Jolly Rogers- Random Wisdom from Under the Mainstream!

Our better world

2011-07-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

I want to wake in a better place.

Why is it that I can no longer remember what it was like to open morning eyes and not step out from some nightmare landscape? I remember a time when the sun lit the beginnings of my day. I remember moments of perfect timeless peace – everything accomplished behind me, and so much time in front that I felt almost immortal. I remember those times, but I no longer remember what it felt like.

How did we come to this place, where every piece of news is mean and dark-spirited? So many people seem so lost and the only answers we get from our country’s leaders are distortions, half-truths and often, just lies.

It would be nice to live again in summer of our youth, where sand and salt wind and the calls of gulls reminded you every moment that you were forever alive and free.

Instead the news reports scream about higher and higher job losses, continual scams and scandals, natural and unnatural disasters and the horrors we would visit upon each other. Alarmists use a debunked global climate change as reasons to keep stealing from the people. Massive corporations seem suspiciously involved in tremendous webs of corruption and monumental amounts of taxpayer money have sifted into hidden places while lawmakers benefit. States are going bankrupt, promises are broken and new taxes and laws threaten to drown the people still barely afloat in a drowning economy.

So where is our better place?

Like some kind of never-never land, it all seems to be just beyond the starlight – always promised and hoped for, but never realized. Like the carefree years of our youth, our better, stronger country seems beyond our reach and looks to only reside in our memories or our imagination.

But there is always a road back from the hard places. Redemption is just beyond our belief in our selves, and our own powerful creativity and ingenuity. We can find clarity and purpose and beauty if we discard fear and the eventual anger and hate it spawns. We can become the shining city again, but we must stop the push for greater regulation and government control of our lives’ smallest details.

I know the place where the sun still warms our future. We can wake there and we can walk there and we can feel the breeze of liberty on our faces. I imagine we will see each other in that golden light, and we will nod and smile knowingly. We will talk about the times when things were hard and dark, but we won’t be able to remember what it felt like. We’ll laugh when we speak and we’ll know that our children and grandchildren are going to grow up in a better world than we did; that they will be happy and secure and filled with truth and compassion.

We created it once - and walked barefoot there - in a time of pinball and cotton candy. Tall ships once gathered to celebrate our country's centennial. We will never see that again in our lifetime - but someone will. And perhaps their generation will see a country where flags fly proudly in front of almost every home. Their community will once again be whole and not fractured. Their world will be a place where compassion and love always wins - and where belief and honor do not need to be questioned.

It is the place where war is unnecessary and sadness, horror, sickness and hunger is lessened and maybe eliminated forever. It’s the place where we can meet old friends and know that each passing day promises we may meet new ones. It is a place of heroes.

I want so bad, to continue to believe in our noble home of the brave.

I want to wake to a better place. And if I do, I’ll wait for you, and we’ll walk there together.

-We the People

Death panel

2011-06-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

One hundred peaceful protestors were blocked from FDA offices Tuesday in an attempt to protest the removal of a vital breast cancer treatment drug from its’ approval lists – an action which would make treatment with the drug impossible for all but society’s elite.

It is one of the first and most complete examples of a “death panel” in operation.

The scene in front of the FDA complex highlighted the continued slip of America from a republic into something resembling a police state. The protestors clad in pink, carried signs - those facing them carried weapons and were clad in combat uniforms.

The leader of the group, who’s wife is battling cancer, continued to repeat through a bullhorn, “we will obey the law.”

And yet, stone-faced, the Homeland Security detachment faced them – finally allowing one of them through to speak to officials after he obeyed requirements to set down his sign and bullhorn.

The process of withdrawing approval for the drug Avastin is called “unlabeling.” By unlabeling the drug, insurance companies are relieved of their obligation to pay for treatment. So, even though people suffering from cancer have paid high premiums for the coverage, with the help of the FDA, the rules can be changed, and the expensive treatments will be witdrawn.

Those who would have been saved by the drug will face terrible deaths in one of the first examples of administrative government-approved killings.

I have a couple simple questions for the reader: First, why face the group of 100 regular citizens with an overwhelming, fully armed police force and demand that the leader of the protest put down his sign and communications and come in alone? Second – and more importantly; how far does one go in “obeying the law,” when to do so means nearly certain death at the hands of the “law?”

It would seem people have become very good at obeying commands from faceless corporate and government commanders and commandos, but are less able to see how much has been taken from them – and do something real about it.

Until, of course, they take everything away – and then, it no longer matters.

Wednesday, the FDA panel convened to consider the unlabeling, ruled In-favor of it – a decision which if given final approval by the FDA Commissioner, will give insurance companies a big fat paycheck – blood-money for the death of untold numbers of Americans.

One last request of the reader: Define evil.

Pride and shame

2011-06-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

I once served in the Honor Guard for the 501^st Tactical Missile Wing. This was a unit based at the famous Greenham Common in Britain. Our duty was to deliver 96 nuclear cruise missiles to Russia in the event the Cold War became hot.

It didn’t.

One day, the base was called to a briefing to discuss the end of the mission – and a new beginning without the threat of the Soviet Union. There were maybe a thousand people filling a massive building. The Honor Guard had been asked to bring the room to attention. That task was probably more appropriate for the Master Sergeant in charge of the Guard – but he passed it to me. I guess I had a loud mouth. I was a little nervous. The sound from the room was deafening – people talking and laughing and at first, no one noticed as I walked down the center of the room, posted, and carried out the order.

In a split second, everything stopped and everyone came to attention. I did an about-face and walked out – and the U.S. and RAF Commanders came in.

I remember a feeling of pride. We had accomplished an amazing mission. In some small way at least, the threat of our mobile system may have forced the hand and hastened the collapse of the Communist government. And there were other “moments” during the final years of the 501^st: There was Eisenhower Day, when I marched the American Flag in a color guard, down the center of Newbury. I had bought new boots for this specific day – straight out of the box and completely unblemished, they were peeling the back of my heels off my feet and filling with blood. I was aware of the situation, but much more aware of the old British men in black suits, lining the streets as we passed, their chests decorated with medals from a long-ago war, where we, the Americans came to the assistance of Britain. Together, our countries had won a war, which saved a world. My color guard performed perfectly that afternoon.

“Pride” is too small a word to cover such a feeling on a day like that.

So to hear of Associations in America, taking veterans to court for flying U.S. flags in their front yard – it infuriates me. A good writer should be objective and impartial. I am afraid, today, I cannot be a good writer.

Today I read about a 77-year-old veteran of Vietnam, who has been told by the homeowner association that the U.S. flag flying in his front yard, violates the rules of the property. This is occurring right now in Macedonia, Ohio. Apparently, there are not enough patriots there in that town to stomp mudholes in the idiots that make up the Association’s board.

Yesterday I read about another Homeowner’s Association in Evans, Georgia, which withdrew approval for a house to be built for a seriously wounded veteran to be erected by the national organization “Homes for our Troops." The house, which was to be specially adapted for SFC Sean Gittens was initially blocked because the association wanted a second story, as well as 700 square feet added to the plan. SFC Gittens was left paralyzed and unable to speak as a result of an aneurism linked to traumatic brain injury resulting from multiple concussive traumas during his Iraq service from April 2007 to April 2008.

As of June 24^th, however, after continued heat, the Association in the way of Gittens’ new home, folded under the pressure, asking for more shutters and other architectural changes, but not the additional floor space. The family hasn’t yet responded back.

In absolute fury over both these situations, I can only say that it is precisely these sorts of things, which diminish all of us. Are some silly neighborhood rules worth more than the history and majesty of the U.S. Flag? Are these effete snobs, which make up these organizations, worth even one man such as SFC Gittens? Where were they – and what were they doing, when Gittens was serving the country?

What a source of pride – America.

What a source of shame.

What do you see?

2011-06-16T17:02:00.001-07:00

Look at the sky and clouds on a perfect day.

Somewhere else, that same view resonates like a kind of emotion, deep within another soul on the other side of the world.

But in our day-to-night lives we can’t see that.

Vibration in sound, familiar to so many, is unfamiliar when thought of as existing inside someone else. Sight and sound and even belief seem so obvious to us when we see ourselves in dreams and life, all the time accepting the lie that each of these things is separate. And that makes us alone.

And still we can’t see that.

Lay on your back in the cool grass as a child and look up at the sky – let memory take you there even now. Such peace connected to such longing. What shapes do great winds and water make in their wrestling, somewhere so far above you? Your skin tingles against the green and the Earth presses up against you and through you. From the void, solar winds and cosmic stuff so ancient it can remember creation itself,, move so fast, through everything. They don’t even know you are there, but they carry through the vast reaches and the clouds and the droplets so far above – with hopes to someday be rain - and having seen so much of the universe, they still become part of us, and we are connected to everything.

And we don’t see that.

The strata of stone and bone and lost civilizations beneath us hide impossible knowledge, and the stars, so far away can be our friends, even though they hide from us during the day. Somewhere else, in a different philosophy, they are friends too. We appear to each other – but we cannot see beyond the surface, and so only ever see color and shape and the lies of skin and clothes and unfamiliar faces. It is easier to believe in the fiction of a world in revolution around us, than to feel the alien texture of connection – and we certainly don’t want to see that; especially reflected within ourselves.

But we kill and cut and bleed and grasp for more – and we name all these things, as if by naming them we can give them order and reason and control.

Half a world away a child can’t sleep because she is too hungry – and down the street someone who was once relied upon to die for you if necessary – lays dying finally, in some forgettable room where so many others have left this world without seeing the sky one last time. They can’t eat even though they are hungry, and they know even that won’t last – there’s a kindness there they can finally understand. No one will come to see them. Across the street someone has been given a final date – and another street over, someone has been given a different kind of date; and dread is their common thread.

And so many certainly don’t want to see any of that.

Squeeze your hands in that distant memory. Feel the Earth give way beneath your fingers, understanding the connection, perhaps – or in a moment, allowing a kind of gift. But that gift is connected through the sunlight and air and cloud and back again to other hearts and minds in so many distant places, you would never be able to speak their names. Yet the stuff of ancient peoples and even older things forgotten fills our hands, cool against the skin and we can almost feel a tear willing itself into being.

I talked to a woman once in Africa. She was a doctor, but so many had died, filling her hands with their fading heat, her soul had eroded. So many mysteries were gone for her – so many hopes now replaced by oblivion’s comfort. She couldn’t imagine anything else because for her, the sky was only something she had to walk under on the way to hear more screams, smell more blood and witness more death.

She couldn’t see anything else anymore.

What is the greater despair? Is it more terrible that it seems like nothing can be done for the lost and tired? Or is the greater horror that so many of us could do so much – and refuse – instead focusing our short lives on the purposeless continuance of hate and hurt.

We can cut each other down to make ourselves seem bigger for just a moment – or we can recognize the infinite connections being made even now without us, and reaching out, become more than ourselves. We can leave our mark or we can become more than that. Sound and shape and touch all resonate in a shared world waiting just beyond each of us – and we don’t have to be alone. Tie your destiny to that of someone else and you together, become greater than you could standing alone. Add a third and a fourth and eventually we can all reach a greater destiny beyond the breeze and the clouds and the shores of that distant sea in which our world – a tiny island, is much less than a speck.

We can reach beyond all of it.

And today I wondered if anyone could see any of that.

The VA health care system - from a veteran's perspective

2011-06-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I considered the work to be sacred in a way.

Work as a real reporter is not the sensationalized headline hunting, self-promoting disgrace it has devolved into these days. A real reporter reports the truth and attempts to be unbiased – actually goes to great lengths to be unbiased. A real reporter covers the news and provides information others cannot get access to. A real reporter is a prize fighter, often without any prize (and usually without much of a salary).

But that’s about the responsibility involved in the job. I want to talk to you about the glory of the thing.

The glory of reporting is that, while you may sometimes feel like Don Qixote de la Mancha, you are not always simply “tilting at windmills.” On occasion, the windmills get their ass kicked.

I lived for that moment. I didn’t like to hurt people, but where there was an injustice which could not be addressed any other way … in fact, where the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough – I could reach the sucker. And when I got to them – with training and experience in a variety of fields, they felt like they’d been truly touched.

And so, I would like to introduce to you a concept, which is due: This is the unveiling of a new blog. Those veterans out there are going to like this – especially New Mexico veterans.

I am about to begin a new blog dedicated to the review of VA services from the perspective of a New Mexico veteran. For those who work at the Veteran’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, get ready. You’re going to love me even more than you do now.

I will make a regular report on initiatives made by the New Mexico VA Health Care System – and the response to these initiatives by veterans in the hallways and waiting rooms of the hospital complex. I will draw on my own experiences for this, but I will try to keep the reporting on those experiences unbiased. Where possible, I will provide you names and offices and phone numbers for sources. Where possible, I will give individuals the opportunity to respond to my articles. But, in the end, you will have a ground-level view of how a veteran’s medical facility treats soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines returning or returned from the battlefields of the world.

You will often be disgusted by what you see and read here. And you will no doubt also experience the entire gamut of other emotions. Because those who knew me as a reporter and news editor of a daily, knew one thing for certain: there was no escape. If you deserved a look by me or the other reporters, it would be hard and uncompromising – and it would be fair. Good things happen in many of these places as well as the bad things.

I know why this kind of thing is not often done. On the one hand, it is often the case that the doctors, nurses and administrators who work there really are doing their best. They are in a high-stress job and aren’t often appreciated or thanked. But they do get their share of difficult patients. On the other hand, people fear reprisals. Veterans are often very sick and their injuries are serious. Private insurance typically will not cover their chronic service-connected conditions – and the VA is the only chance they’ve got, to lead a halfway normal life. They don’t need a massive organization of nameless, faceless administrators and functionaries descending on them like locusts. They are scared.

I am not.

I am a former USAF sergeant and a graduate of the Defense Information School, trained in Public Affairs. I am a better PA person than the character they have working for them. I am a reporter, editor and author. And I am a traditional martial art teacher of 20 years experience.

I will tell you folks who treat veterans poorly in my backyard, quite simply now, what is coming for you – it is what I promised to insect politicians and their like when I began writing the Jolly Rogers a few years ago…

My wrath may not seem real from your lofty positions. You may feel yourselves to be untouchable, but make no mistake I am coming for you.

I am coming for you all.

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The blog about the VA health care system from a veteran’s perspective will be announced here on the Jolly Rogers, when it is set up. Watch for it. As there are further developments, I will report on them here until that new site is up and running.

Eugenics

2011-06-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

Eugenics.

If ever there was a subject you might wish to keep relegated to the pages of paperback sci-fi, this is it. It should be in a special dictionary, where it can’t run the chance of infecting other words, more wholesome – or just not as horrible to contemplate. One might imagine this word accompanying others, such as genocide, rape, etc., into the pages of a black book with even blacker pages.

Maybe then, with our language purged, the concepts would not be so easy to access. But I know that is wishful, fanciful thinking. In the real world, monsters don’t need a vocabulary. They just do what they do best – and in the best outcomes, we catch them and electrocute them… like bugs in that blue lit zapper on your back porch.

Killers, unrepentant terrorists, homicidal maniacs – skin-walkers of every description – and we know the names of the big ones: Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden – so many, we couldn’t list them all if we tried. Still, we put them down like the rabid creatures they are, when we find them – usually.

Of course, if the skin-walkers are discovered nestled happily within our own government, then the hand-wringing begins. But that process of political correct mumbling only starts after the damage has been long done – either by shuffling minions including lawmakers, lawyers, judges, doctors, police officers, city and county administrators … basically everybody you are told to trust and believe, and obey.

To hell with them – that’s my sentiment.

They just didn’t all make it there. Consider North Carolina. This is a state chock full of lovely museums and attractions, like the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, featuring this month, an art gallery of watercolor paintings, and a soon-to-be-displayed exhibit on expanding oceans.

Or you may enjoy the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center! Get your tickets to learn about the “power of the telescope!” There’s just hundreds of places to visit and enjoy yourself, including American History Vacation packages and other wonders.

I wouldn’t recommend a permanent move, however. Their historical lessons will likely not include something from the past 40 years – and I wouldn’t bother checking on this at the NC Children’s Museum, because you won’t find much evidence of it there. Unless you look for that which is not there at all – specifically 7600 children who would now be adults, their children, and their children’s children. And you won’t see anything anywhere about the accomplishments of those kids, because they were never born.

No they weren’t aborted. That’s not the subject of this article. These children were simply never born. That is because from the 1920s to the 1970s, North Carolina had the legal authority to forcefully sterilize members of its’ population. Sure, it was done by Hitler – but apparently he didn’t do it right, because following WWII, North Carolina really picked up the pace sterilizing white women at first, because they were on welfare – and later, black women as they became part of the welfare system. But males were also targeted, and the reasoning was what you would expect of insects with little regard for human life: “you wouldn’t expect a moron to run a train or a feeble-minded women to teach school – you wouldn’t want the state to grat drivers’ licenses to mental defectives…” reads a pamphlet published to promote the program. The capper: “Yet each day the feeble-minded and mentally defective are entrusted with the most important and far reaching job of all … parenthood.”

More than 7500 people were forcibly sterilized in North Carolina. They received an apology from former Governor Mike Easley in 2002. Easley was born in 1950 – during the time period in which the eugenics program was in full swing. Those who received their apology in 2002, basically received it from one of the babies who escaped the culling.

None of the victims of the State ever received any compensation for their empty lives. Only 39 percent of them are still alive. Later this month, those remaining victims will be asked to speak to a “governor’s task force” regarding compensation.

How do you compensate for something like that?

What do you give those people back that you haven’t already stolen from them? And what apology will be heard, by the dead and the unborn?

I imagine those who instituted the program and pushed it into high-gear after WWII – they are likely all beyond justice.

I hope they’re getting forked right alongside Hitler.

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Proponents of eugenics are currently within the federal government. Obama's science advisor John P. Holdren has called for a "Planetary Regime" of totalitarian population control measures in his book "Ecomeasures," published in 1977 - years after Eugenics ended in North Carolina. Apparently, he doesn't think the program of Hitler and North Carolina, went far enough, either. Holdren's leading notion in the book called for adding "infertility drugs" to water supplies; his runner-up... require women to apply for licenses to have children.

The power of dreams

2011-06-04T22:50:00.001-07:00

I understand at the genetic level the need to revolt. My genetic make-up comes from a people who are good at it.

Still, it is disheartening to read the word, as written by modern-day Americans and friends, in response to the perceived – and often very real – dismissal and disdain shown by our elected officials for those who elected them. The response is almost universal now amongst regular folks everywhere … “remove these pretenders from office before they can do any more harm.”

I cannot disagree with the reasoning, but I do disagree with the common reasoned solution.

The question really is: what you believe? And it really is that simple. Consider history.

From 1929 to 1933, the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression. Simultaneously, massive errors in farming practices and natural weather patterns produced the Dust Bowl – and brought devastation to the western U.S. This all occurred during a time when just a decade previous, the “Spanish” Influenza killed 50 million people worldwide. Within that same timeframe, the end of the “Great War” saw approximately 38 million dead. By 1929, despite a bull market leading up to the depression, the crash still occurred, as well as everything that went with it, there was little reason to hope. In fact, the median for education amongst adults living during the 30s was 8.1 years of school. Only about five percent of U.S. youth had ever seen the inside of a college. Less than 40 percent had completed High School.

Life was dark, much seemed hopeless and beyond the control of man. In many places, people were resorting to anything, for just a little bit of hope. Organized crime flourished – violence, strikes and corruption increased, as did racially motivated killings.

What was needed was not greater control and more grasping for power, but simply, a strength of belief.

January 7, 1929, newspapers carried a new comic strip. Comic strips were very popular due to the literacy level of the average citizen. In this case, the strip was something John Flint Dille had been planning for some time, but which finally came to life with the illustrations of Frank Paul. The story had already begun in 1928 in the August edition of Amazing Stories, as written by Phillip Nowlan., including in the title, the word “Armageddon.”

The comic strip Dille had wanted to produce for some time was all about a single purpose: Produce hope … give people something to believe in. The prologue described a man who had just left the air service after a World War, and through an accident in his new civilian job, became accidentally entombed in a mine – only to awake in the year 2429. This simple prologue was of course, the beginning of a name, which would become known around the world … “Buck Rogers.”

Consider this: What kind of hope do you have for the future? How do you think the next year will develop? What do you think will happen to the United States if we have to suffer through another year of a chief executive’s vacationing, golfing, and systematic disassembly of the economy? What results can we expect with further regulation, further control of people’s day-to-day lives?

If we call the America we currently live in, “Orwellian,” then what hope do we have of escape and rebirth? Remember, this … our society is nowhere near as troubled as that of the generation of the Great Depression. We just need something to catch a glimpse beyond the horizon. We need something to believe in.

The miracles depicted in Buck Rogers include rockets, flying machines, television, two-way video communication, cell phones, digital displays – and many other current conveniences. The truth of the power of the convictions which birthed these things was not found in the adult population of that time – but rather the children. By 1929, the comic was everywhere, featuring not just the resourceful Buck Rogers, but the brilliant scientist, Dr. Huer and the courageous and beautiful companion, Wilma Deering.

Children loved it. It became the longest running comic strip in American history – and that’s the real answer to our country’s current predicament – and the way to escape the feeling of despair, which is fueling anxiety across the nation.

We need the children to get all of us there.

Any adult today is fairly irrelevant if they are not doing their part to inspire and encourage the children and teens around them. Because, like the time of the Great Depression, our days of darkness will not be numbered in a year or two or three – and it will not be a civil project or free money, or war, or any other such scheme which will give us new life and new purpose. As adults, we simply do not have the time necessary to create the beautiful thing which is even now, just out of sight and out of reach. But even if we do, the future belongs to someone else.

It will be the children, who having been stoked on the hopes and possibilities and beliefs of our time, will create the next great world of wonder and growth and development. Their capabilities and talents and truth will create even greater inspiration, if we only help them to get there.

It is this simple: as long as we can find the strength to believe in those children and their imagination, we may someday live in a new kind of world. I see that place sometimes in my rare good sleeps, as a crystalline world in which the best, noblest parts of humankind meet a newly imagined frontier of science, religion, art, renewal, rebirth and most of all …

…. dreams.

We can get there. But only if you believe.

Charlatans

2011-06-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

I used to wonder about charlatans.

As a traditional martial art teacher, you see a lot of them. They pop up like weeds in what once was a pristine lawn of real, trained, professionals. The result is, of course, people learn and promote junk technique, and will get themselves and others hurt, trying to perform this stuff in the real world.

These days, there is a new breed of this phony. They wrap themselves in ambiguity, innuendo – or even go so far as to wrap themselves in a uniform. Then they show up at community events.

It’s no longer cool enough to be a martial artist – now, these maggots have to be SEALS.

A recent “Thank You Soldiers” tribute in Thousand Oaks, California drew some meatball named Salhem Dreasden, replete in a Naval officer’s uniform complete with a trident. Of course, he was a fake, but he’s not alone.

A friend of mine relentlessly pursued the true history of a guy claiming to be a professional martial art teacher and – you guessed it –a SEAL. He is neither thing, but has managed to convince members of the press, a local law enforcement community – and many others, simply because no one looked closely enough.

My perspective: he was apparently compensating for something.

It’s everywhere – and it’s going to get worse.

I once visited a martial arts school where they gathered around in a comfortable circle at the end of practice and exchanged lovely stories about how compassionate and forgiving and gentle, etc., their original teachers were. I don’t know if they did this to determine my background – or if they do that kind of stroking regularly there, but when asked, I gave them the truth:

My training was painful, is still ongoing after decades – as I will always view myself as a student – and my teachers were anything but compassionate. They were hard men who scared the crap out of me, and to this day, I am very careful when I am on the mat with them. Practices were a slice of Hell. Earning my 1^st Dan (first degree black belt) was the culmination of a decade of work, and one of the greatest honors of my life. Bones broke, joints dislocated, and I did all of it in a foreign country while serving in the Air Force with the 501^st Tactical Missile Wing. Look it up – a nuclear missile system, which helped bring an end to the Cold War.

