces of scraps in lots of patterns and colors, when looked at individually can seem not worth keeping, but when you add them all together – it creates an amazing end product. I learned from my great-grandmother, who loved my father probably more than she loved all of her nine children, that no matter how ugly or worthless you think a scrap of fabric is, don’t discard it. Later on, those scraps might be just what’s needed in another quilt to create a beautiful design. People are like that too – even the ones who start out as unwanted scraps might mean the whole world to other people later on. In my book, everyone should be a keeper.
Filed under Culture Wars, Politics
Excellent opinion piece on our nuclear arsenal
In some recent posts I discussed our nuclear arsenal and the importance of maintaining and modernizing our nuclear capabilities. The drumbeat that beats loudest since the 1980s taps out the nuclear disarmament tune, whereby suggesting our nuclear force plays a critical role in our national defense strategy hits a sour note among most of our national leadership. Here’s a well-written opinion piece from the heartland by Republican senator, Deb Fisher (junior senator from Nebraska), titled “Modernize, don’t abandon our nuclear arsenal” in Politico, which bolsters my position on our nuclear force.
Filed under Foreign Policy, Military
Sweet land of liberty….. (or land of the gullible?)
Glenn Beck had guests on his show who talked about a new gated community they’re putting together called The Citadel. Through a careful, highly selective application process they hope to find people united by their belief in patriotism, liberty, pride in American exceptionalism and preparedness. This community will require everyone to be self-supporting and these organizers, about as efficiently as the central planners in the old USSR, decided to start a firearms manufacturing factory as a means for the first wave of it’s “pioneers” to support themselves. Guess, they miss the humor in a community touting “liberty” as it’s keystone, building a community with central planners setting up all the rules to become part of the neighborhood, to include what you must believe.
So far, this new community exists only on a webpage and the developers don’t even own the real land to build this oasis of liberty. Not to worry about this being a ponzi scheme, they assure you this beacon of liberty will be located somewhere in Idaho, where they’ve thus far acquired land for the weapons factory. Don’t worry that one of the developers has a criminal record for extortion, which he explained away as his being naive about speaking out. Not to worry that if you fill out the application (with it’s $33 application fee) and if you make it through the Skype interview as a worthy new neighbor for the Citadel community, you must begin paying $50 per month to help secure enough money for these developers to actually buy real property to build this proposed community.
What would living be, where liberty reigns supreme, without the central planners specifying, “All homes will be built of poured concrete for exceptional strength and durability” (even the Three Little Pigs had more freedom). Rest assured, you will be free to build your home to whatever specifications you choose. You’ve also got to be part of the community militia and own a firearm to be able to defend the community. So, you’ll be providing business for the community factory, as well as the work force for it.
I’m going to talk about neighbors and the neighborhood I love best, being part of the United States Army neighborhood. We, as all Army families do, moved frequently and lived overseas as well as all over the US. From my very first days around the Army decades ago, one of the most amazing opportunities to me was to actually be able to meet people, up close and personal, from all over the United States. Due to the traveling and also soldiers’ propensity to marry women in far-flung locales, I even met many people from all over the globe. My husband retired from the Army more than a decade ago and we live in a typical southern town next to a large US Army installation with a population like an international smorgasbord. Just a few days ago, my primary care doctor, who is Syrian, was talking about the situation in Syria and he pulled out his cell phone to show me pictures of his parents home, where the next-door neighbor’s house had recently been bombed. His parents are here living with him, so thankfully they are safe.
From a post I wrote in January titled, “Multiculturism My Way”, you can glean that I consider the world “my neighborhood” too and even growing up in the backwoods of rural PA, I longed to meet people from all over the world. Luck definitely lit my way in life, because it’s been a privilege to have a retired solider hand me a slip of paper that opened the door to first meeting people all over the globe and then to spend decades as part of the US Army neighborhood, where patriotism shines bright. It’s been an opportunity to meet wonderful neighbors and hopefully to be a good neighbor too. So, I want to talk about my neighborhood, where all the values this proposed phony Citadel scheme purports to value is part of the very fabric of the US Army community.
