Download the entire book for free

Download

None of us knows the truth. The truth is much larger and more complex than any single mind.

If we are honest, if we try to tell the truth, if we share our testimony with one another, together we can arrive at a larger, more complete understanding of what is true.

This book is not the truth. Every word in it is as true as I can make it.

Because I believe that I owe you my testimony.

  The Human Condition

What is the human condition?

I once met an Air Force major, who told me that he had written a book debunking Darwin's theory of evolution. There are intelligent, university-educated men and women who believe, in the year 2021 A.D., that the origin myth in Genesis is the literal truth, not a metaphor. They believe that God designed each creature.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are skeptics and scientists who believe that there is no God. That there was neither Space nor Time before the Big Bang. That the Universe came into being without First Cause and for no particular reason. Professor Stephen Hawking is one such skeptic.

Deists like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington believed that an unknowable, intelligent, creative superhuman entity, being or force established the laws of physics and set the clockwork of the Universe in motion, not necessarily intervening in its workings.

I'm with Jefferson and Washington. I don't think that God directly designed Homo sapiens sapiens. If sie had had done so, sie would have done a better job.

What I believe is that God designed the Universe and that over the span of billions of years and quadrillions of planets, a creature such as us, Homo sapiens sapiens, has arisen out of the family of the simians. I believe that in as much as we are intelligent, creative and capable of the good, we are created in God's image, but that, like every other creature, we are a prototype.

This is a bizarre situation. We are human. We partake of the animal and of the divine. We have arisen from monkeys, specifically the branch of monkeys who are tribal, opportunistic omnivores, aggressive at times to the pitch of murder.

We come without instruction manuals, except those which are encoded in our DNA, itself a hodge-podge of fossils, broken copies and still-effective instructions for creating every creature from whom we have ascended, all the way down to the microbes.

We may work out. We may not.

God has worked through the hand of Nature. Nature has taken her time. She is not neat. Her lover is Chaos. Chaos is the father of all forms. Time chooses what works.

We are naked apes. We cannot understand the viciousness of human beings until we accept that of the surviving primates, we are most closely related to the chimpanzee, a domineering hunter-killer. Much, if not most, of our behavior is simian, when it is not more generically animal. We lust. We breed. We kill. We eat. We struggle for dominance in a complex society. We care about what our tribe-members think of us. We worry about our status in the hierarchy of the pack. We manipulate objects. We make and use tools. We love. We hate. We are always anxious. We are quickly moved to fear and anger. We share much, if not most, of our behaviors with the chimpanzee, God help us.

Yet I don’t see any chimps walking on the Moon. Expanding the frontiers of theoretical physics. Painting “Starry Night.” Playing “Voodoo Chile (slight return).” Nailing the landing of a triple Lutz. Nursing a bitter, sick stranger. Collecting oil cans. Obsessing over “3.” Seeking the sixth sigma. On and on and on . . .

We have a superbrain, which has grown larger and more complex over time. The most recent part of it is the cerebral cortex, which is the size and thickness of a silk handkerchief, draped over the folds of the cortex. The cerebral cortex is the seat of much of this peculiarly human behavior, but . . .

Is the brain an engine?

Or is it an engine and a receiver?

We do not know. Perhaps we can know, but only after many more years of advanced research.

How does a network of synapses record information? Why is the qualia of agony so awful? Why is the qualia of joy so wonderful? How does a chemical like oxytocin induce feelings of love?

No one knows.

Perhaps love, joy and pain are elements of higher dimensions and the chemical-electrical storm in the brain vibrates in harmony with radiations from these higher dimensions.

Maybe they aren’t. Chemicals are just chemicals. Joy, pain and love are just psychic illusions, like egocentricity, the illusion that each of us suffer, believing that we are the center of the Universe, because that is what we observe. They work because they work.

We don’t know. We may never know, but we wonder. Just as our most archaic ancestor wondered, when she looked up from her fire to the stars and asked herself, Why?

That is the human condition.

We look up from our fires to the stars and we wonder, Why?

All creatures who do this are human.

As of today, we are the only humans we know.

Time through a Prism of Thought

Time is a mystery. It is a mistake to believe that we understand time. When a prism breaks up light, it allows us to realize that white light is more complex than we thought. Let us consider the weirdness of time through a prism of thought.

a. Notches on the arrow of time

On the human scale, time seems an arrow.

The arrow of time seems balanced on the needlepoint of Now. The past is a memory. It does not exist. The Future is a promise. It does not exist. We have lived, we live, and we shall always live in the Now.

We humans notch the arrow of time. The figure above, for example, may be marked with seconds. One second follows another second, the reassuring click-click-click of clockwork time.

Yet what happens when we consider the duration of Now? How many Nows are there in each second? Are there an infinity, in the same sense that we propose an infinity of dots between any two dots in a geometric line? Or are there a finite number? If there is a finite number, what is that number of Nows?

According to this understanding, both time and space are pixelated. They are made up of extremely small but discrete units. Since the arrow of time does not slide through an infinite number of Nows, what we know as reality could be rendered by a series of Planck instants, stacked on top of each other. Like a motion picture.

Or like a hypercomputer-generated virtual reality.

b. An explosion of the Clockwork Universe

A second is an arbitrary division of an hour; an hour is an arbitrary division of a day. Our sage ancestors chose 60 intervals for seconds, since 60 is richly divisible. It is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 60. The same sages, we think (for we have forgotten who they were . . . wise men or women more ancient than the Sumerians, perhaps), chose 24 hours to divide the day, since 24 is richly divisible. It is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 24.

The day is not arbitrary. Traditionally, it is the amount of time that it takes for the Sun to cycle from sunrise to sunrise (or, if you're a Nelsonian sailor, from noon to noon.)

The Sun defines our days. Our years. The Moon defines our months. Traditionally, a month is the time that it takes the Moon to wax and wane through one lunar cycle, new moon to new moon, full moon to full moon. This is about 29.53 days. Traditionally, a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun, which is about 365.2425 days.

We have been studying these cycles since Paleolithic times, that is, for more than 10,000 years. By the time we were able to build good chronometers in the 18th century, we had learned to marvel at the Clockwork Universe and admire its regularity, even to see in its order the hand of God.

Our more modern understanding explodes the Clockwork Universe. All of it is subject to chaos, including these quaint notions of celestial order.

We think that this day is the same as yesterday; this year is the same as last year. The Sun appears to move in cycles, consistently defining our days, seasons and years. It does not. The Sun is a star, gravity fighting fusion power in a billion-years-long balance, but as subject to chaos as anything else. Its state in any instant is unique. As is the Sun in the instant that I press this key, it has never been and shall never be again.

We perceive that the Sun is revolving around the Earth, but we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a nearly-circular ellipse.

This elliptical orbit is correct only with reference to the Sun. With reference to space, the movement of the Earth is not elliptical, but helical. Since the Sun is revolving around the galactic center at over 450,000 miles per hour and the Milky Way galaxy is moving through space at over 1,300,000 miles per hour, the Earth's path through space is not an ellipse. It is a helix. The same shape as a strand of DNA. Due to the combinations of orbits, wobbles and the galactic transit, the helix stretches and bends, never exactly the same. The space that we inhabit now, we will never inhabit again.

No celestial movement is constant. Due to the friction of the seas, the Earth's rotation is slowing. Days are getting longer. To conserve its angular momentum, the Moon is moving further away from the Earth: about 1.5 inches a year. Months are getting longer.

If a rogue planet, some frozen Jupiter-sized gas giant ejected from some distant solar system billions of years ago were to wander into our solar system, all of these movements would be perturbed, as orbits adjusted. A Black Hole visitor could wreck even greater havoc, even destroy any of the bodies involved, including the Sun. Our solar system dolphins up and down about six times through the galactic plane during each revolution around the Milky Way (a “galactic year,” which takes about 220 or 230 million years.) As our solar system crosses the galactic plane, the chances of such an encounter increase.

From the human scale, astronomical cycles seem fixed. They are not. They are subject to complex interactions. Like all of nature, they are also subject to chaos.

c. The illusion of the independence of time

We think that movement through space has nothing to do with movement through time. We are wrong. The faster we move through space, the slower we move through time. If the galaxy did not travel and the Sun stood still, a second would take less time than the second we know.

We are, in fact, all moving not through space, but through SpaceTime. The velocity of our movement through SpaceTime is constant. It is the speed of light, c, or, 299,792,458 meters per second. More on this bizarre concept in a later essay.

Time seems independent of space. Time seems independent of light. In fact, time, space and light are deeply interconnected.

d. Imponderably deep time

The Milky Way will begin to collide with the Andromeda galaxy in about four billion years. It will take the two galaxies about a billion years to merge into a larger galaxy. Our Sun will be nearing the end of its life as a Yellow Dwarf, but our solar system should witness the galactic merge.

Yet it is not eternity.

d. The question of forever, the unknowability of eternity

What happens after the “Heat Death of the Universe?” When all the suns are cold?

Will it continue forever?

We don't know. One theory is that the state of the Universe interacts with the laws of physics. At the moment of the Big Bang, there was a singularity: all the Universe was impossibly hot and dense. It expanded. In the first instants of its expansion, many things changed; nothingness expanded faster than light. According to this theory, once the Universe is cold enough and disperse enough, the laws of physics will change and the Universe will collapse into nothingness or into another singularity.

What lies beyond our observable Universe? Is it infinite? Or is all our Universe just one bubble in a vast boiling ocean of Universes?

Is time a river? Or is it merely one bubble in a boiling ocean of bubbles, each bubble its own Space, its own Time?

What is the difference between infinite time and the eternal?

The eternal is outside of time. The eternal is not before nor after time. There was no “before” before time.

Whether we are scientists or theists, we believe in eternity. We imagine a moment before the Big Bang, when there was no such moment; we try to picture the mind of God moving over the dark waters, before he summoned light.

We cannot imagine eternity. Perhaps we should not try. Eternity is beyond human ken.

A prism reveals that light is more complex than we imagined. A prism of thought reveals that time is more complex than we imagined, especially in its strange relationship with space and in its imperceivable, unknowable granularity and immensity. I believe that Time, like Space, Matter and Energy, are emanations from dimensions higher than those that we can perceive. I will return to this theme in the essays, “Jesus as Messenger” and “Evidence of Higher Dimensions.”

 God

Is there a God?

If there is a God, sie is an occult God, a God who hides hir face from us, whose voice is silent. The human condition is to stand alone in an indifferent, nurturing and wildly hostile Universe, smaller, within the vastness of cosmic time and space, than motes of dust. Alone, yet tormented by the feeling that we shouldn’t be alone, that we cannot be alone.

Why would an occult God hide from us?

As we observe nature, we must deduce that if there is a creator, then sie is a lover of life. Wherever there can be life, we find it, usually in myriad prolific forms. Where these is oxygen, we find aerobic life. Where there is no oxygen, we find anaerobic life.

Direct exposure to the Godhead might forge us into angels. It might doom us to the good. It might rob of us our free will. If God in hir heaven radiates divine glory and each ray of hir glory is an angel, then sie already has entities such as these. Having crowded hir heaven with angels, doomed to the good, a creative God who is a lover of life might want to establish lower realms of being, where creatures of lesser capacities are nevertheless given the opportunity to choose between good and evil. Having been subjected by definition to a host of evils, of trials and tribulations, such creatures might earn unique dignity and worth when they choose the good. Certainly it would entail a great deal of tedium, of ghastly horror, wracking confusion and bitterness, but perhaps this lover of life would judge that in balance such a realm would be worth creating.

This is what I believe. But where is my evidence?

If there is an occult God, sie hides within hir masterwork, the Universe, with an absolute mastery. There is no evidence that God exists. Everything can be explained without a First Cause, even if the physicist's ultimate explanation, Why not?, is unsatisfying.

Yet let us consider this important question more closely.

We have the testimony of the prophets, mystics and messengers from higher realms. Moses descended from the mountain, telling us of seeing God within a perpetually burning bush. Jesus saw the Holy Spirit descend from the heavens like a dove at the moment of his baptism. The disciples witnessed the resurrected Christ and touched his wounds. Saul, soon to be Paul, heard his voice in the sky, when he was struck blind on the road to Damascus. In the cave of Hira, Muhammad was visited by the archangel, Gabriel. The angel Moroni directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates, from which he translated the Book of Mormon.

We may even have our own revelations. I myself, a mere Presbyterian, once had a Marion vision. In 1997, tormented by agonizing lower back pain, I silently screamed a prayer for deliverance, and out of the votive candle upon the dresser radiated a vision of the Virgin Mary. Her face was resplendent, purely sympathetic and merciful. Her complexion was olive, pure, immaculate, the pores of her skin finer than those of a baby. She vanished in a moment. So did the pain.

To the skeptic, none of these revelations may be accepted as evidence. The Universe exists, but the worlds in which we truly live are the models generated by our brains. This is perhaps the main function of the mind: to take in sensory input and to generate from its data a world in which we live. What you are seeing, hearing and feeling right now is not the Universe. It is a model in your mind. A reductive model, at that. The brain is a world-generating machine. Under unusual stresses, such as pain, encroaching death, hypoxia, exhaustion, hunger and thirst, anxiety or hallucinogenic drugs, the brain can generate alternate realities, peopled with angels, demons and all-loving snakes.

These visions are intensely interesting. Perhaps they are metaphors of some higher reality. Perhaps they are wholly artificial, the artifacts of the misfiring of our wiring. As skeptics, we cannot accept them as evidence.