The practices were hard and uncompromising. I’d pay real money to be that young and do all of it again.

Of course, the greatest single honor of my life was finding my wife and knowing my children. Following that – I was fortunate to serve in the U.S. military. I was a Sergeant. I was no one important. I served with people who were important - they were great men and women back then – and would become greater in time. The military was often hard and uncompromising.

I loved it and would give away a lot just to wear the uniform one more time. And although I often dream of it - that will never happen.

But what is guaranteed to happen is this: Today or tomorrow, I’ll bump into an alleged 10^th Degree such-and-such at the grocery store, or online. I’ll get to hear bullshit stories from some dweeb who is so insecure, he has to fabricate a background. They are like lint or pillballs, I can’t keep them off of me – away from me. I have been coated in these creatures for decades.

I know how sick it makes me feel. And I know how disgusted it makes others feel, but I have to wonder what that says about us as a people? Are so many people so insignificant – so worthless – that they have to become a lie?

They can – of course – never be reached for comment.

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For the fakes, I have this to say: Grow a pair.

Why we cry

2011-06-01T20:15:00.001-07:00

Watch the sun go down and you have to hope it will come up again tomorrow.

That’s the reason, it is said, that seagulls cry – because they see the sun sinking and believe the night will be eternal. Coyotes cry for a much different reason, according to many Indian tribes.

And no one knows why whales cry.

Humans cry for so many reasons, there aren’t names for them all. But sometimes, they cry for the same reasons as seagulls – the end of the world really does happen every day. For someone, somewhere, an accident, illness or just the weight of the years piled upon them, pulls them away from the world we know, into a place no one has ever returned from.

Look out at the night sky and see the stars. Whatever your viewpoint, the vastness of the great ocean of black is only made more real by those tiny points of light. One native American tribe attributes those lights to an accident – a cosmic splash of flowers from a great bag – flowers the creator had intended to place in perfect patterns, so the creatures of the world would always know he was real.

We often suffer through doomsday claims and for some, a countdown and expectation of something perfect and complete, just around the edge of night. Yet we are still here, imperfect with our wishes and hopes and cruelties and crimes.

We remain here to continue in our days, knowing that another sunset is coming. And in all of the moments between the time we open our eyes in the morning and close them at day’s end, we somehow lose sight of the truth that each breath we take, represents a moment in which somewhere else, the world is ending – or at least changing irrevocably for someone else. And of course in that same moment the world is beginning – being born, in every sense that is possible.

On an antique table in a corner of my house is an ancient tooth – not of a whale, but certainly something as large as a whale, that cut through the black of the sea 186 million years ago. The eyes of that creature looked upon a very different Earth. In the time it lived, there were no people yet, but the Earth was already ancient. It swam through the crush of a universe no mind can comprehend.

Time is the greatest mystery and immensity of all. We are lost, trying to stay afloat in its’ waves and currents. But nothing can tread those waters forever. No matter how fearsome or how beautiful a thing is, the truth remains. We know it when we are young, and one incredible day we feel somehow the miracle that we have slowed or stopped everything. In that youth we can stop time, but when we are old, we are only time travelers, remembering better days and trying to forget the days which haunt us. Backward and forward – lives played like some kind of worn film, flickering and crackling – eventually giving way to silence.

Perhaps all the tears shed over the millennia, are simply a reflection of these truths: The sun rises and sets and may indeed do so again tomorrow – but the moment we are experiencing right now; that simple spark amidst an eternal fire – is an opportunity to be greater than we were a moment ago, an hour, a day - a lifetime.

If everyone did everything they could to make the world a better place, we would see a day in which no one would fear the night. Hope and compassion would be real - not just words, and we would all know the truth the Creator wanted us to see in the stars.

Perhaps we would even know the meaning of the songs of whales and wolves and the music of a perfect afternoon in an unforgettable place.

We can get there from here, but politics and intolerance, hate and all the ignorance and stupidity we would visit upon each other – all has to be gathered and left to dry and bleach in the sun, until it all shrivels and dries, and is carried away in softness.

Somewhere the sun is going down – and somewhere else a sliver of golden light cuts across the horizon.

The only true mystery remaining is what you will do with this single moment.

A final hope on this September 11

2010-09-12T01:18:00.001-07:00

Never believe the sun has set forever and left us in darkness.

Never forget the victims. Their names are only markers for things we cannot ever see in total - their lives and those they touched even briefly - the changes they wrought in the world, without even knowing it... that is the true monument.

It wasn't the terrorists' acts which changed the world - it was the lives of the victims and the rallying cry which rose even as the dust settled. Some brave few answered that call and paid the price for all of us. Our warriors still hunt the animals who would continue to prey on the innocent the world over.

So many people- so many stories and lives we will never know - given up for the rest of us. I hope those of us whose safety and security have been purchased at such a high price, have the wisdom and dignity and understanding to honor those sacrifices with our own lives. May we please live our days full and completely enough to give meaning and purpose to those lost since that terrible September day.

And if meaning and purpose and balance is beyond our ability to attain, may we at least have the strength to face the days ahead without our brothers and sisters - may we be given enough mornings to wake and rise and make a difference in the world, so that someday those who live in the future may look back and say, "Those who were left at home - who remained at home, accomplished something - some measure of honor - some measure of peace and some measure of purpose."

And us who have all followed the victims and the heroes into the next world, perhaps we can grasp a shred of happiness in our final moments, just long enough to fade from this Earth with a sigh of contentment - and they who come for us, we will recognize - even as they take us away.

And the world will be brighter. And the sun will rise again without us.

And even that final truth will be right and perfect and wonderful.

Remember the Ash

2010-08-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

Remember the smoke pouring out of two of the tallest buildings in the world.

Remember the first news reports - the first estimates of how many people could be trapped inside.

Remember the freeze-frame of the massive jet as it crashed into the second tower - eliminating all doubt that this was an intentional action - an act of war on innocent people.

Remember the firefighters and policemen that responded instantly - despite the impending collapse which would kill so many of them.

Remember the ash which covered everyone - no one of any color - no one of any creed. Simply one people - Americans - now soon to be at war with extremists.

Remember how no one targeted the Muslim faith itself. Remember how American flags seemed to spring from every shopfront - every home - every street - even people who had never even been to New York - or even known anyone there.

Remember it.

We were all covered with ash that day - everywhere - even in countries far removed. Americans grieved and vowed to take vengeance. And so did much of the world.

When did we "get over" Pearl Harbor? When did we excuse the Holocaust and those responsible? When did we walk away from Clocktower shooters and Hijacker terrorists? When did we just shake our heads and say, "It's OK - it happened in another time, to other people - it happened, but we've forgotten what the moment felt like. We've forgotten all of it?"

Do you think we washed the last of that ash off? I can still feel it on my skin. I can still feel it, even though I was not there. I can feel the weight of it - heavier - not lighter over the years. Was it Muslims who perpetrated those acts of terror? Or do all Muslims disavow the thing? Why is the new Mosque planned for construction on the site where the towers fell, named after the first Muslim conquest in the West?

Please answer me. I would love to have some kind of reasoning - some line which explained the morality of placing a victory monument on the site where those thousands of people died. Because that is what the thing is - it is a claim of victory.

I find it difficult to believe that Bob Beckle would suggest on national television that New Yorkers should "Get over it." Apparently he forgot to mention the rest of America - many of whom have not, will not and can not ever set it aside.

Like myself.

What I would give to be able to have talked to one of those people before they died that day due to Muslim terrorists. What I would have given to have known even one of them, just for a moment? What would I have said? I would have asked them to tell me their life's story - I would ask them what their favorite things were about this world - I would have asked so that their history be passed on.

And I demand a monument with those stories, written by their relatives in stone - on the very site they plan to build this Mosque - this atrocity of conquest. Because by erecting that building where they are, is naming this "war on terror" something else entirely.

They are sadly - intentionally or unintentionally - creating a "Crusade."

In Human history, civilization has collapsed many times, over much smaller things.

Lights.

2010-08-03T00:05:00.001-07:00

Look down at any city at night and the lights you see can be viewed as only sad glitter.

But look with open eyes and heart and any city – even the worst place in the world, is lit by more than electricity, more than fire.

That is because from high above we forget the lights are more than just that. Those lights are exultant. They are a shining – a proof of life.

In New Mexico, not so long ago, a small town was known for its’ light. Shining in the darkness of a massive desert, the town was more of an outpost – a place where villagers were struggling to survive. A battle was fought there once. But it was an affirmation of life, more than it was a sign of God’s will. Still, with the unknown darkness against them always, the people of the village chose to erect a cross on a lonely hill where the battle was fought and won. It was a monument to victory… but as with most victories, it is mostly lost to time. I know it from half-remembered stories, told to me in passing. The only thing I’m sure of is the real monument – the true monument: It was the village which is still alive after all this time. It is a community of souls. The village name is “The Light.”

I often think that what we see is not enough. Our understanding seems lost within bodies aging. Our reasoning seems increasingly clouded, when you would think it would sharpen with experience and knowledge - certainly, the breeding ground of wisdom.

But so many days we spend railing against the imagined forces of darkness. And of course, that is also because of experience, because we know the darkness can be real. We know that monsters prowl the half-light thrown at the fringe of shadow. We’re sure of it, because it is true. I have flown in military helicopters over terrain most of you couldn’t imagine, until it all seemed like a patchwork quilt below me, blurring one shape into another. Killers and victims were down there somewhere, but my ground-pounder eyesight wasn't as acute at altitude. I have flown in an AT-38 Talon beside an F-117A Stealth Fighter – somewhere in the deep background a landscape of brown becoming white-capped mountain peaks; all of it so familiar – and yet so different. The tiny lights I would see approaching innumerable airfields when I was younger, were jets just like those – representative, perhaps of the soaring souls on board. But you can’t see that from the balcony of a barracks building. And from a fast-flying military aircraft, often you can't see the life and death below you.

I recently made a list. I suppose many would see it as an affirmation of their fears: a country in decline or perhaps at the cusp of a new beginning. Once again, it depends how you view things. I would like to list those things here. But please read beyond them, and understand maybe more than you did when you started reading this article.

Here is our government’s actions in recent times:

They have been unwilling to deal with illegals and Mexican Drug cartels

A string of broken promises have stacked one upon the other – some which fly in the face of principles set forth when our country was founded.

We have a government which forces through bills – but those bills are really edicts forced upon a population in the dead of night.

Our country is taking up socialized programs which cannot be supported in the current economy – or perhaps any economy. The same programs have, of course, failed wherever and whenever they have been tried in history.

The same government is also outlaying funds for ridiculous programs, further increasing the national debt in some kind of insane spree – like a teenager burning their way through a wallet filled with dad’s credit cards.

The administration of our country refuses to expand drilling for fuel by companies here in the U.S., citing environmental concerns, but then play golf, vacation and take long breaks during the worst environmental catastrophe seen since Chernobyl - by mismanaging and ignoring the Gulf oil spill.

In the same timeframe all this is happening, they continue to look at cap-and-trade – a concept, which will simply kick an economy, which is already down. And dying.

Meanwhile, their claim to glory, besides a ridiculous health care package rivaling the complexities and mysteries already seen in an overgrown tax code, is a push for “Green” anything - in any way it can be even loosely achieved. And while climate research has been shown to be at worse, a conspiracy – and at best, bad science, the same administration continues to beat the drum as fewer and fewer people listen.

Lastly, there’s a mismanagement of an ongoing war. Generals are not supported, then removed when they question why they are not receiving the personnel and materials they need. Troops are shuffled like a deck of cards, and in a ridiculous contradiction, the government seeks to go soft on terrorists and admitted enemies of the country – yet in the same breath, level charges against our most elite commandos for something they didn’t do in the first place, but something they should be free to do more of – assaulting the monsters in the night.

And of course, when making a list such as this, you can’t leave out the details: like the disrespect shown to our greatest allies, the embracing of rogue groups and states – as if they were our friends, and lastly, the marginalizing, demonizing and disregard for the regular people of the country.

It would seem, at first glance, that America is dying.

But, I would encourage you to take a different point of view for a moment. The inaction of the federal government in matters of state sovereignty has created a huge divide, which cannot be bridged by federal force. The tighter the hand squeezes, the more water escapes the grip. The harder the darkness presses against the light – the brighter those lights become.

And we have shone so very brightly indeed. In an environment of racial tension once again, our countrymen today would do well to remember that the founding of America itself occurred through the efforts of women and men of all nationalities and creeds alike, fighting side-by-side against a common oppressor. We exist because the lights of their lives were extinguished in exchange for our own. Small flames don’t die; they create newer, larger ones. And so our country was born, itself.

And edicts may be nailed to every post on every corner, broadcast through the very air itself – but none will last out the week. Torn, tattered, blown, fading out into space itself – all such unpopular mandates join the great political landfill, always just out of sight; perhaps hidden by great actions of legendary people. The junk-pile of unjust law is occluded, because the shadows cast by the legendary are long; and their accomplishments so great that even the failed and disgraced in the world recede into background noise and clutter.

Socialized debtor programs can’t support themselves. Collapse and equalization is inevitable; recovery and rebirth are always around the corner, and they are always glorious. Look at the Great Depression, followed by the most terrible war the world may have ever seen – all of it, suffering and death and horror on a scale seemingly unimaginable. Still, the result was a great expansion of society, technology, education and enlightenment, even. We reached for the lights in the night sky… and we got there.

Trade scams and snake-oil salesmen are nothing new either. They have taken on the form of complex government schemes, but they are still visible for what they are. They fill a void, of course. They provide the uninformed and the ignorant and the somnambulant with something to grasp at. But, they reach for shadows – and the darkness always follows shadows. I think even these folks know that, deep down. Education and hard lessons provide the cure for this. In an age of information, the uninformed grow fewer in number. The lights in this case are the glow of millions of networked computer screens and televisions. And information cannot be controlled. It can be parsed, and it can be twisted and shaped. But those tricks are also part of the information stream. Those who wish to see, will in fact see.

Turning on friends is never a good thing. Children learn this early on. Yet our own government can’t seem to prevent itself from engaging in such activity – perhaps they are aged, or foolish, or careless. After some time, policies and actions like this become another collapse. Actions like these are the truly unsustainable things in life. When loss is constant, eventually either someone takes your place or you take another tack - one with the wind, instead of against it. To stand is sometimes the most difficult thing in the world.

And of course we come full circle in looking at things like this. Like the city lights and the patchwork countryside, and the mountain set against high-flying aircraft; and even like the town, which is named “The Light,” we are all part of a much larger picture. Our combined wills against that of a government grown oppressive, are like the ocean against a grain of sand. Governments come and go. People remain.

Look down at any city at night – and you may see only lights. But if you look with different eyes you see dreams and hopes and futures not yet born or even imagined.

We are made of light.

Racial Cards

2010-07-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

In casinos, the cards are regularly changed. This prevents all sorts of embarrassing situations from occurring.

I sure wish America would put the whole pack of racial cards away.

I related a story yesterday about asking while teaching a class, with a group of adults – and one 7-year-old, if they could name one Lee Greenwood song. Only the 7-year-old could do it. He said, “God Bless the USA.”

It’s an interesting thing to have been born during a time, which that 7-year-old couldn’t even imagine – and yet, the kid has heard –and likes Lee Greenwood. But to have lived during a time when a dime could get you a phone call, when men were walking on the Moon, and when so much turbulence was occurring in society as I walked barefoot in a small fishing village in the summers – it is a sobering thought. The world was changing around me – and I never even noticed. For that 7-year-old last night – I wonder what he notices? Does he see or feel the change in society or are these his barefoot summers. I kind of hope the latter is the case.

And lately, I have begun to wonder if we’ve changed at all. Things are way out of control. People pointing at each other – and much worse – using the term “Racist?” I know there are groups out there who would gladly jump on that particular crazy train, but it is important to realize that the really virulent creatures out there, are not identified by the way they look or talk – just by the way they hate. That’s why it is possible to find them. Just look at the tenets of their organization – or their personal views as evidenced by their comments. But when you do that, you have to take in the whole picture – not just the things you “want” to see.

It is not the late 60s – not even the 70s, when I grew up. How I wish it was most days. I wish for those sunlit barefoot, ocean bleached and broken streets, the nights I would spend fishing – and the knowledge that if I stayed out late enough, my dad would always make that midnight walk out to the State Pier to tell me it was time to pack it in. Always.

There was a certain perfection to those days which despite my age and experience, now, I cannot put my finger on. Call it innocence, I guess. Maybe we are all there at some point in our life.

And then, you get a few more years tucked under the belt, and you realize the world isn’t all sunshine and beaches. There is real anger out there – anger for nothing. Perhaps the anger is there for its’ own sake, and nothing more. Like a parasite, it grows fat on our indifference, until it can exert its’ own brand of influence.

People die that way. Because they are the wrong religion, the wrong color, because they do not speak the language, because they are in the wrong political party, the wrong family, they die – or are forced to into terrible things. If they have no voice, or no influence, they are ground beneath the wheels of a terrible machine. It can be called a machine because it has no soul and no conscience, but it might as well be called a mob – or a pack of dogs. Because a person can be reasonable – people, on the other hand, are not.

Some will note the name Shirley Sherrod – although a few days ago, not many would have known her. She has had an interesting couple of days. Shirley might have earned herself an earlier column here on my website – but I must say, that as a former newspaper reporter, I like to wait until all the facts are in-hand, before I get out the hammer.

And all the facts were not in a couple days ago.

Yet, oddly, we have had the White House involved with the woman’s dismissal? They couldn’t wait for her to finish driving home. She was asked via mobile phone, by her boss (who allegedly had no real contact with the White House) to pull over to the side of the road – and send her resignation immediately.

But Shirley didn’t do the things they accused her of. And when I use the word “they” – in this instance, I am speaking to all the bickering children out there. All the self-important, all the “I’m right and you’re wrong” – or at least, left. I’m speaking to all those alleged leaders we have – from the Big O, to the crackpots who want to refer to themselves as “leaders” because of their “ethics.” Here’s a quote from a Marine Gunny I know:

“Shut the Hell up.”

That about covers it.

Shirley used her life experiences to illustrate how a person can change for the better. Look up the entire speech she gave – not the sound-bite offered to fuel anger and cause more divisiveness. Sherrod’s message in the speech was clear – if she can be a better person, and if she can find a way, anyone can.

Try listening to each other for a change. Try waiting – in this near-instantaneous-dataflow world we live in – just a little while longer before answering. Multi-tasking is a lovely concept, but if you slow things down a little bit, there’s time to do everything – and focus all your attention on each thing as it comes.

That “waiting” is something I’ve only just recently learned how to do. It has taken a lot to realize I just need to allow a little grass to grow, in-between comments and actions. The 7-year-old in last night’s class could have told me that, I think. He did say "God Bless the USA." And that was worth more to me than any lesson. It gives me hope - and that's such a rare commodity.

But I should have always known these things, and I should have always been able to follow these simple guidelines. But I am no wise man – and sometimes, not even a very good person. So I forget, and lapse into bad habits and old patterns. I am often a needle in a groove – and my life is a 45, not a 33. That statement will confirm when I grew up. And for those who don’t know what it means. Just take a breath. Calm down and turn on your iPod or iPad – or whatever the hell it is that has some music on it. Take out a deck of cards and if you don’t know solitaire, build a little house. It’s good to build steady hands and patience.

But take out the regular cards - not the racial ones.

---------------

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/07/20/the-full-shirley-sherrod-speech/

Room 101 - revisited

2010-07-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

I offer you these two articles, which I first wrote in August 2009. They have new relevance today, now that the idiots at the Washington Post have decided in their lofty self-image, to reveal the underpinnings of America's Intelligence gathering capabilities. Back when I first wrote these, I was still hoping that our government wouldn't slide as far as it has. It seemed at the time that the push for nationalized health care and National Socialism (the very definition for the NAZIs) would not take root here. But it has. And we're quickly approaching an end-game of Biblical proportions.

Don't believe me?

That's OK.

Read what I said in 2009.

Above: a post card requesting the release of a political prisoner from

the clutches of the corrupt Somali government which collapsed, leaving

the country in ruin, and precipitating international

intervention in Operation Restore Hope 1992-93. This card was found
on the floor of the corridor of the vacant parliament building
amongst piles of millions of such requests.

Your health care is history. Your lives are being crushed. You just can’t see the ceiling yet, but it is falling, and we are all underneath it.

I’m going to paraphrase Orwell again – why? Because, we are living in a time where we are sliding faster and faster into the dark “future” of 1984. Orwell wrote that most of the material that you are dealing with has no connection with anything in the real world, “not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.”

Statistics, he wrote, are “just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.”

So where is the truth? Truth is currently whatever those in power want to call it. We who live outside of Washington and all the groups connected, contracted and in collusion with the country’s alleged leadership, have no voice. No matter how many town meetings we sandbag – or how many Congressional offices we stand outside of, we are the Proles of 1984. We are the ignored. We are derided and dismissed.

Now, we are the re-educated, reformed and failing that, interrogated or tortured.

No longer will most of the old agencies be part of the political process. We have czars for everything. We have provided unlimited funding to hidden groups – and some not so hidden, like ACORN. Now, no longer will the Central Intelligence Agency have the ability to do a major part of its job. Someone else will be managing all interrogations. Allegedly the new unit will focus specifically on key terror suspects – and yes, it will have its’ own czar.

In 1984, Winston does not know why Withers and the FFCC are disgraced and disbanded. Heretical tendencies are at question, but “what was likeliest of all -- the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.”

Many are saying that this change in the interrogation scenario will have a chilling effect – that is, new interrogators hired by the fledgling group will be very cautious – overly cautious, so as not to lose their jobs in the future and become the targets of prosecution.

But, the polar opposite is also true. By removing something as dark as detention and interrogation from a system which has oversight to one which only is answerable to the President – and subsequently no real oversight, you end up with the same kind of system which exists in Third-world countries. Don’t believe it? You don’t have to. The disappeared can’t speak for themselves. They have long ago faced the horrors of their torture chambers – the Orwellian “pain-giving dial,” and are now buried with thousands – perhaps millions - of their fellow citizens; and they are all buried in lost landfills around the globe. I know it because I have stood in the corridors of the former parliament building of the ousted President Siad Barre of Somalia. I stood knee-deep in postcards each requesting the release of a different particular political prisoner. The corridor was thousands of feet long, and filled from one end to the other.

I can still feel them against my legs – like the fingers of the lost dead.

And dear reader, you think it can’t happen here? What then happens now?

One thing is for certain, the cattle-like media will now follow this CIA topic and will allow their albeit meager attention to waver from the story of the failing health-care reform legislation. And of course, the administration knows they are currently losing that battle. Or are they?

With attention split between the hot-button of interrogation and torture and previous policy versus current policy, a possible window will open through which some version of health care reform will be stuffed through. Meanwhile, the CIA, which in recent months has gone head-to-head with skin-walkers like Nancy Pelosi, will be reduced in authority and power.

And all that power and authority will be delivered into the loving hands of Big Brother Obama, who could stop the impending prosecution of CIA personnel and others – a modern day witch hunt – in its’ tracks. But he won’t, because he only stands to gain from the avalanche his friend, Eric Holder, has put into motion.

Make no mistake, though. We are already in Orwell’s Room 101. We are strapped to the chair and are completely immobilized. We cannot move our head. And the interrogator O’Brien is with us.

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

What’s the worst thing in the world to you, dear reader? Is it the loss of everything that once made us America? For poor Winston, it was rats. Rats like we have in Washington right now.

'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'

But they’re not on the other side of the wall any more, dear reader. They are here with us all. They are in our government – by the dozens – by the hundreds or thousands. They are preparing us for Room 101. The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual, wrote Orwell. And he was right – it could be burning alive, impalement, drowning or a thousand other things. But our rats are smart. They’ve found the most terrible thing to inflict on all of us – something truly universal, which every American dreads.

