Month: September 2011

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Presidential Vigilante?

  

  Just after 9/11, an emotional President George W. Bush, confronted with the knowledge that it was likely the Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden who was directly responsible for the carnage, was asked what he meant when he stated he would work to bring bin Laden to justice. The President acknowledged he didn’t care if he was brought in “dead or alive”.  This frontier justice remark was immediately seized upon as a prime example of a leader who held a view of international justice devoid of any nuance.  It was considered by the opposition and the liberal media as an extremely intemperate remark.  Even Mrs. Bush stated she was concerned with the imagery the President’s words projected.  This remark however was just the start of a whole series of attacks on the President’s perceived reactionary cowboy justice mentality felt serially responsible for inappropriate ‘lone ranger’ actions resulting in their opinion in the radical mistakes of policy defining Guantanamo imprisonment of unindicted combatants, WMD, Iraq, Abu Graib, and the Surge.

     Well it turns out there is a new Wyatt Earp in Town,  and this one is the real embodiment of frontier justice.  President Obama has determined the court room process and commitment to perpetrator rights  he initially felt was so vital to the American psyche as evidenced in  his initial determination to try in American courts the 9/11 co-conspirators,  has little residual value.  He has essentially abandoned his considerations for civilian justice and instead has become a mighty force for vigilante justice.  Over the last several years he has become a singular success in finding and eliminating Al Qaeda’s  starting lineup, and a court room is the farthest thing from his mind for determining the sentence.  The continuous sentence from the sky that is delivered by the Predator drone assumes the sentence is tied to the identification of the perpetrator, and the verdict is, without fail, an immediate execution.  The reality of the bin Laden raid was that the justice meted out would be instantaneous, and there was no effort to “bring him back alive” for a traditional court room conviction.  Now, in the country of Yemen a similar sentence has been passed on Anwar Al-Awlaki, the notorious instigator of the Fort Hood massacre and director of other significant terrorist attacks, and the justice has again ended with a frontier noose party.

      This time, the howling hypocrites on the left are going to have a hard time keeping silent on this act.  Awlaki, for all his attempts at mascarading as the next bin Laden,  is after all, an American citizen.  If there ever was an argument for what the left has been enraged about in the United States actions regarding terrorist combatant’s rights, the execution of an American citizen overseas for an alleged role in a crime without due process is enough to make the Guantanamo and Bush haters gag.  The attack against Obama’s ongoing strategy as an extralegal act is bound to pick up steam.  

     The President is finding out that his reflexive and harsh stance against the previous administration’s legal argument in avoiding civilian court positions himself as a hypocrite of the first order in own recent actions.  Awlaki, born and raised in the United States, projected his venom on the internet inciting violence, but the direct link to traitorous acts against the United States is a circuitous one.  The actions has led voices as diverse as the liberal Salon eMagazine and presidential candidate Ron Paul to condemn the act.  The argument is beginning to be put forth that the presence of views antithecal to the United States is being used as grounds for targeting killing, a slippery slope indeed.

     Awlaki’s pathetic persona was more demonic than his ridiculous resemblence to the  movie actor Avner Eisenberg in 1985’s movie Romancing the Stone: Jewel of the Nile.

The Bad Guy                                                                                         The Movie Actor

No, Awlaki was not the bumbling well meaning religious figure Avner Eisenberg played in the 1985 comedy – he was every bit the nihilist creep that has seized the Islamic mantle in the name of a fascist vision of the world. There are no tears to be shed because he happened to be an American version of the male fantacists dream of an islamic “holy man”. The truth is that Awlaki was willing participant in the violent conspiracy against modern civilization and ended up as he should have – at the wrong end of an American directed weapon. Good riddance. But the argument, if there ever was one, put forward by the President of the need for due process, died with Awlaki. I dont want to hear even one more little hypocritical squeak from any liberal about this administration’s purified notions of justice any more. This President, like no other,  has turned the war on terrorism – into the O.K. Corrall.