Yet I assure you that I will never speak against the Virgin Mary, nor suffer to witness an attempt to defile her immaculate purity. Hatefully, I blaspheme against her son with some regularity, but her I must hold in more pure reverence, because I have witnessed her purity.

Supernatural revelations set aside, then, let us consider witnessing the divine in the natural world. Poets, mystics and even Deists have detected the hand of the Maker in hir works.

Unless we are broken or perverse, we must give witness to the beauty, the majesty and the glory of creation. It overwhelms our senses. City-dwellers crawl through our miserable lives under light-polluted skies, but take anyone of us out into the desert, hundreds of miles from man-made lights, and let us see the true night sky. Let us see tens of thousands of stars, the broad path of the Milky Way arcing up in the sky (for our solar system is flying around its center, tilted 60º from its plane – we fly askew, my friends), perhaps made yet more spectacular with the Perseid meteor shower. The mind will fill with awe.

The glory of a sunset, the fury of a storm at sea . . .

When I was a boy, in Rennerdale, I walked alone, for hours, in the woods around our little town. Yet I did not always feel alone. I wondered how much that I witnessed had been witnessed, thousands of years ago, by the Indians. Their woods were hemlock; mine, oak, elm and birch, but nevertheless I shared a communion with them.

One winter, I walked, alone, high on the mountainside. I found three large eagle tracks pressed deep into the crusty snow, with no other footprints anywhere nearby. I sat and pondered the mystery, while it snowed: large, clumpy conglomerates of snowflakes, each of the thousands making a tiny, crystalline sound as it landed on the crusty snow pack. And no other sound, not even a wind. Pure silence . . . and the sound of snowfall.

Believing in God, I communed with hir, in such moments. Our poets and novelists have documented thousands of such experiences. While I honor them, as a skeptic, I cannot accept them as evidence. As creatures, perhaps we are wired to respond to beauty with such emotions, just as peahens are programmed to respond to the cock's absurd plumage.

Many Deists, who were also students of science and mathematics, have discovered more telling evidence in the beauty of hir laws. As we discover them, we must wonder at their beauty, their elegance, their profound complexity, sensing, in fact, an intelligence at work. Within the mathematics of reality, we may recognize a pattern, and know the Maker not only by hir works, but by the laws that generate hir works.

Not all scientists are skeptics. According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2009, 51% of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science believe in some form of deity or higher power, 33% naming hir God, 18% indicating a belief in a universal spirit or higher power. According to a 2016 survey1, belief is lower among scientists in France, but higher in Hong Kong and Italy, and much higher in India and Turkey. Such scientists can reconcile their skepticism with their faith through witness of the majesty of the laws of nature.

One aspect of the Universe worth consideration is that the laws of nature seem to be finely tuned so that life can emerge. This idea is called, “The Fine-Tuned Universe,” and it has been advanced by such eminent scientists as Sir Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer who coined the term, "Big Bang," and Martin John Rees, an astrophysicist and the 60th president of the Royal Society. As we learn more and more about how the Universe works, one thing that we notice is that if certain laws or properties were not as they are, or within a thin margin of what they are, the Universe would not work well enough for stars to form, planets to coalesce and life to emerge. Many properties seem fine-tuned; Rees focuses on six in his book, "Just Six Numbers." One example is the balance between gravity and the electromagnetic force. A weaker gravity would not have allowed stars and planets to form; an only slightly weaker gravity, or an only slightly stronger electromagnetic force, would have made the stars burn colder: tooo cold in fact to allow supernovae to generate the heavy metals needed for life.

One rejoinder to this idea is that things are the way they have to be in order for us to exist and witness them. This is the “anthropic principle.” Other opponents of the fine-tuned idea is that there may have been or still may be many Universes – a Multiverse, in fact – and the one that worked is the one in which we find ourselves.

There is no evidence, I believe, for these other Universes. In fact, the only Universe that we can observe seems to have been intelligently designed to allow life. While its true that it may be the way it is because it is this way, and if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here to witness it, I hope that our more rigorously skeptical scientists can forgive us for recognizing in hir masterwork, the handiwork of a master. We are creatures who excel in seeing patterns, even when patterns are absent.

Yet this is not what I consider the most telling evidence. It is in the study of our fellow humans that I find the greatest evidence for the higher being.

Strangely enough.

Over a lifetime, among the people whom I have known and the people whom I have read about, I have seen the difference between those who believe and those who do not. Especially, when we contrast the faithful not with the sturdy skeptics and the cheerful atheists, men such as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Ricky Gervais, but with those who not only deny God, but reject the moral. Who deny goodness itself.

Certainly, good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Among those who embrace the darkness, we may see in the apex of their trajectories a wild ecstasy, a freedom from restraint that might be mistaken for liberty, but, almost inevitably, in these individuals, and certainly around them, is squalor. Misery. Ruined innocence. The most terrible suffering. And, not always, but usually, ruination.

Spirit is the only substance in nature that can be measured in its absence.

There is a natural religion. There is a way things work and many ways that they do not work. Even when the good suffer – and suffer they do, sometimes agonizingly – we see in them a resilience. A way of nature that allows them to survive, to heal and to grow again.

Which brings me to my personal experience. It is not evidence to anyone except to myself.

When I turn to the light, I thrive in hir radiance. When I turn to the dark, I whither. There is that within me which experiences the divine. I am a child of God, and, I hope you will indulge the testimony of my experience:

This is what my soul, my spirit, feels and senses beyond feeling.

I give testimony to the Spirit.

The Way.

I feel and I acknowledge and I give praise to God Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth and all the unimaginably vast and glorious cosmos.

Praise God for this glorious creation. Give thanks that in hir mercy, sie has made a realm where creatures such as you and I may ascend, troubled and traveling, bizarre and dialectic, the crown of creation, the sons and daughters of an infinitely patient Nature.

Hir voice resounds within me, because the Way is a wind that blows through all of creation and that sounds through all of us who have turned toward this wind.

This wind. This light.

This Way.

I do not know what to call hir, so I call hir God Almighty.

 Death

The best thing that was ever said about death was by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, along the lines of:

I do not expect to be troubled by oblivion after death any more than I was troubled by my non-existence before birth.

Life is brain-based. I believe that there is more going on in the brain than the chemicals and electricity that we can observe. I believe that the brain is both a generator and a receiver.

Once your brain stops, you’re dead. Game over. You will not experience anything. You will no longer exist. This will trouble you no more than your non-existence before your birth troubled you. I think David Hume got it right. He walked the walk, too. His was not an easy death, but he died, patient, polite and uncomplaining, in 1776.

One of the reasons that we have been so busy throughout history imagining after-lives is that the evidence of our senses is terrifyingly convincing. Death is it. The end. Every living creature dies. After it dies, it no longer exists. Its bodily remains rot.

Now an Almighty God could resurrect us. Since he is omniscient, he has a perfect knowledge of our exact DNA sequence, our complete connectome, which is a detailed map of our neurons and synaptic gaps, a profile of all of our hormones and other chemicals, and even an inventory of our hosted bacteria, fungus and other tiny critters. Being omnipotent, he could make a copy. An omniscient, omnipotent God could resurrect us.

If we do survive death, then it could with a body or without a body.

We are bodily creatures who occupy space and experience time. If we are to be resurrected as we are, then it must be with a body. Our minds are not built for any other existence. This is aligned with Christian doctrine. Christ arose bodily. He appeared before his disciples in his body. His wounds could be touched. The doctrine of physical resurrection is included in the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of the saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. Amen.

Let's consider the other possibility: that of a non-corporeal, or bodiless, existence. The evidence for this could be drawn from the testimony of the thousands of people who have had Near-Death Experiences (NDE). Almost universally, they report that their consciousness rose above their body. They saw themselves from above. Then they traveled through some sort of tunnel of light, at the far end of which they encountered other beings, often the spirits of departed loved ones. Then they were told that their time had not yet arrived and they must return to Earth.

As have so many others, my own father-in-law, Leonardo, when he nearly died, brought back his testimony of a higher realm. Or was his dying brain playing tricks?

Until it is our turn to make that most final of all journeys, the one thing of which we can be sure is that we are going to die. We can hope that we transcend to a higher plane of being, but, while we are here, we should be grateful for the life we have. We should live it in a way that makes sense to ourselves and to our children. We should live it well. The evidence of our senses is that this life is our only shot.

 Sex

The first draft of this essay was confused. I whined about the ludicrous ecstasy of the orgasm. Nature overcranked the volume of this pleasure. Half as much feels-good would have been plenty, since if helping strangers felt even as tenth as good as friction on the penis, we would solve most of the world’s problems within the year. I also complained about my obsession with ovals, whereas other shapes, such as hexagons, leave me cold. These were my bug reports about sex.

Then my mango trees flowered and began to fruit. As I stood, studying the hundreds of little mangoes, each smaller than a pea, popping out from the inflorescences of flowers, I realized that I had confused intercourse, which is the act of sexual union between two animals, with sex.

Sex predates the animals. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even spiders do it. All of the animals do it.

We should remember, though, that many plants are sexual. Male and female created He the marijuana plant, for example. Every plant that gives off spores can reproduce sexually. (I say, “can,” and not “does,” because some of them, like the redwood, can also reproduce asexually, that is, by cloning herself.) Sexual plants include all those nasty cedars in Texas. Cedar dust is all about sex. Any plant that gives off pollen is sexual. That’s what pollen is – it’s plant sperm.

Fungus can be sexual. Mushrooms are the sex organs of fungus. Their function is to broadcast fungus sperm.

Sexual reproduction has been around longer than the animals. Some bacteria figured out how to do the sex: shuffle the deck of genes and deal a new hand every reproduction. Different branches of these sexy bacteria became the plants, others became the fungi, others became the animals. Probably it was sex that allowed these kingdoms of life to ascend as quickly as we have. It took us one and a half billion years to get this far. Without sex, it would have taken much longer. Who knows? Ten billion years? One hundred billion years? A trillion years? Without sex, our chances of surviving long enough to ascend to intelligent life before our home world gets fried by a coronal mass ejection, baked by a comet strike or smothered by a supervolcano would have been much, much lower. The secret of our success has been sex.

So let’s take a closer look at it.

Sexual reproduction is a scheme that does two things:

1) Preserves data through endless copying

2) Shuffles those data in ways that allows life to re-invent itself with each new individual

With the exception of some special cells that we’ll discuss in a minute, in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies is a copy of our DNA, the old double-helix. If our technology were good enough, we could clone ourselves from any one of those cells. That’s because DNA is our blueprint. It tells each cell how to make the proteins that make the tissues that make us.

DNA is a set of instructions and the data needed to execute those instructions meaningfully. Think of it as a library with three billion words in it. These words are organized into volumes. Those volumes are called “chromosomes.” The blueprint for the human body is described in 23 volumes.

So how many chromosomes do you have in the DNA in the nucleus of every cell in your body?

If you said, 23, then . . .

You’re halfway home.

The correct answer is 46. That’s because each of us are carrying around a double set: one library from Mom and one library from Dad.

Since we each have two different libraries and the data and the instructions in those libraries are different, how do our cells know what to do? Who do they listen to? Mom or Dad?

Let’s say Book 1, “Bones,” has a chapter for each of the 270 bones in a baby’s body. The first chapter is an overview chapter, which describes how all the bones fit together . . . and how tall the person should be, but there isn’t a sentence that says, “Make this person 180 centimeters tall.” It has an entire page devoted to height. There are instructions on how to calculate the height. There’s a table of eight rows with heights in them, each of a different ancestor. This is what these pages look like in both the Mom and Dad libraries:

Using Mom’s and Dad’s rules and data, the planned height for this individual, if a girl, is 148.125 cm or, if a boy, is 175.5 cm.

That’s how it works, day in and day out. Each cell in your body is making about 30,000 of these types of calculations every second.

There’s a problem, though: how many of your genes do you pass on to the next generation?

One solution would be to give them all your genes. Let your mate do the same. That way, no information would be lost. We would walk around with a vast library of our ancestor’s genetic information. If we ever needed a special trick, such as how to survive the Black Death, we could look that up from a 14th century ancestor!

But no can do. A billion and a half years ago, bacteria that tried that solution died. If you pass ALL of your genes onto the next generation, your children will have 6 billion genes. Their children will have 12 billion genes. In ten generations, your descendants will have over a trillion genes. In about 125 generations, your descendants will have more molecules in their DNA than there are atoms making up the entire planet.

That’s not going to work. So Nature, Chaos and Time came up with a sweet solution. They invented sex. 46 chromosomes are enough. Mom will give you 23 and Dad will give you 23. But which 23?

One solution would be for Mom to give you her mother’s genes and Dad to give you his father’s genes.

Nothing would ever change, though, except for some random mutations caused by cosmic rays or copy errors. Sex provides a much more elegant solution. It involves creating a sex cell that has only 23 chromosomes. Females make sex cells called “eggs.” Males make sex cells called “sperm.” Eggs are made once in a lifetime. A baby girl is born with her eggs ready-made. Boys manufacture theirs, pretty much constantly.

Each sex cell is going to merge genes from the libraries of Mom and Dad.

The merge looks like this:

The deck is thoroughly shuffled. It is not a case of taking 46 cards, shuffling them and dealing out 23. It’s a case of shuffling millions of words on hundreds of thousands of pages and dealing out 23 books. Each sex cell is unique. It exists only once in Nature. When the male sex cell merges with the female sex cell, the merger of the randomly merged sex cells will create a unique individual. Maybe different enough from everybody else to have an evolutionary advantage.