They are stealing freedom.

-------------

And another article from 2009.
A nightmare.

The first thing they teach you in journalism school is to maintain a narrow focus. If you go after too big a subject, you risk confusing the reader. The second thing they teach you is not to exaggerate – report the facts. Let the facts stand on their own. Maybe, the third thing is to keep yourself out of the story. You can report effectively while keeping the article neutral and objective.

Sorry about this. I’m going to break every one of these rules.

But it’s OK, because the fourth thing I remember them teaching us is that if you know the rules, then you can break them – or you know when your breaking them… or something like that. I was sleepy that day.

Anyway, here goes. Some will read this and call it alarmist crap. Some will read it and label me a whack-job. Some won’t even get through it before they feel compelled to pick up their field glasses and scan the skies for the “black helicopters.” And of course, some, who have likely been considering putting me on a watch-list, will now just wave their hands dismissively and stamp “whack-job” on that file folder in the black helicopter headquarters.

I’m going to paint you a picture of words – a picture, which normally would be found inside science fiction novels. Here – in this sentence, ends any humor. What follows is your sci-fi scenario:

Very soon, people will be found dead, who have been standing in line overnight, waiting to get into the emergency room. Some type of universal health care will pass because no one prevented it. The complicated, ridiculous system will simply kill people at street level. Others will be found dead in their homes, knowing that the wait will be too long, and they may as well die in the comfort of their homes, instead of dying in the 21st century “med” lines.

Very soon, the news will be reporting incidents where killings have picked up outside the crammed primary care and emergency clinics because the criminals will have discovered an easy, soft target to acquire free drugs – simply take it from those too weak and sick, to resist.

Terrorists will carry out their publicized threats to use the Mexican border to carry through satchels of chemical and bio weapons, releasing them from the tops of skyscrapers perhaps, in densely populated areas during high traffic times during the day.

Plagues will create “sanctuary” cities of the dying – people who cannot be helped by the already overburdened first-responder and the rest of the top-heavy, socialized health-care system.

Those still moderately productive and not relegated to slow death in these places, will be relied upon to provide for everyone else – especially those insulated at the top of the political and financial ladders. They will be taxed mercilessly and the result will be a blossoming black market.

Police will be used to break up peaceful demonstrations and meetings, using a variety of excuses cloaked in the truth that any protests or claims against them will never make it into court – or if they eventually do, will not have any significance. Dissenting voices on the air will be silenced one way or the other – perhaps simply by using the rest of the “house” media and “new media,” to chip away at the opposition until they can no longer continue. Or perhaps they will be quieted through application of astronomical buy-outs using appropriated funds from untraceable public funding – in which the new owners simply replace the entire organization with more controllable reporters who will “toe the line.”

Congress will become irrelevant. Czars and committee dictators will replace the political process – especially for issues, which various groups want shoved-through into law without interference.

The new laws will include legislation to tell us how we can live and what we are allowed to think and say. Thought policing will take place through a “civilian” para-military arm of the government, which reports only to the President, perhaps through a handful of czars.

Presidential term limits will be eliminated. The massive powers newly taken up by the government would become more and more centralized until we arrive at a true dictatorship.

Outside the U.S., countries will become more and more nervous as a world superpower becomes more insulated and less controlled.

Growing internal unrest will lead the new dictatorship to levy heavier and heavier controls on the population. Resistance groups will be labled, “enemies of the state.” Peaceful rallies will be broken up by members of the massive civilian para-military group, which will by then, have massive power. People will be “disappeared.” Further confrontations will lead to further organization by resistance groups, pitting the overweight government apparatus against its own citizens.

I know. It's science fiction, right?

But make no mistake – if things continue on the path they are currently on, we will become subjects. We will become slaves. We will become the lost. Welcome to my nightmare.

Do something to stop it.

Please.

Mathematics, life - and horrible patterns

2010-07-18T21:01:00.000-07:00

Mathematics.

It can alter our very existence. Physics in it’s many guises, chemistry and biology – things unknown – all either bend before its’ strength, or bend in spite of it.

Words pale in comparison. Unless you consider the poetry of motion, the perfection of good poetry, the quest for perfection. And I once thought these things to be very separate. Perhaps that’s the nature of our lives – to contain and separate. In that way, things make sense and when they make sense, there is order – not chaos.

Some folks see patterns in things, which others refuse to look at. Patterns are built into us – or they’re built into the universe and don’t notice us at all. There’s so many contradictions in a good conspiracy theory that people caught in the intoxicating web of pattern, can’t help but wait for the spider.

I am no conspiracy lover – and mysteries I love because they exist. But there are both good mysteries and bad mysteries – like everything in this world, they are polarized. A good reporter counts only on the facts. An error in fact, after all, is an error, which calls into question other people – and the word of other people. And so I am going to pose a question based on facts. You may answer it… or not.

The question is based on the researcher in the previous article.

This particular doctor is an interesting individual in that his studies seem to cross the threshold of various disciplines. He is also interesting in that the very things he studies, seem to cross at a variety of creepy levels.

But forget about all that for a moment. Let’s concentrate on condoms. Specifically, please turn your attention to condoms as they relate to the following facts: Xaioming Li receives a $2.6 million grant to do a study on the connection between Chinese prostitutes and alcohol – all funded by the United States. The study is allegedly a five-year study, and will focus on more than 100 venues (brothels) in Guangxi.

So – back to mathematics: 100 brothels (let’s say they’re badly managed and only have 20 girls each). That’s 2000 girls. Then let’s say that during a given day, each group of 20 girls visits with ten men – that’s busy, but not crazy town. Even so, that’s 20,000 condoms a day – if you want to keep them well-supplied. That’s 500,000 condoms a month, six million a year and 30 million over five years. How much does a pack of Trojans cost at the market? Please ask yourself with what money they intend to pay the people involved in the research project – even if you’re only handing out 1/10^th of the money in supplies to the locals.

Not odd enough? Consider then, Li himself. Wayne State University, School of Medicine. Dr. Li will head the program to train prostitutes and pimps in Guangxi, China. So it’s not odd to find him connected to Psychology. Nor is it odd to find him connected to HIV/AIDS studies - and as with all coincidences, patterns form. What those patterns tell us when we are not in full possession of the facts, is a subjective individual choice. Skip back two articles in this blog and you will read about a myopic monkey. The question here, is whether the coincidences in this case, are a real pattern and what does the pattern represent?

Because Li appears to have some connections in Bethesda, Maryland (a locale long-associated with biomed research in the U.S. - much funded by the NIH, which is funding Li) – and Li’s studies have involved children, in the past – small children. In some instances, the study of the fetus and its’ mother – and chimeric cells which are exchanged between the two.

If you read further, you will find that Li’s interests involve epidemics and pandemics and how they are associated with culture and behavioral change. Previous slants for this research cross the boundaries from STD research and intervention, into mental health research.

According to a news release by the university, “The HIV/AIDS pandemic scene in East Asia is largely dominated by China. While AIDS is not considered an epidemic in China, the infection rate has risen sharply in recent years, and the potential impact of a serious outbreak would be disastrous for both China and the world’s economy.”

Acquired Immuno Deficiency Virus has no clear source. According to various theories and research, its' beginnings coincide with a variety of changes in the world. What is known as fact is that some versions of HIV very closely match SIV, which is found in some primates. The discovery of the disease in the 1980s has led to a great deal of research suggesting transmission of the first case or cases via bush-meat (hunters killing and eating infected monkeys), or inoculation programs using dirty needles in unsanitary, overpopulated environs, thus infecting large numbers of people - and remaining undiscovered until it made its' way out of the country of origin. Regardless, the disease now has spread to all corners of the globe - even China.

And so, grant money flows from the U.S. Government – and interestingly, China is willing to allow a U.S. medical study to proceed in country. Even more interesting, are some of the other headlines coming out of China. In the incidents, which have made it past government censors, in just the last eight weeks, 17 are dead and 80 wounded.

They all involve children – being murdered during multiple attacks – school children. Their attackers have in every case, been wielding knives.

And so far, there’s no explanation for the pattern.

Reasonable advice would be to simply do the math. How many crazies do you recall in recent history – all attacking a singular target group within the population – without clear motive – with no connection with each other – and with exactly the same weapon and exactly the same means and method.

How many? It does, after all, come down to simple mathematics – but mathematics as it applies to psychology, biology, chemistry, genetics – and human life itself.

Where is the real spider in this particular web? Is it a potential epidemic connected somehow to HIV in one of the most populated places on Earth – in a province known for its’ tourism and potentially a center for STDs - or is all of this just coincidence and bizarre, horrific occurrences? If it is a potential epidemic or pandemic, are the murders a disconnected product of it - or potentially a direct result. Is Li's group really there to talk to prostitutes about drinking and safe-sex or are they there to gather data and investigate a disease or social breakdown due to disease - in situ?

Answer the question or not – the choice is yours.

Gatekeepers and Keymasters

2010-07-17T01:23:00.003-07:00

I wasn’t going to write about this topic for a myriad of reasons, which will shortly become apparent, but I see no way around it. It must be approached head-on. Sorry – that was a pun, which you do not currently understand, but which will in just a few more paragraphs, cause you to:

a. blush

b. laugh

c. both

d. do both – then check your schedule to see when you can arrange a trip to China.

I apologize to my one Chinese reader – there’s always one. And I apologize to the entire industry, which I am likely about to insult.

Now, to the meat of the thing – which is another pun.

First, I should preface this by saying that the Guangxi District is a lovely multinational locale in southern China, which boasts beautiful scenery, and a multitude of cultures. Indeed, tourism is big in Guangxi, so you won’t be alone if you book your flight right now. Face-to-face communication with various cultures is said to bring you unexpected happy surprises.

There are sights to see in Guangxi which include Reed Flute Cave, Seven Stars Park and Fu Bo Hill – all real places, but also possible double-entendres. I apologize to the spirits of those places, should they be reading my articles. Please don’t haunt me – I already have so many ghosts flocking about, that the place is starting to look like the new locale to shoot another poltergeist movie.

I should also say, however, that lovely Guangxi also features Yangshuo, which is a peaceful town with plenty of local appeal, but also western restaurants and hotels. It’s called “The Earth Village.” My belief is that Al Gore and friends would subsequently feel at home in sleepy Yangshuo.

Yes, it is a great place. And it’s going to be made even better by 2.6 million in American tax dollars. Why not? After all, China is bankrolling most of our economy. We should lay down some bread for our friendly Chinese brothers and sisters, right? Oops – there’s another pun.

You see, Guangxi has a lot of great things going for it. And among them is its’ very busy population. Real busy. And I mean that in the best possible way – the Guangxi folks may have a lot of fantastic destinations available for daytime tourism – but it’s the night life which has everyone talking.

Almost three million dollars will be spent on a program to help Guangxi prostitutes with their choices in booze and condoms – and it even offers training to their pimps! Yeah, baby. But pimps and prostitutes are such old fashioned terms. It’s kind of like “climate change” instead of “global warming.” The researcher who secured the crazy grant money for the study, is instead calling the pros, “Female Sex Workers” or FSWs and their managers, “Gatekeepers.” Presumably, that would make their clients “Keymasters,” but they apparently didn’t think of that one.

What they did think of is amazing, though.

Allegedly, using the study on Guangxi FSWs and their Gatekeepers, will benefit the United States because prostitution occurs in conjunction with alcohol in the U.S. – and oddly, the formula is also present in China! It’s like going to a fast-food joint and ordering a combo-meal. Just don’t super-size.

Alcohol has been apparently a part of sex practices for many, many years. No – you didn’t know that, because you don’t live in Guangxi, where apparently they are having a lot of sex. But the HIV virus, which is no laughing matter – affects 1.2 million Americans! And it affects the Chinese of Guangxi too! But probably the 1.2 million Americans with the virus aren’t all having sex, like the folks in Guangxi.

And fortunately, the project exists at the “exploration” stage. What is that exactly? It’s really quite simple. According to the researcher heading the project :), the study is a venue-based intervention program which is not aimed at eliminating the prostitution. That would get the researchers beat up by the Gatekeepers – a process which is often called “rolling,” here in the sexless, boring West.

In fact, the work will entail teaching FSWs new communication skills, including negotiating and limit-setting (oh, the imagery in those few words), and will throw in a basketful of behavioral skills which include using latex in appropriate ways and a variety of “individual” skills. A second, more mysterious phase is still being planned. My bet is that it teaches FSWs how not to strangle their Keymasters accidentally, resulting in dead Hollywood actors. Of course, this is Guangxi – not Taiwan, where they don’t know how to have proper sex.

And there’s so many different venues that will benefit from your taxes! There’s nearly 100 commercial sex venues which will be so much improved by the personal attention given the researchers. And it’s all backed by the National Institutes of Health.

Got your plane ticket and travel itinerary yet? Remember the whole HIV thing, though. Aside from the reaction of my wife – the whole virus thing is a deal-breaker for me.

I have now no doubt, been barred from visiting Guangxi - and will probably be rolled by the Gatekeepers and FSWs should I show my face there. It's a tough world out there. If only we had better prostitutes - or better alcohol.

Killing and dying.

2010-07-13T23:45:00.001-07:00

A long time ago I had an unusual job.

It dealt with 96 nuclear-armed, ground-launched, cruise missiles.

When you deal with weapons like that, on mobile systems – basically all-terrain tractor-trailer units, you have to deal with some very real threats. So, your training has to encompass those things.

Within this framework I’d like to paint you a picture of a portion of this training. Let me tell you about the end of the world.

If you’re hit by a nuclear weapon – hell, if it’s anywhere nearby, you’re a ghost before you even knew something bad happened. If you’re further away, you get shards of material blasted at near the speed of sound, through the walls of your house. If you’re in front of a window, the glass will shred you, and you’ll die of blood loss before you can even register the burns – and mercifully before the radiation causes you to hemhorage. The weakness and sickness and loss of hair, bodily function and finally bleeding, will kill those less lucky – those not close enough for instant vaporization, but far enough away to seemingly have escaped. They will die within days or a week, staggering through the ruins.

And a terrorist’s dirty bomb is very good at producing the latter effect, on a smaller scale. But those who die, will die badly. Very badly. Consider your own home – think about everyone sick at the same time – no one to care for them. No ability to care for each other. That is what a nuke – dirty or otherwise, produces.

All warriors are cold warriors. The truth of these things is never far from your mind. But worse truths lay in wait. Let me share them with you.

Consider a perfect day, not too much wind, not too much sun not too hot or cold. It’s a good day to be outside, walking the streets of your city. But as night approaches, an aerosol is dispersed. It won’t happen high up. But the chemical will come as a fine mist. It will stick to surfaces. There are about 70 different variations of what you just breathed or got on your skin. It may affect your vision, or your nervous system as a whole, but here’s the highlights: In as little as a few hours you and your family members will be suffering from blindness, hideous blisters which will burst and cause more blisters, lungs which are irreversibly damaged, will likely fill with fluid and you’ll die – if you’re lucky. If not, involuntary urination, defecation, vomiting, twitching, and unstoppable convulsions will precede your demise – and the death of everyone around you.

And that’s just the simple stuff.

Biological Hell is worse. With this end-of-world scenario, aerosol delivery is also very viable. The results are however, much more terrible. Weaponization of these diseases produces resistant strains with methods of delivery designed to have the greatest effect possible on the target. They are also combined and are generally existing as almost a talcum-powder consistency. Anthrax, ebola, Marburg, plague, cholera, tularemia, brucellosis, Shingella, spotted fever, typhus, psittacosis, yellow fever, hemhorragic fever, encephalitis are all known as having been considered for weaponization – or already existing as such. Most are transmissible. Bio-warfare can include variants which act against vegetation, cattle or other animals, collapsing food chains.

An SUU-24/A dispenser – which is ancient technology – could infect 50-percent or more of a population in a 16-square-mile area with Tularemia. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq officials admitted to UN inspection teams that the country produced botulinum toxin in amounts considered to be three times what is necessary to kill the entire human population of the Earth by inhalation. One gram of the toxin evenly dispersed is enough to kill one-million people, albeit technical factors make this somewhat difficult. But despite this, terrorists have already attempted its’ use in Tokyo, Japan.

Nevertheless, death by botulinum toxin is singularly horrible. Once absorbed, it binds irreversibly in the neuromuscular junctions of the synapses. Difficulty seeing, speaking or swallowing begins the process. Dry mouth and hyperventilation start as it becomes obvious that paralysis is taking place. Loss of head control, weakness. But you are not confused. You know exactly what is happening to you, and you can experience every awful moment. Without treatment, you will die. And a microbe modified, could possibly make the toxin transmissible.

So if you have read this far, understand this: Congress is attempting today to cut $2 billion from bioterrorism prevention, claiming the probability of such an attack is low. Probability figures only matter to those whom a thing does not happen to. And I would suggest, we are already seeing the effects of world-enders: witness Sept. 11, Katrina, or the most recent Gulf Oil Spill.

The end of the world doesn’t have to come with trumpets and the return of the messiah. World-enders happen all the time, to average people everywhere. They happen, because of insane acts, drunk drivers, inattentive pilots, faulty equipment, simple, unavoidable sickness and injury, and long days in a hospital waiting for some kind of hope.

Hope is rare at the end of the world.

A long time ago I had an unusual job. The ramifications surrounding the necessity of such a job are staggering. Then Ronald Reagan stood up and asked the Soviet Union to tear down a wall. The world pivoted on that moment.

But the devices and the material and the desire is still out there – a desire to kill others, whatever the cost.Consider this deeply. You are already a target, be it by those claiming “holy war,” or those just claiming it is right to hurt you because of the color of your skin – or because you speak a different language – or because you come from a particular place. Rhetoric has been ratcheted up – even by our country’s leadership, as they take away the money to treat you and your family, should a pandemic occur. The project which would be discontinued if Congress gets its’ way, has already purchased 29 million doses of anthrax vaccine, 20 million doses of smallpox vaccine and 200,000 doses of botulinum toxin treatment. But it will be discontinued because "probabilities" are low. Thousands of people dead on Sept. 11 attacks - but that's not enough. We should stick our heads in the sand and not worry about it.

I have heard that in the a certain holy text, a specific line suggests that if a man is coming to kill you, you should wake up earlier and kill him first. This passage doesn't speak about protecting your family - it asks you to get to killing earlier.

In our greatest texts – in the things considered revered and timeless, we speak of killing on profound scales. I suppose we’re good at it – it’s the dying part that’s difficult.

In the eye of the tiger

2010-07-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

What constitutes a police state?
If you look at history, there's a whole lot of examples. In some cases, this brand of government has gone hand-in-hand with other things which humans do to humans - oh so well.

Police states in other cases have led to mistreatment, despair, protests, long-simmering hatred and the killing of innocents, numbering into the thousands - and some cases , the millions. I have personally stood knee deep in letters and cards requesting the release of political prisoners, emptied and left to rot in the corridors of a parliament building in a third-world capitol.

We, as a species, kill and cause pain on an epic scale. More tired examples, but certainly more terrible, come to mind. Do I really need to enumerate them - to list them here? If I do, will you not simply stop reading - not because these things are not fact, but because they are so familiar? Isn't it sad that they should be?

Sadder still is the ability of humans to lose sight of things when they are indeed right before them. It is like some small monkey from prehistory, out of the trees and standing in the tall grass for the first time. The tiger is close enough that his breath can be felt, yet because the monkey's pattern-recognition is poor, he can't see the predator. And so, he is a small brunch snack, his DNA is not passed forward, and that is probably good, because if it were, millions of myopic monkeys would exist only as tiger food.

Similarly, we today are having a pattern-recognition problem. Consider the tiger that stands before us. It is a top-heavy, muscle-bound creature built for only one purpose - to eat us. The current administration has all the money it will ever need (it's printing it). It has control of the press. It has all the power it will ever need, and if nothing changes, it will conclude with a situation not unlike what New York currently has - a version of Bloomberg, the perpetual mayor. Those who have read the articles I have written over the past year, understand that the last ingredient for a civilization lost - is the suspension of term limits. At that point, you have a dictatorship.

But I have begun to wonder if we don't already have that. Consider our own personal tiger once again. How many details of the Gulf BP oil spill, are being allowed to meet the public eye? BP private security is working so closely with Homeland Security in the South, that many reporters have confused the two. Some have been threatened, their persons and belongings searched and seized. While the management of the actual disaster was practically non-existent, the management of the on-scene locale following the alleged end of the disaster is total and comprehensive. The story - the facts, and the very history and data surrounding the event are being sifted and scrubbed and the rights of average citizens simply don't matter. Those rights haven't mattered since a guy named Joe, asked a guy named Barrack a simple question - they probably haven't mattered for years, and because of our bad eyesight, we haven't really seen it.

Kings love that. They enjoy total power, and they don't have to listen to, or even see the suffering of their subjects. Dictators love that, too. They just exterminate and bury whoever gets in their way.

Tigers have always loved it.

All predators enjoy their spot at the top of the food chain. And sometimes, they enjoy it so much, they just live to kill.

Remember that.

Oil platform - FUBAR

2010-05-31T23:07:00.001-07:00

If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to see it fall, does that mean that it fell?

If a bomb explodes in the forest, but no one is there to hear the blast – or at least, no one important, does it mean anything exploded? If you live near a place named Tunguska, the answer to both questions would be “yes.”

Similarly, if an oil rig was said to be a safety hazard, but no one was really listening, would that mean the oil rig wouldn’t explode and sink to the bottom of the ocean, killing half the eastern seaboard in an unstoppable wave of black death? Would it mean that a civilian company wouldn’t be left holding the whole bag of sticky poo as the entire gulf coast dies? Would it mean that a U.S. president – an outspoken opponent to drilling and big oil - wouldn’t be sitting on his hands?

See where I’m going with this?

Cause and effect – yeah baby. It’s all about cause and effect. As impossible as it is to know the circumstances surrounding the catastrophe in the Gulf, it is more impossible to understand the reason for the hand-wringing and inaction going on now within our government. The president listens to a few briefs, picks up even fewer tar balls from off the sandy beaches in the South, and goes home for vacation – yet again.

"Hey, Secret Service guys, let's stop for some yummy shrimp cocktails before we head home."

Meanwhile, everything dies – or gets ready to die. British Petroleum executives must be hoarse from the screaming. One can almost hear them – “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute … what the Hell?” Then a few days later – “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute …. What the Hell? SOMEBODY BLOODY HELP US!”

So, they send in the Coast Guard. Look, I’m not one to get down on any military service, because I was in one - and I know I'm going to get cursed by CG guys for this - but when you have a Lobster Boat lost at sea, you call the Coast Guard. When you have potentially every lobster turning toxic at the bottom of the ocean, it’s time to call someone else. I don’t know – was Bruce Willis busy? Could somebody give the guy a call, at least? I mean, he dealt with that asteroid thing pretty well, and he’s an oil drillin’ guy too, right?

Yeah, I know, that one was fiction. Bummer. Worse than a bummer, because we’re supposed to be counting on British Petroleum and the Coast Guard – or is it the Coast Guard and British Petroleum? Does anyone know who’s in charge here? One can just hear the BP executives now, “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute…”

I apologize, dear reader. I know you are about to push the nuke button on me, because this is serious Shite, here and the Coast Guard is all over this problem - and they're handling it. But, being a former military guy, I can see when something is SNAFU, TARFU – or as in this particular case, FUBAR. When things have reached FUBAR stage, it’s time to grab your ass, pucker up, and develop some flexibility. For those unfamiliar with these acronyms, I offer this pleasant gauge:

SNAFU – An oil platform is placed in deep water with Gilligan and the Skipper in charge.

TARFU – Gilligan and the Skipper cannot be found after the oil platform explodes.