Soldiers believe in a strong national defense, almost down to the last man and woman. Soldiers believe in patriotism too and a cloak of values shields our neighborhood: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service , honor, integrity, personal courage (Army values here) As the standard-bearers of General George Washington’s army, we certainly take very seriously the trust invested in us to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. Unlike these, hummm, I’m searching for a word that isn’t a cuss word, because ‘jackasses” came to mind. Here, I’ll settle on calling them deluded people, unlike them, the Army community is strong enough to welcome people from all over the US and the world and still be a place where our values flourish. In basic training at Fort Dix, NJ, I learned about how a foreigner seeking citizenship, could acquire it by serving in the US Army. So, we’re strong enough to welcome diverse people into our ranks and still stay true to our values.
I had all kinds of neighbors living in the barracks as a young private and once I married we found wonderful neighbors everywhere we lived – on Army posts, in German villages and in civilian communities in America. I’ve managed to make friends and learn a heck of a lot by embracing people who are different than me. I’ve learned to make some darned good egg rolls from an Army wife from Thailand, who came to my home and spent the afternoon showing me. I’ve acquired recipes galore and much more. I had an Army wife from Korea (who married a Cuban guy) show me how to make sushi (yes, I know Japanese, right) in her kitchen. She was trying to learn how to make Cuban dishes. I learned to prepare many German dishes from numerous German friends. I had a Cuban neighbor in one neighborhood, who loved to cook and she was constantly bringing food to me and telling me, “here try this, you’ll love it!” and I did. That Cuban lady was friends with my next-door neighbor who was Puerto-Rican, so I often got a combination of foods to try. When my oldest daughter was in kindergarten, I met a Lebanese neighbor down the street and she asked me to bring my kids down to her house to play with her son, who was my daughter’s classmate. We became friends and I learned about Lebanese food, because this family ran a Lebanese restaurant. Lebanese food ranks as some of the best food in the world.
In my food from around the world saga, I can’t leave out this wonderful Southern lady, who was married to a retired Special Forces soldier, who lived down the street from me when we lived off-post at Fort Bragg. This wonderful lady and her husband had adopted two special needs children and this lady struck up a friendship with me, because her little daughter was the same age as my oldest daughter. This lady taught me about Southern cooking and boy, she loved to cook. She often would call in the morning and tell me to bring my daughter down to her house and she’d list the lunch menu and many times she’d say, “come early and we can chat and I’ll show you how to cook”….- fill-in-the-blank with a Southern dish.
Now, some of my forays into international cooking do go awry and I provided a good laugh for my youngest daughter’s friend several years ago when she was in my kitchen watching me roll up burritos. This neighbor has a Mexican mother and she had this dismayed look on her face and said, “What are you doing!” She told me how to properly roll up burritos and I am sure her mother got a good laugh out of her story about my pathetic burrito-rolling skills, but hey, this girl loves my potato salad, so we all have our strong suits:-)
I must confess that my favorite cuisine is authentic Chinese. Unfortunately, I never met a Chinese woman to come teach me how to cook Chinese food. I do have a friend who is half-Japanese who offered lots of advice on Japanese cooking, but I’ve been winging it on Chinese cooking with cookbooks and experimenting over the years. When I did volunteer work at the American Red Cross doing Red Cross messages, a lovely Puerto-Rican friend frequently brought in food. I learned that the Caribbean is sort of an international mishmash of cultures and thus I still use this handwritten recipe from this friend called , “Puertorican Chinese Arroz”, where she helpfully put “rice” in parentheses.