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What’s Worse Than Bad? Much Worse…

    

     Imagine that relative no one likes to talk about. You know the one. Its the undisciplined but lovable one that always thought that succeeding in life was not about hard work, but a crap shoot. There’s always that scheme, that upstart, that’s going to a make a million if only the funds are available. At first it looks good superficially. There seems to be comfort, and some luxury – some early returns – but always the need for more money. You want them to succeed, and eventually,  you need for them to succeed. And suddenly you find yourself caught up in it, providing funds, and then assets. Then somehow, your very mortgage is used to under write the scheme, and it goes belly up. Its no longer about the relative’s lack of discipline. Its about your own survival.

     Somewhere in the next few weeks to months, Europe’s unruly relative Greece is going to go belly up on its debts, and Europe’s, if not the world’s economy is going to shudder. Europe, fused at Greece’s hip through the Euro, over looked Greece’s undisciplined governmental structure, its profligate self directed spending to secure all its citizens a cushy supported existence, and its progressive balancing of the cost on Greece’s ever more puny private sector. It overlooked all that , and took in Greece anyway into the shared economic structure of the Euro, thereby making all of the European community at risk for Greece’s inevitable bill.   Now the bill is coming due and Europe’s biggest banks are panicking at the mounds of worthless Greek bonds they will hold. Despite several ‘bailouts”, the circumstances of Greece’s internal economy have not significantly changed and the default is surely coming. Of course that’s not all the bad news. Europe doesn’t have just one wayward cousin. Most of Europe is in the same boat due to decades of voting in socialist parties that progressively padded the ‘security net’ for its citizens. Falling in behind Greece are Portugal, Ireland, and ominously, Spain and the biggest indigestible enchilada of all, Italy.

     The plans feverishly being put forth to avert the crisis lerch from bad to completely unpalatable. The United States’ ugly experience with TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) in 2008 that most of the country feels bailed out the old boy network at the cost of the taxpayer, without applying the market punishments that prevent bad behavior, is being considered on a scale in Europe that defies belief – after all its entire countries this time that are teetering on default. The healthier countries of Europe, left with little option are considering just such a plan, and it is predictable that the fallout to the governments that will put the burden on its citizens to pay for their wayward relatives will be magnified tenfold to the United States experience.

The lessons to the United States in this mess will be both directly and indirectly laid out. The direct effect of fractional governmental default, severe continental bank strain, and huge bills to the European taxpayer is bound to create the elements of a double dip world wide recession, or worse. The indirect effects of a Europe where the traditional powers become disgusted with their less disciplined smaller neighbors, and start to look inward and protect their own economies, is a recipe for the kind of conflict that has convulsed Europe for 500 years. No one, not the United States, not anybody, wants to go back to that. The sad truth for the United States is despite the unfolding lesson of Europe’s lack of capacity to control its internal spending on itself, the U.S. is on a headlong path to undergo the same inevitable trap. The current administration is like the relative shooting craps and hoping the money trough holds out long enough to catch a winner and fund all the nonsense.

As surely as the sun rises in the East, the European economic crisis and what it says about the future of the western ideal of democratic debate and action to address crises in a peaceful and equitable way is about to play out. There are some serious thinkers out there that are not convinced we are equipped to solve this mess. Unfortunately, for both the pessimist and the optimist reviewing the high arc of western civilization’s day in the sun, its going to be a very stormy night.

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“Better a Bad Press, than a Good Eulogy”

     The world, in damaging fashion, has become progressively attached to mythical narratives that no matter how detached from reality are held up as rock bed truths. Former Vice President Gore flies around on private jets raging about those who would question “the settled science” of global warming. President Obama professes that the root of all current economic ills is to be found in the inequities of “the rich not paying their fair share”. The most poisonous world myth narrative, however, has been present for more than fifty years – that the underlying cause of world tumult and Arab middle east radicalism and extended poverty is the ongoing sore of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The narrative states that if only the government of Israel would give the Palestinian people a viable territory for statehood and address legitimate grievances the ongoing strains that fragment the world would cease to exist and radical terrorism would die on the vine. The narrative projects Israel as the unique obstruction to a world of peace and the paramount cause of an Arab nation unable to lift itself from backwardness, totalitarian governments, and individual sense of inferiority and hopelessness.