That’s the power of sex. That’s why sex works. That’s why you exist, using your amazing eyes to see these symbols and using your amazing brain to decode these symbols into words and those words into meaning. Sex is why you are intelligent.

Before we finish, though, let’s think about those genes that did not get passed down. What about Grandma Noe? How about G-g-grandpa Hugo? Grandpa Tom?

If that was the last copy of a gene from that individual, he or she is lost to history. Gone forever. Sex is a “lossy” scheme. Data are lost with each transaction. This is unsatisfactory, however. At least from the perspective of DNA (which seems to have quite a say in the matter), the purpose of life is to further this particular germline. Throwing away half the data every generation is not good enough. Not with DNA. It is one pushy molecule.

That’s why the feels-good is cranked up to an unbelievable level. Your DNA doesn’t want you to make just one copy of itself, where half the data are lost. Your DNA wants you to make lots of copies of itself. Only by having lots of kids can your DNA hope to survive as wholly as possible.

The chance of any gene surviving reproduction is 50%. With two kids, it rises to 75%. With three kids, the chance of survival rises to 87.5%. DNA will never get to 100%. It can’t, but it’s going to try.

You need 12 kids to get to a 99% chance of survival for your entire DNA. This aspect of sex is one reason that we’ve had the human population explosion, which we’ll examine in a later essay.

It’s why my mango tree sheds hundreds of fruits.

It’s why in Texas, the yellow dust comes off the cedars in clouds.

Sex is data. Data do not want to die.

 Alone I: The Personal

Alone

by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring—

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow—I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone—

And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

Then—in my childhood—in the dawn

Of a most stormy life—was drawn

From ev’ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still—

From the torrent, or the fountain—

From the red cliff of the mountain—

From the sun that ’round me roll’d

In its autumn tint of gold—

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by—

From the thunder, and the storm—

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view—

 Alone II – Us and Them

We humans weren’t always alone. We Homo sapiens sapiens shared this wild planet with other humans, whom we now label as “archaic.” Homo neanderthalensis. Homo denisova. Homo naledi. Homo floresiensis. We probably shared it with other archaic humans, unnamed because they are still unknown to us. We have not yet had the luck to find their bones, hundreds of thousands of years after their last deaths. Maybe we never will.

A few decades ago, anthropologists argued whether or not we ever interbred with other humans. Some argued that we never did, or, if we did, the offspring must have been sterile, just like mules are the sterile offspring of horses and donkeys. A fan of popular science, I sided with the proponents of intermixture, because my skull has an occipital bun, a characteristic of the Neanderthal. Since the rise of the genetic sciences in the 1990s, we now know that all Homo sapiens sapiens represent an admixture of various early humans. Even today, tens of thousands of years later, Caucasians and Asians have perhaps 3% or so of Neanderthal heritage. Asians may have some Homo denisova. Various African peoples, such as the San and the Pygmy, also have inherited some genes from archaic humans.

What caused our cousins to disappear?

Outcompetition may have played a large role. Survival of the fittest and all that rot. We Homo sapiens sapiens make good spears and throwing sticks. We have may bagged a lot more deer, while the Neanderthals were wasting their time and getting gored and trampled as they tried to shove in their stupid pointed sticks.

We may have spread diseases, just as the smallpox, yellow fever and other germs, in the same way that the Europeans wiped out most of the early Americans.

We Homo sapiens sapiens are always in heat. Our mothers can pump out 15 babies in 15 years. Maybe other early humans had a seasonal, vice a monthly cycle, and we just outbred them.

Maybe Short-faced Bears ate them all. I don’t know.

Tragically, human history presents a compelling case for genocide. I believe that in the long, complicated epic of humankind that genocide did play a major role in the disappearance of our fellow humans.

Us against them. Them against us.

This “Us and Them” mind-set seems so pervasive in human history and is still so wide-spread and virulent today, so entrenched in our cultures, that I believe it is the bloody fingerprints on the scene of the crime.

If so, what a great crime it was. Murder most foul, orders of magnitude magnified, is genocide. Worse, even worse, is genocide exercised to the point of extinction of entire species of fellow humans. What a crime against them. What a massive disservice to ourselves.

We need not have been alone, if only they had survived. Who knows what counsels, what perspectives, what mental or spiritual arts were lost, when the last Neanderthal or Denisovan died? Who knows how much better we would understand ourselves, even, if only we could see ourselves reflected in a mirror so much closer to ourselves than that of a hairy chimpanzee?

But no, no . . . they are gone. We may resurrect their bodies from traces of DNA, interpolated with guesswork, but we will never be able to resurrect their cultures.

Our fellow humans are gone.

We are alone.

 Alone III – Where are the Aliens?

Maybe we’re listening to the wrong frequencies. Maybe radio isn’t even the right medium. We could be like primitive people looking for smoke signals, when we should be building fiberoptic networks.

Our efforts, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), are still meager and recent. The search for alien civilizations is not being supported by governments, as this great scientific endeavor should be. Breakthrough Listen, the largest and most sophisticated SETI project to date, began in 2016 and will cost $100M. All of it is privately funded.

New technologies are coming on-line. Breakthrough Listen will scan 1,000,000 star systems. It is too early to despair.

We must increasingly consider, however, the awful possibility that we are alone. In all the immense cosmos, we are the only people like us. The kind that builds radios.

Absolutely alone? Or just practically alone?

Let’s consider the worst-case scenario first. We are absolutely alone.

Explainers like me always babble on about Frank Drake and his equation:

N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

Where N, the number of alien civilizations, is equal to the product of:

* R*, the number of stars

* fp, the fraction of stars that have planets

* ne, the fraction of planets that are worth a damn

* fl, the fraction of those planets lucky enough that the miracle of life happens

* fi, the fraction of those planets that stay lucky long enough for life to evolve to intelligence

* fc, the fraction of those smart creatures who start blasting radio signals

* L, the length of time they blast radio before they kill themselves, or their sun or something else kills them or they decide electricity is a waste of time.

The Drake equation is a good conceptual framework, but it’s useless for calculation, unless you can reasonably estimate how likely these events are. Which, in 2021 A.D., we cannot. We have only the beginnings of an idea how likely it is for life to arise, for example. We’ll know a lot more in a few hundred years.

In the meantime, here’s what I think: life, which is a complex of chemicals that stores information to make more copies of itself, is an incredible fluke. (A fluke is a weird, improbable event, like flipping a quarter and having it land on its edge.) Multiple-cellular life is a fluke on top of a fluke. Intelligent multiple-cellular life is a fluke on top of a fluke on top of a fluke. Intelligent multiple-cellular life that survives to advanced technology is a fluke on top of . . . etc., but guess what? Even if you make it that far, L isn’t that long, because if you got there, you’re probably an aggressive species. Have a cigar. Enjoy that, because you’re an aggressive species with highly destructive technology, and, most of the time, some psychopath among you is going to use that technology to kill everyone and do it within centuries of your first bright rat or brilliant bee building a radio.

Think about it. Earth is a weird planet. It has this freak Moon. Way larger than most moons for a planet this size! The Earth and the Moon are practically a dual planet system. Our big old freaky Moon only happened because of a perfect apocalyptic kiss from a Mar-size planetoid. If the collision had been a more glancing blow, off into space the rubble goes, leaving behind no Moon. If the collision had been a more direct blow, there would have been nothing left except rubble. Nothing left but another asteroid belt.

A perfect kiss. A perfect shot. One big old Moon, which stabilizes our rotation. Without the Moon to stabilize our rotation, the planet’s axis would periodically flip around, causing magnitude bazillion earthquakes and mile-high tsunamis across the continents and ultraviolent, instant climate changes, since the poles are now where the equator used to be. Without our big old Moon, even sea-based multiple cellular life might not survive these periodic Armageddons. Land-based life wouldn’t have a chance.

The Moon’s tidal force also acted like a laboratory stirrer, mixing up all those chemicals in the primitive oceans. Maybe you need a big freaky moon to stir up the amino acids for the millions of years it takes for amino acids to come alive.

We’ve discovered lots of exoplanets in the “Goldilocks Zone,” where it is not so cold that water freezes and not so hot that water boils. The problem is that any Goldilocks Zone is a shooting gallery. Our much-praised, so-called gentle Sun periodically burps out coronal mass ejections. Some have hit the Earth, but none, for the past three or four billion years or so, have been big enough to sterilize the entire planet.

The Earth froze over twice. We’d be Snowball Earth today, if volcanic gases hadn’t warmed us up.

Supervolcanic eruptions and meteor strikes have almost wiped out all terrestrial and oceanic life not once, but several times. 250 million years ago, a Siberian supervolcano killed off 95% of species. 65 million years ago, a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. 70,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano may have killed half of the species alive. Only 12,000 years ago, a comet strike wiped out megafauna in North American and elsewhere. So, even here in our comfortable little shooting gallery of a Goldilocks Zone, we’ve had the luck to be balanced, somehow, between volcanic hellfire and icy extinction, while we have survived killshot after killshot from asteroids and comets.

We have been lucky. Lucky!!

We have been as lucky as a jerk who wins the state lottery, survives a lightning strike on the way to collect his winnings, wins the lottery again with a ticket he bought with his unburned winnings, stumbles unhurt across no-man’s-land during the battle of the Ardennes, wins the love of Ivanka Trump and hits back-to-back Royal Flushes.

Remember the kicker: you have to be tough, resilient and aggressive species to survive long enough to evolve to advanced technological intelligence, but every time that an aggressive species survives that long, it is, by definition, an aggressive species with dangerous technology, which is going to kill almost everything around it, just as we’re doing now, ruin its life-giving ecosystem, just as we’re doing now, and then direct all of that lethal technology against itself, just as we’re doing now, with about 13,400 nuclear warheads pointing at our skulls.

L isn’t that long. Cleverness outstrips wisdom. This is called the “late filter of intelligence.”

These are the reasons that we may be absolutely alone, even with trillions of stars. We think our life is normal, just because it’s what we know, but perhaps it is so wildly improbable that it has only happened once in 13.8 billion years. And we are it.

Or, we may be practically alone. Once we learn enough to reasonably estimate the terms of the Drake equation, we may be able to apply it against the trillions of planets and calculate, yes, creatures such as us likely ascend every 100,000,000 years in every galaxy the size of our Milky Way.

If that were the case, perhaps five such civilizations have arisen, say, 400M, 300M, 200M and 100M years ago, then just a moment ago, as we arose. Three of them self-destructed within tens of thousands of years. Their bubbles of radio transmissions, hundreds of millions of years old and only tens of thousands of years thick, have long since passed us or have faded to undetectable levels.

Maybe each species is stuck in its home star system. Well within reach of the psychopaths – or those hurtfully ungrateful artificial intelligences. You know, those Skynets.

We humans, with our human scale, are not equipped to understand the immense spans of time and space involved. Anyone who thinks that Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, is “only” four light years away, does not understand the distance involved. It’s a lot further than any of us can imagine.

Even if advanced civilizations blossom every million years, here and there across the galaxy, they are separated by unimaginable distances of space. Separated by unimaginable gaps in time.

Even then, we are all sealed.

Vacuum-packed.

In our little corner of an unimaginably large galaxy, we may be forever alone.

War

Aggression is the nature of the beast. War is a highly organized social norm that is no more inevitable than slavery, foot-binding, child sacrifice or cannibalism. We can stop war. We must stop war.

Peace is possible.

It pains me, but I believe that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people will die during our coming wars. Perhaps the survivors, if any, will have the wisdom and the cultural maturity to finally abandon this evil practice. Perhaps the next world war or the fourth world war will be our last. Humanity will end in mass suicide.

The choice could be ours. Unfortunately, our cleverness has far outstripped our wisdom. The horrendous inertia of history is driving us headlong toward a fiery crash against a concrete wall, a wall, for those who have eyes to see, that is looming ever larger before us, that fills our windshield, that is our doom.

Chimpanzees make war. Our closest surviving cousins are territorial. The males form hierarchies. They follow the dominant male in a file, patrolling the perimeter of their territory. If they catch a member from another group within their territory or even near the perimeter, they attack and murder him. By degrees, their territories, their nations, expand or contract. One group, the “Us,” grows, while the other group, the “Them,” diminishes, perhaps to assimilation or extinction. This is war. War is simian behavior.

We know archaic humans hunted, but we have found scant evidence that indicates whether or not they made war. A few cave drawings of human figures pin-cushioned with spears do not bode well. Neither do the scores of skulls, thousands of years old, bearing wounds from club and ax. Our best evidence for archaic warfare, however, lies in our history.

The Iroquois, whom we praise for their political sophistication, made annual war upon the Virginia tribes. The Lenape, or Delaware, whom the Iroquois had “made women” (revoked their privileges to make war, following subjugation by the Iroquois) were banished from eastern Pennsylvania to the forks of the Ohio. They and other Ohio valley tribes would raid white settlements, killing the men, kidnapping desirable women and promising children and torturing and executing prisoners for sport. We have a rich historical record of the bellicose nature of these Neolithic peoples and Neolithic peoples around the world. Tragically, we also have a rich historical record of the wars that we more technologically advanced Europeans and Americans made upon them.

Was there ever a peaceful society?

Perhaps. It is possible that peace was the norm for thousands of years for many small nomadic tribes, who followed the annual migrations of reindeer or buffalo. Peaceful nomads who had more than enough trouble with Short-faced Bears, Sabre-Toothed Tigers and Dire Wolves to pick a fight with their fellow humans. Perhaps there were many peaceful settlements of hunter-gatherers, isolated by wild rivers and frozen mountains from anyone who would do them harm. Perhaps the Indus Valley civilization was peaceful. We have yet to unearth weapons or other evidence of warfare.