What’s magical about Chinese cuisine, as well as their culture, is how they take what little they have and through a long, long history, as one of the oldest cultures on earth, developed ways to adjust and thrive, through good times and bad. Chinese people demonstrate amazing resilience. Their cooking encapsulates this, how with a few varied cooking techniques or a few spices, they can take a few simple ingredients and turn it into something unique and flavorful. The Chinese spirit to adapt and persevere always amazes me. Of course, they offer Sun Tzu too, which I just love- all that ancient wisdom on military strategy that still resonates today;-)
This is a true story about a neighbor I had one time – a lovely, good neighbor with a very kind heart and the kind of trusting soul – like the type of people who will start sending money to some schemers like these Citadel planners (yes, this liberty-based community is a “scheme” – it exists only on their webpage). We were living in military quarters in Germany at the time and my neighbor (a lovely German lady) was preparing to move back to the States with her soldier husband. My neighbor had an extensive David Winter cottage collection, which she decided to sell. She sold them to a soldier who didn’t have the money up front, so she accepted a stack of postdated checks, which she agreed to deposit each month and he assured her that he would have money in this checking account to cover them. I urged her to hold on to her collection until she found a buyer with cash in hand.
That same neighbor was planning to buy some lovely lakefront property in the US, dirt cheap and sight unseen, but she needed to send money fast before someone else snatched up this almost too good to be true deal. I forget where she heard about this property, but I begged her to hold on to her money until she got back to the US and could actually walk around this property and see what she was buying. When I thought her naive trust had reached its limit, she told me about this puppy her dog had. Her close friend down the street headed back to the States and my neighbor said her friend was going to send money to her to fly that puppy back to the States as soon as they were settled at their next duty station. The friend had said she wanted the puppy, but then had endless excuses why she couldn’t take the puppy with them. I gently tried to tell my neighbor that if her friend had really wanted that puppy, she would have taken it with them when they left. Naturally, my neighbor was stuck keeping that puppy.
My neighbor would help anyone and she had a wonderful sense of humor. She was the type of neighbor I loved having and you know I couldn’t tell you exactly what her politics were, nor did I ever think about her patriotism. What I did value was that if I needed a helping hand or help in an emergency, I knew she would do whatever she could to help me. I judged her on her character and she had a sterling character, albeit a bit too trusting of a soul. It might be better to teach your kids to respect and value people with differing views rather than enclosing your family behind a fortress to shield them from people with different views.
Filed under Culture Wars, Military
Paving the path to Peace
Here’s a quick news story, “Egypt sees Ethiopian dam as risk to water supply” in the Guardian, to illustrate the importance of access to water. I stated in my last blog piece that access to water may prove to be one of the gravest friction points in decades to come. In this report, Ethiopia, sensing Egyptian weakness, appears intent to move on a dam project. This dam project will provide much needed energy for Ethiopia and development opportunity. On the other side, this dam might spell looming crop failures and a crisis for Egypt. Egypt, already in a precarious situation from the much-hyped Arab Spring, could collapse even more, because the Arab Spring was a big lie. President Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood – the group that spawned radical Islamism. President Obama keeps trying to paint the Muslim Brotherhood as a mostly secular organization, but there again is another one of those big lies he told. Egypt’s economy has gotten much worse since the ouster of Mubarak and the prospect of a diminished water supply or an impediment to the primary water source for Egypt portends a potential for more conflicts, both internal and external.
This little example illuminates just one factor that might ignite another war or another internal revolt inside Egypt and we see these regional friction points all over the globe. It would be lovely if some naive notion like Global Zero could resolve the world’s problems and make us all safe. The truth is we need to maintain our military might, restore our economic equilibrium and start working to be a shining example for democratic ideals. The United States should be upgrading our aging nuclear arsenal, not dismantling it or allowing it to decay. We need to be able to protect ourselves and the many countries that rely on our nuclear umbrella for security. The Wall Street journal ran an interview with former Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, in 2009 that I came across yesterday mentioned in another article (I forgot which article or I’d put a link to that too). Mr.Schlesinger provides the most insightful, detailed, clear reasons why we need to remain a nuclear power for the foreseeable future in this piece titled,“Why We Don’t Want a Nuclear-Free World”. (WSJ interview here).