     The mythmakers of this narrative are particularly pronounced in Europe, a continent that participated in the not so distance past in a process designed to methodically and ruthlessly  ethnically cleanse itself of the Jewish people, and progressively in the American administration, that views Israel as the intransigent that stands in the way of restoring a rightful order in the Middle East that would enhance American security.  The conflict that has raged since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 provides a ongoing template for literally every untoward fact on the ground, the persistence of poverty stricken ‘temporary’ sanctuaries for the “homeless” Palestinian refugees, the rise of radical terrorist organizations to run governments, the unbending totalitarian streaks in Arab governmental rule, and the legitimization of a nihilistic sociopath to the position of President of Iran.

     The greatest weapon the world has to defend itself against these mythmakers are the few statesmen that are capable in measured, logical tones to shine the light of truth on to those that continue to evoke the fantasies.  The combination of courage, intelligence, and rational expression has no greater exponent in the world today than Bejamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the state of Israel.  Yesterday, in front of a hostile United Nations General Assembly, one of the most profound propagators of the myth through its non-stop condemnation of Israel for the past forty years, Prime Minister Netanyahu laid out the bright light of a truth that put the whole world on notice that truth can be the only means of solution of the conflict. 

History has seem of recent years void of the type of leaders who speak to the greater truths that advance humanity and speak across cultures.  The Prime Minister of Israel shows to all that such leaders are still out there.  His command of subject, and clarity of argument knows no equal on the world stage today. He reminds us that overriding role of great statesmenship is to recognize truth as the path to solve conflict, and in doing so to accept that many will not want to hear it. He notes that we can not hope to find answers when only one participant in conflict resolution is asked to sacrifice, and that sacrifice can not come without the rational outcome of security. One could only hope that we  in America may find our own Netanyahu.  Thanks to the wonderful work that the blog Powerline continues to provide, we have Netanyahu’s speech in its entirety.  Watch the whole thing, and see if you don’t have the lazy mists of accepted narrative dissolved by a statesman who has accepted this generation’s mantle of one will speak the truth, and through truth, lead us all to a better place.  The charlatans out there who emote glibness without reason in comparison look ever more inconsequential, and are doomed to history’s dusty hall of insignificance.

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God’s Musical Messenger

    
The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe were home to some of the most profound individual achievements  in the history of western civilization.   The 17th century proffered the return of the scientist and objectivity with great discoveries and theorems delineated by some of the greatest minds in history, including Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Hooke changing man’s perception and acknowledgement of the natural world.  The 18th century was the age of enlightenment, dominated by political revolution and elevation of the musician composer to giants of the age, with Handel, Haydn, and Mozart reconnecting man to his internal psyche and soul, and his personal relationship to his God.  The individual that bridged the two eras and lived in both the world of objectivity and spiritualism was perhaps among the greatest of them, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750).  Bach lived a life of total devotion to his artistic science and to his God and ended up creating a nearly perfect form of veneration that knows no equal.  He saw himself as a vessel of the creative force of the Holy Spirit and devoted his musical life expression to the sacred.  Many composers have produced greatness, but Bach stands alone in the marriage of musical design,  intimate melody, diversity, and sacred profundity.  Now over 260 years from his death, Bach stands as a colossus of western civilization.