FUBAR – Gilligan and the Skipper are running the effort to close the valve on the broken pipe at the bottom of the ocean, with a can of compressed air and some silly-putty between them.

Got the picture? It’s about that bad now. Even the professor and Mr. Howell can’t come up with a good enough plan – or throw enough money at it. If it weren’t so tragic, you’d have to laugh. In fact, you may as well laugh – or pray. That’s about the best course of action at the moment, and that's my official policy. Why doesn't the President order up some big juju magic and do something? Why would he? If he stays away from it, maybe it won't stick to him, like say, tar would.

No wait – let’s build a big hat and drop it over the pipe! Wow! That’s a great idea! Holy crap, someone call BP! No wait – they tried that. It was called the “Ass-hat” idea.” Yep. Didn’t work. It didn’t work about as well as everything else hasn’t worked. In fact, the big O, actually picking tar-balls off the coastline was maybe the most effective thing done yet. How bad can it get?

Well, after we try a big hat, then a smaller hat - then a really small hat and some shit no one understands, how about this: It is already the most massive environmental disaster the U.S. has ever seen, but that’s just the warm-up. The threat is simply unknown. No one has any idea. As of now, there is nearly 100 miles of coastline polluted in Louisiana alone. As there’s only 400 miles of Louisiana coast, things have certainly reached the FUBAR stage. There's oil plumes extending out far beyond this already, and no one knows why. Oh, and here's the best part...every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil will be dying, RIGHT NOW. Birds, reptiles and mammals will be dying for a long time to come – and here’s a big wake up call … WE'RE MAMMALS TOO! Some smart guys have actually been saying there will be “both short term and long term impacts.”

No shit, professor? Feel like cracking open Mr. Lobster or sucking down those raw oysters a year from now? Yummy. Just do a quick science experiment … buy a can of 40 –weight oil (your choice) and dump it in your fish tank. Then fry up Mr. Fish, get all Jurrasic on him and see how you feel in the morning.

No? Well, then, for good measure, call the Coastguard and British Petroleum and ask them to recommend a filter to get all the goo out of the tank. Still nothing?

OK, who’s to blame? According to Speaker Pelosi, and some other dim lights in Congress, it’s former President George Bush. Wow. Color me surprised. According to environmentalists, it’s just “big oil.” And according to President Obama, it is big corporate greed, then former President Bush - then big oil. But as far as British Petroleum is concerned – well, we know what they are saying still.

“What the Hell? Who the Hell…”

Sorry, no answers – and no non-toxic fish yummies. And definitely no more screaming, because those BP executives have lost their voice.

It’s a FUBAR alert still in progress.

Not sick yet – look at this fun link….

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

Poppies and Memorial Day

2010-05-28T22:20:00.001-07:00

By Wicked Patriot

Sometimes I wonder at the phrase "Happy Memorial Day" I wonder how many people remember that Memorial day has nothing to do with holidays, family vacations, BBQ's or cold beer.

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day to honor the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War. After WW1 is was broadened in scope to encompass all soldiers who have fallen in service of our great country.

The first Memorial Day was observed by freed slaves to honor the Union soldiers who had died to free them in a long forgotten place called the Washington Race Course on May 1st 1865. The Washington Race Course was a former Confederate prisoner of war camp in South Carolina.

After the war freed slaves exhumed Union soldiers buried in the mass grave on the site and gave them a proper burial.

Memorial Day was not a declared “holiday” until 1968. This is when the "holiday" was combined with Veterans Day and Washington's Birthday to create a convenient three-day weekend for Congress (fitting). The “holidays” were eventually separated again in 1978. Most businesses are no longer closed on Washington's Birthday or Veterans Day, but Memorial Day seems to endure. Not so much to honor the fallen, but to give the government a three-day weekend.

My father served all his adult life for a country he loved. Now he is gone, like so many others forgotten on distant shores – never again to see the country they fought and died for.

You see it is not about BBQ's and days off to me, or anyone like me. The little boys and girls that have to grow up without their moms and dads, know this as do the wives and husbands who cannot go on to grow old together. And there are so many sisters and brothers sorely missed by those that love them – they understand this too.

When I think about Memorial Day, I think of Red Poppies sold by the VFW and the poem that inspired that tradition, “In Flanders Fields,” penned by John McCrea. Do you know it? I do.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Remember as you drive to your BBQ’s and to the beach, there are those unseen, beyond the veil of the final nightfall, who whisper “remember me.”

Patriotism.

2010-05-27T22:20:00.001-07:00

In 1991 I wrote an article about patriotism.

It wasn’t much. I simply explained that the flag waving and bugle playing and all that great stuff really wasn’t what it all was about. It was really about family and duty and caring for your brothers and sisters. Patriotism is the best things about being human.

I know these sorts of ideas may seem trite to some. I imagine there are plenty of folks out there who don’t believe in God or Heaven – or whatever you’d like to call either. Perhaps they believe in other things. Perhaps they believe in nothing at all. And that’s fine – belief or non-belief isn’t mandatory, but making some kind of choice to do something for other people is.

I can’t help but think of all those commercials and paid “news reports” – some with the President himself, extolling the need for volunteering – asking for people to give of themselves. And yet, half a world away, young men and women are doing just that. They are volunteering to protect the rest of us against a very real enemy. You just haven’t seen the faces of those killers, personally. You hear instead, the platitudes of a government led by cowards. You listen to propaganda – or worse – you believe total fabrications intended to ramp up the volume of hate and despair.

I know the face of hopelessness. I know its’ bitter taste, and can tell you personally what it is like to look into the eyes of the kind of creatures who caused the gaping hole and all the misery in New York. These individuals are no longer human. They aren’t fighting for their families – they aren’t serving any duty, holy or otherwise. They are in fact, insane.

Individuals like that, and all those who enable them – even to a large extent, many in our own government – are just husks. They are empty, lost individuals shuffling through a decaying landscape. For them, the suffering of average people is not real, and the sacrifices made on their behalf simply do not even come to mind. They can’t possibly see beyond their own needs, and so, in their mind, how could there be anyone else who does? How could there be any real kindness and any real giving – without a taking? For these people, how could there even be a God in the face of so much thoughtlessness and emptiness in the cold vastness of the universe?

It is within that barren landscape of soul, that hate and terror and oppression are born.

But there is an alternative and it is always within reach. You can simply choose to care. You can simply try your hardest to be a better person than you were the day before. You can be the one to say a kind word, to ask a simple question, to do a selfless thing and to honor those who are giving up themselves in every possible way, so you will be happy and safe.

I have had the greatest honor of wearing the uniform of my country. But it is as nothing compared to the greatness of those who have come before me and those who have come after. I have known both. I have had friends who flew gliders into France on D-Day. I have listened to the stories describing a sky on fire as gliders exploded in balls of flame and bodies of comrades fell to earth. I have known men who were officers in the Underwater Demolition Teams. Their stories are told in pieces – the pieces they are allowed to speak about, and the pieces which their voices will allow them to tell. I have known veterans of Korea and Vietnam and there’s a sadness there, too great for words.

And most recently, I have spoken to a number of my active duty brothers and sisters. I dread the future because it holds the chance – the day – when those voices will go silent and I will never know their fate. My time and my efforts were like a blink compared to these people.

And so we come to the meaning of it all. Patriotism is this: a belief and love for your fellow man, and for an idea that became a country and a people. It is about being more than skin and blood and bone. It is simply about transcendence, and hope, and the willingness to give everything up so that the person next to you – or someone you never met - will be free and live a full life. You don’t have to understand it, but you do have to respect it.

Michelle Obama once described a particular moment as the first time she was proud of her country. With her and her husband choosing to take yet another vacation as the annual wreath is laid on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I would have to say it is the first time I am truly and deeply ashamed of our President.

But this is still America, and those brave souls being remembered on Monday, died so he and the First Lady could do as they wish. That sacrifice and that gift – all given for nothing in return, is the true measure and meaning of patriotism.

ZEUS system with MTBS®

2010-05-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

The veil of secrecy is lifted. The new project at D&S Tactical is now not only named, but is also pending approval by a major tactical supply company - soon to be identified. To contact D&S about this, send e-mail to the Barren Earth Blade Smith.

Following are some words on the system. At D&S we make gear for legends.

All ideas start with a small spark. That spark sometimes is a perfect moment – and sometimes it is formed from the actions and simple existence of great men and women. Examples are all around us.

This world has seen titans – and they are measured by their unflinching valor, by heroism which mere mortals cannot understand, and by actions which literally form the very world we live on. Some may say these great people simply disappear like the flicker and pop of a dying candle flame. Others may equate these immortals, as the ancient Samurai did, to cherry blossoms – fine and beautiful things while they are here among us, but gone when the wind comes and the days grow cold.

But there are those who believe our hero’s live on, strengthening us in our darkest personal hours. They are eternal. If heaven or Valhalla exists, then surely they are there looking down on us, giving us the strength to accomplish just one more thing – or to live a whole lifetime with purpose and compassion and strength.

We don’t memorialize the dead – we memorialize the legendary.

That is the spirit in which the ZEUS knife and Modular Tactical Blade System (MTBS®) were created. In the memory of great men he both knew and those brothers and sisters who are still out there in the dark places, fighting for us all. Barren Earth Knife Smith, Dave Rogers, of D&S Tactical brought the ZEUS into being with the finest materials available on the market today – and simple imagination, determination and hand-craftsmanship.

Made from slabs of 8A High Carbon Stainless Super Steel, the ZEUS is .178 thick and extremely tough. Featuring a razor-sharp double-edge down half of its’ wide blade, this weapon is built for a wide variety of challenges in the business of Special Warfare. The spear-point double edge with its’ mild hollow grind, make it easy to sharpen while allowing for excellent penetration of the target and smooth withdrawal. The steel is extremely resistant to corrosion and incredibly durable due to the cryogenic quench in the heat treatment process. A variety of Black-T blade coatings improve the strength and are designed to match the colors of the handles and sheath. The blades are available in black, dark grey, light grey, tan, dark earth and OD green. They fit each of the custom handles, and mounted blades can be field-stripped and reconfigured depending on mission requirements, in a matter of minutes. A cleverly-designed, silenced, kydex container with MOLE system clip is available to carry spare blades. Blades can be ordered with a variety of engraving – or none at all, to facilitate proper equipment in the places and instances where being identified by your equipment simply isn’t an option.

The handle is equally well suited in the water or out, due to the careful hand-shaping and individual treatment given each knife. Holes in the handle suck water away from the surface, allowing a sure grip in any environment and increasing the surface-area in contact with the palm of the hand. The G10 material which makes up the handle is formed from hundreds of tissue thin fiberglass and resin layers under incredible heat and pressure. Every knife is assembled by Rogers with individual attention to every detail. The steel pins are heavy anodized allen bolts and are set firmly into the sides. The handles are available in pitch black, desert / black, urban grey / black and jungle / black. They can be set permanently onto a blade – or can be removable – to allow operators to combine them with different blades and sheaths at will.

The sheaths are made specifically for each individual blade system– hand cut and fitted using black concealex, with specialized removable face-plates available in desert digital, jungle digital and urban digital colors and are fitted with specialized tek-lok clips. Everything is done piece by piece. The application of these faceplates in conjunction with our handles and coated and uncoated blades, provide a truly modular blade system and perfect customization according to individual requirements.

The finished product is completed with the trademark style of any D&S Tactical product. It is carefully disassembled and reassembled to ensure it is as close to perfect as it can be.

Because, we honor the memory of our nation’s greatest warriors.

We memorialize the legendary.

PTSD revisited again

2010-05-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve got some first-hand knowledge with regard to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s always with me. I’ve dealt with the effects of it since 1993.

So, when I read about some dumb comments being made on the subject, I can’t help but call it as I see it. Not to be flippant, but the winner of today’s dumb comment drawing is: the Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps. To be fair, I don’t know the man – and I wasn’t in San Diego for that three-day conference. I didn’t hear his whole speech. Maybe he’s really with the program. Most Marines I’ve met, are.

But, I felt it necessary to take this story on. These were very dumb comments – and they were were made during a recent, posh get-together consisting of 1,000 Marines, sailors and mental health specialists at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego. I’ll take these and put them in the light and perspective of someone with PTSD.

But first, some history and science: PTSD has been in the spotlight because our troops have been deployed – and deployed – and deployed again, in endless rotations to one desert or another, one crap city, town or village or another, and one mountain range or another since 2001.

Check your calendar, dear reader. While you’ve been visiting Starbucks for the last nine years, men and women in uniform have been out there making sure both you and Starbucks are here to enjoy the smell of coffee. On a more serious note, PTSD hasn’t been with us since 2001 – it’s always been with us. The cause of the disorder is thought to be chemical reactions in the human brain.

The human brain produces some of the most powerful chemical compounds on the face of the planet. We are each a pharmacy of “Dr. Feel-Good” medications. The trouble occurs when the brain notices something really bad is happening. In that momentary flash, brain chemistry kicks into high gear, and the result is a “remapping” of brain structure or operation. There are opinions that suggest major reconfiguration of thought processes due to these very real and very physical changes. The brain does this so that the next time such an event happens to you, you are "hard-wired" to respond. Study in fields such as neuroendocrinology and neuroanatomy and genetics have all been brought to bear on the disorder. But basically, the disorder has been with us, since the first tiger chased the first of our monkey ancestors across a field.

And unfortunately, it has happened to military folks through every conflict in history. It has been recorded since the 6^th century BC, when an Athenian soldier suffered no external injury but became blind after witnessing the death of a friend. The names people have given it, perhaps reflect the times. In recent history it has been known as exhaustion, neurasthenia, war neurosis, shell shock, battle fatigue and combat fatigue. New names have not changed the thing itself - they only make the doctors and other professionals in society feel smarter.

And so, we come back to San Diego. Because it was there that Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps, said, “We are at the point where we need to take action.”

Yeah baby. We’re there. We weren’t there nine years ago – and we weren’t there after Kosovo or Somalia or Panama, Vietnam, Korea, WWII or WWI, or all the other military engagements troops have been involved with. But, we’re there now. Oh good. I thought we’d never get “there.”

We are there because the general is sitting with a big smile on his face behind a white-draped table at the Town and Country Resort. We are there because the Marines are seeing a suicide rate which surpasses all the other services – almost doubled since 2006. And of course we’re there, because the words “at the point” and “take action” sound good in a speech - and make you feel all warm, squishy, safe and smart.

But the truth is, we are very far from “there.”

And apparently, this point has not been overlooked by the general, because also part of his speech was the following statement: “We are not satisfied with the results we are seeing.” And of course, his capper to that statement "commanders can point to no single factor." The general also explained that the military is such a loving and understanding place, that “there are men and women in their ranks who have sought and received help for post-traumatic stress disorder – and have been able to rejoin their units and win promotion.” Yeah – it’s ok. Don’t worry, be happy.

I know of instances where that statement has been true. I also know that during my time in the service, if you had a problem, the last place you wanted to be was in a military doctor’s office, talking about your woes, because it would make people you work with, not want to work with you. It might cause your flight status or deployment status or other very important things to be revoked. It might end you up in some dead-end job in a forgotten corner of the world. And it might cause you to be given your walking papers - a medical discharge. But again, to be fair to the general, the military is trying very hard to get a handle on this thing. Of course, dear reader, you’re fooling yourself to think they are any closer to solving it. You can stoke yourself on anti-depressants and seratonin re-uptake inhibitors and drugs that affect dopamine. You can pop sleeping pills until your head swims, you can try prayer – and that one might be your best hope – you can sit in a circle, hold hands and sing kumbaya or cry on each other's shoulders, you can sit in an auditorium and listen to the VA give you a two-hour, droning bullshit “orientation.” You can do the Tai Chi dance in the garden, go in for an experimental treatment like the stellate ganglion block or the ecstasy trials, or you can even let them drill holes in your head and give you a boost to end all boosts.

But in the end, wherever you go, that’s where you are. There’s no easy answer – and no amount of late-night programming, drinking, eating or farting; blogging, reading or zoning-out to the endless scroll of twitter, will ever make it easier to turn out the light. No one will be there in your dreams to help you when the ghosts come. Nothing will tamp down that almost itchy feeling you get in crowds. Nothing will stop the memories from crowding out your waking thoughts. Nothing will stop the anxiety and the incessant feeling like you’re forgetting something important – like you have to do something right now, or you have to watch those high windows, those shadowed places or the fidgeting scumbag in the market for suspicious movement. Nothing will stop the surges of adrenaline in response to fireworks, a dropped object or a too-familiar smell.

And of course, nothing will stop them from re-naming this condition. At least they accomplished that one thing at the conference in San Diego.

They’re calling it “Moral Injury.”

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For your reference: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/military/article_3dc03ec3-6a37-5608-8563-aca88f635271.html

Boots.

2010-05-09T23:11:00.000-07:00

Boots.

You see them in the closet, or maybe strewn across your floor like some kind of trail to hidden places.

I’ve worn a lot of boots. Maybe I wore so many for so long that my feet would no longer accept a tennis shoe or something a little less rugged and maybe more dressy. Since leaving the service in 1994, my feet got worse and worse until I was walking with a cane. But I was still shuffling along in my Desert Storm era boots - lately salvaged from military surplus stores.

It’s a strange thing when you consider these military icons – I mean really consider them.

Back when I was still a young man, I was a member of the honor guard, rifle detail and sword detail. I worked at a base with 96 ground-launched nuclear cruise missiles. It was a serious, deadly mission. And we were playing “Chicken” with the declining Soviet Union. I would usually get to the base headquarters building just as the anthem was played. I enjoyed taking the time there in front of headquarters, rendering a salute as the flag was raised. I remember it clearly. The jump boots I wore back then gleamed. I kept my uniform immaculate. One of the guys taking down the flag did not. The toes of his boots were in need of polish. I noticed things like that.

Another day I carried the American flag down the main street of Newbury, UK, as the street was lined with WWII veterans there in recognition of Eisenhower Day. I remember seeing those old men in their dark suits, medals lining their chests – so many medals. Beside me, another troop carried the British flag. We moved slow and respectfully with a long parade line behind us. The old men’s faces were somber, but their boots shined as brightly as ours. I noticed.

Flash forward - to a dispersal exercise in which I was detailed as an LPOP. My camouflage was exceptional, and when I was young, I could disappear. One night two guys walked down to my position. They stopped right over me.

“Where is this guy?” said the one in front of me. I was looking at his boots. He had missed lacing through one eyelet. I noticed things like that – even in the pitch black of that field.

“I don’t know,” said the other, behind me, now poking me in the back with his rifle. “What is this pile of trash? Someone should come out here and clean this up.” They walked on, their footsteps receding into the distance. As an LPOP I was not supposed to engage them – just report their position. It was my job to notice things like that.

Flash forward – to a long day in Moscow. I had come back in from a walk – trailed for hours by members of the KGB. The Soviet Union was in its’ death throes, but you couldn’t tell that from our trip. We’d been given the full “dollar” tour of the city, and being young and stupid I found every opportunity to slip out into the streets alone. One night I grabbed a cab and made a long trip across the city. It was blistering cold. I needed a real hat and coat. By the time I got back to the hotel, the government agent stationed outside the door of my room had changed. Now it was “Thick Mustache” and his thin-soled scuffed shoes. The laces were thin too – as were his lips. Lips which never smiled despite my courteous tip of my new hat. He crossed his legs, adjusted the newspaper in his hands, and looked away dismissively. I still remember it clearly. The heel of his right shoe tipped toward me and I noticed it was worn on the outside. Bow-legged maybe. Yeah, I noticed.

Flash forward – It looked like I might be staying behind when the main group of our unit left Mogadishu bound for home. I needed new boots, but the Air Force supply group wouldn’t give them to me. You see, I wasn’t on any of their lists – I was with the Joint Task Force and my friends were all U.S. Army, Navy and Marines. It was almost funny when I couldn’t get any of those other groups to slide me a new pair of covers for the old dogs, either. I think I did laugh at that – after all, I did have a tendency to notice things like that. Then my home unit needed me back – and I was on my way back to Holloman and the F-117A.

Flash forward – I picked up a newspaper a week after returning home from deployment in Africa. The black jumps felt foreign on my feet after so long in the deserts. They would forever feel foreign now, although I didn’t know that then. I slouched in the couch at the front of the office and flipped open the paper. The front page caught me immediately. The soles of a pair of boots were visible in the back of a flatbed. Their owner stared up at the sky – those who were loading him into the back, were caught in a moment of strain. Perhaps it was the camera gear still hanging around his neck. Maybe it was just the slackness of his frame. Shot up and dead, the Frenchman had been my friend. He had filmed me all around the country of Somalia. We had joked about that. Back then I could still speak some French - not anymore. My friend’s left shoe was unlaced, ends of the string trailing in a pool of something. A black and white photo doesn’t deliver true color, but I knew those boots were deep brown – and the pool of liquid they were being dragged through was red. I noticed things like that.

There’s no answer for the things we carry with us. There’s no reality where such troublesome thoughts fit neatly or comfortably. There’s no place to put them when they try to crowd out other thoughts. I've seen other photos now too in newspapers - of boots next to an up-ended rifle and a helmet. I've seen a lot of photos like that.

Flash forward – I’m old now, but not old enough to have these memories wiped clean by time. Sometimes I’m grateful for that. Most of the time I am not. Still, the other day I received a phone call that I’d won a contest. Somehow I’d won an entire lifetime of new boots from www.militaryboots.com. The irony isn’t lost on me, and oddly the new Converse shoes actually fit. They fit perfect. I can't help but think of all the young guys and gals over there now, in the bad places for us. A lot of them would like a new set of shoes. Some of them there today, won't be coming home tomorrow. I can't do anything about that, except remember them every time I lace up. The militaryboots folks were very kind - they really just held the contest out of the goodness of their hearts. It wasn't a slick marketing thing. They really are the best sorts of people - and they have every boot known to man. When they asked what color I wanted, I didn't hesitate.

My new boots are black. Black like eternal night - like my dreams mostly are. Black because I'm so tired of the desert, and still after all these years, it's where I live.

I notice things like that.

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Here's the full story on the contest: http://www.militaryboots.com/blog/
And here's where to go if you need new boots: http://www.militaryboots.com

And here's a link to a better writer than I,; and it is such a very high compliment: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/180e2d

An old article I did after interviewing Commander Marcinko

2010-05-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

Just thought some of the readers of this blog would like to see this - an interview which I did with SEAL Commander Dick Marcinko in 1997. The Commander is known worldwide for his series of books which started with his exceptional biography. Today he's also known for his public speaking, a popular video game, and a new company producing high-tech time pieces for operators. See the black watch at right, which is his top- of-the-line, Red Cell wristwatch.

I remember sitting on the curb with him at the gate of Holloman AFB collecting quotes for this story. He was a regular guy - but not the kind of regular guy you ever wanted coming after you. To the Vietnamese, he was "Shark Man of the Delta," to others, he was Demo Dick. But his most famous name is certainly the one he coined himself - "Rogue Warrior."

A letter to a general

2010-05-02T22:21:00.001-07:00

In the last few months of my time in the military I was placed in charge of “Special Projects” at Holloman AFB. It is a position, which does not exist. It doesn’t exist for a reason – because it never really existed.

Special Projects was like calling your breakfast “special” or your neighbor’s house “special.” Just because one has scrambled eggs on it – and the other has rotten eggs dripping down the windows and doors, doesn’t mean they are special. In fact, “Special Projects,” should have been called “Projects for the Soon To Depart (PSTD),” if it had to be called anything at all. In fact, it was absolutely “Special” in the way the old lady down the street describes it, when her rat-dog shits all over the carpet – as in, “Ohh, isn’t that special!” But there was a reason for it – there always is.