We should take a leadership role with other world powers to strike a path toward resolving the third world hot spots by forging consensus, instead of playing out our high stakes strategic gambits on the backs of these much poorer countries. Constantly upping the ante and fueling these conflicts with more and more weapons just prolongs the carnage. Recovering from war takes decades, sometimes longer. The American South remained trapped in poverty for almost a century after the US Civil War and even today remnants of the effect of that war can easily be found. Some of these third world countries remain trapped in almost endless strife, where the people face a daily struggle for just the vestiges of survival.
To confidently support arming some lunatic rebel bands in Syria, where a video hit the airwaves and online, with one such “commander” slicing up his fallen foe and yanking out his heart and liver – and eating it, well, obviously it’s reprehensible to arm these types of barbarians in our name. Assad is a monster too, so I’m not supporting him either. The solution would be to try to limit the arms flowing in, instead of trying to find ways to fan the flames. I watched Vladimir Putin talk about this video and I agree with him, but I think his trying to prop up Assad won’t work either. If Russia, China and the US decided to end this Syrian tragedy, they could do it. All it would take is deciding the carnage has dragged on long enough, end the senseless slaughter and work toward some sort of political arrangement. President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s arrogant presumptions about redrawing the map of the Mid-East to fit their political agenda has led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of civilians and will end up costing even more. To use US might, directly or through arming others, imposes responsibility for the end result. Supporting the Arab Spring has destabilized the entire region and their cavalier bravado looks likely to end in the region spiraling out of control and likely will lead to a larger regional war.
The last century’s collapse of colonialism, world wars and cold war era need to become historical stepping stones on a path to more constructive cooperation among the world’s leaders. Assuredly there will be many twists and turns along the path and maybe even a few obstacles that seem insurmountable. We might even come upon some obstacles that seem like a Sisyphean boulder that will keep rolling downhill to crush our hopes for peace. If we believe it is possible, the only thing standing in our way is the will to chip away at that boulder until it becomes just gravel to pave our path. Being the daughter of a man who built roads for a living, I watched Pop blast away entire mountains, so I know it can be done;-)
Filed under Foreign Policy, Military, Politics
Global Zero: Another Nothing-Burger Plan
This one article in The American Thinker titled “Global Zero: Naive, Dangerous, and Provocative” caught my attention, so after reading this piece by Sierra Rayne, I clicked on the website for “Global Zero” (here) to see exactly what they’re proposing. This group, Global Zero, sets its goal as an elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2030 and the webpage boasts a video with President Obama speechifying on a “world without nuclear weapons” followed by a bunch of Hollywood celebrities spouting off about this issue and offering their “expertise” on nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation – “the greatest threat” according to these yahoos. Rayne offers a spirited defense of a nuclear weapons deterrent impact in some detail and backs it with historical examples to make the case.
Now, I admit to having an idealistic plan to get us on the road to peace, but it sure doesn’t begin with the US and Russia cutting their nuclear arsenals dramatically first, which is how the Global Zero experts propose we go about eliminating nuclear weapons. Of course, “multilateral” negotiations will follow that and “proportionate” cuts will be negotiated. (one can only wonder what these folks have been smoking). I think the very last countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals should be the US, Russia and China, or even India and a few other democracies, because these are world powers and military strength keeps a balance of power in the world.
I believe that if a handful of the world powers acted in unison to defang the rogue regimes of nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t take more than an example or two of taking out their nuclear capabilities before other similar countries opted to hand over their nuclear weapons without a fight. This might be a start at reining in nuclear weapons. Even my scenario is fraught with complications and risks, but not anywhere as dangerous as to start disarming and hope others follow your example.
Peace can only come through strength, because nothing so encourages bullies (tyrants, despots and others seeking power) than weakness. I tried not to laugh at our champion of “leading from behind” being at the front of this rose-colored, strategic nothing-burger plan.