     Bach spent his entire life in relative obscurity for his creations but was recognized as an organ virtuoso from the start.  The Bach family mutated a significant musical gene with Bach born of a musical family and he himself producing three composer sons of significant repute.  Bach was born and reared in Eisenach, Germany, and spent much of his adult life close to home.  His initial significant impact was as a court musician in Weimar, eventually taking positions as chief Kapellmeister in Kothen, and then Leipzig.  At each step Bach churned out both secular and sacred music for local consumption,  bringing virtuoso individual skills to prominence while elevating liturgy to profoundly emotional spiritual levels.  Brief contacts with fame were fleeting; the most famous story regarding Frederick the Great’s desire to see if the legendary German could hold a candle to his French language and culture dominated court. He brought him to the royal court in Potsdam and challenge him to create a from scratch fugue from a musical theme he had composed. Bach immediately dazzled the court with an extended three part fugue that left them speechless, then retired to his room to compose a six part fugue he presented the next day.  At a time when music wavered between song and uncomplicated construction, Bach brought a mathematical science to his singular melodies that will never know an equal.  The style known as contrapuntal, elevated music to an intellectual complexity not previously known, with an emotional depth previously seen only in the great artworks of the Renaissance.  Yet Bach in his lifetime was a relatively obscure jewel and died with his greatest works essentially unknown to the wider audience beyond his Sunday services.

     With the elevation of the great composers of the 19th century to celebrity status, Bach’s works were rediscovered and their timeless greatness were noted to have held up very well.  The perfect structure, the intensely emotional expression, and the absolutely unique creations have become a critical part of humanity’s sense of existential purpose and the most profound examples of the human capacity for greatness.  Bach was too humble regarding his place in God’s creation to see himself as anything other than a vessel for God’s relationship with His creation.  Humility like that, that creates genius output like Bach, should be a humility that we all could only hope to emulate.

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Searching for Something, or Somebody

 

     The world is in a bit of a funk right now.  The cherished elements of human progress and life quality assumed as the societal pinnacles for most of the twentieth century – good government, impartial laws, secure health, universal education, individual freedom, and unfettered commerce – are tottering, and we seem unable to know what to do to re-invigorate them.  Europe,  having sustained two devastating world wars, looked to the collectivist instinct and social safety net, building eventually the greatest guarantee of a life comfortably safe from the pain of failure or circumstance, yet it now finds an unmotivated, unhappy population, and a surging inability to financially underwrite the created lifestyle.  America, the beacon of personal freedom and achievement, is progressively committing itself to the same kind of  securities for its population it has viewed in European society, accepting progressively oppressive indebtedness at the very moment it sees its European cousins collapsing under theirs. The Arab world, so long under the yoke of dictatorial regimes, has risen to throw off the oppressors, only to appear to except an even more oppressive religious dogmatic rule.  The Asian behemoth China hurtles forward to modernize at an unabsorbable rate, ignoring its internal conflicts to aggressively project upon its wary neighbors India, Korea, and Japan a new subtle hegemony.

     What the heck is going on?   The air feels heavy and stagnant, the humidity high, the threat of rain and storm on the horizon.  The sense of helplessness and inevitability of a lesser existence continues.  The world’s  human spirit is feeling worn; almost as if it is tired of the burden and simply waiting for a new species to take over.  Its not just economic recessions, scarcity of resources, theoretical climatic doom, or looming conflicts that suppress the primordial fight or flight response of individuals.  It seems progressively our innate give-a-damn is busted.

     I really think a large part of the collective funk is the world’s indifference lately to seek great leaders who worked to achieve great universal truths without regard to their personal advancement.  Where is the Arab world’s George Washington, who threw the tyrants out, secured his nation’s future, then threw himself out to prevent any possibility of despotism?  Where is Europe’s  Abraham Lincoln, who recognized the importance of a federal unity while carefully protecting the capacity and rights of every individual citizen?  Where is China’s Konrad Adenauer, who can marshal the enormous potential of his citizens while respecting and working with his neighbors to the benefit of each?  Where is Islam’s Martin Luther King, who spoke from the depth of his religious conviction about the universal basic rights of all people, regardless of individual circumstance, color, or creed?  Where is America’s Alexander Hamilton, who recognized the balance between the national investment and the individual responsibility to create the foundations for the  greatest economic engine the world has ever seen?