Take for example the office adjacent, in which two high-ranking officers were in charge of something called “Quality Force.” Yep – it’s just what you were thinking. Much like Special Projects, Quality Force had nothing to do with anything in its’ title. There was no such thing as a “Quality Force” or “Do More With Less.” If you could do "more with less," then you must have had too much to begin with. If you are calling everything "Quality" now, that must mean that before, your force was something less than that. Lastly, when you’re given less to work with, less generally gets done – and when you have to call something “Quality,” you can be pretty sure that is not what it is all about. Quality Force propaganda was controlled by the two less-than-quality monkey head officers behind that second-floor headquarters door. But that didn’t change what every regular serviceman and woman knew it to be – just a trail of rat-dog shit.

And once smelled, you always know it for what it is.

And so, when the Army Two-Star and SOCOM Commander, Charles T. Cleveland allowed the charges to go forward against three young Navy SEALs, you could be damned sure there was both more and less to that whole story than met the eye. The smell was too familiar. Now, with two SEALs cleared, the third and final guy steps into the courtroom this week.

If the military administrative rat-dog squad had anything other than “Quality” people, the General might get a clue and try to back out while there’s still time. Just let McCabe go. But, the wheels and weasels are already in motion – and in the service, that means the whole stinking trail of poop must be allowed to drop completely, once a little bit of the steaming sauce has hit the carpet.

After all, why have a small mess, when a much bigger one is possible.

Being an NCO of some hard-knocks experience, I tend to view things from a Special Projects perspective. So pardon me if I don’t get all teary-eyed over Cleveland getting smeared as this charade he allowed to begin implodes like a rusting Soviet submarine on its’ way to Davy Jones. And I damned sure would be contemplating a fun Welcome Back To Active Duty party (WBTAD), to Petty Officer Third Class Kevin DeMartino, the lying rat-dog enlisted guy who has proven to the world that “Yes, Virginia, Shitheads Do Exist (YVSDE).

In fact, now that I am long since out of the service, I can voice my gentle opinion as publicly as I would like – and “I do like,” so, here it is:

Dear General,

The dumbest Airman Basic I ever knew, could have seen this one coming. In fact, there were probably a number of recent trainees, fresh from Lackland AFB, you could have consulted. But you didn’t. One wonders how it was possible, then, to run afoul of such a simple and obvious thing. If young enlisted guys are unwilling to accept non-judicial punishment and instead risk court-martial for something they are swearing they didn’t do – then probably, they didn’t do it. Because, in the world of the enlisted, you know how things are geared – and that is mostly in such a way as to chew you up and spit you out. When an enlisted guy is offered non-judicial wrist slapping instead of career-ending CM action, and he takes the CM, he’s either a fool, he likes how they deliver the food at the jail, or – and this is really a key point – HE’S INNOCENT.

But, potentially being a worthless hump, you decide in your gilded letterhead glory, to hammer these guys.

I have only met a handful of generals, because I was just a regular schmuck. One bitched me out, two were really good to me, one shook my hand, one stood beside me in a hummer in Somalia, one signed my journals and one even tried to promote me. They were all good guys, and to be fair, I don’t know you. But I can say for certain how I would have handled a scenario like this one these SEALs have been faced with. I would have been indignant and pissed off, and as a tough, but principled sergeant, I would have delivered my thoughts about such a thing in-person, replete with colorful language and punctuated with appropriate additional activity. It would have been stupid and pointless (perhaps like this article), then, as an old friend of mine once said, “I could go to lock-up or some icy northern rock in the ocean, with a smile on my face.”

But these young men are professionals. They are good, decent men. They deserve respect and support, not Prosecution By Pinheads (PBP). They have handled themselves with dignity and their actions prove what I and every other American except for yourself and the prosecutors already knew – they didn’t deserve this. They prove there are a lot of folks out there, anyone would be proud to serve with. You, however, should possibly consider opening a new office for yourself – the PSTD (see paragraph two of this article), because you might just want to think about some civilian career options.

Subsequently, you may feel free to include yourself in the “pinhead” category if you would like. I won’t put you there, because I’m a member of the former “Quality Force.”

And I was “Special.”

______

P.S. If the poor schmuck you have compiling your press clips happens to come across this article and you are given it in your daily folder of "poop about you," please feel free to send me a response. I'll actually print it - even if you call me an asshole - and especially if you say "you didn't do it."Because I always gave officers my support. And I always thought you generals were stand-up guys. I wonder what young men and women will think, though, after this?

Guardian Grandmas

2010-04-29T14:59:00.001-07:00

Rio Rancho is in the midst of a sand-storm.

Which is really too bad, because I was looking forward to some mind-numbing work tempering one of my steel-work projects. But high winds mean no starting 1300 degree fires in the forge. Those same high winds and impenetrable dust mean, in the current state of things out there, it isn’t wise to play badminton.

And it may mean that we’ve finally lost Al Gore. He’s out there wandering aimlessly in the storm. But that seems unlikely, after all, he lives in a mansion on the East Coast - or is it the $9 million, Montecito Mansion on the West Coast, now? Hey, everyone needs multiple homes to fly their private jet between. Nope - he's not lost. He's just an asshole.

I can’t help but draw a few comparisons here, though. Like this: The Dust Storm outside is not as strange as the Alice In Wonderland arrival of the SWAT team to protect Obama from a gaggle of grandmas in East Nowhere, Quincy, Illinois.

Hell, it wasn’t even East Providence – or South Boston – or even the South Valley of Albuquerque. It wasn’t the drug-war, drug-ridden country of Mexico – It wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan and it wasn’t Mogadishu, Somalia, which even Clinton had the balls to visit.

It was Quincy.

Illinois.

For God’s sake! Someone use your common sense! If there’s a group of old ladies standing around in Illinois – regardless of whether or not they are wearing red – when you use the words “Tea Party” in that context, that may be exactly what it is! They may have been just about to break out the cards and coffee cake, when the shock troops rolled in – in formation! They were moving double-time! In formation! They were frightening the few children who were there, so just imagine what images those kids will carry forward (and that is no joke at all.)

Here's a statement released by Quincy PD about the deployment of their SWAT:

"During President Obama’s address, at approximately 1530 hours, the MFFT was deployed. A group of individuals positioned themselves on the south side of York Street near 3rd Street. This was within the area that was to be kept secure at the request of the U. S. Secret Service agents in charge of the site. Prior to the event only ticketed individuals were to be in this area; during the event it was restricted to the general public completely. Secret Service personnel requested these individuals leave the area and to go back to the north side of York Street. They did not comply. Quincy Police Department personnel made the same requests and again they did not comply. At that time the MFFT was deployed to stand post between the individuals and the site and, if necessary, remove the individuals. Once the MFFT was in place, the individuals agreed to move. Once everyone complied and the site was again secure, the MFFT returned to their staging point. No physical force was used during this deployment."

So yeah, I can see the danger, El Presidente.’ Don’t furrow your boyish brow over these simple ruminations. Those weren’t nice grandmas – they were demon-grandmas; kind of like demon sheep, just with blue hair! They are part of the Guardian Grandmas … they just weren’t wearing their red berets that day. I can see how it would be necessary to call out SWAT, because there’s no way Secret Service could handle that crowd.

Standing at parade rest behind the Guardian Grandmas were neat rows of elite cops in their black armored Darth Vader gear. What a sight. What a statement on how far we have fallen as a nation. What are these clowns doing to us? What’s the next step in the escalation process? We bring grandmas, they bring SWAT; we bring grandmas and cold drinks - they bring armored humvees; we bring grandmas, drinks and umbrellas – and they bring Mark 19 Grenade launchers. Where does it end? We bring grandmas and drinks, umbrellas … and the unthinkable: a card table! And yummy snacks – and they bring thermonuclear weapons.

This is our tax dollars at work – and this is our tax dollars at work … on Crack!

Frankly, dear reader, I don’t know how much more I can say on the subject – except what any of the Guardian Grandmas might say to Obama: “Shame on you!”

I’m going to go have a piece of coffee cake.

_______

And for those of you who want the ultimate weapon.... The Battle Fork . -
www.http://dsadventuregear.blogspot.com/

Stare at some goats - do it now!

2010-04-22T23:38:00.001-07:00

I haven’t watched the news on television for some time. I haven’t listened to the latest smears and jeers by a boyish, imbecile president. I haven’t watched Al Sharpton claim everyone who isn’t him is racist. I haven’t watched the latest celebrities claiming everyone should ride bikes and wear sandals or wooden clogs – and squeeze our own milk out of cow tits because plastic and factories are killing the planet.

No wait. It’s cow farts, isn’t it? So, we should stop drinking milk because that has too much fat and probably salt – and eat the cow – but not all at once, because that’s too much red meat in our diet. Or something.

No, I just haven’t watched any of that crap. I haven’t listened to it on the radio – and if I see a photo of someone distasteful on the internet, I very calmly click off of the link and look at something peaceful and meaningless – like the slowly scrolling lines of Twitter – or a movie, like Men Who Stare at Goats.

In fact, it is during this movie that I realized what an interesting world this would be if we had Jedi Knights. These guys would be able to see into the future and know we are heading for a fall similar to the one expected by 14^th century explorers – blip; off the end of the flat Earth. Monty Python had some cartoons to that effect as well – and it would look just like that in the mind of the Jedi.

Jedi Knights would be able to see into the hearts and minds of our elected officials and know who was a bad guy – unless he was really bad, like that Sith Lord dude in George Lucas’ films. Then they wouldn’t know, but they could band together and kick his ass – or have their kids kick his ass. Yeah, it would be great.

Jedi Knights could also stroll around in those cool robes, looking regal and somehow, above it all – like Obama if he was a Supreme Court Justice, instead of a Supreme Being. Jedi dudes could stride purposefully around the White House, looking purposeful and stuff. And they could do kind, considerate things, like speak to the gathered angry crowds in soothing, lofty voices – like Obama, if he actually did that – and if he wasn’t an arrogant pimple.

Jedi Knights would be able to use their mind tricks to make Biden look smart and cultured. They would also be able to levitate him – which would be cool, although I don’t know why.

The Jedi would be able to use their minds to influence the biased, rat-bastard news media, and have them report the news instead of interpret it through some plastic, botox injected, hairplug ridden, boob enhanced, bleach-blonde who can read, or was once a lawyer who learned how to read.

The Jedi Knights would be able to whip out their light-saber thingies and carve irritating people into small smoking bits while giving significant looks to the rest of the nearby miscreants. Terrorists would be eliminated almost immediately, although unions would for the most part, hang in there – as we saw with Jabba The Hut – or Pizza The Hut, depending on which version of the movie you saw.

Yep, everything would be so much better with Jedi dudes. No Obamanator, no Pelosi Skin Walker, no Barney the bend-over dinosaur, no evil ACORN creatures or ACLU zombies lurching about, no brainwashed school teachers and second-hand brainwashed kids, no prosecutions of our nation’s heroes, no drug problems, immigration issues, financial meltdowns – and no environmental concerns, because we could move all the environmentalists to that planet with the Ewoks, where all those nature-lovers would be cooked in big Ewok pots until they were nice and crunchy.

There would be no traffic jams, because we could just fly around the jackass in the Fed Ex truck. There would be no starvation or disease, because the Jedi would see that coming easy, and divert the appropriate relief efforts long before things required Sean Penn to get dickheads like Chavez to send cruise ships for relief workers. In fact, small-time dictators like Chavez and smoochy admirers like Penn, would be carved up into bouillon cubes by multi-colored light-sabers, for use in Ewok stew. It would be a very festive process and produce a hot export for a booming economy – and no one would be sick, unless they got really old on some swamp planet exile, like Yoda – or Yogurt – again, depending on the version you watched. But no sickness would mean no need for universal health care, new-age Hollywood diets or Richard Simmons – oops, too late. Way too late on that last one.

Yeah, basically life would be grand.

But I, dear reader, would live on a distant moon, where the television signals were still rolling in episodes of the Honeymooners, I love Lucy or Gilligan’s Island – because this whole fight the Dark Side thing, sucks tremendously. And having to watch it every friggin’ day on the tube and not be able to do a thing about it – well, that sucks too.

Makes you want to stare at some goats. Because if you can drop one of those suckers just by using the Force, we’re in business.

Terrorist Tartare

2010-04-21T17:44:00.000-07:00

I used to transcribe police logs.

If you’ve ever worked at a newspaper – a real newspaper and not the New York Times – you might know what I mean. If you don’t, sit down, shut up – you’re about to learn something.

In New Mexico’s Otero and Lincoln County, characters like Billy the Kid and other Old-West notables used to roam the empty expanses, testing their will against tough terrain and a tougher population. The results were often recorded by the lawmen of the day. Which got me to wondering one afternoon, what a typical police blotter from that time might have looked like. So I took a trip to the Alamogordo Public Library and found out.

In their special section, which dealt with such things, I found my answer. It was a statement written by a deputy sheriff in the 1800s. He said “I went to talk to old Jim. He was ornery. So, I shot him dead.”

And herein lies the point of my article: We have come so far in our idiot dealings by politicians and the like, that we would send America’s premier assault team to bag a really bad bean like Abed, and then we prosecute members of the team for assaulting the guy. What’s wrong with that picture? What kind of half-assed government do we really have when they allow the military leadership to go forward with such a ridiculous charge?

Why is it ridiculous, dear reader? I hear you moaning back there behind your computer, you politically correct weenie. Go chew some Granola, you’ll feel better.

The charge is ridiculous because I, for one, want Abed assaulted. In fact, I want Abed punched repeatedly, just before I teach him how to fly. As a former military guy myself, I can only say that given the job to bring Abed in – I would likely have done just that, but I would have dropped him out in front of headquarters from a height of about 250 feet. Why that particular altitude? It’s high enough to make sure the deceleration kills him, but low enough for myself, Abed’s buddies, and even God, himself, to appreciate the bounce.

They would have enough of the guy to scrape into a paper bag – enough for a DNA test if it didn’t get mixed up with the camel dung. But Abed wouldn’t be in a talking mood. His buddies might be – but not him. So no courtroom antics, no teary-eyed terrorist-rat-bastard recounting on the stand – and what’s key here – no Abed.

Coarse you say? Callous? I don’t give a rat’s ass. Shove it somewhere dark and personal if you don’t like it. Sit down and shut up.

But hey - that’s me. I was just a meathead sergeant. I was a nobody. I wasn’t a trained professional like our SEALs. They fulfilled the job and brought that sack of human shit, Abed back intact – with all his fingers and toes, even! And I don’t give a hoot if one of them whacked Abed and made him cry. In fact, I’d like them to whack him some more. Give him one whack for every one individual who died in New York on September 11. Then give him one more whack – just as a parting gift from me. Please. Turn him into a damned piñata and drop him off in Otero or Lincoln County, New Mexico – or hell, leave him in my backyard. We’ll welcome him to the U.S. properly.

But our suits want to prosecute the guys who went in and got Abed – so just ask yourself this… next time we have to go get one of these pricks, who are we going to send? Are we going to send the Ghostbusters? Are we going to drop in Anthony Bourdain, the globe-trotting, snarky, liberal chef? Are we going to send the local Bridge club from the senior center? How about that pencil-necked pizza delivery guy, or the dickhead who until recently, used to do the voice-overs for the GEICO commercials?

I just don’t know – and I guess our leadership doesn’t know either.

But they can do the world a favor – they can send me along. Let the hard men drag the rat out of his tent and over to the chopper. I’ll be happy to take it from there. Then I will say something, when the ride is over, which will no doubt, go into the history books. I will say it with a smile, as the leadership is busy scraping the paper-thin smear of “terrorist tartare” into a zip-lock. Because that’s the best way to ensure it stays “fresh.”

I will say, “I went to talk to old Abed. He was ornery. Had to kick him out of the chopper.”

Obama or his Defense Secretary, Gates – listen to this: Let the SEALs go. Let them get back to doing their jobs, or you’re going to have to reinstate me, and other old sergeants like me.

But you better pack a spoon and spatula if you do.

Mission Impossible

2010-04-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

In the dustcloud surrounding the tea party, no one is watching the small stuff.

But then again, the small stuff is actually big stuff – it’s just so big, it is impossible for most people to see the edges – subsequently, like a big stupid bird with its’ head in the ground, it is possible to believe the Earth doesn’t exist. Even if your head is in it – I mean.

And so we come to Tom Cruise. Well, not really Tom Cruise – just one of the characters he played. Remember the super secret guy in Mission Impossible? Yeah, that one. Remember the plotline of the first movie – the NOC (Not Official Cover) list – and how it was so important to ensure the list not fall into the bad guy’s hands, that the U.S. Government had it hidden in only one computer with a climate-controlled, laser, heat, motion, sound vibration and moisture sensored room? A room with with only one vent – sixty feet up - through which it was - of course - possible to stuff Tom Cruise, so he could steal it and carry forward the plotline?

Yeah that part.

Well, people like Tom played in that movie, are real. They just aren’t your average schmucks. And no movie will be made about them – no monuments raised – no mention of their actions beyond their own small community. You and I won’t know them. They will seek no fame and likely no fortune, and despite doing horrific duty in the toilet bowls of the world, our government may seek to prosecute and jail them for smacking some terrorist, or doing other things they either didn’t do – or in my personal view – should have done more of.

But as bad as it is for our elected fools to be attacking the very people who carry out their policies and orders – as bad as it is for stuffed shirts who ask these folks to do the “impossible,” then question the methods used to achieve those goals, it is not the problem I am writing about today.

Because if you take the current prosecution of the SEALs over the alleged smackdown of some scumbag who probably bit his own damned lip – you will discover that this very same scumbag was responsible for stringing up the mutilated corpses of former U.S. Special Forces operators working as contractors after their time in the service was up.

You will note, that those operators who were tortured and hung, were targeted – and you should then ask yourself why. Because reports are being circulated that the New York Times – the same newspaper who’s Communist and Marxist Pulitzer Prize winners I have reported on before – is preparing to go public with a list of Americans providing force protection for our troops in Afghanistan.

The NOC list.

“Wait,” you say, “isn’t that under lock and key in some kind of climate-controlled, laser, heat, motion, sound, vibration and moisture sensored room?” The short answer is “apparently not.” And if it was, someone let the biggest leftist publication in the world have the passcode.

In fact, the truth is that the New York Times has been waging a very private war over the use of “contractors” in our hot zones, sparking some writers to question whether activities of the Central Intelligence Agency are actually behind the Times’ inside information. Whether or not that connection could be proven, is beside the point. The release of such a list will provide terrorist scumbags the world over with the names of not only the operators, but their families – their children and grandchildren!

What would you do to protect your family? Or do you think that somehow your family is excluded because you aren’t on the list?

What you should be asking yourself, then, is: Who is on the list? Is it your neighbor? Your co-worker’s spouse? The husband who’s wife you sit next to in the subway each morning? The brother of your kid’s school teacher? A friend of a friend? Then ask yourself this – what happens when the bad guys come to take revenge? What moment will that be – and where will you be when it happens? Can you even remember the images of people leaping to certain death from the top floors of the World Trade Center? They weren’t even specifically targeted. They just went to work that day, and they – and most everyone around them – died horribly.

So, back to the point of this article. When all is said and done, you can ask yourself this one: Who is worse – the terrorists overseas setting roadside bombs and hanging our people from bridges, or the terrorists here at home in places like the New York Times - with their lists, and the power of life or death by simply pressing the “enter” key and publishing death itself.

It isn’t some crap Tom Cruise movie after all – is it?

POST-SCRIPT: The following is a statement I received yesterday from one of those individuals who did the “Mission Impossible” stuff in the real world, to keep you safe. I have done you civilians the kindness of explaining in parentheses, what the military terms, here, mean…

“An old master chief friend told me when all this shit was brewing. Keep your ear to the ground and stay frosty & hidden. The lefties are in love with the tangos (terrorists) & they’d love nothing more than to hand us over to be crucified. Be ready on a moment’s notice to swim off and save yourself, to fight another day. But be very careful about sky-lining yourself (identifying yourself). They’ll come after your family and your 20 (your exposed flank) will be exposed to the world.

The New York Times has become as much of a threat as any tango out there. America’s warriors young & old have been betrayed again. I will never forget and will definitely NEVER FORGIVE!!!!”

More information: http://bigjournalism.com/bthor/2010/04/14/sos-red-alert-new-york-times-about-to-put-american-troops-in-deadly-peril/

Taking Flight

2010-04-13T14:35:00.001-07:00

In the desert there is a horizon. It is always there and always unreachable – the thin line where the brown of the earth meets the blue of the sky – a reminder that there are limits to existence.

I remember times when those limits weren’t so harshly defined.

There was a time many of us remember, when televisions didn’t have a thousand channels and there were no remote controls or cell phones. There was a time when radios would be propped against sand dunes, the sound coming from them a gentle, tinny background voice, as out in the distance the waves rolled in – and in the further distance, ships navigated somewhere between the sea and the sky.

In those days, there were no ipods, ipads, home computers or internet. Newspapers could be seen unfolded in corner babrber shops daily, and astronauts were visiting the Moon. There were all sorts of people whom you could look up to – and even if you didn’t agree with the government and the president, there was still a kind of respect you could find – a level of statesmanship you might someday hope to aspire to.

In those days you could recite the pledge of allegiance in school, and not wonder if someone was going to object. You could fly your flag in your front yard and not have to wonder if the day was coming when you would be told to remove it because it offended the family living next-door.

A kaleidoscope of images come to mind when I think about these things. Memories, some dark, some bright – all clamor for attention on the surface of my mind. I remember the call of gulls late in the day as the fishing boats returned. I remember when people used to receive their day’s milk in bottles delivered to boxes at their back steps. I remember when the mailman was trustworthy and had time to stop and chat. I remember when a ten-speed bike was a miracle of engineering and when having power windows on your car, meant you probably had an Olympic-sized pool in your backyard, a house filled with fine-china and finer furniture. I remember when housing developments seemed unusual – when it was strange to see so many places side-by-side, looking so similar. I remember seasons of salt-laden summer breezes, falls filled with bronzed, fallen leaves and new maple syrup and candy apples. I remember winters of cold temperatures, but warm family visits. There were holidays filled with strung lights and song and there were spring-times when the girls always seemed prettier and you just knew things were going to get better and better.

It’s a kind of sadness I feel, I suppose, when I compare the future we have traded for that past - which I know in my heart to have been somehow purer and more complete. We made that trade with our eyes open, grasping at the shiny magic beans – giving away a world of life on Earth for a hoped for place in the clouds.

But here in the desert, the world speaks few lies. Look at these things we have now. All the accoutrements of a modern age have cluttered our homes and our lives, and left us with less, not more. The progress of science and reason has made for greater technology, but a dearth of spirit. Like Orwell’s Winston, we are beaten down and left tired and sickly by the crush of our own personal institutional monsters. Many seek solace in the voices of big media concerns, but the men and women of those businesses always make their money on the controversy and carnage. It isn’t in their interest to have a better world.

Our answers seem always out of reach. Despite promises of change and progress we are always offered one more magic bean through technology and politics and science and religion. And despite living in the world promised by Frank Dille, in his Depression-era Buck Rogers cartoons, we seem no closer to that horizon. We can reach the shores of a new sea from our space-station foothold in the infinity of space, but are no closer to a better life. There’s no promise of a new diaspora. The horizon remains unreachable.

But remember, there was a time when the days ahead of us were endless, and this place held nothing but possibilities. Hope was real and change was a word, which had meaning. We had a future that was wide open to us all. There was room for heroes and explorers. There were great men and women of all kinds. We could believe.

The difference between then and now is really a simple one. We knew our world for what it was. Freedom was part of our being – we stood certain in our identity. We were Americans and we could be proud of our country’s short 200+ year journey. This has been a journey, which resulted in each of us alive today - walking and talking and running and screaming and laughing and crying in delight and pain and the range of all emotion in between.

Believe in that place again. That’s all it takes. Believe in the country I saw from shore in 1976, as the Tall Ships gathered in celebration of the Centennial. Liberty isn’t in the titan’s flame, held aloft by a statue in New York. It exists small and always nearly flickering out, in the hearts of men and women everywhere.