Here’s another one of those home truths that I am so fond of using to make my point. Let’s state what should be obvious, but apparently needs to be driven home once more – any weapon, be it a slingshot or a nuclear weapon, is an inanimate object. Inanimate objects aren’t the problem. Yep, it’s always the people that pose the problem and let’s be more precise here, it’s what’s in the hearts of man that can turn that slingshot or nuclear weapon into a “threat”. We’ve always got to contend with people first and the rest of the inanimate objects truly rank as a secondary issue.
No matter which way the world goes regarding nuclear weapons, you can’t un-invent something. You can eventually make something obsolete, but that doesn’t follow some neat little plan devised by left-wing political activists with a victory date already set. Boy, President Obama sure fit the bill for this poster boy, because he naively announced the withdrawal date from Afghanistan before he even got the troops in place for his ballyhooed surge. Of course, we all know the Taliban will be right back in power, because they smelled President Obama’s weakness all the way from the Pakistani tribal areas.
Let’s talk about people, since the solution to all human problems falls on our shoulders. People always form groups – it’s how we live. Groups always compete and also many groups don’t get along (let’s face it Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, the long-running American TV show to teach kids to be “good neighbors” seems to be the global exception, not the rule). So, let’s look at life in the “Neighborhood of Make Believe”, the imaginary setting in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for his puppet show segment in each episode.
I watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for years when my kids were young and unlike many children’s shows, Fred Rogers’ show, highlighted important lessons on the people problems, that carry us further toward finding peaceful solutions than most of the touted geopolitical experts in the world. In the Neighborhood of Make Believe reigned a bullying, irrational, impulsive monarch, King Friday XIII – the worst type of leader to deal with and as his name implies – bad news. Each episode highlighted a different “people problem” and solutions to work out this problem. King Friday never wanted to admit he was wrong, but his calm, more rational wife, Queen Sara Saturday, usually intervened to help resolve the crisis and to calm down King Friday and try to reason with him.
Sadly, the Neighborhood of Make Believe mirrors our real world rather closely, except in the real world we don’t have enough level-headed, steady leaders, like Queen Sara Saturday, running things (yes, she made running a group, “Food for the World”, a primary duty).
King Friday often made impulsive, poorly thought out decisions and it’s leaders like him that pose the challenge on dealing with the nuclear proliferation issue. While King Friday loved to give long-winded speeches (he didn’t own a teleprompter thankfully), he still could be reasoned with, but in the real world we must contend with the threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of batshit crazy leaders, who don’t have a Queen Sara Saturday nearby to calm things down. Some idiotic celebrity-driven group like this, Global Zero, is just one more misguided attempt at trying to fix a complex, multifaceted problem with a leftover 60s “kumbaya” solution.
We need an international security framework, not some celebrities with a dopey plan. Really, let’s put it this way, since ‘bullying” is now such a new crisis requiring national action: Is the way to deal with bullies to let them keep their sticks to beat up others and to force everyone else not to defend themselves (this is that zero tolerance that these leftists always embrace – hint: Global Zero)? Yes, this is how these idiots solve the problems – no fighting, leaving the bullies to run wild and teaching other kids to be passive victims. I dealt with some bullies on my school bus as a kid and got into more than one fist fight. Zero tolerance for violence doesn’t deal with bullies on a school bus any more than an idiotic zero nuclear weapons policy will deal with the bullies in the world.
Every effort should be made to reduce ethnic and regional friction points, but in the big picture world, we all need a geopolitical structure that offers some stability. That comes from global leadership and strength, not from the major world powers feverishly eliminating their nuclear arsenals and hoping others follow suit. A phrase like “greatest threat” presumes a whole heck of a lot and basically it’s sheer arrogance to believe one problem poses the greatest threat. Sure nuclear proliferation ranks as a serious threat, but personally I think something more basic could be a greater threat – access to water.