That’s about it, though. Everywhere else we look, we see evidence of warfare. In fact, in our earliest well-recorded civilizations, those of Mesopotamia, we have striking evidence of a fully developed national culture of warfare, which I call “the Babylon system:” the powerful king, files of soldiers and a class of spiritual and artistic accomplices. Every society throughout history, until today, is an example of the Babylon system. This is the subject of another essay.

The material benefits of success in war are famous. Loot. Taxation. Slavery. Acquisition of new technologies, especially those that may help in the next war, whether the gladius or rocketry.

What are some of the other benefits?

Genetic success at both the personal and tribal levels.

The individual in all of history who was the most successful in propagating his germline was Genghis Khan. He raped thousands of victims. More people alive today are descended from Genghis Khan than from any other individual. If propagating one’s germline is the game of life, the person with the highest score is Genghis Khan.

War and subsequent rapine and colonization also benefit the successful warrior people. The English would all be Celtic, but for successive waves of conquerors: the Romans, the Danes, the Angles and Saxons and the Normans.

Wave after wave . . . throughout England, Europe, Asia and all the world. The bellicose have won and increasingly imposed our culture and our genetic disposition for sociopathy and aggression. We are all of us their descendants. The killer in me is the killer in you.

This mechanism of warfare has encouraged psychopathic traits to spread throughout the population. After a few thousands of years of this, almost everybody is now at least a little mean and crazy. Today, a disturbingly high percentage of the population can be classified as sociopathic or psychopathic. These traits – which allow the mean person to take advantage of other people without feeling remorse – actually can help these deranged individuals to rise to the top of power structures such as governments or corporations. Poster children for heartless leadership includes Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Recent examples of heartless leaders in business include CEOs such as Elizabeth Holmes, the liar behind the Theranos scam, Bernie Madoff, who bilked more than $64B from investors who trusted him and Pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, who raised the cost of a life-saving pill 56 times to $750 a pill. Some studies estimate that sociopathy among our corporate leadership is four times or more than that of the national average.

While I was in boot camp in the Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS) in Pensacola, Florida, I and my aircrew classmates were given a test for sociopathy.

Would you rather throw up on yourself or throw up on someone else?

Would you rather drop a bowling ball on your own foot or on someone else’s foot?

They never showed us our scores, but I suspect, having lived, worked and drunk with fighter jocks, bomber pukes, intel wienies and other types, that the most sociopathic, the least sympathetic, candidates were selected for the bomber community. Because you have to drop bombs, don’t you? Not only today, but tomorrow and next year. Ask General Curtis LeMay, who firebombed Tokyo.

War has long been with us, perhaps since the beginning, when we branched off 8 million years ago from the chimps, but the weapons that we have developed have grown exponentially more lethal, our nature more bellicose and the social norm of warfare more entrenched and sophisticated.

These problems would be horrific, even if we were still slaughtering each other organically, using spears, arrows and swords. We are not. The lethality and the toxicity of our weapons is increasing geometrically. It is the increased lethality and toxicity of our weapons systems that causes the wall of doom to loom so large in our windshields.

Weapons of mass destruction.

I grew up in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon. There was a Nike missile site atop the western ridge above my little Appalachian village.

An antenna like the one above rotated atop the western ridge throughout all my early boyhood. I would stand over the surveyor’s spike, hatched with a cross, at the crossroads of Suburban Avenue and Columbia Avenue, at the hilltop there in my little hometown of Rennerdale and gaze up at the international orange radar on the western ridge as it rotated and whined, rotated and whined. It fascinated me. I remember it as huge, hundreds of feet wide. In reality, it was probably only 50-feet wide. I was disappointed when it was hidden inside a white geodesic dome. My father and my great-uncle Ted told me that the mission of the Nike site was to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could destroy Pittsburgh with nuclear bombs.

We kiddy Boomers were taught to worry about nuclear holocaust. We practiced crouching under our desks. We had drills of evacuating to the gym, where we wouldn’t be shredded by flying glass, I suppose. Our little suburban elementary school had a nuclear fallout shelter sign, as did thousands of others.

On our little black-and-white TVs, we watched movies such as “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail-Safe,” and “On the Beach.” We read books such as “Alas, Babylon.” As a generation, we were raised to fear nuclear war.

Today, however, the danger of a nuclear holocaust is the new normal. Corporate media doesn’t fret us anymore about it. Occasionally, individual artists such as James Cameron remind us, but we have been lulled asleep. We don’t think about it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t do anything about it.

The world today remains under the shadow of about 13,400 nuclear warheads.

As Dr. Kahn (the nuclear strategist who inspired the character Dr. Strangelove), pointed out in “On Thermonuclear War,” even a complete exchange of nuclear weapons might not kill everyone, unless mankind had the courtesy to stand in formations in the desert. At least, not with the initial blast. Fall-out might get us all.

Do this drill: take a map of the USA and draw 300, just 300, red circles, scaled to, say, the destructive radius of a 100-kiloton bomb. The Russians have plenty of those. Use a radius of 4 kilometers, which should cover blast effects and heat damage severe enough to cause 3rd degree burns. (That’s radius, not diameter, mind you.) (A 3rd degree burn destroys the entire exposed skin.) (If you don’t want to use a paper map, you can try an on-line version of this drill, such as the one at Nuclear Secrecy bit.ly/3alHqeN.)

For example, to destroy south Florida, start in Miami, put one downtown, one on the financial district, one on Miami International Airport (MIA). Put one on downtown Ft. Lauderdale. One on Ft. Lauderdale International Airport (FLL). Maybe one on the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. That’s six.

Do that for 300 bombs across the USA. You’ll soon realize that 300 bombs would destroy America. There are about 13,400 nuclear warheads in the world today.

Consider secondary and tertiary effects. War disrupts transportation, medical care, food supply and such, then disease and starvation kill more people than combat. Consider nuclear fall-out, not just from the bombs, but from strikes on nuclear power plants and nuclear waste disposal facilities. Consider nuclear winter from the burning of cities and forests. No crops for a year, maybe two or three years.

Then think how fragile and interconnected and inter-dependent modern civilization is. A financial crisis in Greece can trigger a depression in Europe, which can trigger a depression in the US, Latin America and the world. A substantial nuclear war anywhere in the world would disrupt the world economy so severely that it might topple western civilization.

Nuclear bombs are the old school of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The genetic revolution is going to dramatically increase the lethality of bacteriological weapons. As in my novel, INFECTRESS, we are going to be able to program bacteria and to invent particularly nasty viruses. Using ever-more-widely available technologies such as CRISPR, terrorists, disgruntled biohackers and bored psychopaths will be able to design and brew microbes as lethal as Ebola and as infectious as the common cold.

Only a world at peace can hope to avoid these disasters. We must have peace, not merely because war is bad. We must have peace in order to survive.

The alternative to peace is not endless war.

It is extinction.

It is universal self-genocide.

It is the end of Man.

 Our Wars – 0

The United States of America has been at war since October, 2001, almost 20 years, without a declaration of war. In the terrorist attack of 9/11, we have found an enemy, radical Islamists, whom we can hate and fight forever. In the meantime, we continue to field the largest, most powerful navy and air force that the globe has ever seen; a large, capable and highly trained standing army; and we maintain and modernize an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction adequate to destroy all of civilization, at any minute of any hour of any day.

Raised in the shadow of nuclear holocaust, I remain convinced that war and peace are worth talking about, some time before we look up and see the arching exhausts as the big missiles fly.

A three- or four-page essay is not long enough to consider the complexities of each of our wars. In the end notes, I will recommend book-length histories that do each conflict far more justice. What I will attempt to accomplish in this testimony is a series of quick sketches, capturing why the war started, how we fought it, and how well the violence resolved the issues. Since this is testimony, not history, I will include the perspective of my own self and of my family: how we, as ordinary Americans, were taught to understand these wars and how they affected us personally.

Come with me on a quick patrol through America’s wars. These are the wars fought by us, the people of the United States. To a large degree, they have been the wars of all of humanity. They have been our wars.

 Our Wars I – The French and Indian War

Why write about the French and Indian War?

Because in a bloody way, it is a war that we are still fighting.

The problems in North America did not begin in my home state of Pennsylvania. They began in New England. The first war between the European colonials and the Indians was King Phillip's War. After a series of provocations and raids, in November 1675, over a thousand colonials attacked and killed over 600 Narragansetts. As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania, I was not taught about King Phillip's War, nor was I taught about the following interesting story about my own home state: the swindling Walking Purchase of 1737.

According to the King of England, at least, William Penn was the proprietor of 45,000 square miles of American soil. Penn was a member of the Society of Friends, the “Quakers,” a pacifistic Protestant sect. As the proprietor of his colony, Pennsylvania, he treated the natives fairly. His sons and successors, not so much.

The white settlers wanted to expand westward from the town of Philadelphia. They offered to buy some land. The natives had notions of tribal territories, hunting rights and so on, but nothing like the European notion of land ownership. Neither did they have technologies that measured time and space with tortuous exactitude, such as the chronometer and the surveyor's compass. So they bargained away as much land westward as a man could walk in three days.

The Philadelphians put an ad in the paper for fast walkers. Three of the most fleet-footed frontiersmen were chosen. When they began walking, the natives, who were men of the Lenape tribe, protested, Hey! You’re walking too fast!

No, you said walking. We’re walking, the white men said.

As the sun set the first day, the Lenape, already grumbling, said, OK, let’s camp for the night.

Nah, we said. The deal was for three days. A day is 24 hours. We’re going to keep walking.

So we did. All night. All the next day and all the next night. All of the third day and all the third night, until after 72 hours of speed-walking over hills and streams, the exhausted frontiersmen collapsed. We white settlers claimed far, far more land than the Lenape had thought that they had bargained away. The Lenape did not declare war, but they were unhappy. This amazing story, the story of the swindling Walking Purchase of 1737, was the beginning of the troubles in Pennsylvania.

We Americans honored every treaty we ever made with the tribes, except for those treaties that proved inconvenient. From the swindling Walking Purchase of 1737 to the last Lakota surrender of 1891, we cheated them.

We failed to treat native Americans with respect, even though, when first seen by Caucasian eyes, the City of Mexico was larger, more beautiful and more sophisticated than any city in Europe. Even though the Indians had been living and thriving in the Americas for over 16,000 years. Perhaps, for more than 100,000 years.

They didn’t have guns, though, and that made the difference. So we burned their books, bulldozed their mounds and built cathedrals atop their pyramids.

Down south, the Spanish had been killing and enslaving the Indians for more than century. In North America, the troubles heated up when the imperial French began pressing down from Quebec, Canada. They built a string of forts along the Allegheny River, which they called “la Belle Riviere,” (“the beautiful river.”) Governor Dinwiddie of the Virginia colony was not having it. He sent George Washington, a loyal British American and a major in the Virginia militia, up there to talk with the French. At that time, both the Virginia and Pennsylvania colonies claimed the fork of the Ohio as their territory. The French received Washington with wine and courtesy, but they did not withdraw, as the governor requested.

So Governor Dinwiddie promoted Washington to Lieutenant Colonel and sent him northwest as part of an armed expedition. Dinwiddie had the green light from London. At this point, a world war was probably inevitable, but in any case, it sparked off about 42 miles southeast of the forks of the Ohio.

In the Battle of Jumonville Glen, on 28 May 1754, the British Americans and their Indian allies clashed with the French and their Indian allies. It was a small skirmish, which the British Americans won. The French surrendered. A leader of the victorious Indians, Tanacharison, is said to have tomahawked the skull of Ensign Jumonville and washed his hands in his brains. This is disputed, but the skirmish and the death of Jumonville, whether by tomahawk or by bullet, ignited a world war called internationally “the Seven Years War” and called in the colonies “the French and Indian War.”

The imperial French and British played the various Indian tribes against each other. Neither the French nor the British respected their Indian allies. Although they relied upon them for scouting and combat, they treated them as irregular auxiliaries under their command. In 1757, for example, a leader of the French, General Montcalm, relied on his Indian allies during the long siege of Fort William Henry in New York. Between themselves, the French and the British negotiated a surrender. Montcalm ordered his allies to stand down, but he did not respect their tradition of warfare, which included plunder. His Indian allies felt cheated. As the British fighters and their families retreated, the Indians attacked, killing over a hundred unarmed people and taking many others prisoner. This lack of understanding and respect created problems again and again, during the long war and its subsequent troubled peace.

The end of the war did not settle matters between the ever-encroaching whites and the natives. During Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763-64, for example, Fort Pitt withstood a two-month siege before finally being relieved. Other forts fell.

So the wars against the north American Indians rolled westward, as the hordes of settlers rolled westwards and the survivors of the eastern tribes retreated and the western tribes such as the Comanche and the Apache took their turns trying to defend their territories. Only the Seminole prevailed, because they were masters of the impenetrable Everglades. All of the other tribes succumbed, diminished 90% by Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, yellow fever and the plague. Outgunned. Overwhelmed by successive, endless tsunamis of white settlers.

The Seven Years War ended in 1763 A.D. The wars against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, however, has continued throughout my lifetime. When I was the Guatemala analyst at the United States Southern Command in the early 1980s, the Guatemalan Army killed tens of thousands of Mayan Indians. This was not an American war, but our fingerprints are near the scene of the crime, since, in 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered a coup against the democratically elected president, which placed the genocidal Guatemalan Army in charge.