     I am fairly certain they are out there, but classic selflessness is not currently considered an attractive virtue.  The American experience currently may be the test best as to whether the world is willing to wake up and look for leaders that project our better nature.  The current American President, enmeshed in an economic downslide progressively of his own making, is incapable of putting forth an agenda that frames clearly the problems we face, nor propose recognizable and constructive solutions.  He is post modernist, reaching back to past strategies to provide securities to the populous supposedly denied ignoring the effect of those strategies on the future.  He is a created hologram of an inward looking society that wanted its President to look, sound, and emote a certain way, but never assessed as to whether the experience or track record of achievement was there to act. The result is a political process that doesn’t remotely correct the inequities of the past, while assuring through its actions the inability to solve this problems in the future.  We have as a society, through this man, achieved perfect political irrelevancy.

     I think the world is going to watch America over the next year to see if the concept of leadership will come back into vogue.  Is there a collective will to see the re-establishment of common sense, restoration of personal responsibility,  return of right and wrong, promotion of individual talent and creativity, and mature and aggressive true shared sacrifice to secure the nation’s future?  Will a leader come out of the current malaise to harness human capacity and articulate the path to a better future?  The world will watch closely to see if the country most designed for course correction can self correct.  The way forward is fairly well delineated.  Lets see if America, and the world, can once again accept the better angels of our nature, and recognize the current pathfinders that mirror those that at one time were celebrated in our textbooks.

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9/11

     Ten years ago, at 8:46am under an impossibly clear blue sky, American Airlines flight 11 under the control of committed assassins struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The world shuddered perceptively on its axis. The intent of men to whom the achievements of western civilization were an abomination were clarified 17 minutes later when United Airlines flight 175 similarly struck the south tower at 9:03am. The reign of terror from the air continued that morning with American Airlines flight 77 striking the Pentagon building in Washington DC at 9:37am, and was culminated by the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 by its own passengers at 10:03am to prevent the hijacked plane from completing its murderous intent of destroying the Capitol building in Washington.

     77 minutes of premeditated destruction and death affecting thousands of lives of which the lasting effects we are still living through today. To what end was the calamitous decision to throw the world into violent struggle made by Osama bin Laden and his ilk? A war against history. A war against individual will. A war against humanity. The deaths of 2996 individuals on that day, tragic accepting the 19 terrorists who willingly gave their lives to destroy others, know no compensation. The children who lost fathers, the husbands who lost wives, the colleagues who lost colleagues.   The sacrifices were for the fantasies of men who preferred a world where men could again be dominant kings, their women subjugated, science used to suppress freedom, and free thought and will to be eliminated.  This was the event that was to ignite the collapse of history’s forward drive of the past thousand years, and reduce humanity to the rule of the ignorant and the deluded.

     It was the fantasy of such men that led to such destruction on that morning. Pathetic fantasy.  Through ten years of war, death, economic strain, and challenge to principles of freedom promulgated by the events of that day, the residual image that captures the pathetic nature of such fantasy was the last view of bin Laden sitting in a filthy room in Pakistan, watching videos of himself, the last person left still  interested in his words and philosophies.  He was tried and convicted by Navy Seals for his crimes against humanity this summer, the sentence was executed, and we are all the better.

     9/11 taught us that the capacity of man for self hate runs deep within us, and is an enemy that needs to be exposed and rejected.  There can be no diversity of opinion when it comes to the worthiness of each individual life, the ability to achieve maximal potential, the respect for and defense of individual freedom.  The tyrants will always seek to crush the spirit of man and reinforce his self hate, to secure the tyrant’s fantasy of domination of free will.     We do well to use the anniversary of this tragic day in history as a reminder to forever be on the Ramparts against the tyrants never ending hatred of humanity’s positive thread.