Since I don’t pretend to be an expert, I’ll concede the point that many unforeseen threats could emerge that jump way ahead of even water. Some pandemic could pose an existential threat to many countries in rapid succession, throwing the world into a tailspin or some natural catastrophe, which impacts several continents. Heck, it could even be both, a natural catastrophe followed by a pandemic. This is why I hate celebrity-driven causes, they’re filled with “informed experts”, who possess not an iota of understanding about military history, grand strategy, nuclear strategy or even general history. This glossily-packaged cause is about the celebrities’ vanity, not about any serious effort to impact nuclear proliferation.
Here’s a thought, perhaps, the greatest threat just might be weakness, which this loopy movement would increase dramatically. My best advice for people – if some morons come up with a plan that has ZERO in the title, consider it null (nothing but hot air).
Filed under Foreign Policy, Military, Politics
The emperor and his metadata robe (Diana West’s perfect metaphor)
Being naive about technology definitely can shield one from the realities of just how disingenuous our government’s explanations about NSA surveillance rank. A couple days ago, I posted a piece about this topic where I equated this metadata collection to gigantic “junk mail folders”. A casual conversation yesterday with my son who is a software engineer left me reeling with just how clueless I, along with many other Americans, am. We heard soothing assurances lulling us into believing that everything’s safe, yes, “hey trust us”, because only metadata is being collected and the actual content of private electronic communications remains safely shielded behind this secure wall. Turns out that wall, like most that our government is entrusted to secure, offers about as much protection as our southern border defense. The new surveillance state, justified by the so-called, post 9/11 reality, exists because it’s so easy to dupe technological dummies like me (and millions of other Americans). My son explained that it’s easy to mine information from data, but he added the caveat, “it just depends what you’re looking for”. In an effort to reassure myself that the government wasn’t deliberately lulling us into submission by this “metadata” only explanation, I said, “but it’s complicated and takes a lot of effort to find out the contents that they say are protected, right?” My son smiled at my gullibility and said that he’s very good at mining data, but his skills are small fries compared to the people who do that for a living. So, I asked why this administration seems so uninformed, like in Benghazi, where they came up with the narrative of the lame youtube video caused a spontaneous protest, if they have all this amazing technology to decipher information quickly. My son hinted that might be a human lapse, not a glitch in the technology – sort of telling the boss what he wants to hear or feeding him information that fits his agenda.
This morning I stumbled upon this tidbit of information in a Rick Moran column (here). In 2008 the Obama administration slipped in some amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the FISA Amendments Act, which empower the attorney general to access all of your private communications without any prior approval from the FISA court. The Obama administration wrote enough loopholes into this act to stray far beyond any legislative constraints, leading me to the sad realization that this wall of protection for our private communications exists only as a rhetorical flourish to deflect us from asking more questions.
At this point, the more I read trying to understand the terminology, the more I realize that even the terminology exists in a relativist’s utopia. Metadata, means data about data, but even that definition according to Wikipedia, is ambiguous (here). The simplistic analogy that it’s like your phone records, which aren’t considered protected and needing a subpoena to access, seems rather hollow in light of just how much information about your private life can be gleaned from sifting through your metadata. Since most of us remain clueless about the terms, the government feels secure, knowing that telling us “it’s just metadata” will keep us quiet because, we don’t really want to know how exposed we are.
Diana West, a brilliant political commentator, refers to this symptom in her new book, “American Betrayal; The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (here), as the situation in the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (here), where everyone pretends to see the invisible new clothes, except for a guileless child, who shouts out that the emperor is naked. Maybe, metadata is just another set of fine invisible clothes the government has donned to keep us in our place, but hopefully a few brave adults will cry out that they don’t see it . Her Townhall.com columns can be found (here) and her blog (here). West lays out the stakes for our country much more eloquently than I could ever hope to in her latest column No Constitution, No Borders, No USA.
Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, Politics, The Constitution
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