Do you think that the wars between the Europeans and the Indians are over? If you think, yes, then you are not an Indian.

Ask one. Ask a Mayan Indian in Guatemala. He will not answer you, because he is terrified. He will stare at you in silence, then get away from you as quickly as possible.

 Our Wars II – The Revolutionary War

My great-great-great-grandfather, Johann Jacob Bodamer, was a winter patriot. He fought in the first battle of Trenton. He was wounded in the second.

George Washington was in trouble. The English had kicked him and his army out of New York, kicked him and his army across New Jersey, kicked him and his army until they were holed up in Philadelphia. The year was almost over. Many of his volunteers would be going home for the winter. Who knows how many, if any, would come back and rejoin his pathetically losing Continental Army in the spring?

He needed a victory. Badly.

So, on 25 December 1776, he formed up his troops along the banks of the Delaware river. The story has been told that the troops were read Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis #1:”

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

This is a story too good not to be true. We don’t know whether my ggg-grandfather, Johann Jacob Bodamer, spoke English at the time. He was a 19-year-old volunteer in the German Regiment, in which many of the troops spoke only their native tongue.

In either case, the troops crossed the ice-choked Delaware in ferries and Durham boats. In the darkest hours of the night, with his fellow winter soldiers, Johann marched along the far bank toward Trenton, the cold wind blowing in their faces.

The story is told that in Trenton, the garrison of Hessian mercenaries were celebrating Christmas, drinking and laughing, all indoors with warm fires and attractive company. When the drunk commander finally heard that the damned rebels had come, he and his men stumbled outside into the dark and wind and blowing snow. This story probably grew in the telling, as good stories do. In any case, the garrison was surprised by the early morning attack. Their muskets didn’t fire reliably in the wet. The Americans had brought a few small cannons, which did fire, and they cut the Hessians up. It was all over quickly.

Johann Jacob Bodamer survived the first battle of Trenton unhurt.

In those days, wars were fought during the summer. Lord Cornwallis and the British Army were on the road to Princeton. He was going to embark for England and spend the winter in London with Lady Cornwallis, then return to polish off the rebels in the spring. When he heard the news of the defeat in Trenton, though, he turned his army around and started to head back.

Washington sent Colonel Edward Hand’s First Pennsylvania Regiment and the German Regiment to slow them down. Armed with long rifles, with far more distance and accuracy than the Brown Bess smooth-bore muskets the redcoats carried, Colonel Hand’s men took up ambush positions in the woods and gullies, struck and retreated, struck and retreated.

Fire and retreat, fire and retreat, all afternoon long, delaying the advance of the British. Meanwhile, Washington had his main body of troops entrenched in Trenton, on the hillside on the far side of the Assunpink Creek. With the rest of the German regiment, Johann participated in the delaying action, until, on the outskirts of Trenton, he took a .50 caliber musket ball in his back.

At the head of his troops, General Washington, mounted, his horse’s chest pressed against the fence alongside the stone bridge that crossed the Assunpink Creek, watched the last, desperate retreat of the delaying forces, hot under fire from the advancing redcoats. He may or may not have noticed my ancestor, Johann, crawling on his hands and knees across the stone bridge, as he struggled to rejoin his brothers-in-arms.

The two armies exchanged fire. Cornwallis did not accept the challenge of charging over a bridge against entrenched forces. After the end of the battle, under the cover of darkness, the Americans wrapped our wagon wheels in rags, lit deceptive fires and snuck away into the night.

That was the second battle of Trenton, also known as the Battle of Assunpink Creek. My ggg-grandfather survived his abdominal wound, which was remarkable: gut shots were usually fatal in the 18th century, due to infection. He was evacuated, presumably to Philadelphia.

The next day, in the Battle of Princeton, Washington rallied his troops as the line collapsed. His position was exposed to devastating fire. During a redcoat volley, one of Washington’s aides covered his face with his hat, because he could not bear to see his leader killed. The father of our country had great personal luck in battle. Despite many acts as brave, he was never wounded in that long hard war.

So my family has some skin in the game.

What game was it, though?

Why were we colonists so disloyal to the crown?

What did British Americans like Thomas Paine, John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson want?

To be frank, I am not fully convinced by the reasons given in the Declaration of Independence. After its wonderful, but far too terse, preamble, it seems a little thin to me. As if we were spoiled teens, who just didn’t want to contribute to the imperial economy. To kick our share, our “quinta,” into the royal coffers. Were we just spoiled colonists, who expected the King to fight the French on his own dime?

I agree with Sir Winston Churchill's account of the disastrous loss of the American colonies. (His “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” is highly recommended.) During the 1600s and 1700s, the British were far too busy with their succession troubles, religious and civil wars to pay adequate mind to events across the Atlantic, where the colonists, while considering themselves British subjects, were developing their own America-centric worldviews.

Even as late as the 1770s, if King George III had been a better leader, and if London had treated the colonialists (or at least, the English-speaking landowners) as fully enfranchised British subjects, succession could have been avoided.

We did have among us a cabal of free-thinkers, of Freemasons and Deists, who were sick of the endless game of thrones that is the nightmare of European history, who were sick of the syphilitic kiss of vampires, of the accumulation of power by self-appointed elites who claimed superior bloodlines and higher attainments and the anointment of God himself, but who were really just a clutch of violent psychopaths, who didn’t care whether or not tens of millions died in battle, whether or not their older brothers needed stabbed in the back, whether or not their nephews needed strangled in their cribs, or whether or not peasants, slaves and serfs lived in shitholes, as long as they stayed on top.

These malcontents could have been politically isolated or physically crushed. If men like George Washington had been treated with respect, Americans might still be speaking English today. And drinking warm beer around bonfires on Guy Fawke's Night.

As it was, though, we Americans were of many minds. Some absolutely loyal to the king, some provisionally loyal, others disloyal. We had royalists, disgruntled royalists, democrats and pistol-waving free-thinkers among us.

I myself distrust, even hate, kings. My attitude springs from my home soil, southwestern Pennsylvania, which was a hotbed of English-hating, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.

My dad thought he was an Irish American. He was wrong. The Cool lineage included some Irish, but his family was more Scottish than Irish and more Scotch Irish than Scottish. I asked him what he thought that “Scotch Irish” meant. He said that he thought it meant an admixture of Scottish and Irish.

No, not quite. The history of the American revolution is partly the history of the Scotch Irish. Many revolutionaries were Scotch Irish. Over three million of their descendants live in the country today. We have been here so long that many of us, like my father, have forgotten our story.

The Scotch Irish are an American people who just called themselves “Irish” back in the days of the Revolution. They were mainly lowland Scots, whom King James I of England had transplanted from Scotland to the north of Ireland, in the region now known as Ulster. (King James I of England was also King James VI of Scotland, the king who sponsored the “King James Bible.” He ascended the English throne for the same reason his second cousin, once removed, Elizabeth I, had done: Henry VIII’s son had not survived to take the throne.) The cause of this “plantation” of Scotsmen to Ireland was that the northern Irish had risen in rebellion against the English. The English had invaded. They had killed so many people that the countryside was relatively unpopulated. King James I decided to handle that problem by moving in tens of thousands of Scots. These Scots weren’t Catholic. They weren’t Anglican. They were Presbyterians. The Presbyterians are an old sect of Protestants who organize our church with “presbyteries,” which are elected assemblies of elders, similar to a congress or a parliament.

The “plantation” of these Scotsmen in Ireland worked great, at least for the first hundred years. They worked hard. They developed rich farms. They thought of themselves as Irish, but they didn’t intermarry with the Catholic Irish, or so we’re told. In tales such as these, usually there’s a few Romeos chasing their Juliettes.

Then the English started raising the rents. They started religious persecution against these non-Anglican folks. In response, the Scotch Irish rose up as a people and emigrated in mass waves to America during the 1700s. Except for ones they left behind, who have only emerged from “The Troubles” of Northern Ireland during my lifetime.

Because of the rent-racking and religious persecution, these Scotch Irish Presbyterians in America had a beef with the English. Pittsburgh and all of southwest Pennsylvania was a hotbed of Scotch Irish, Presbyterian, Anglophobic pistol-wavers.

I was dipped a Baptist and sprinkled a Presbyterian. I guess the sprinkling is the one that took, because although I love the English (and I do love the English, far more than I understand them and more, indeed, than they seem to understand themselves), but I hate the king. Any king. Or the queen, for that matter. I look forward to the day that all the English realize that the proper identity for their royals is docents in the museums of their former palaces, with absolutely no political role whatsoever. Or shipping clerks in a coffee warehouse. Or chicken farmers.

Today, we’re not even supposed to notice as our own presidency grows ever more kingly. As our congresspersons do not live up to their constitutional duty and responsibility to declare war, instead, authorizing a commander-in-chief to decide when and where our troops will fight and die. A president who can, apparently, unilaterally break treaties. Who, although a lawyer himself, can mouth the following words:

"I'm saying that when the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

-- Richard Nixon, interview with David Frost, 1977, ("Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews," Sir David Frost, Harper Perennial, New York, 2007, pgs. 254-6, 266-7; also, clip from the film, "Frost/Nixon," YouTube, bit.ly/2UXITDf)

No, no, no, no, no . . .

The president of the United States is not above the law. If you read through the Constitution even once (which you should certainly do), you will be left with the unmistakable impression that the framers meant to check the inevitable tendency of the executive to grow too powerful. The fearsome responsibility to decide war or peace belongs to the Congress.

The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War

The framers wanted to make it difficult for the United States to go to war. It shouldn’t be up to just the president. Nor to just the Senate. The entire Congress should declare war. They should not pass the buck by voting for some lesser instrument, such as a public law authorizing the use of force. The Constitution specifically mentions Letters of Marque, which is a lesser instrument authorizing violence, so these public laws may have not been illegal, but they have been unconstitutional in that they have gone against the spirit of the constitutional mandate for congressional responsibility for deciding to go to war.

The last time the United States Congress declared war was on 8 December 1941.

Today, 7 April 2021, we have been at war somewhere in the world every day since October 2001. That means that this October, we will have been at war for 20 straight years without a declaration of war.

The founding fathers were also leery of foreign entanglements and large standing armies.

. . . they [the citizens] must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves . . . which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

-- George Washington's Farewell Address, 1796

Today, the USA has trade, economic and mutual defense treaties all around the world. We spend more than half a trillion dollars a year on our military forces, more than the next seven biggest-spending nations combined.

If he were alive today, George Washington might wonder what has happened to his revolution.

My ggg-grandfather, Johann Jacob Buttermore, might wonder, too.

The problem, sadly, is that not all revolutionaries were fighting the same war. We British Americans were of many minds. We had pistol-waving democrats like Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. We had pro-British royalists like Alexander Hamilton. The Constitution was a compromise. It attempted to address the concerns of those who believed in the rule of the many and those who believed in the rule of the few. The fact that the Founding Fathers were able to hammer out a compromise that, the Civil War set aside, has continued to work, more or less, for two hundred years, is remarkable enough.

The truth, however, is that we sleep-walk in a Hamiltonian America, dreaming Jeffersonian dreams. Hamilton liked the English crown. He believed that the people were a mob, undisciplined, self-serving and dangerous unless strongly ruled. Jefferson liked the French revolution, at least in its beginning. He believed that a well-educated populace can govern itself.

The tide of history is flooding ever-stronger toward Hamilton. As the American people continue to allow ourselves to be so poorly served by our elected leaders, we are continuing to prove the point of the Hamiltonians: the mob is too stupid to rule itself. We must be ruled by an elite.

Because of this, the American revolution is a war that we are still fighting today.

 Our Wars III – The War of 1812

Thanks to Admiral Zumwalt, our proud Navy celebrates its birthday on October 13th, the day in 1775 that the Continental Navy was established. This is a stretch. We Americans allowed that navy to fall into disrepair. The Continental Navy’s last ship, USS Alliance, was sold into the merchant service in 1785. For a while, we Americans had no navy. We formed a Coast Guard, but it was focused on enforcing tariffs, not protecting American shipping.

The more honest birth date for the United States Navy is 27 March 1794. That’s the date the Congress authorized the construction of six frigates. One of them, USS Constitution, is the oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat. She can be visited today in Boston harbor. The six frigates were built in response to piracy. The American merchant fleet lacked protection. Understandably, the Royal Navy was not interested in providing this service. There was no American navy. Pirates out of Algiers were snapping up one American merchant ship after another.

George Washington was in his second term. Thomas Jefferson was our ambassador to France. As the senior American revolutionary in Europe (Ben Franklin having died in 1790), he kept his eye on the Barbary pirates.

Like other founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson was leery of the dangers to a republic of an army:

There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation, and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot, but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.

-- Thomas Jefferson's letter to Colonel Humphreys, Paris, March 18, 1789. (Project Gutenberg bit.ly/2SCiY25)

He decided, however, that building, maintaining and operating a navy would be cheaper than paying never-ending ransoms to pirates. Thomas Jefferson became an advocate for the re-establishment of a navy.

We built those six frigates out of old-growth coastal live oak. This wood was tough, difficult and expensive to timber, but, boy, did it make good ships. USS Constitution was called, “Old Ironsides,” because cannon balls would bounce off. This great native wood is one reason the old girl is still afloat two hundred years later.

The early US Navy was the fruit of a large and capable maritime establishment. We Americans had many sailors, shipbuilders, shipyards and lots of great wood and cordage to support our vigorous fishing, whaling and merchant fleets. There was no draft. No press gangs. The US Navy was an all-volunteer force. The sailors were capable, well-paid and eager to fight their ships.