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Los Alamos

 

    I have been away for a well deserved trip and traveled to a favorite corner of the world, northern New Mexico.  As a humbly self described amateur historian, the pulse of history that surges through this unique land could occupy me for months.   The visible chapters of the untold millennia of earth’s history is unrivaled in the geologic variety and infinity vistas, and the area is just as rich in the human story of civilization since the last Ice Age.  The historical books come together in the special corner of the world that forms the mesa on which the little town of Los Alamos rests.  The several hundred million years since the inland seas receded and left the spectacular vistas of New Mexico at the base of the southern rockies seems, at times, eternally fixed, but the past thousand years, a geologic eyeblink, saw amazing human intersessions upon this timeless land.  From the civilized mesa dwellers at Bandolier, to the Pueblos of the native American, the intense migration of the Spanish civilization, and the American merchant invasion via the Santa Fe Trail the land at Otowi, New Mexico has seen a special immersion of cultures.  No migration, however, has probably had the permanent and profound effect of the human experience as did the most recent one – the 1942 migration of the scientist clan onto the Otowi mesa assuming their new home in the Los Alamos County Ranch School and changing science and history forever.  From 1942 to 1945, the ancient mesa at Otowi became the center of scientific research and development that opened the secret of the atom and resulted in atomic energy and the most devastating weapon ever devised by man, the atomic bomb.

     The story is best told in two wonderful books that are a must for anyone wants to understand the incredible tale of Los Alamos and the atomic quest.  The first is Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb .  There is no better and more understandable treatise of the incredible genius that ties Ernest Rutherford’s 1890’s discovery of the atom to the brilliant teamwork of the great collection of scientists that Robert Oppenheimer corralled in Los Alamos in the 1940’s.  The human story of discovery and commitment is best told in Jennet Conant’s wonderful book, 109 East Palace.  Ms. Conant captures the personalities, immense work and breathtaking achievements of the team at Los Alamos preforming under unimagined stress and complete secrecy in a more innocent time. 

     Los Alamos became the site for the most intense science project known to man due to a memory of the director of the search for the secret of the power of the atom, J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The secret project, assigned to the Army’s Manhattan Corp of Engineers, and thereafter known as the Manhattan Project, required a special individual to be in charge and attempt to achieve the impossible in an insufferably short period of time.  It required an individual of special brilliance, who could understand and coordinate physicists, mathematicians, engineers, metallurgists, explosives specialists, chemists, and warriors, hold them together, and finish the job under the enormous pressure of a country fighting for its very life in a race against its enemy for the ultimate weapon, harnessing the power of the atom.  The country found such a man in J. Robert Oppenheimer from the University of California.  Oppenheimer, in looking for the right secluded location for such an enterprise requiring space, water, and the capacity for secrecy, remembered the horse trails of his youth in the region of the Bandolier Indian ruins and went with General Leslie Groves to seek out the location as a home for the project in 1942.  The site proved perfect and the decision was to base the project at the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School in Otowi, New Mexico.  The school had been a place where children of wealthy parents could immerse their children in a life of rigor, scholarship. and self confidence that the life of the  West was considered to represent.  Oppenheimer assembled a team of hundreds of scientists whose average age was twenty five, who subjected themselves to the rigors of the task, with the spirit of the school that had preceeded their community at Los Alamos.  In less than three years, Los Alamos proved to be the most successful science experiment in history, taking a theoretical possibility, that the atom, held together by immense forces, could be, in a controlled fashion, be persuaded to release those forces.  On July 16th, 1945, in the desert outside of the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the forces of nature were released from a device conceived, created, constructed, and culminated by the geniuses of the little community of the Ranch School at Los Alamos, and the world for good and bad willl never be the same.   The test of the atomic weapon, referred to by the group as “The Gadget” proved to all that man holds the unique ability to covert thought into reality, limitless in scope when the effort was total.

     The town of Los Alamos continues to this day as a leader in science and atomic energy, and the Bradford Museum of Science located there, is very worthy of a visit to understand the task of nuclear scientists that continue to this day.  The Ranch School still stands and the little museum located on Bathtub Row brings to life the community Oppenheimer led, and reminds us of the world of 1940’s northern New Mexico that made it possible.

     The amazing story is told well in the documentary below, A Moment in Time.  Although an hour in length, it is worth every second to bring the unique story  of Los Alamos to life. The trip off Highway 25 onto Highway 502 in northern New Mexico to the little town of Los Alamos holds an unlimited amount of storyline to the human experience that make getting away to special places worthwhile.