As it turns out, we are as close to the perfect horizon as we want to be. We can choose to see it as an expression of our tired, earthbound nature, or we can seek our future with gladdened hearts seeing each day as a gift. We can keep safe that small light inside us. We live in the end-times only if we choose to. Dille knew it when he commissioned the Buck Rogers comics in the ‘30s and influenced a new generation of people. But it wasn’t technology he was selling then – it was the clarity of belief.

We can be so much more if we choose to be. And in that simple thought, the horizon disappears, and we understand that the line where the desert meets the sky wasn’t reminding us of our limitations – it was proof of the music of our immortal souls. Within that symphony we can finally know that we are completely free – and that we are truly alive.

Don't Jump.

2010-03-24T16:59:00.001-07:00

After the idiots voted in Congress to pass the unknowable health care bill in all its’ amazingly horrifying glory, I was concerned that the sun would come up on the bloated corpses of folks who had decided not to wait for the death panels, and just leap from the nearest bridge now.

There’s a problem with that plan – actually several, which I will attempt to outline here.

You might think – well, the trouble with that plan is that you’d be breakfast for birds and stray cats, and you’d be right. While the sudden deceleration would solve your worries, cure your sleeping problem, and reduce the screaming your television has to endure, jumping does in fact mean you are likely very dead. No not the fake, BS kind of dead – like the promises of alleged threats being received by members of Congress.

But one of the big problems is that the whole Health Care package is an awfully big ass to try and cover with both hands. Subsequently, I would expect the following weeks to show increasing troubles with a fairly unpopular piece of legislation. You can’t win ‘em all – and indeed this bill is about as “perfectly clear” as a peat bog or a tar pit. The failures will be many and very varied. It will become a thorn in the side of not just the regular people, but also the folks who did it to us.

Are you one of the brilliant porch bulbs who believe this new law is just an extension of your illumination? Pull your head out. We needed some repairs to the system, we didn’t need the government to decide on its’ own to screw us whenever and however it liked – even though that’s what they’re the best at.

So making the leap due to the combined the dirty work of Pelosi, Obama, all the rest of the president’s cookie-squad - the self-serving, insulting skin-bags filled with farts – hardly makes any sense. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I fear this footwear is being worn by a government, resembling a fat, North African centipede. Did you know those critters were poisonous and stealthy and cold, and liked dark places despite their brightly colored worm-like bodies? Sound like a description of those in our capitol? There’s a reason for that.

No, all of these reasons against jumping from the bridge are good, sound reasons, but they are trumped by the grand-daddy of all reasons: In order to jump from the Obama bridge, you have to make the assumption that somehow the starting point is high up there, in the clouds where such high-flying morality and lofty ideas exist. The assumption is as full of hot air as the Pelosi fart bag. The real reason you can’t jump, is that the Obama bridge is below ground level already. In fact, it doesn’t bridge anything. It’s just a hard spot somewhere underneath all the muck.

The only question left is this: Is the hard surface close enough that we won’t sink like dinosaurs and disappear in the bubbling tar.

If so, we’ll make some great museum exhibits for the intelligent descendants of our English Bulldogs.

“Here,” they will say with sweeping gestures of their stubby little arms, “is the remains of Human Republicus and Human Stupidus, preserved in the dark depths of this sticky, gooey place.”

The small Bulldog children will “ooh and ahh,” their jowls flapping against the acrylic windows of the exhibit.

“And here is a completely different species,” will say that docent of the far-future. “This is what we’ve tentatively termed Governmentus Spinelessimus. We are generally of the opinion that this species caused the death of the entire civilization, despite what the global warming scientists are saying.”

Yeah, don’t jump. In this case to get anywhere, you actually have to climb out of the muck.

The Day America Died

2010-03-21T15:30:00.001-07:00

February 3, 1959 was viewed as “the day the music died.” On that day singer, songwriter, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed when their chartered plane crashed on the way to Moorhead, Minnesota. Holly had set the pace for all other rock and roll artists to come. He was one of the first that genre to write, produce and perform his own work. Don McLean sang about the dark day of the crash in his famous song, American Pie.

Holly, Valens and Richardson died, as a revolution in civil rights had just begun – a massive storm, which swept across the United States, changing the face of the country and enhancing and expanding freedom for all American people by 1968.

Fifty-one years later, we face a scenario in Congress where freedom is again at stake, where an economy has crashed, and now legislation is being forced through Congress against the people’s will. The protestors are there in large numbers, the anger is there, and members of congress are even re-enacting landmark walks from history in an effort to legitimize their planned violation of the Constitution. Watching it on television, it looks like video footage from protests in the 60s.

Only this time, freedom isn’t being given, it is being taken from us. Under the government plan, everyone’s health care in the U.S. will no longer be controlled by the individual, but instead be distributed by the government. Allegedly the plan will produce huge monetary savings and yet at the same time extend health care to millions of people who currently do not have coverage. None of this can be proven to be real, however.

The vote to pass a massive piece of Health Care legislation through the House of Representatives is ongoing as I write this. Protestors are laying down their signs in Washington and going home. Some remain, and purple-shirted union members who have been violent during previous demonstrations, and stand to benefit from the bill, have just arrived in large numbers.

Sitting here in a small house in the desert in New Mexico, the feeling is tangible, that this legislation represents the start of a government take-over, which one would expect in a Third-World or a communist country. Just one small part of this legislation illustrates the overall flaws: convicts are protected from government fines for lack of medical coverage, but not the spouses or family of military veterans. There are massive problems within this bill, yet it is going to be passed on promises that these issues will be dealt with later.

That seems unlikely.

That the path of this bill is littered with crooked deals, bribes and gifts to unions is clear. That more than 65 percent of the American people are against it, and the provisions in the HC bill are set to harm the average family is also clear. In fact, the biggest winner in all of this, seems to be the Internal Revenue Service which will see the funding to hire thousands of new employees who’s job will be to harass and collect more taxes and penalties from the population.

The representatives each state has sent to do the “will” of the people, are instead doing the will of power-brokers and the president. The anger of the people is being waved away dismissively. Politicians and their staff jeer their constituents, calling them stupid and irrelevant. The president smears each of his speeches with a large helping of arrogance and paternalism. The alleged reform is riddled with budget gimmicks, double-counting and impossible numbers.

Smoke and mirrors and liars and fools – that’s what we’ve got in Washington tonight, and that’s why we are in the place we are. The collapsed economy and the destruction of the jobs market screams for attention and none of these problems are being dealt with in this bill. But I believe if this bill passes, we may face a much more profound crash.

It all makes me think about that plane crash in ’59. McLean’s feelings about the day – which he sang about - may have proven true. It was “the day the music died.” But it was eventually followed by a time of rebirth. After all, Holly inspired The Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Stones and so many others all now a part of our colorful history.

So perhaps if this despicable action passes today – as it seems it will – it could be marked as the “day America died.” I wonder, if that happens, who will sing about it and what will be born from it? Who will be inspired and what great works will come because of this disaster?

Because, we will stand.

Even against this.

Demon Pass

2010-03-17T18:54:00.001-07:00

Where do we go next?

If you accept as an axiom, what I was taught in schools when I was a kid – that the Pilgrims left England for the new world because they just simply could no longer accept the religious restrictions and persecutions being heaped upon them there, then my question stands: Where do we go next?

The administration holds a weapon of mass destruction they are calling “deem and pass,” but which I spell “demon pass.” Essentially one-sixth of the U.S. economy will be decided without any accountability. Know this – the guy you always see in the disaster movies, standing on the corner with the disheveled appearance, swinging an old bell, holding a sign which reads “the end is near” – he might be right. Once health care passes, the administration will have lit the fuse to an economic bomb of incalculable proportions.

It’s like you’re on a railroad to Hell – next stop, the really warm place.

So we come to the place of Bret Baier’s interview with President Barack Obama. How much is the president claiming this health care package will save all of us? According to Baier’s talk with the man today, the administration “knows…that this is going to reduce the deficit by over a trillion dollars.” And that should be a relief, right? Because the commitments the U.S. government has already made, amount to 12 trillion dollars (they’ve already managed to spend $2.5 trillion). Yet the alleged one trillion is held aloft and waved around like a flag. Subsequently, the president says today, “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate.”

In other words, he doesn’t care how the bill gets to his desk, as long as it arrives there – preferably this week.

And he doesn’t want to answer any questions about the situation – despite receiving as many as “40,000 letters or e-mails a day,” according to the president himself in today’s talk. He’s got the exact same e-mails Baier has – he says so… it must be true! In fact, he offered to show them to Baier! But the difference is that Obama’s e-mails are different. His e-mails – all 40,000 of them, apparently – are asking why they can’t get health care. The servers must be overloaded with the sheer mass and moans of the multitudes who are just begging for health care relief.

It’s ridiculous, but here’s the words of the president: “What I’m saying is whatever they end up voting on – and I hope it’s going to be sometime this week – that is going to be a vote for or against my health care proposal. That’s what matters.”

I would humbly suggest that what matters are the numbers as being reported by many different segments in polls and media. People are angry. People are fed-up. They are tired of the posturing and they are tired of the focus being placed on health-care and not on the economy and the fact that terrorists are enemies and not criminals with rights. We the people, want the government to focus on taking care of outstanding business – ie. the war on terrorists. We the people, want the government to deal with getting some of the money back which we so merrily handed corrupt bankers and glad-handers in the past year. We, the people want our representatives to actually represent us.

And we’re tired of the warm, fake smiles, the lies, derision and paternalism we are being saturated with, anytime we hear one of these elected representatives speak.

So where do we go next? Where’s the “new world” for us now?

I’m afraid it isn’t a destination measured in miles

The trip to the new world is simply measured in time. How much time is unclear – we have just days before Demon Pass.

What follows may indeed be Hell.

Simpler times - harder solutions

2010-03-09T15:51:00.000-08:00

This article first ran in September of 2009. It probably is even more relevant as the U.S. Government seeks to ban fishing by private citizens.

It used to be a pint of minnows would bring you 40 cents.
I know, it doesn’t seem like much in either regard – not many minnows and not much change, but if you’re 7 to 10-years-old and you live next to a salt marsh in a tiny coastal village, that 40 cents is serious money.

All you needed was a few bucks for a minnow trap – which would be serviceable for a few seasons, some old bread, and a float. And that added up to serious wheeling and dealing at Jim’s Dock – and even better, the purchasing of candy with your bankroll at Skips dock. Since they were and still are right next to each other, you didn’t have far to walk, and you didn’t need to wear any shoes.

I don’t know what made me think about the slog out to pull in the minnow traps, so long ago, but the thought reminded me of another thing – the year that salt marsh was discovered by teens with dragnets. As you can imagine, it slimmed down the minnow population a bit, and the trips to Jim’s were less frequent and a bit leaner for quite a while.

Of course, dear reader, you may choose to take a variety of lessons from this article. I suppose you could equate the teenagers’ minnow over-fishing to some kind of larger-scale environmental slant. SAVE THE MINNOWS! I can see the posters and the Greenpeace protesters – or the fleets of Sea Sheppard rowboats doing battle with the evil dragnet folks, even now. Or you and Al Gore might band together and take a revisionist point of view. You could claim that it wasn’t the teens with their dragnet, but rather, global warming which depleted the minnow population to dangerous bait-fish levels, thus destabilizing the marsh and impacting in some arcane way, the ozone layer. Worms, which the minnows eat, are blooming unnaturally and the resulting increase in worm farts is killing Al Gore – or something like that.

But myself, I like to just look back on that time fondly.

Because, for a short, golden age, all I had to worry about was checking that trap, bargaining with Jim, and collecting my candy from Skip’s. Those were perfect days of barefoot youth and I remember a feeling of timelessness. Was it really just an illusion?

When I was screwing up the courage for another bartering session with Jim, Nixon, Ford and another guy named Jimmy were President. It was the 70s and there was a crappy economy, inflation, a gas shortage and in 1978 and '79, a major blizzard and a hostage crisis in Iran that lasted 444 days. I remember in the early 70s my father bought an orange Volkswagon Super Beetle when VW had the Thing in their showrooms. I know now that there was a lot wrong in the world – and not a lot being done right by the White House or anyone in office.

But for me there were simply the minnow traps.

Wouldn’t the world be an easier place if it worked on the simple arrangement of cash for minnows? Instead, we have cash for clunkers, dollars for dinged up appliances, bailouts for boneheads, jobs for jackasses, and amidst it all, a health care solution, which most people believe, solves nothing. Shovel-ready doesn’t mean much if there’s no one out there, shoveling or nothing to shovel with or for.

I saw my first Corvette Stingray back in those years – probably a ’73 or ’74. They were giving those out free to astronauts in those days. Maybe I imagined a life where I would become an astronaut and get one of those cars from Chevy.

Well, I’ve known a few astronauts, was in the Air Force for a long time, I’ve been a warrior and a reporter, an artist, martial art teacher and poet - and I own a nice 1973 Stingray. In fact, I was just working on it. It has an 8-track player and power windows – yeah baby; cutting edge. Jimmy Carter is still out there, and a strange new version of him is once again in office. Small cars are making a comeback, and a huge economic crisis is on us with massive inflation looming somewhere in our near future.

But I’m selling the Stingray, and that small village and beach house with the minnow trap probably rusted away somewhere beneath it, is all so far away. The desert southwest has the same sun looking down on it, but the days feel less golden, the time less easy. The sun is harsh and hot and unforgiving and I am aging and aching and tired.

I don’t have any answers – I don’t know the way back to that time, and I guess no one does. But I do know that a pint of minnows once got you 40 cents. It was a solid deal with real returns and no crooked bankers. The candy you bought with your hard-earned money was sweet, the beach sand, pure and soft and clean, the water cool and clear. The fish or crab you caught later that day at the state pier, could be cooked in an iron skillet if you were lucky to have an aunt or mother, or grandmother like mine.

Why can’t it still be that way and who do I have to fight to make sure that places and times like that still exist for some child, somewhere, sometime in the future?

Because whoever I need to fight, whoever stands in the way of that, you’re standing in the wrong place.

And we’re coming for you.

We’re coming for you all.

Heart and Truth

2010-03-05T19:07:00.000-08:00

There’s a heart beating somewhere – someone who knows what is right and wrong – someone who understands the grain and texture of the cutting edge of freedom.

Somewhere, someone who can’t be anything but single-minded, is hunting the most terrible killers ever known. The man is out there on the edges of the known world. Around him are his team-mates – now fewer because the earth is all equal in its’ potential. It is a killing field and it is a graveyard. His buddy was sent home the other day to recover inside some hospital in a forgotten corner of the real world – if he lives that long or gets that far. The man stands in this dirt street, but can still see his friend's crooked smile and grey eyes – an image that remains despite the moment of burns and blood. A tire on the edges of the field of vision smoulders, acrid, but now almost unrecognizable as they search for truth in a third-world Hell.

They are a world away from another heart, beating just as fiercely as a woman pushes her way through the crowded streets of her city. She steps on a discarded newspaper with a headline suggesting another group of troops dead after a firefight in a place she never heard of. Signs and billboards scream bright messages of the marketplace. Tires from a passing taxi splash dirty water onto sheer stockings. A curse, voiced low, is lost in the sound of the crowd as the woman angles toward the protection of the nearby sheer faces of the glass-fronted buildings. More advertisements featuring a green hillside complete with cattle are too idyllic to be real. The images are passed unnoticed except for the brief subliminal flash as tired eyes search for truth in the mundane.

And somewhere removed from that city another heart beats strong and slow. A day of hard work not yet finished still reflects in eyes set into a creased, weather-worn face. Cattle move ahead of him across the deep green hillside as the family brings them in yet again – a long day repeated season upon season – maybe back to a time close to the dawn of man. Truth is in the feel of the leather work-glove, the even steps on uneven ground. Truth is the fences and the young children being taught this ancient way the only way it can be taught - first-hand. He passes an old vehicle submerged in the ground where it was left. A rusted bolt pokes out from the curve of a fender.

Removed from the pasture by a thousand miles, a wrench turns steady on a stubborn bolt. It may have been in this place all the way back to the day that car first rolled off the assembly line. It may have been part of the work of the previous owner. But it stands in the way of a working machine – and the heart of this man is so attuned to machines that it may as well be made out of steel, itself. There’s something in the broken things that people bring him, and the perfection he creates is like some kind of new-world magic. Truth is inside his understanding of these simple things. He knows this even as he cleans the grease from his hands at the end of each day – but never perfectly. His face stares back at him from the smudged mirror. Every year older, and every year more distant. People are harder for him to understand than gears, so his manner is gruff and his words short. His daughter doesn't come to see him anymore. She gave up the garage for a different kind of life. He misses her. Somehow there’s always a hint of black oil inside his truth.

A beauty undiscovered combs back waves of red hair reflected somehow not as perfectly in a bedroom mirror. Her heart beats lightly. She knows somewhere out there is the right life for her, but she hasn’t found it yet. Her eyes are an impossible blue – like the sky on a clear Southwestern day. She is filled with laughter and kindness. Maybe she’s a teacher, maybe she’s a student, maybe she's even a nurse in a local hospital or maybe she’s just the free spirit we all wish we could be when we consider our own truth.

Somewhere in a nearby hospital a child is dying of an incurable disease – his spirit almost truly free now. His favorite friend, the nice lady with the red hair isn't here today. His heart beats weakly, but the boy understands more than the adults around him have given him credit for. He knows his time is measured in days and not weeks or months. He doesn’t need to understand eternity because it lives with him every moment. He would like to have been a fireman or a policeman or maybe a soldier like the one in the room across the hall, but he knows he won’t get the chance. He peeks around the corner into the soldier’s room. The man turns his head as the boy approaches the bedside a crooked smile and grey eyes are just visible on the uncovered part of the man’s face. A rough hand reaches out and touches the smooth, unblemished skin of the young man’s head. No words are exchanged. They each understand the truth. It washes around them as invisible and infinite as time itself.

Somewhere someone understands freedom. Maybe we all do. We are all regular people just trying to get through our lives, but we don’t have to live within our politics or the things we think we own. We don’t have to live as captives to the darkness of our pain, our hatreds or our carlessness. We can be more. We can transcend. We can experience truth and recognize that there are others who experience it too – in so many different ways. We are woven together in ways we’ll never be able to see or understand. Can't you see it? Can't you feel it?

Give me a single heartbeat and a moment of perfect clarity and I will give you something of enduring beauty and wonder. I will show you a miracle and I will give you freedom as we all know it should be.

I will give you the United States of America.

Ever have a day like this?

2010-03-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

DAYS OF DARK AND LIGHT

A collaboration by Waterwolf and Badoracle

Some days the sun may shine, but there is no warmth and no light. And some nights only come filled with ghosts.

You don’t have to understand. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.

Ever have a day like this?

You wake up in a cold sweat, but can't exactly remember what your dream was? So you resign yourself to get up, but now, you’re pissed off at the whole world.

Pain racks your body right down to your very soul and your dark mood deepens. You smile and kiss your wife all the while inside you feel adrift and lost. Try as you might, you can't seem to shake off the gloominess that has settled in deep and heavy – like sand blown in from somewhere across the world. It heaps against the doors in your mind. They won’t open against the weight.

Your day stutters and skips and you stagger through with the energy and vigor of a man making the last walk – the one that ends in a noose. Sounds and smells so familiar, tie you to a place you’ve wished a million times forgotten, but which never leaves you. It finds a way to cling inside your head, crouching in the dark corners - a formless shape with shiny feral eyes, waiting for the mind to slew sideways, like a heavy vehicle on black ice.

Then all at once, it’s with you. And it uses memories like the worse kind of thief, enveloping you in a place, that although you hated, you can't help but smile remembering old friends – your buddies, and lighthearted moments you shared with them; pranks and laughter, stupid stunts; the ridiculous in a land of anarchy and insanity.

Then you’re hit while you’re off-balance. The shadow sweeps over you – its’ true nature, huge and winged, somewhere above and always out of sight, but no less cold. You can’t help but remember something that happened - a certain buddy that didn't return with you – hell so many that will never be seen or heard from again. Like the sand heaping up against those doors in your mind, the lost are numbered, as are the grains of sand. They have become the eternal.

Your day just got worse.

You shake your head, physically hoping to shake that feeling as you glance at the clock and realize you've only been up for 30 minutes.

You want to puke, you want to hit something. Instead, you shake your head and try doing something else. The shadow refuses to return to its’ hiding place. The dark mood doesn't lift. But you find a sturdy box you can stuff both of them into. You mentally keep a hand on it – just hold it there. It struggles whispering and slipping inside. It flutters and jumps against the lid like an insect - like a spider. You man-up and carry on.

Things begin to fall into step as your day continues. Then you take a ride to run errands, and you lose your grip on the box. Your thoughts have wandered and that thing has slipped out now. It’s riding shotgun, grinning – and you can't really remember what you were thinking about. You’re miles away from your original destination. The anger leaps forward, white hot and total.

A blink later and you’re somehow finished with your errands. You retreat back to your safe zone, your home - your fort!

Close the curtains. I don't want to see anyone or anything. The smell of someone cooking outdoors slips in anyway, and now you're no longer home. That smell – damn it - I know that smell.

But I'm sitting in my truck, parked in the driveway. Not inside the house at all. Neighbors try not to look at you, as you slam the door - as you glance at your watch. It’s 1700 and the entire day is gone. You go back out to the truck and lay your hand on the hood. The engine is cold. You must have been

sitting in it for quite a while. There’s a wave of familiar embarrassment.

Must have been sitting there like a dummy, all that time. You find your way back to the door. Sitting in front of the TV, you pray for the day to be over. On the glowing screen you watch the dumbest shit ever, just to shut off the brain. You eat out of habit. Food loses its’ taste and texture. You’re filled with sounds, smells and faces of a place and time gone – yet still alive in you.

Time for bed. Delivered to another night when your wish is for peaceful sleep and a tomorrow different and better.

Don’t try to understand. It’s better if you don’t. I will thank God for all of it – the good and the bad.

And I’ll pray for the rest.

The Wrong Choice

2010-02-18T21:33:00.000-08:00

What’s normal? What’s extreme?

Joe Stack flies his aircraft into the side of an IRS building. Maybe the best thing that can be said about that, is his act only killed one other person, although he injured several. His wife and kid left behind, Stack decided it was necessary to climb into a light aircraft and carry out an act of terrorism. His reasoning: violence is not just an answer to the problems of the day – in his own words, “it is the only answer.”

In the same day, the news is finally made public that Iran is now very close to combining nuclear weapons with Intercontinental delivery systems – and simultaneously authorities roll up a terror plot at Fort Jackson involving five suspects who are part of an Arabic translation program. The five were apparently involved in a plan to poison Army food supplies.

As people try to distance themselves from Stack in interviews and as the military does their CID thing with the five “09 Lima” troops who were actually detained in December, and the Iranian government seeks to join the big-boy club of Atomic world-enders, we sink in more than $800 billion in debt. We are collectively dragged under by the whole “green planet,” environmental thing, which has only just begun to make fools of a long list of bribed scientists and new-industry types. All their hands will be eventually caught in that particular cookie jar. The Vegas mayor refuses to meet with the President and job loss has reached levels well beyond the point which Obama himself identified early on, as a level on parity with the Great Depression.

Could any of this be worse? Could there be any more messages out there to tell us we are swimming in dangerous waters?

Stack’s writings, posted on the internet, prior to his suicide / attempted-homicide run on the IRS building, called for revolt, identifying Americans as zombies. He cites draconian restrictions, “pompous political thugs,” and “mindless minions” as the elements destroying the country. He uses the term “cruel joke” and identifies himself as a “fool.”