We did well in the Quasi War with France. (There are sixteen essays in this “Our Wars” series, but I am skipping some conflicts, such as the Quasi War with France, the invasion of Grenada, over a hundred other military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, the expedition that fought the Bolsheviks in Russia and others.) When the British began to impress American sailors off of our merchant ships, we protested, to little avail. The king and his subjects had no love for the traitors across the Atlantic.

We began to fight the Royal Navy. In the first three frigate-to-frigate actions, the US Navy won, mortifying the English, who were proud of their tradition of supremacy at sea.

A handful of big frigates, however, was not an adequate force to take on the world’s greatest navy. We had no ships of the line. The Royal Navy had over 130 ships of the line, each bigger than a frigate.

To illustrate this point, the British invaded our homeland and burnt the Capitol Building and the White House. Dolley Madison, bless her, saved what she could, including a life-size oil portrait of Washington. Or her servants did, anyway. Still, let’s hear it for Dolley Madison, who was smart, vivacious and beautiful. She was a great hostess; she got political opponents to attend her parties and to behave themselves, back in the day when being rude could spark a duel:

We Americans invaded Canada but failed. This was our second of two big attempts to take over the Great White North. Both failed. Otherwise, Old Glory might have 60-some stars.

This essay does not end conclusively. Neither did the War of 1812.

Neither did the Revolution, for that matter. The beautiful, complex “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, between London and the District of Colombia and between the financial centers of the City of London and Wall Street continues to this day.

 Our Wars IV – The Mexican-American War

In 1977, when I was backpacking in Mexico, a Mexican told me that the name of this war in Mexican schoolbooks was “The War of Yankee Imperialist Aggression.” I don’t know whether that’s true, but I’m willing to believe it.

Of the war itself, I was taught little. In the Pennsylvania of my youth, this war wasn’t taught as something that was central to the American story. We little boomers in the Keystone State learned about William Penn, the Quakers, the Revolution and the Civil War. Even today, judging from news reports, how it is taught – and how Mexican American history in general is taught – is still a subject of considerable controversy in states like Texas and Arizona.

We should all know and appreciate the stories of our peoples. It’s OK, I think, to enjoy films that celebrate the mythic aspects of that story, such as “The Alamo,” 2004, the one with Billy Bob Thornton. It’s a well-done movie about a great story. It is fine to take national pride in heroes such as Sam Houston, David Crockett and Jim Bowie. There’s a lot more to the story, though, than the Alamo. The Navy blockaded the Pacific Coast, for example. The Army captured Mexico City. The geography of Mexico, with its killing northern deserts, played a larger role than anything else, though, I believe. Everything from Texas to California ended up part of the United States because the land itself facilitated that political alignment. There were also consequences caused by the English political economic culture, which emphasized development more, as opposed to the Spanish political economic culture, with its overemphasis on exploitation and extraction. Both systems exploited, but the English version encouraged more development. In the end, the vast land belonged to the peoples who built the railroads.

I have lived and traveled in Mexico for a total of eight months, starting in 1977 and most recently in 2012. I’ve lived multiple times in Florida, Texas and California. There are not so many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Florida relative to Cubans and other Hispanics, but the experience is worth mentioning, since for twelve years I experienced what it’s like to live in America as a minority. Miami is dominated culturally, politically and linguistically by Hispanics. Non-Hispanic Whites (sometimes called Anglos, which isn’t quite right, or gringos, which isn’t quite proper) were a 12% minority in Doral, where I lived and worked.

Even as a fluent Spanish speaker who had spent years living in Mexico and Panamá, I felt like a stranger in my own homeland. Or what I considered to be my homeland. The news anchors at Univision and Telemundo seem undecided. They tended to refer to “este nacion” (“this nation”) rather than use the word “America,” which some people consider controversial. Because “las Americas” (“the Americas”) is the name of the entire hemisphere. “United States” is not a truly distinctive name, because the long name of our southern neighbor is “Estados Unidos Mexicanos” (“United States Mexican”). So even calling this nation by either of its two official names, “United States” or “United States of America,” believe it or not, riles some people.

Because there’s some people who resent our western expansion. Who never bought into the “manifest destiny” program. Who think that everything from Texas to California was stolen from Mexico.

Some even refer to this lost territory, today inhabited by tens of millions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, as “Aztlan,” which is the Aztec name for their mythic homeland. Some Mexicans in “Aztlan” are not made to feel quite at home, either, especially if their entrance to the region was informal. Especially not under President Donald J. Trump, whose first campaign kick-off speech included these statements: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Whose loony idea was to build a wall to keep out immigrants, which is impractical, but a great dog whistle for nativist resentment of foreigners.

Who of us are the natives, though? Who of us are the foreigners?

That’s the problem with the Mexican-American War. It hasn’t ended. In a painful way, we are still fighting it every day.

Mexico has developed a lot economically and politically since I first visited her 42 years ago. Whatever the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has done for the American worker, the cash flow through the maquiladoras, or border factories in Mexico, as well as increased trade seem to have helped Mexico to develop economically. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), while still dominant, no longer has a single-party stranglehold on political life. The Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) has gained some power.

I suspect that corruption is a bigger problem than it ever was. As long as our wrong-headed and counterproductive War on Drugs continues, corruption is a stain that spreads. In Mexico. In America. Everywhere. We were taught that lesson during Prohibition, but it is a lesson that we have failed to learn.

In the meantime, how Mexico is bleeding! Drug-trafficking cartels such as Los Zeta are some of the most monstrously violent in the world, worse than the Mafia, worse than the FARC. When I wrote the first draft of this essay, a Mormon family had been horribly murdered. I was saddened, but then I thought, well, maybe now that some Americans have died, the American public will pay some attention to the horrible violence in Mexico.

As I suspected that it would, the mainstream media moved on. The only important story about Mexican-American relations was that the Orange Man wanted a wall. Then COVID-19 became the only news story.

About that wall, though: you can’t build a wall around America. There’s a lot of coasts, for one thing. Don’t forget that long unpatrolled border with Canada. You can’t lock every door in your house, except one, and think you’ve done anything except change the place an intruder is going to enter. Anyone who knows the first thing about perimeter security knows that any fence is just a line in the sand. All fences and walls can be defeated. You need sensors, patrols, defense-in-depth and a border patrol, immigration and police system geared to enforce a rational, practical and popularly supported immigration system. Maybe, even, a just one.

The United States of America and the United Mexican States are Siamese twins, joined at the hip, with two hearts, a shared liver and three kidneys between us. What disease Mexico has, the US has; what disease we have, Mexico has. It is in our best interest to have a healthy, happy and prosperous Mexico.

Because a full-blown Battle for Aztlan could be as bloody as our next war, the Civil War.

Our Wars V – The Civil War

Of my eight great-great-grandfathers, five served in the Union Army. (Three of the eight were too old to serve.) Of the five who served, three of them suffered from wounds, capture, imprisonment or dread sufficient to drive them to desertion. One deserted, was arrested and pressed back into service, then was captured and imprisoned by the Confederates. One, William Henry Sisler, died of Yellow Fever. He is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near Leesburg, Virginia.

One of my great-great-granduncles, a Buttermore, served as a medical doctor in the Confederate Army.

The family tradition holds that when the Civil War broke out, my gg-grandfather, Henry Holmes King, was so excited that he jumped out of the window of his schoolhouse and ran off to enlist. I tend to believe this story is true, since, from his enlistment documents in the National Archives, I know that he lied about his age.

So, millions of American men and boys pulled on uniforms of gray or of blue. They lined up by ranks and by files. They slaughtered one another by the hundreds of thousands.

Yes, it was about slavery. Lincoln was an abolitionist. Once he was sworn to the presidency, preserving the Union was his top priority, as he publicly stated, but popular support in the North for abolishing the evil institution was strong, supported by many civic groups and churches.

Yes, it was about state’s rights. After four generations of ever-increasing federal dominance of the states and constant movement of most of the population, we have forgotten the strength of people’s feeling for their country. By their country, they meant their state. (I say we have forgotten, but I don’t think some of the still-unreconstructed Confederates have forgotten. Ask them today.)

Yes, it was about money. Das kapital. The largest capital asset in the South was slaves. Slaveholders and the region in general had more money invested in slaves than any other asset, including land.

It would have been cheaper for the North, even so, to buy out the slaves, build ships to send them back to Africa, or homestead them in the west, than to fight this war and suffer all of its costs, many of which continue to this day.

Were there bucks for that?

No, but there were bucks for guns and bombs and boots and cannon and so on. Pittsburgh boomed. Anyone who owned steel mills, foundries and weapons plants boomed. The banks boomed.

Four years later, at least 618,222 American men were dead. This was about 4% of the total male population at the time.

How many bucks were spent in reconstructing the South? In rebuilding, for example, Atlanta or Savannah? On transitioning former slaves, held in ignorance, to useful, productive citizens?

Not enough. We had to pay off those war debts first. Four generations later, we have enough money to build and operate prisons and high-rise tenements to warehouse a large segment of our population. Only China has more people behind bars than America. We have money for jails and tenements, but we lack the funds to fund the ascendancy of many African Americans from second-class citizens, an underclass in which too many languish even today.

We lack the funds to pay a living wage for honest work.

To run a national program of uplift, where every black kid who is smart enough gets job training or higher education. Or every other black kid. Or every tenth black kid.

To bankroll black businesses.

To revitalize our urban centers, so that they are places where people, regardless of the color of their skin, want to live and work.

If history is any judge, however, we’ll have enough money for a second Civil War, even as we wallow, today, in the miseries of the first Civil War.

 Our Wars VI – The Spanish-American War

Remember the Maine?

In 1898, 266 sailors died when she exploded and sank in Havana harbor. The official inquiry blamed a naval mine. The sinking of the USS Maine impelled the US to declare war on Spain. It was a short war. Admiral Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay.

Following the American victory, we held sway over the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island.

Expansionism, if not imperialism, was strong in turn-of-the-century America, part of a tidal wave of “manifest destiny.” Now, in 2021 A.D., let’s see where we are with these fruits plucked from the decrepit tree of the Spanish empire.

We Americans have fought at least twice in Cuba, ostensibly for their independence and freedom. It’s still an imprisoned island. The purity of our will is suspect, given how our corporations, including Big Sugar and the Sicilian Mafia, behaved themselves when we did hold sway over Cuba. In any case, perhaps the lesson here is that you can’t always export freedom through the use of arms.

Puerto Rico is not a state. It is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Those of us who are Puerto Rican have no senator nor representative in the United States Congress, only a non-voting “resident commissioner.” We pay no federal income taxes on our income earned on the island. We are American citizens, free to move to any state. Many of us proudly serve in our armed forces. Some of us think the current status of Puerto Rico is fine; others disagree. Some want independence. Many resent the horrible way that the Puerto Rican people were treated after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017 A.D. The response was slow and inadequate. For example, with tens of thousands of people still lacking electricity months after the hurricane struck, a $300M contract was awarded to an obscure firm in Montana, Whitefish Energy, with only two employees. Florida Power & Light, the Army Corps of Engineers or Pacific Gas & Electric would have been much more sensible choices to lead this major power reconstruction project. This bizarre incident and the callous response from the Trump White House illustrate that Puerto Rico’s limbo status as an unincorporated territory may not be in her long-term interest. Statehood or independence might confer upon the Island of Enchantment the dignity that she deserves.

As a consequence of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) (one of the wars not covered in the sixteen Our Wars essays), as many as 200,000 civilians died from disease, malnutrition and combat. The Philippines remained a territory of the United States until 1946, when she became an independent nation. Starting in 1947, under a special agreement between the two nations, the US Navy recruited many thousands of Filipinos, providing a fast track to US citizenship, available after three years of service. During my active duty between 1979 and 1999, I served with many Filipino sailors. Even through those years, they dominated in rates such as Disbursing Clerk (DK) and Messman (MS).

I was in USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) when Mount Pinatubo blew. We were underway in the South China Sea. My boss, Rear Admiral Wright, became the commander of Joint Task Force – Fiery Vigil, responsible for evacuating our dependents from Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. Unescorted, our ship eased into Subic Bay. Ordinarily a tropical paradise, with royal blue skies and vivid green jungle foliage, Subic was a hellscape. The sea was black. The sky was a weird tint of green that smelled like a charcoal barbecue. All the trees and bushes and buildings and streets were crushed under deep layers of volcanic ash, gray as dry cement. We evacuated hundreds of women and children, as well as dozens of dogs and cats, all of whom were air-lifted to Guam.

The USA subsequently closed these bases, formerly thought to be strategically key to our presence in the Far East. The Filipino people continue to do what they must to survive and to thrive. Over two million Filipinos work overseas, often in places like Saudi Arabia and Singapore. I wish these sunny, cheerful and hard-working people the best; I do not know whether we have done well by them, either as their imperial protectors or as their friends.

Meanwhile, Guam and Wake Island are still US territories. Over 120 years later, we continue to live in the shadow of the Spanish-American War.

The cause of the war? The casus bello? The explosion that sank the Maine?

It wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t a naval mine.

The Maine blew up because a fire spontaneously started in a coal bin. This fire heated up the bulkhead shared with the neighboring magazine, which is where a ship stores its munitions. Some black powder in the magazine ignited, triggering a chain reaction of her own 6” and 10” shells. It took decades and numerous investigations, including one headed by Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, to get to the bottom of this incident.

Remember the Maine. Those who favor war, such as newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and future president Teddy Roosevelt, will latch onto any excuse to further their warlike agendas. It doesn’t have to be a sinister conspiracy, a deliberate false flag, to give them the war that they want.

A coal fire will do.

 Our Wars VII – World War I

My grandfather, William Randolph Cool, honorably served during World War One (WWI). The story of his service handed down to me was untrue.

He was drafted in September 1918. He was in boot camp only for a couple of months before the war ended on 11 November 1918. At Camp Greenleaf, Georgia, he had been a private, part of a unit under training, Evacuation Hospital #46, which never graduated and never deployed to Europe.

He spent the last seven months of his service in Camp Stuart, Newport News, Virginia. His unit accepted wounded soldiers coming home from the western front. Originally designated Debarkation Hospital #51, on 1 May 1919, it was re-designated General Hospital #43, after which it specialized in psychiatric cases.

My grandfather was honorably discharged on 27 June 1919. He never deployed to Europe. He saw no combat. He was never wounded.

All of this was honorable. This is the truth that should have been told.

Instead, my father told us that my grandfather had been gassed in France. That he had been put up on a hill for three days and nights. That a soup cart would go up the hill every day. On its way down, they would pile on the dead. That the only thing that kept him alive was his hatred for the United States Army.

This is the story that I have believed all my life. That is, until yesterday.

A family historian annoys the living and disturbs the dead. In 1973, a fire destroyed 80% of the Army’s service records. My grandfather’s service records were lost. So, I was unable to verify the family story of his service. Until yesterday, when I searched in Ancestry.com, which is always adding new sources. I found his “WWI Veteran Service and Compensation File” and his “Pennsylvania Veterans Compensation Application.” Both of these documents, sworn to and signed by my grandfather, attest that he never deployed, was never wounded and had served only in the capacities that I have sketched above.

In 1996, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Boorda, killed himself. He shot himself in the chest, distraught about a news investigation that he was not entitled to wear the “V” for valor on two of his service ribbons. The man killed himself because he had been wearing little gold “V”s on colored bits of cloth on his chest.

In the American military culture, it is contemptible to claim to have been in combat when you have not. To claim that you have been wounded when you have not. This is called “stealing glory.” I feel ashamed that either my grandfather lied or my father lied.

Yet who am I to judge? I don’t know what he told my father. I only know what my father said that he said.

My grandfather had problems. He drank too much. A few years after leaving the Army, he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to sixteen months in the Allegheny County Workhouse. My father and his elder sister, Ruth, were born out of wedlock. My grandfather abandoned my grandmother, Edna Scott Alston, and their two children, leaving my father the man of the house when he was thirteen, in 1943.

Later, my grandfather recovered enough to become a master mechanic. He was awarded patent #2112014 for a spring-loaded auxiliary aircraft engine to be used for emergency landings. He re-married and supported his second wife until his death in 1966.

It is possible that when my father was a youth, consuming a steady diet of “Why We Fight” propaganda, he was anxious to fight in the war. It is possible that my grandfather told him these stories, ending with the moral, “Don’t ever join the US Army,” because he was trying to protect his only son.

He never made it to France, but he certainly got an eyeful of the damage, both physical and psychological, that the war had done to young men, who were just like him but who had gone over there and had come back physical and psychological wrecks. He worked with these wounded men, day and night, for months.

My father was notorious for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. He died in 2015, so the surviving family will never know what, if anything, my grandfather told him about his service nor when nor why the story grew in the telling. Of course, the ugly incidents above – possibly lying about military service, jail time, dipsomania, bastardy and child abandonment – are things people don’t talk about. Yet this is the truth as I know it.

In any case, World War One did not just affect my family. It affected tens of millions of families.

Kings and Kaisers, many of them related, swore to defend their allies. They established a system of interlocking mutual defense treaties. It was like a roomful of connected mousetraps. All it took was one terrorist killing one feudal lord and all the mousetraps snapped. Millions of common folks died.

We Americans wanted to stay out of it. We had a relatively small army of 98,000 men. A fifth as many British soldiers, 19,240 men, died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The carnage in Europe evoked the carnage of the Civil War, which for many American families was still a living memory. In his 1916 re-election campaign, Woodrow Wilson ran on a slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War.”

Even the sinking of the ocean liner, RMS Lusitania, was not enough to drag America into this war. The Germans had taken out ads in American newspapers, warning the public that "vessels flying the flag of Great Britain . . . are liable to destruction and that travelers sailing in the war zone . . . do so at their own risk." The Lusitania had millions of rounds of munitions in her cargo. The Royal Navy did not provide an escort. A German U-boat sunk her south of Ireland on 7 May 1915, killing over 1,000 people, including 128 Americans. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest when President Wilson officially protested to the Germans over the attack on the Lusitania. He felt the President was steering the nation away from neutrality and toward war.

In January 1917, the Germans re-initiated unrestricted submarine warfare in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, although they made provisions for safe passage of American vessels as long as they were clearly marked and were free of contraband. The British blockade of Germany, begun in 1914, included foodstuffs as contraband. The largest navy in the world and naval mines effected this blockade, which resulted in food shortages, malnutrition and food riots. The German blockade of England began to result in more American deaths, as merchant sailors lost their lives.

Then British intelligence, anxious for American help in the war, shared a telegram they had intercepted and broken. The Zimmerman telegram was a diplomatic cable from Berlin to Mexico City, suggesting that the Mexicans might want to enter the war on the German side, with a goal of re-gaining the lost national territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Its author, a diplomatic civil servant named Zimmerman, admitted that it was a real cable. Yet here was an incidence of the British using intelligence information to incite America to war.

It worked. Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. The relatively fresh American troops swung the tide of battle to the side of the Allies.

Over 100,000 Americans died, with over 200,000 wounded. Over eight million soldiers of all nations died in WWI. Almost thirteen million were wounded. Over four million civilians were killed.

The victors did not merely punish Germany. They tore her up and enslaved her with reparations. The French and the English sought to neutralize the Germans for generations. The Treaty of Versailles set the stage for an even greater war. It would be fought one generation later, when corporals and fighter aces became warlords and air marshals.

Crimes and misdemeanors. Who am I to judge my grandfather? When I have changed one bedpan of one combat veteran while he is shaking uncontrollably from shell shock, I shall have the right to judge my father’s father.

Notes on the entangling alliances that killed millions:

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was the first cousin of King George V of England. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were second cousins (once removed).

The "Dual Alliance" of 1879 was a German and Austro-Hungarian mutual defense pact in the case of Russian attack. The "Franco-Russian Alliance" of 1892 was a mutual defense pact in the case of a German attack. The "Entente Cordiale" of 1904 encouraged an alignment between the French and the British. The "Anglo-Russian Convention" of 1907 encouraged an alignment between the British and the Russians. Jefferson, Adams and Washington might have called these “foreign entanglements.” They were put in place not so much in the interest of peace as in the advancement of the power of each empire.

Franz Ferdinand was the nephew to Franz Joseph I and the heir presumptive of the Austro-Hungarian throne. Serbian terrorists assassinated him on 28 June 1914. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and mobilized for war. Russia and Germany mobilized for war. On 31 July 1914, Austria-Hungary demanded that Russia demobilize. Russia refused. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914. Five days later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. France mobilized for war. On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. Nine days later, Britain and France declared war on Austria-Hungary. Japan sided with Britain. The Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, and soon, much of the world was at war. The Babylon system was in full swing across the globe; the Kings sought to smite their enemies.

 Our Wars VIII – World War II

Born in 1930, my father was too young to serve in WWII. So was my only uncle.

My entire generation, the Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1965, however, spent our childhoods in the deep shadows of WWII. We were also the spawn of this war. Survivors of the war returned home, anxious to build new lives. They took their Merchant Marine back pay and started construction businesses. They took advantage of the G.I. Bill and became young executives. They married, moved into the burgeoning suburbs and had lots of kids. The Greatest Generation was so fruitful that there was a bubble in the population dubbed the Baby Boom. I was born right in the middle, in 1955. I grew up watching John Wayne, Henry Fonda and even Humphrey Bogart fight the Good War on a black-and-white television.

So how good was the Good War?

How necessary was it?

How honorably did we Americans fight?

In the Versailles negotiations, Woodrow Wilson wanted to create a world parliament. He got his League of Nations. The French and English wanted to neutralize the Germans. They got a fractured Germany, which would rise from its fragments and set the world on fire. If the aims instead had been to construct a democratic, prosperous Europe, perhaps WWII could have been averted.

Let’s look at the interwar period from the perspective of money. Of big money. Of das kapital. The economic boom of the Jazz Age was fueled by torrents of money flooding into the stock market. Major projects such as the electrification of the country required major investments. Fortunately, we had created a central bank that could invent money through schemes like fractional lending, in which a bank that had, say, $1M, could pretend that it had $10M or even $40M. Lots of people were getting rich through schemes like, “watering stocks,” where a profitable enterprise incorporates into three new enterprises and everyone pretends that the three new enterprises are worth what the parent enterprise had been worth. So many rich people were getting richer, using imaginary money, that lots of regular folks started to get excited and invest real money, that is, money damp from the sweat of their labor, their life savings and the college funds for their sons.

Boom times are good times. They had a great soundtrack, too: big band jazz. My Nana, who had been a flapper during the Jazz Age, loved to teach us how to do the Charleston, where you swap your knees and then spin, wagging your finger in the air.

Times were good even in Germany, so much so that malcontent parties such as the Communists and the National Socialists were losing traction. (The differences between Communism and National Socialism are where on stage the owners of the mines and factories stand, their costumes, and the lines they’re allowed to speak. Also, the Communists are internationalists, while the Nazis are nationalists to the point of ultra-racism. They hate different people, too. Mostly, they hate each other. Otherwise, there’s not many important differences. They’re both totalitarian regimes with a death grip on the means of production, who are willing to enslave and massacre their own populations by the millions.)

All speculative bubbles, like all other parties, must end. When imaginary money too far outstrips sweaty money, the bubble will pop. Those smart enough to see this coming got out in time. Maybe their getting out caused the bubble to pop. Maybe the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, where the people on top, those who started the pyramid, decided to cash out. Certainly lots of rich people lost their shirts, too, but some didn’t. If you wanted to investigate the Wall Street crash of 1929 as a Ponzi scheme, a short list of suspects would be major investors who didn’t go broke. The Rockefellers and the Rothschilds came out OK, I believe. Alfred Lee Loomis of Tuxedo Park saw it coming.

Life was hard for almost everyone else, though. A quarter of Americans went broke and were unemployed. Factories shuttered. Families lost their farms and homes. Many were forced into living in shanty towns. My grandfather, as the story goes, anyway, rode the rails and worked as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest.

The “business cycle” has its bulls and bears, its booms and busts, its expansions and contractions, its growths and recessions. Just the nature of business, right? Well, this contraction was so painful that they had to call it the Great Depression. It lasted all the way to the outbreak of WWII.

America suffered. Latin America suffered. Europe suffered. Germany suffered so deeply that the malcontents like the Communists and the National Socialists started to gain traction again.

One of the problems with democracy, besides the enfranchisement of the stupid, is that you only have to lose once to the wrong party and it’s Game Over. So it was in 1932, when the Nazis gained enough votes that Hitler was made Reich Chancellor.

The parliament building, the Reichstag, burned down. Maybe a Dutch communist started the fire. Maybe the Nazis did. It didn’t much matter, because the Nazis used the burning of the Reichstag as all the pretext they needed to seize absolute power. Through the Reichstag Fire Degree and the Enabling Act of 1933, Hitler became the dictator of Germany. Soon all other political parties and unions were banned. The Nazis took over control of all media. The Gestapo and other secret police punished WrongThink with imprisonment, torture, confiscation and death. Informers and monitoring of telephone and telegraph communications became features of the surveillance state, the police state. Herr Hitler ruled by Führerprinzip: what I say, goes.

Hitler, evil madman?

Evil, surely, since he murdered millions. He was too devious to ink an order, but he did say in a public speech that if international Jewry caused a war, they would be annihilated:

Ich will heute wieder ein Prophet sein: Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht die Bolschewisierung der Erde und damit der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa.

I want to be a prophet again today: If international financial Jewry inside and outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

-- Adolph Hitler, Reichstag speech, January 30, 1939, text from WorldFutureFund.org bit.ly/39UpIhO

Very little happened in wartime Germany except through Führerprinzip. Until the very end, everything that Himmler did was the will of Hitler. Of course, Hitler ordered the Holocaust. The Holocaust is an historical fact. Maybe six million is not the exact number. The Nazis kept records, but these were not complete. Some of the camps were not engineered to be death factories, but rather slave labor camps, where Jews and other enemies of the state could be inevitably but gradually worked to death. The surviving cremation ovens in Auschwitz were underengineered for a death camp; the Germans tend to overengineer. Before the regime collapsed, the Nazis razed some camps, such as Sobibor, so the evidence for purpose-built death camps has been partially obliterated. In any case, once the Wannsee conference put out the word, the Nazis killed as many Jews as they could, as fast as they could, using the infrastructure at hand. They put killing Jews on a higher priority than fighting the war. Holocaust deniers are denying the reality of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, on par with Stalin’s savaging of the Ukraine or Mao’s mass murders.

Madman?

No. Well, maybe. Certainly, he was a sociopath. He lacked empathy for his fellow human beings, although he did like dogs and kids. Probably, he was a sociopath even before WWI, even as a child, due perhaps to the beatings by his father. Practically his entire division was wiped out in WWI, but Hitler had no sympathy for the war-weary.