Whatever happened to Stack, he lost his mind and sought to join the ranks of indiscriminate killers we have identified as terrorists. Regardless of the term eventually used to label him, however, his assertion that violence is the “only way,” is the craziest and saddest part of it all. From Stack’s point of view, life has reached the point where it is necessary to kill others. Odd, isn’t it, that this is the same point of view shared by Al Qaida, Iranian crazies and others across the world. “Nothing changes unless there is a body count,” is what Stack writes in his final words, evidently neglecting to see the obvious – that a body count doesn’t necessarily change anything for the better. Real power does not come from the barrel of a gun, despite the mass-murderer, Mao’s assertions and those in our own government who seem to want to agree – and Stack, who went even further, by actually pulling the trigger turning his aircraft into a bomb.

Killing is a fever. War is killing on a massive scale, shifting the fever into the realm of epidemic or pandemic. In all of these instances, the work of the grim reaper is halted only because he grows tired. Fevers burn themselves out. Meanwhile, they manage to kill fairly indiscriminately. Death is an equal-opportunity kind of thing and in the end, “body-count” often simply means, there’s just a lot of people needlessly dead. The dead aren’t nameless zombies. They are always artists and thinkers and writers and craftsmen, tradesmen and businessmen, homemakers and lovers – all manner of folks who are the same as you and I. And of course, they are also often children and entire families.

Have we forgotten so quickly the terrible September day when so many of our countrymen died? Have we forgotten the exterminations perpetrated in our more distant past? How could Stack have arrived at his conclusions in the face of all that? For that matter, how can any terrorists arrive at their conclusions?

Maybe it’s another kind of fever? Maybe it’s the fever of madness – and if we’re real lucky, it will all burn itself out.

Otherwise, we are facing something worse. Multiple plots on U.S. military bases suggest more than coincidence is at work. Iranian missile tests combined with the level of activity in their nuclear program, as well as reports of Russian assistance, adds up to an imminent attack on Israel or others. A cold war with Iran is not very likely, as in order to be cold, it needs to involve cool heads.

Ask yourself this: If a former businessman can lose himself enough, to fly an aircraft into a building, and if members of our military are involved in killing and attempting to kill fellow troops, how far away do you think we are from nuke-equipped Iranian crazies, lighting candles at the slightest provocation – or for no reason at all? How easy will it be for Iran to provide their atomic weapons to others willing to pay for them? What’s the result then?

What’s normal and what’s extreme?

I would suggest that Stack falls into the latter category with all the other self-deceived and insane. He was born innocent in 1956 and chose to end his time on this world with an act of terror. He could have done anything instead of that. He could have chosen to help others despite his own personal woes. He could have adapted, overcome and found a way to contribute to real solutions today. He could have fled and flown his aircraft somewhere a long way from anyone he ever knew and all his problems. He could have just disappeared, to start again somewhere else. He could have done some good with his remaining time on the globe, and like everyone who enters their names on the rolls of the lost, he could have made a much better choice.

He didn’t.

Light of change - or of endings

2010-02-12T23:22:00.000-08:00

I love bug zappers because of the pretty light.

This was brought to mind by a Eugene Williams quote. He didn’t love bug zappers – he loved spiritual something-or-others, but, you get the point.

Actually, I don’t even know who Eugene Williams is, but someone on Twitter was in the middle of one of their endless, mind-numbing, quoting exercises and dragged the moldy corpse of Williams out into the light of day. Anyone who is a fellow twit, knows what I’m talking about, but those who haven’t taken that questionable, evolutionary leap, would need to subject yourself to three years of immersion in regurgitated quotes from the dead or mummified – or something in the terminal, non-moving, or museum exhibit status.

I think it’s a reflection of our society. I think we’ve travelled the fast-food highway of intellect and arrived at some vaguely recognizable neon-lit destination with an all-to-recognizable menu of voices droning on about this or that. I’ve been trying to reflect a little on the stuff of life in the past week. I’ve been communing with technology and discovered myself lacking.

I can’t help but remember a friend and fellow reporter, who admitted to me one day that she was a little afraid of computers and where they were taking us. She didn’t want to learn how to use the sparkling new Apple Quadras, which had been lovingly installed and networked at a daily still using a 50+ year-old offset press. This was long before cell phones and the internet and personal digital assistants, etc. It was long before “blue tooth,” or iPods or “i-anything.” I used an Apple Newton 2000, and it was frighteningly powerful technology. My friend’s name was Lisa, and she said something prophetic that day. She said, “someday soon there’s going to be two kinds of people – those who understand this crap and can adapt to it, and those who simply can’t. It may be the end of everything.”

I thought that was interesting and sad and maybe a bit truthful. It was also kind of scary, because Lisa was a former Titan Missile System Officer. Basically, her job was to wait around in a silo for the end of the world, then make certain she and her fellow officer turned their own set of keys, perhaps adding to the nuclear afterglow.

Earth as a cinder - makes you think doesn’t it?

Might make you think of some famous dead guy’s quote about the flicker we all represent in eternity’s pale blue light. Might even make you run another search on the internet and copy and paste some dried-up, retread drivel, making yourself appear for a brief moment to be worldly and educated. One more gasp – one more silent gaze at a glowing screen. One more press of a gently illuminated “Enter” key.

But myself, I think of the bug zapper. I think of the long flight toward the pretty light – oddly enough, itself blue and inviting. I think about the tiny creature’s short life and all the small, bug-world innovations, insect politics and plodding daily affairs it has taken part in. I wonder how far apart we really are as organisms.

From my vantage point, my personal flight, doesn’t seem that long, folks. I have seen the past years rush by in a stream of barely-recognized consciousness. I’ve seen people’s aging and endings – and the same waits for each of us, somewhere in the draining sands of tomorrow’s hour-glass or atomic clock; or whatever it is we’re using to count the passage of time these days. “Maudlin,” you say? “Depressing midnight, babble from some unseen hand, clacking away at some remote keyboard in some forgettable part of the world.” Why are you even reading this drivel?

I can’t answer that question. I know you’re staring at some glowing object in the process of reading this, and although you’re not growing wings, the crackle of electricity is there – so close – and you have been drawn in. But is it the real danger here? Or is it the technology and culture and course of society - our own failing, transitory natures, which represent the real danger?

Was Lisa right?

Here’s my take on it, after reflecting on that conversation, since 1997: She just might be. But Lisa’s imagined end-game only needs to come true, if we become the mindless drones only useful for dying in some kind of crackling, crisping end. Lisa’s truth is only given life, if we ourselves hand over our imaginations and sense of wonder to the stale, spoon-fed, tasteless pap of re-written, politically correct, progressively-driven, history. Contribute nothing – create nothing and offer nothing of yourself, and we all will indeed, visit some kind of Greek Tragedy on ourselves.

Because there are really two kinds of light – the one, which leads to something new, undiscovered, bold and transformative, and the one which leads to a small pop and a long fall.

We choose.

Memories of Snow

2010-02-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

Snow in New Mexico is unexpected. When a storm hits, it’s usually late at night on the high desert, and when you wake in the morning, it is to a perfect, even landscape of crystal white.

There are many places in the world where such an event goes unremarked and unnoticed. The windshield scraper and wide, flat shovel are constant daily reminders that you’d rather be living somewhere warm, like New Mexico, for example.

It isn’t warm here today.

But the unending white transformation of our brown horizon as I look out the window, reminds me of so many other things. A kaleidoscope of images roll through my mind as I touch a finger to the cold window glass. Around that touch, the window fogs briefly. Maybe I sigh.

My great friend, Jimmy, who much later became a bounty hunter in New York and worked as a consultant to police forces – a big, wall of a man… but here he’s just a child, bundled in New England winter gear, dragging a battered sled beside me as we make our way across a long field on his family’s farm at the end of Anthony Street. Neither of us knew where life would take us back then. But I can still feel the bite of the cold as it pressed into my clothes after many dozens of high-speed runs down that perfect hill. The thrill as you purposefully threw the sled over at the end and tumbled into the cold…

…Tumbling out the back of a slow moving truck in the dead winter on Britain’s Salisbury Plain. Somewhere out across the field was a Ground-Launched Nuclear Cruise Missile emplacement – two all-terrain tractor-trailer rigs connected by fiber-optic cable, surrounded by rings of well-trained security forces. On this night I was with a small team of Royal Air Force Regiment troops and we were playing the part of “aggressors.” Our five-man crew was detailed to find the deployed missile rig and destroy it. We were dressed in Soviet uniforms and gear for this exercise, acting like the real-world Spetsnaz, who were out there waiting to make the real attacks if we ever had the world-ending call to launch those nukes. It was cold enough to make you want to stay moving, numb and raw, but somehow the mud beneath us still soaked through everything as we low-crawled across that field…

…A field, flat like a spread of ground I walked one evening in Moscow, while Soviet power was still total. The snow crunched beneath cold boots. I was still without a hat, and the traverse was leaving me more than chilled. The KGB operatives trailing me seemed warm and comfortable as I would see them slip in and out of my peripheral vision…

…my peripheral vision almost as good as the starlight scope as I tucked myself up against a fence line and surveyed my observation area. As an Listening Post / Observation Post (LPOP), I was alone out there – able to call in a fire team if I spotted enemy movement, but that was impossible when they were standing right next to you. They had approached from a vehicle I couldn’t identify and now worked their way along the fence line to where I was. I had up-ended a trashcan and left it on it’s side, covering myself with the contents and staying there through the long night.

“What’s this junk?” said the one behind me, poking me in the back with the muzzle of his rifle.

“I don’t know,” said the other, his boots just inches from me. “But someone should come out here and clean this up.” They walked on, eventually far enough away that I could call command. The fire team soon rolled up and I saw it all …

… I saw my son’s face as I left him in 1992. A snow had fallen in Alamogordo and I had been attached to the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force. First stop Camp Pendleton, then onward to the Horn of Africa. I remember trudging through that snow fall to retrieve my mobility gear from a disinterested supply troop in a remote building, then driving in a blue Ford Taurus to the deployment area. Later, on a C-141, I thought back on that last glimpse of Nico and wondered if fate would return me, or not. Outside the scream of the aircraft engines I imagined I could hear the frigid blast of air as it roared past…

…A blast of cold air as opened the car door, climbed out and swung it shut. Climbing the hill toward the VA for one of the hundreds of trips I’ve made in and out of that hospital. I noted this time, that a huge bronze statue had been erected in front of the six-story structure. They had chosen to rename the facility in 2008 in recognition of one of the State’s most decorated war heroes. Raymond G. “Jerry” Murphy was a Korean War hero – a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He acted against orders to rescue his wounded fellow Marines who were caught by enemy fire on Ungok Hill. He refused treatment until all were accounted for.

But Murphy wasn’t buried in his dress uniform when he died in 2007. He chose to be interred in his VA volunteer smock. He was director of VA Services in Albuquerque Regional VA for 23 years, and when he retired from that job, he donned the volunteer smock from 1997 until he died a decade later.

I probably met Jerry a number of times. I may have passed him in one of those hallways – I may have asked him for directions to one office or another. He was still working there when VA doctors and staff saved my life. I may have seen him many times. But I don’t remember.

And that, for me, is one of the coldest memories of all.

How many seasons – how many snowfalls go by when we don’t remember the things being asked of our sons and daughters in some distant land. It’s not necessary for you to understand or agree with the reasons they are there. But the fact that they are there, has meaning and purpose, and it will forever change them and maybe everyone they know or have ever known. They deserve our thanks and a handshake or hug when we do see them in our day-to-day life. Stop what you’re doing and go up and ask them where they served. It will change their day, and strengthen their belief that there really are people out there who care what they’ve sacrificed for the colors, for their loved ones and for the people in their unit they served with. That simple “thank you” makes such a difference.

Or you can go to your local VA and have a look around. Talk to some of the people there. Maybe you can do something to help. Maybe you’ll see some folks like Jerry. And maybe you’ll take a moment, recognize them, and say thank you.

Outside the seasons will still keep passing us all by – and more and more of those fine men and women will rest beneath the snow with each passing year. They won’t all get a bronze statue, like Jerry – a monument still too small to represent the man himself. But remember, whether you believe in the war they are fighting or not, they all walked through fire for you, and still are.

Find them and thank them while you have that opportunity.

Blue to black

2010-01-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

Somewhere out in front of us is a grey horizon. And as our eyes open to take in the vastness of the world, we eventually look up – into the perfection of a cerulean sky.

Beneath our feet lay the earth and stones of generations. From the microscopic dust blowing along the surface, to dark strata below guarding treasures and entombing lost civilizations, it’s all down there. If we took the time to dig, we might pass the ages when giants hunted in steaming forests and we may not even notice the moment when the first vertebrate dragged itself from water to land. If we had the time and energy, education and resources, we may even dig to the hallowed kernel of ground where the world, itself, began.

But we live in the here and now. We live in a time of crooked politicians and their dirty companions, attempting to foist legislation upon a public they see as too stupid to care, or too complacent to stand in their way. We live in a time where people might not kill you for the change in your pocket, but would love to kill you, everyone you ever met and ever loved, for some ridiculous warped idea of religion. In this time in which we live, it is possible for someone to hate you without ever having met you – and it is possible for them to hate you enough to commit mass-murder.

We live in a time when the rapists, molesters and murderers walk free with minor sentences, while regular citizens face the continued loss of liberties and threat of a very real police state, while our alleged representatives in government, extend every right available, to terrorists - whom we should be vigorously interrogating to prevent the death of more innocent people.

Our president delivers speeches written and massaged by PR artists, while he himself remains little more than a television actor, mouthing lines with the air of authority and truth. His gloss of belief is delivered in tones designed to lull the populace into some kind of hypnotic slumber. Around that president, a failing construct of unpopular policy creaks and moans under its’ own uncompleted weight. The plans and programs now being tracked by an increasingly angry and impatient public are deemed unpopular, unsustainable and possibly un-American. That same public is educating itself in order to guard against the erosion of freedom under the guise and promise of some kind of utopian vision.

Still the same words are repeated, the same tone maintained. We stand on the same patch of ground, neither elevated nor enlightened. Economy and jobs are allegedly the focus, but the goals of such speeches are never outlined by the words, which are spoken. Instead, these flaccid monologues are meant to shore up support in leaking political levees. The “would-be” leadership is drowning, and they’re casting about for something to help them stay afloat. The growing numbers of faces at the rails stare downward, unsympathetic.

Defeat comes in many forms, textures and flavors. But it always seems bitter to the one who fails, and bright and flavorful to the victor. Recently, the administration suffered a blow, which negatively affected their cohesiveness and set fire to their plans. Their choices seem self-evident. In order to pay for the expenses they have already incurred, they must cut other areas dramatically. Their shrill screams for progress have devolved into the moaning and gnashing of the thwarted. Now they just want to hurt someone.

May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a transcendent speech in which he committed to landing a man on the moon by the end of that decade. The project captured imaginations and fueled the dreams of future scientists and businessmen and writers and artists who were just children then, huddled on the floor of their parents’ homes. In living rooms across the world, those black and white pictures were transmitted to small television screens. But those of us who remember that time, realized in those moments, like Kennedy had years earlier, we were also something else.

We are explorers. We are adventurers. We need the unknown horizon. It defines us.

What dreams will be had when this presidency finally finishes stealing our children’s and grandchildren’s future? What moonrise will we point to when we are old, a tiny hand, held softly in our own – a tiny mind shining brightly beside us, behind bright eyes, looking up at a much dimmer silver surface, now too far away, even for imagination.

Because, the plans to return to the moon and press onward to Mars are now likely dead, killed by politicians without the foresight or bravery of Kennedy – politicians who are very much attached to wallowing in the dirt, and lack the spine even to be physically able to look upward.

Instead, they will take the money they would have spent on those efforts, and throw it away on climate research – itself proven a failure – rife with corrupted data and hidden funding for trumped up results. And whatever is left over they will fritter away on money schemes and dark political support organizations. In the end neither elevated, nor enlightened we will stand here bereft of everything that once made us great.

Our wealth spent, our children’s wealth spent, and their children’s wealth spent, we will live in a society in decay. And even our hope will have been traded away in our sleep.

Above us, beyond the blue, the air is thin and pure where it gives way to perfect vacuum and finally a black horizon. And there, shining brightly in the night is all the rest of God’s creation; endless shores in an endless sea, flickering and calling us to embrace our true nature and become explorers again.

If we dare to dream.

New custom project has just been started

2010-01-25T17:28:00.000-08:00

I just have to share this, because it is very cool - albeit shameless marketing . As most of you know, I make custom knives. But every now and then I do a custom handbag. Above you can see two of these. The next one is going to be impressive.

Just begun is a project like none I have yet done - a custom, designer handbag with the classy look of those pictured above, but fitted with internal titanium and kevlar armor, a spring-loaded extruding knife mechanism with hidden internal weapons mounts, a survival kit and totally convertible from a classy shoulder carry to a backpack. It is a new concept "BAG AS SHIELD and BAG AS WEAPON."

I'm telling you - the NRA hasn't even seen anything like this. It is true D&S Adventure Gear hardware - and as always, it will be one-of-a-kind.

Want to see more of my custom work - go here ....

dsadventuregear.blogspot.com

Teleprompters and potatoes

2010-01-24T18:38:00.001-08:00

by the

I am sitting here in my fluffy pink bathrobe, and my partner in crime tells me that Obama has made a speech to 6^th graders. I thought, “Oh great, isn’t that a great thing for kids. Then I look at the pictures."

I have had a flurry of emotions. First all I could do was cry.

Dan Quayle couldn’t spell “potato,” when he was in front of Trenton 6^th Graders. January 19, Barack Obama couldn’t speak in front of another group of the same school-age kids in Falls Church, Virginia, without his presidential podium – and WITHOUT HIS DAMNED TELEPROMPTER!

Dan Quayle couldn’t spell Potato, but I can’t spell “dufus” – and I really need to right now! This dufus (is that spelled right?) needs a teleprompter to talk to little frakking kids! So I have to pull my bathrobe up over my eyes, to wipe the tears. I think then - "OK I will look at all the pics. Maybe they are fake."

Nope wrong again. More tears and hysterical laughter as I see they are not fake. Not only does this dufus (is that repetitious?) have a Teleprompter - he has a podium with the official seal for the Office of the President. Does he think he is talking to future voters here?

As I wipe the tears away, I fondly remember my President GW sitting on the floor laughing with kids. Reading them stories, playing softball and many other things. All done without a teleprompter or speech-writers. At the White House April 15, 2008, President Bush remarked to Pope Bennedict after a sermon, “Thank you your Holiness, that was an awesome speech.” There’s so many more good ones, but at least they were all done from the heart and not read off a screen.

Who is this current idiot that he cannot talk to kids?

I don’t know. But I have to blow my nose, because the snot and tears are now unstoppable. My pink fluffy bathrobe is a sticky snot rag. I need a beer summit. I can solve all our problems from my pink bathrobe. He can pet the stupid Bulldog. The Bulldog can bark at the teleprompter.

No wonder they are trying to kill us with underpants.

My computer just froze. He killed my computer.

---------

need to see to believe....look at the left of the photo....

Obama, his teleprompter and podium with Sixth Graders.

Red for Resolve

2010-01-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

I respect the office of President of the United States. I always have and always will. It’s part of my make-up. It’s just the way things are.

However, as a private citizen these days, I decided a few months ago to take my observations onto the internet through the Jolly Rogers blog. Subsequently, I aimed to provide an objective viewpoint for various issues, but I have found over time that the activities of our country’s leadership became so questionable that I couldn’t necessarily claim “middle-ground” status.

It may be impossible to cover these issues and report both sides. This is because there are so many lies out there, and they will not get a platform here.

Following Scott Brown’s win in his run for the U.S. Senate, I was saddened – but not surprised – to read the President’s remarks as delivered today. I realize there are folks out there who believe that President Obama cannot possibly do any wrong. I respect your opinion and applaud your ability to keep your opinion freely, and always speak your mind.

I must now speak mine.

Addressing the contents of the Jan 22^nd speech to the press, I would have to list the following points, which directly conflict with the statements the President made today:

First, I do not believe the Recovery Act had anything to do with economic recovery in any form. Job saves and job creation are impossible benchmarks to measure. And I can't see any recovery in those areas. If we have recovered, it would be due to the work of the regular people finding a way around idiot government restrictions – some way to stay in business and keep as many of their people as possible, paid and against all odds, employed.

Second, the statement that the prior economy was creating wealth for the elite, but no one else, is false on its’ face. What happened to all the 401Ks across the nation in the last year? I didn’t agree with the economics of the previous administration, but the 10 percent of folks who lost their jobs recently, probably are not feeling like things are at all improved.

Third, clinging to “clean energy” and all things “green” is a losing position. That ship is sinking rapidly, with all the lying, conspiring environmental scientists chained to the deck. Obama may feel free to stay at the helm, but he’ll go down with that ship.

Four – the number of Americans without health insurance continues to change dramatically. It is bigger when the administration is desperate, and smaller when they think some minor concessions might actually move the HCR mess forward. The names used for HCR are also very plastic. When it suits the spin, the name morphs into something new – but it remains the same old junk.

Reform, however, is probably necessary in some form. Anyone who has ever got a medical bill and paid $20 for an aspirin and $40 for a blanket – or has been a doctor ruined by lawyers – probably has a clear picture where we might start. Crush the lawyers through tort reform – it’s a shovel-ready project.

Five – Clarity is the last term the average person would use to identify Obama or his administration. His folks are nowhere near transparent. They are not even opaque. They are hiding behind locked doors in the most highly secured facilities in the world. They exclude opposing viewpoints. Their “open-door-policies” only apply to those who share their point of view. When they speak – it is by reading PR-massaged texts, which have been scrubbed clean of any specific terminology or actual truth. They do not even feel obligated to answer direct questions put to them by the press.

But the most important aspect of Obama’s recent speech is that it shows the direction the President wants to go. Brown’s win – which I have argued in this blog, is a referendum on arrogance – has not changed the words scrolling on those tele-prompters.

So, when Obama says “let me be clear: This isn’t about me,” we can be sure that the whole mess and the resulting activity in the administration, is in fact all about Barack Obama, who allegedly reads letters and listens to sad stories at town hall meetings all day long. In his speech, he relates another indistinct story or two and continues with the same drivel, which has led to the anger, which turned a blue Massachusetts red.

Red for anger, perhaps - but certainly, red for Republican, and possibly red for resolve.

On the basis of these comments and the disorganized, collapsing house of cards which has long been Washington, and now seems destined to be Obama’s legacy, I believe the man and the people he’s surrounded himself with, are delusional.

I hope they can snap out of it soon.

What would Harry do?

2010-01-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

What would Harry do?

I see our efforts in Haiti and I can’t help but think of Somalia – and with thoughts of Somalia, invariably come thoughts of folk singer, Harry Chapin. Harry died in 1981 and amongst his accomplishments as a singer, he really did his best for a single cause – ending world hunger.

Harry was a writer of unusual skill. He had the ability to take snapshots of everyday people’s lives and translate those into perfect, simple songs that touched people from all walks of life. He wrote about soldiers and lovers, the lost and the found. He painted pictures in music of dreamers and those who have forgotten how to dream. But amidst it all – just as his career was finally taking off, and people were finally just beginning to listen – he died in a highway accident on the way to a benefit concert.

I believe if he were alive today, Harry would be all over the disaster in Haiti. He would probably be one of the first people on the ground there – and he would have gone if he had to row a boat there, himself. Perhaps there are those who would dispute the man based on his politics, but he would have been there handing out food or comforting the wounded and dying. Every year at least half his concerts were free, either for charity or benefit.

Where are the people like Harry today?

There are some out there. There’s Kelsey Grammer who has set up a matching grant for Haiti relief for children and Sandra Bullock, who donated $1 million toward earthquake relief. There’s Madonna who gave $250,000. A George Clooney and Brad Pitt organization “Not on Our Watch,” also donated $1 million. Pitt and Angelina Jolie pledged $1 million and actress Alyssa Milano gave $50,000. Lance Armstrong’s foundation has also put in $250,000.

In fact, $567.67 million, has so far been pledged to help in Haiti, by individuals, countries, companies and international organizations. But please set that number in contrast to what has been used here in the U.S. recently, to grease certain lawmakers – simple greed alone in our own government, has trumped the combined efforts of all these various efforts by contributors to the humanitarian effort in Haiti.

In addition to money donations, Suriname has sent military and police personnel as well as blankets and rice. Bolivia has sent blood for transfusions and food for the people. Even Venezuela, Bangladesh and the Philippines have responded.

But the regular people of America would likely make Chapin the proudest, were he alive today. Several hundred thousand people have made personal donations through the Red Cross. A massive military response to aid survivors was launched by the U.S. Our country has sent in a powerful combination of forces to fight the immense challenges in Haiti. Navy ships, helicopters, transport planes, Marine Expeditionary Forces, USAF Special Forces and many others have been sent in. Just today, 2,000 Marines were diverted from their deployment in the Middle East, to Haiti.

Is it enough? I don’t know.

Harry Chapin had a favorite saying. He exhorted people to simply “do something.” And I believe there are plenty who are. I recently printed a response I received from the White House, to the only thing I really had to offer – my own person. As a former veteran of Operation Restore Hope, Somalia, I would be happy to sit in a closet in a basement somewhere, and answer phones, if it would free up just one active-duty troop to go over and do their thing. I would be happy to help man the lines loading aircraft or unloading aircraft. I would be happy to assist in any regard – digging for survivors, burying the dead, handing out water and food, caring for the injured. I don’t care what it takes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I bet there are a lot of folks out there who would gladly answer a call by Uncle Sam to go back to Active Duty and meet the crisis head-on. Couldn't there be a network set up for U.S. military disabled or discharged volunteers? How many of us in these ranks could still “do something?”

Because politics don’t mean squat when people’s lives are at stake. What matters is not some broad notion involving saving the world, but rather providing simple decency and reaching out to people just like you - separated by geography and circumstance alone. These things are done one person at a time, one day at a time. And they are done by people who care.

Let’s do something.

---

Here is the link to Kelsey Grammer's site. He is providing a great relief program for children of Haiti ... http://kelsey.todhdsocial.com/landing.php

Here is an obituary which ran in the Washington Post, July 17, 1981, on Harry and his life.

Harry's family website can be viewed here.

Below is some data I received from a government source I have – ways you can help right now.

State Department provided the following info regarding support. In addition you can direct folks to the White House / State Dept sites:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/HaitiEarthquake and http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/pa_haiti_info_number.html

Donate

• Financial Donations

o Donate $10 to the American Red Cross – charged to your cell phone bill – by texting "HAITI" to "90999."

o Contribute online to the Red Cross h ttp://american.redcross.org/supporthaiti

• Find more ways to help through the Center for International Disaster Information http://www.cidi.org/incident/haiti-10a/ .

Private Offers of Assistance for Haiti Relief Efforts

U.S. citizens who wish to contribute to the relief effort for Haiti after the earthquake, either online or by text message, can visit the White House web site http://www.whitehouse.gov/ . Additionally, persons who wish to provide assistance or expertise in Haiti are asked to contact the Center for International Disaster Information. The Center, operated under a grant from the United States Agency for International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, has established a dedicated page to coordinate Haiti support http://www.cidi.org/incident/haiti-10a/ .

Read the warning from the FBI on Haitian Earthquake Relief Fraud and Scams http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/escams.htm

A referendum on arrogance

2010-01-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

In case you missed it, one man from Massachusetts may have just prevented an internal national disaster of unprecedented proportions by winning a place in the U.S. Senate and proclaiming loudly, “This is the people’s seat!”

How did it happen?

I’m sure there’s a lot of the country’s leadership, who are asking themselves this question. I have heard some amazing one-liners spoken on air today – my favorite being, “Where was the turning point?” I’m going to take this opportunity to direct those who missed a couple small things to look a little closer – did they really miss the more than one-million people protesting at the Capitol Mall? Here’s a hint…that was your turning point. If you didn’t look at your television that day, or you didn’t look out your windows in Washington that day, please see the photos on this blog, dated Sept. 12, 2009. The numbers of people at that event were confirmed by satellite. How do you miss a million people? The numbers exceeded those at Obama’s inauguration.

That was the moment to do something to stay in office. That day, where one simple hand-written sign read “silence is consent – can you hear us now?” resonated across the nation. That was the day when things could have been turned around, and it could have been done by a simple impromptu speech – ideally delivered by the President of the United States.

Instead, the leadership of our country has chosen to ignore the response by the U.S. citizenship, calling them various names including using a disgusting sexual reference “teabagger.” Odd how despite the government’s use of derogatory terminology and depictions, even on National Public Radio, Massachusetts has lost their traditional Democrat Senate seat. And isn’t it interesting that because of the disgraceful Christmas Eve vote on Health Care Reform and all the hidden dealings behind closed doors, paired with the treatment of regular Americans at Town Hall meetings, we are here at this point. With all the buy-offs and thievery and dirty dealings, our leadership should now be coming to the clear realization that the people are in fact, their bosses, and not the other way around. I wonder if they will.

Because here’s another number for you: 123,263 votes. That’s how many votes Brown won by. It’s enough to be considered a real “landslide”

And here’s what it all boils down to:

This election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate is not a referendum on Barack Obama or his often, idiotic policies. This is a referendum on arrogance. People are tired of the elitist arrogance of our nation’s administration.

And now that this election has happened, that leadership had best get Brown seated quickly and efficiently, trot their health care package out in front of the new 41^st Republican and take their lumps. If they do not do this, the entire situation will change dramatically. Why? Because the regular people needed this win. This is the long-awaited flashpoint – and against all odds and the weight of history, it is thankfully a positive one. History doesn’t record many positive flashpoints, so our leaders can now get out in front of this and press forward, go back to the drawing board and start working together – or they can reap the whirlwind.

Mark these words. If they keep playing the blame game and keep pressing this unpopular legislation forward, they will lose everything. If they attempt to buy another congressman to sneak the HCR package through, anger will build to impossible proportions – only it will be anger now backed by the knowledge that “the people really can win.” After all, “you can’t stop the truck.” This is the kind of momentum you either get behind, or the weight of the thing will simply roll right over you.

It is pure hope. Real hope – and not the cardboard cut-out “change” which so many Tea Party participants have suggested Obama can feel free to keep.

Tonight, Scott Brown could run for President, and he would win.

Brown WINS!

2010-01-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

We have won the day.
The Jolly Rogers will have a special article on Brown's win and what it means, tomorrow.

We have won more than a special election. Now we're going to have to hold the President's and the democrats' feet in Congress, to the fire. Kill health care reform - send it back and do it right.

Learn your lessons and understand you have over-reached.

Why we cry

2010-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

I once stood in Red Square and even walked the streets of Moscow alone at night, while the Soviet Union was still strong.

The streets were clean, the iron fist of the government visible everywhere. I have regrets in my life – as everyone does – but that time I spent in Moscow was nowhere near a regret. The insights it provided were powerful ones, which I have never forgotten.

All cold warriors lived in a time when Mutually Assured Destruction was the best strategy we had, to deal with the potential destruction of the entire world. Under that premise, our nuclear capabilities were balanced against the Soviet Union’s nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities. Leadership in both countries knew that a war with each other would mean the end of everything. That war was within a single phone-call of happening, and we were all on mere minutes from the end of human life on this planet several times. School children had been taught since the early 50s, to climb under their desks if necessary, for protection from falling debris, in the event of a Nuclear War.

By 1986, the truth of the power of these weapons was widely known. No desk was going to protect you. Nothing would. It was during this time, I went to Moscow.

The visit was a powerful one. I was a young man and to be in our respected adversary’s back-yard was quite an experience. Every military exercise I had been involved in as part of the 501^st Tactical Missile Wing in the United Kingdom, had ended with a massive Soviet strike – in theory, killing us all.

Standing in front of Lenin’s tomb, I remember pondering that. Everywhere I went it seemed the hammer and sickle were present. KGB followed the members of our group everywhere. Even on my evening excursions, I had my shadows. In our hotel, they were ever present, walking up or down the stairwells, standing in the lobby, ten or twelve feet away inside the Kremlin. Everywhere.

I bought some lacquer pins one day – folk art – from a vendor on Arbot. It was the tourist thing to do. I paid him with American dollars, which were worth far more than rubles, but I had to wait until the government oversight was not so present to quickly hand the artist the money. He could have been arrested for it – I suppose we both could have.

But that brings me to the point of this article. Because, you see, we may not have ever got to the last moment before armeggedon – the moment you know everything is about to drastically end in a flash, a fleeting sense of pressure and heat – then nothing. We might never have reached the moment when people around us simply begin dying inexplicably – unable to breathe, then choking, falling, skin burning. We might not have experienced the end of everything in quite the way a cold warrior was trained to envision it – or respond.

But it is possible we’re seeing it all around us, today.

Certainly we are at war with terrorists, and we are killing them in large numbers, as they are killing us. But it’s the unseen things, which are being destroyed that concern me the most.

Consider that our children have been brought up with the Hollywood fiction that someone will survive a planet-ending event like a nuclear exchange. Consider that these same children have been taught the language of blind acceptance and mediocrity in our public school system. They have been indoctrinated in the rules and regulations of the collective. They have become good little drones.

And we who have grown older in this environment have given away small pieces of ourselves. From the time when I walked free and barefoot, fishing rod in-hand, our land has been given over to those who would withhold water from farmers, take property which does not belong to them, steal in the name of the government, place surveillance cameras on every corner, and install draconian rules into the structure of our day-to-day lives. They say how - they say where and they say when. We out here are just "little people."

It began with the Patriot Act, but it will not end there. Now after getting control over most of the press, and stealing unlimited money from the people, the U.S. government is on the verge of passing legislation, which will give them unlimited control over every individual’s health and welfare. The health care bill will allow them to determine whether you or your family ultimately live or die. It is not a question of “if” anymore. They are doing it.

I know it, because I once experienced an environment like the one being created around us now. The feeling is the same. It is dark and oppressive. When I see news clips of a reporter being thrown to the ground by a Martha Coakley campaign operative, I am reminded of a man who was abducted by secret police right in front of us one day in Moscow, just outside the University gates. That man was selling hats – and I would have bought one from him. It was bitterly cold. Instead he felt the hammer of Soviet rule.

Our government is out of control – hell, they long ago forgot what it meant to be responsible to the people. Their press conferences reveal leadership which looks down on the average people from such lofty perches, that they don’t even feel a need to answer simple questions – let alone, answer for their actions.

Make no mistake. We are still living under the threat of destruction. We may face more terrorism, but that’s not the greatest danger. We are lost – and if we do not stop our march toward a big-brother system resembling Soviet rule, we may not be able to find our way back to those barefoot lands, which now seem so distant.

I remember coming home from Moscow. I remember seeing the American flag for the first time in what seemed like forever.

I felt a tear on my cheek and wondered why it was there.

Now I know.

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Folks get out and vote for Scott Brown today in Massachusetts. We can get back to our "barefoot" place, but we have to slow the government down. Electing Brown will be a good first step - maybe our last chance.

Light bearers

2010-01-19T01:45:00.000-08:00

The fire of heroism has been reduced to a spark in the depths and grainy textures of a long winter night in our world today. Listen to the sad tales of those lost on the hidden paths, but also hear the gleeful laughter of the mad and twisted, their toxic words and venom blistering in its’ intensity.

Their cackling nearly glows with a dark light of its’ own. Their politician teeth flash menacing in the ink black of an age which seems to threaten eternity. But they are the only creatures, which can see in these dim environs, and they are only interested in the pain of others. The rest of us may feel simply lost in the dark, wishing or praying with voices thin and raw, that we will live long enough to see daybreak.

But there are light-bearers.

Sometimes those who bring the light and preserve our freedom are seen as giants. They stride amongst us as great and revered and we all know their names. Those who don’t know these names are missing such great stories and understanding, that they can’t possibly form opinions that make any sense in their lives. If we were to name some of these beacons to our shared history, we might cite Jefferson or Adams or Washington. If we’re a little more steeped in history, we may claim Jones or Barry – and so many others.

But the plain truth actually often comes in plain clothes. The light isn’t held only in the hands of the mighty, but often nurtured and protected and carried by regular people, unknowingly, until its' dim ember is given new life. Most of these regular people stumble through life, just trying to stay breathing from one moment to the next. Their threadbare clothes are the last thing they will ever wear, and the ground beneath the shifting fog around their feet, will be the cold place where they will finally find peace - just a moment and a bullet away.

Revolution must start somewhere. The fire of real hope is born from simple people like Francis Marion, who led a group of “irregulars” which was a living nightmare to their opponent’s the British. Marion was the “Swamp Fox,” arguably the greatest guerilla fighter in the American Revolution. He terrorized the British and ran hit-and-run operations, killing and disappearing like a ghost. To pursue Marion was considered to flirt with certain death. At one point, from an austere island fort he held off fifty warships, crippled the enemy fleet and saved the city of Charleston, achieving the first victory of the war for independence.

His men received nothing – no pay, food or ammunition from the Continental Army, but he fought on. And when victory was declared, Marion and his men were not asked to join the celebration their clothes were far to ragged and they weren't considered presentable. But plain truth, even wrapped in tattered clothes, is so very bright, indeed.

Or there’s the perfect light of Deborah Samson, who disguised herself as a man for three years in order to fight during the American Revolution. She fought hand-to-hand and was wounded twice, once by a sword-stroke to the side of her head . When she recovered, she was asked to deliver a letter to General George Washington, and she knew the letter's contents meant her secret had been discovered and her days as a soldier were over. Shaking and nervous, she was called in to see Washington - but In order to spare her embarrassment, the General said nothing, instead he quietly handed her a discharge, a note and enough money to get her home. After the war, Washington invited her to visit. During her stay she was the subject of a special bill in Congress, granting her a pension, land and acknowledgement as a Revolutionary Soldier. She shined so brightly.

Then there is a lonely statue on the Boston Common. Probably unnoticed and uncommented in the same glowing language of the great Founders of our nation, there is Crispus Attucks, an African former slave and dock worker, who fought no famous battles, but instead, was simply one of the biggest men in an angry crowd on a Monday evening in March 1770. After a British soldier injured a young boy, Attucks stepped forward to defend the child, and was one of eleven civilians shot. He fell in the snow in front of the Custom House on King Street, one of five who died in the Boston Massacre, the event which possibly touched off the inescapable – revolution. Attucks was called “the first to defy – and the first to die.” But his light shone so bright, the ideas of independence blasted outward from that moment, changing things yet again - even by the shine of his pooled blood on that snow-covered street.

And Attucks was far from the last – he was joined by nearly 26,000 other people – patriots all, and many never remembered and never known, though they each carried a spark of light which together lit a fire in the night like no other.

That fire has led so many others to the shores of our nation. And those flames would be fed by more sacrifice – at least 1,315,329 fellow Americans in as many as 29 wars and conflicts throughout our history since the Revolutionary War. But the spark hasn’t been carried by the military alone. We have seen great civilian sacrifice – even within our lifetime, and we can all contribute our own spark in endless ways and in an unending march into history, as long as we care enough and as long as we want to see our children live in beauty, strength and dignity.

There are light bearers – and they eternally carry the fire of determination for so many others. The source of that light is all of us.

It is the same fire held aloft by a famous sculpture, portraying a woman escaping the chains of tyranny, which lie at her feet. That sculpture has been given the very name the flames she holds, represents…Liberty.

And we, who live here beyond her light, live in the greatest country in the world. We are, like Marion and Samson and Attucks, all Americans – and our country is the United States.

And we are united by Freedom.

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Want to know how to fight right now? Want to bring about another American Revolution? Get behind Scott Brown, who is running for the Senate in Massachusetts, for a start. Brown is fighting for a chance to turn back the tide of darkness - a government which no longer listens to the people. Brown's election can change everything. See the articles on Brown on this blog to understand why, or visit his website here .

If Brown wins

2010-01-18T01:17:00.000-08:00

What happens if Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts senate seat on Tuesday?

Because there are a lot of folks holding their breath on this one. In fact, despite Obama’s recent speech on behalf of Coakley, I suspect there is a very real shockwave going through the Democrat leadership in Washington right now.

They will be frantic over this. After all, if Brown wins and isn’t held-up procedurally, he will vote against the health care bill. And that leaves a very big problem for the Reid, Pelosi gang: Who can they buy next?

Purchasing votes is in vogue – in case you haven’t heard. It’s apparently over the line to purchase a Senate seat – hence the trouble which caused Rob Blagojevich to be removed from office. However, it is not against the rules to purchase votes from the Senators who are already in office, otherwise we would not be so familiar with the name Mary Landrieu or Ben Nelson.

So, my bet is that, being the fine people they believe themselves to be, our cuddly lawmakers will be scrambling to come up with a viable contingency plan should that which has been blue, turns out to be Brown.

What would some of those likely plans be?

Well, here at the Jolly Rogers, we decided to set one of our research teams on the problem. These guys are the unflinching, stone-faced ones which have had their sense of humor surgically replaced by chips of obsidian. You know, rock apes.

“You want us to research what?” they asked, while tearing a sheet of titanium into small, evenly-sized pieces with their bare fingers.

Not to be intimidated by rock apes, but realizing it might require small, short sentences to get the point across, I said, “I want you to. Find out. What the Congress plans. To do if. Scott Brown. Is elected.”

“Why would we do that?” they asked while feeding pieces of what could be lawyers, but is probably chicken - to the alligators out back.

“Because I need to know – because enquiring minds want to know,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“What’s an enquiring mind?” replied the one on the right. At this, I shrugged.

“Anyone who isn’t Nancy Pelosi,” I said. The rock apes stare at each other blankly. The alligators stare up at them, imploringly.

“What’s a Nancypelosi?” asks the one on the left as he bench-presses a Toyota.

Anyway, you get the picture, dear reader? Here at the Jolly Rogers, research takes time. But it always pays off. Here for the first time in print, are the plans Congress has made if Scott Brown gets his new job:

First: Use the Massachusetts political infrastructure to prevent or delay certification of Brown by the Massachusetts Secretary of State. He said he’s got 10 days before he has to do anything, and the “health care gang” are going to try to get the bill out from behind closed doors before then. If they can’t, the Jolly Rogers team has discovered that the following secret plans have been put into play…

1) Go to CongressMart and buy a brand new, shiny Republican to jump ship and become a Democrat and vote for health care reform. It will only cost a little more than any normal American will make in their lifetime, and it will negate Brown’s vote against the legislation.

2) If CongressMart is closed, they will immediately proceed to plan B, which has already been set up – ie. delaying the swearing-in and seating of Brown.

3) If this screws up as badly as Coakley has screwed up in the past week, they will change the lock codes to the front door, and claim no one remembers them. It will take time for a SWAT team to burn their way in.

4) Meanwhile, Harry Reid and friends will quickly trot out whatever tuna-head plan they have put together and get a quick vote in which every Republican will say “Nay,” but it won’t matter, because there will be enough Democrat votes to pass it.

5) Then, because the front door is still being worked on by SWAT, Reid and Pelosi will rush up to the roof. Harry will "Karate-chop" them past security, and they will slip over to a protected spot, where Reid will pull back a tarp and Pelosi will strap into a hidden Russian Black-Sail ultra-light. (I know it seems improbable, but our sources say she’s really quite nimble despite all the Botox.)

6) The silent motor will propel her into the Washington night, clutching the heavy satchel containing the mysterious health care bill.

7) She’ll land on the rooftop of the White House where a special team of SEIU operatives will secure the document and carry it down to the President’s desk.

8) Obama will whip out the special pen he received as a gift from the British (you know - the one which was a really thoughtful gift – unlike the i-pod and speeches he gave to the Queen of England) – and with a Presidential flourish, sign the odious bill into law.

9) Robert Gibbs Blob will then gloat in a disgusting manner in front of the press corps, and the call will be made to set up the new “Death Panels.”

So that’s it.

Now that their secret plans have been outed in the final hours before Brown’s election, I suspect they won’t have time to come up with any new ones. Brown’s journey to the Senate should be safe and uneventful.

All Massachusetts voters have to do is get him there.

Do it. And all kidding aside - let’s take our country back.

Note I received from White House regarding Haiti

2010-01-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

Following is a response to one of the notes I sent (this one to the White House), volunteering to help in any way with the humanitarian relief of Haiti. Anyone who knows me, understands I can be a bit critical of the administration, but I have always believed that when disaster strikes, you respond and do the right thing - regardless of politics. Politicians will not save people in Haiti - only good people will do that. I have offered and will continue to offer to help whenever such need arises. As I said in my last post ... "what will you do?"

Dear Friend:

Thank you for writing. The reports and images from Haiti of collapsed hospitals, crumbled homes, and men and women carrying their injured neighbors through the streets are truly heart-wrenching. As we learn more about the extent of the devastation, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti and Haitian Americans who do not yet know the fate of their families and loved ones.

I have directed my Administration to respond with a swift, coordinated, and aggressive effort to save lives. The people of Haiti will have the full support of the United States Government in the urgent effort to rescue those trapped beneath the rubble and to deliver the humanitarian relief--the food, water, and medicine--that Haitians will need in the coming days.

This is also a time when we are reminded of the common humanity we all share, and Americans have always responded to these situations with generosity of spirit. If you would like to support the urgent humanitarian effort in Haiti, I encourage you to visit our website where you can learn more about how to contribute:

http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/HaitiEarthquake

Americans trying to locate family members in Haiti are encouraged to contact the State Department at (888) 407-4747.

We will continue to stand with the people of Haiti and keep them in our thoughts and prayers.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

Saving Haiti - do it now.

2010-01-14T16:35:00.000-08:00

Help Haiti.

So many folks don't understand what this means - they can't see beyond their nose. They don't understand how bad things are - or how bad they are going to get.

I do. You have to see a place collapsed. 7,000 bodies have just been buried in a mass grave. Believe me, there will be many, many more. I have very little to offer other than myself, but I have contacted those whom I could, to volunteer to help. I even sent a note to the White House. I don't expect any calls back - there's so many fine folks in our military and relief organizations today, and they have little need of some former lower-enlisted guy, but in a way, that's not the point.

I'm a disabled vet from Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and I have volunteered to go back.

What will you do?

Saving Haiti

2010-01-13T17:30:00.000-08:00

What’s necessary?

For Haiti currently we need a massive relief effort on the order of magnitude only possible through the might and determination of our military.

This is from someone who has taken part in a U.S. military humanitarian relief effort – and regardless of the difficulties involved, that is what I believe is required here. Those people need assistance now. That assistance needs to be total and complete to prevent the range of disasters, which will continue to heap on the population.

The 23^rd Tactical Brigade has landed today at the airport, and 2,000 Marines are allegedly on their way – and perhaps that’s a start. But destroyed infrastructure, collapsed neighborhoods, no communications and a barely functioning airport is just the edges of the problem. Soon security issues and disease will set in. At that point, the scope of death will be measured in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

How much should we do to help Haiti?

Everything we damned well can! I don’t care how much money or how much effort we have provided in the past and I don’t care what it takes. We must assist and we must assist in a very direct and total manner.

We are spread thin in military commitments, but I for one, as a former military person many years ago, and a veteran of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, would gladly volunteer for any kind of recall to assist in any way the military or the government would have me. I would gladly go right now.

Those are people out there in the dark, trapped under the rubble, and those are people standing amidst the shattered concrete, digging furiously by hand, themselves being cut to ribbons in the debris, trying to get to friends and family, who may be alive now, but are buried in a place that will likely become their grave.

Those are children out there in the street at night, lost and crying – unable to find any member of their family. Others are walking injured, hungry, thirsty, trying to find their wives, their husbands – their children.

Those are the lost, the scared, the tired and the hungry. Those people are you and I, just removed by circumstance, and their tenuous hold on any semblance of life has been dealt a blow they may not be able to recover from on their own.

We have to help them. It is within our ability to do so, and we have got to do everything we can.