His sexuality seems askew. He was obsessively possessive of a young half-niece, who died violently. For political reasons, he ordered the murder of his homosexual friend, Ernst Rohm. He discusses syphilis for thirteen pages in Mein Kampf. The woman who changed his sheets in the Berghof believed that if he was having sex with Eva Braun, it wasn’t in the bed. He married his faithful female companion, then assisted in her suicide. None of this passes the sniff test.

He was an absolute egomaniac, as attested by his behavior, bearing and willingness to be literally worshiped. He signed off on Himmler’s plan to create a Nazi state religion, with Der Fuhrer as its god. Finally, in defeat, his assertions that the German people had failed him, that they had not deserved him, and that they deserved instead to have their buildings, roads, tunnels, bridges and so on destroyed, illustrate his egomania.

By the end of WWII, he was a physical wreck. He was emotionally deranged, hopped up on pills and weird supplements provided by his own personal Dr. Feelgood, and stressed beyond belief, but not, I don’t think, insane.

Most of his decision-making, even when evil, even when poor, even when romantic rather than practical, was rational. Adolf Hitler is most properly understood not as an evil madman, but as a politician. As an ultranationalist who cared about his great destiny, the fate of the German people and nothing else. To dismiss this dire warning from history as the aberrations of a madman is to lay ourselves open to the next ultranationalist. To the next Fuhrer.

Where did Hitler get his cash?

I do not know. I would like to know. It would be illuminating to follow the money.

Most of his personal wealth seems to have come from book sales. He also benefited from state expenditures into such things as construction of barracks for his security at the Berghof, his mountain retreat. Like Goering, he benefited from stolen art, with a view toward creating a grand art museum in his hometown. Like Himmler, though, he seemed to have been averse to dipping directly into the state coffers. Most dictators are not so shy.

Who funded the rise of the Nazi party? I do not know, but it seems that he got some seed money from national and international financiers, including, sadly, Henry Ford. While this seed money may have been enough to kick-start the party, it certainly wasn’t enough to fund the German economic miracle: to build the autobahn and the factories and to raise an illegal army, navy and air force. Apparently, these big bucks came from three sources: bonds, loans from the banks and industrialists and the looting of national treasuries. The Nazis were bank robbers. They stole Austria’s gold, for example, on the first day of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. (The French managed to smuggle out their central bank’s gold after Paris fell. London moved a lot of their gold to Canada, just in case the Nazis did take the island.) These loans and bonds coming due may have been one reason to pre-maturely invade the east. (Other reasons: He felt that his time on Earth was limited and his destiny must be fulfilled. He suspected that he would surprise Stalin, which he did. All his gambles to date had paid off big. Also, the mountains inspired him to dare.) Hitler had bills to pay. Robbing more treasuries and seizing oil fields and vast expanses of land, as well as tens of millions of slaves, may have seemed a better option than going broke, mid-war.

Wrong, Herr Fuhrer. A romantic thinker, not a practical thinker, Hitler fatally underestimated the resilience of the Red Army, crippled but not killed by Stalin’s purges; the size of their reserves; the patriotism of the heroic Russian people; the sheer size of the theater (maps of the scale that you can spread on a table are lies); and the acumen of Stalin, who became an expert logistician, but, unlike Hitler, was disciplined enough to allow professionals like Zhukov to make military decisions . . . at least, on many important occasions.

Once again, the American people wanted to stay out of yet another European war. In response to the question, "Should we send our Army and Navy abroad to fight against Germany?" in a Gallup poll during the first week of September 1939, 84% of respondents said no.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was re-elected by this peace-oriented voting public, after having promised that he would keep our boys at home. During his re-election campaign of 1940, he said:

"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

FDR felt sympathy for the English people, but he was a democrat and an anti-imperialist. He was not a fan of empires, including the British Empire. Nor, even, the American empire. Of the Philippines, he wrote:

"Over a third of a century ago the United States . . . acquired sovereignty over the Philippine Islands . . . Our Nation covets no territory; it desires to hold no people against their will over whom it has gained sovereignty through war."

"A Promise Fulfilled - The First Step toward Independence for the Philippine Islands," Franklin Delano Roosevelt, message to Congress, March 2, 1934. bit.ly/2v96Ug0

Roosevelt wanted to save the English people from Nazi tyranny, but he was not motivated to preserve the British Empire. He knew the American people did not want to fight in another European war, but he steered the nation away from true neutrality. The cash-strapped British could not afford to buy all of the weapons and supplies that they needed. Roosevelt started a program of “lending” and “leasing” arms and supplies.

Roosevelt leaned into WWII. He met with Winston Churchill and issued “the Atlantic charter,” a blueprint for a post-war world, in August 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. America demanded that Japan withdraw from China. We cut off Japan’s oil supplies in August 1941; America had supplied 80% of Japan’s oil.

FDR had moved the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in 1940. In Washington, the highest circles of government were aware that an attack on the fleet was likely. Ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, wrote in his diary:

"[Roosevelt] brought up the event that we are likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

The Pacific Fleet itself, however, was not made ready for combat. Pearl Harbor is a constricted bay. Many of our battleships were moored abreast, so that getting underway was time-consuming. Given the diplomatic and political situation between America and Japan in December 1941, the fleet should have been deployed in a defensive cordon around the Hawaiian Islands. Sailors belong on ships. Ships belong at sea.

Whether or not any organization in Hawaii or Washington D.C. had certain foreknowledge of the Japanese attack – through an intercept of a naval communication, for example – given the political and diplomatic relations between America and Japan, the culpability of leaving the fleet defenseless, in harbor, extends from FDR down through the Secretary of War, the Chief of Naval Operations down to the Pacific Fleet commander. After the attack, only the Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Kimmel, was held responsible. He was demoted to two-stars and retired in early 1942.

Hitler did not have to declare war on America. He did so anyway on 11 December 1941. I believe that he simply thought that there was no use pretending anymore that the Americans were not allied with the British. A more cautious leader would have bit his tongue, hoping that the Americans and the British would fight the Japanese in the Pacific, while the Germans fought the British and the Russians in Europe. Not Hitler, though. He was impulsive. Now the world was truly at war.

I was proud to serve three years on the Pacific Fleet staff. In the same building that was the headquarters of Admiral Nimitz. I used to bike to work, some days, along the harbor and past the USS Arizona. I find it hard to believe that any naval officer would participate in a scheme to sacrifice the fleet to get the nation into war. I have no problem believing, however, that there was a serious disconnect between DC and Hawaii and that the admirals and captains in Hawaii who should have known better were arrogant enough to believe that the “Japs” would not dare to attack the mighty American fleet. At least not that Sunday.

This was a lack of respect for the enemy.

Money is many things. It is a medium of exchange. It is a symbol of value, be it intrinsic or illusory. Money is also a command signal that regulates human behavior. Now the war was on. Money that had previously languished, perhaps in secret reservoirs, came charging into the economy. It placed high value of converting shuttered or peacetime industries into war industries; iron ore into warships; aluminum ore into bombers; farmers and bums into soldiers; housewives into riveters. The war ended the Great Depression. If money had ever commanded us to build schools, hospitals, housing, universities, bridges, dams, canals and so on with the same intensity and insistence that it commanded us to mobilize for and fight WWII, we would live in an America that was unimaginably prosperous, an Atlantis, a continent-spanning Emerald City.

Be that as it may, by the time of our victory over Japan, the USA, and Russia, for that matter, had mobilized and geared up to absolutely fantastic levels of war production. By the time that the Royal Navy was disencumbered enough to report for duty to Admiral Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet was so colossal that the entire Royal Navy was a mere supernumerary flotilla. By the time that we sailed into Tokyo Bay, our warships were so numerous that they covered the entire bay and their power spanned the mighty Pacific Ocean.

During the war, the Russians produced over 120,000 military aircraft, over 110,000 tanks and over 500,000 pieces of artillery.

The British owed us money. India demanded its long-delayed independence. The British Empire, so beloved by Churchill, became a mere commonwealth.

Within four years, the formerly isolationist Americans became the leaders of a de facto global empire. We can say that the Allies won the war, but the truer statement is that the Americans and the Soviets won, while the British survived.

How honorably did we fight?

Ask Curtis LeMay, who fire-bombed Tokyo: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."

War coarsens. We began as isolationists. We ended by fire-bombing Dresden and Tokyo and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These atrocities are often justified in the context of estimates of over one million American casualties, if Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan, had been necessary.

War coarsens. We Americans became a people who could do such things, and, using this moral calculus, absolve ourselves of our crimes.

 The Korean War

During the Korean War, my father was of service age. Following his father’s advice, he joined the United States Navy. He became a Yeoman First Class – Submarine Service (YN1-SS). He served in diesel boats such as USS Grenadier (SS-525), in and under the Atlantic, while war raged on the farside of the world.

When he spoke of this, he may have been somewhat wistful, even, perhaps, abashed, which was not a characteristic mood of my bluff, self-confident father. He mainly spoke of it, though, as if he had chosen wisely.

He did. The Korean War was a nightmare. South Korean and United Nations troops faced North Korean and Chinese forces, supported by Russian arms. The Chinese conducted successive “short wave” attacks to penetrate enemy lines and then attack from the rear. The American bombardment of North Korea hardly left any significant buildings standing. Combat conditions were horrific, especially in the winter. The fighting was intense, bloody and ultimately inconclusive.

For the Korean War is not over, not even today, sixty-seven years after the armistice of 27 July 1953. There has never been a peace treaty. North of the Demilitarized Zone, the entire state of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) is a military machine, poised to launch annihilation on the truly democratic republic of South Korea. Their capital, Seoul, a metropolis of almost 10 million people, lies within 25 kilometers of the enemy. For the past seven decades, tens of thousands of American troops have been stationed in Korea to deter aggression, or, if deterrence fails, to serve as a tripwire for further American military involvement.

The Korean war kick-started Japan’s economic resurgence. War orders for jeeps, trucks and other necessities helped to finance the rebuilding of their manufacturing infrastructure. When I was a boy in the 1960s, “Made in Japan” was a joke, although people did admit that they made good cameras, and, did you know, good motorcycles? Cheap, too. By the 1980s, powerful collaborations been government and industry selectively targeted and destroyed or devastated segment after segment of American manufacture. Radios, then television. Motorcycles, then economy cars, then trucks, then sedans, then luxury sedans. Ever beautifully precise, the Japanese adopted William Deming’s principles, especially the quest for constant improvement of quality and efficiency. A combination of government-financed product dumping and simple outperformance, delivering superior products at prices that were impossible or difficult to compete with, put great pressure on American businesses. A second wave of assault by Chinese products of lower quality but even cheaper prices has led to the demise of American firms across many manufacturing sectors, such as Pontiac and Packard and Oldsmobile, Magnavox and Sylvania, Bethlehem Steel and Goodrich. If business is war, then the Book of Five Rings is worth a read.

Perhaps Korea is our next war, too. In any case, the regime of Pyongyang merits study. As William Gibson has said, the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. If you want to see what an Orwellian nightmare looks like in real life, study North Korea today. The individual has been totally subjugated by the state. WrongThink is punished by imprisonment and torture. Hundreds of thousands live in labor and political re-education camps. Under the “3 generations of punishment” policy, children and grandchildren can be punished for the “crimes” of their ancestor. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of North Koreans have starved, while the Kings of the state, now in their third generation, live in opulence. If you want to know why I hate royalty, look no further than the colossal, gilded status of Kim Jong-il and his father, as Lilliputian, brain-washed minions bow before them.

This is the future of the world, unless freedom prevails.

 The Vietnam War

Here are through the looking glass. We find ourselves on the farside of a reality that makes sense, using reason and conventional wisdom and what we have been taught. The Vietnam War and the state of America in 2021 A.D. and all of the turmoil and heartache and violence in between make no sense, unless we understand the events of 22 November 1963.

Unless we come to terms with who killed President John F. Kennedy, and why, and how that murder changed our nation, changed the power structure that rules us and changed the nature of the reality in which we now live.

We must peer at the barrier itself. We must study the dark glass. We must turn our most critical eye to the horror and contemplate all possibilities, even that of almost unimaginable treason.

 The Assassination of JFK

I was eight years old, sick at home with a cold. When I woke up from a nap, the house was silent. I went looking for my mother. Finally, through the dining room windows I saw her in the front yard, raking leaves.

This was strange. My mother didn’t rake leaves.

Walking up to her, I could tell from her tense movements and expression that something was wrong.

“Mom, what is it?”

She hesitated, then said, “Someone shot the President. He’s dead.”

My family took the death of JFK particularly hard. My father identified with the young, handsome, virile, Irish American president and my mother identified with his beautiful, elegant and supportive wife. Their archetypes had been destroyed.

My mother didn’t want us children to watch the news on TV. My father overruled her, saying that it was our history and that we should not miss it. So we were watching on Sunday. We watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV.

We were watching on Monday, as the drums pounded incessantly and a three-year-old boy saluted his dead father.

Over the years, I have studied the events of 22 November 1963 sporadically, ignoring the issue for years on end, then diving, each time more deeply into its details, then setting it aside for some more years. I had a life to live, after all. For many years, I was content to accept the official explanation, the findings of the Warren Commission: Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) was a lone gunman. There was no conspiracy. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate, let alone accept.

It was only beginning in 2013 A.D., twice retired, that I had the time available to spend months on end studying the events in Dealy Plaza, the Parkland Hospital and the Bethesda Naval Hospital, in depth, item-by-item, which the subject requires. As anyone who studies the assassination with this intensity must conclude, practically every bit of evidence is suspect, compromised, the subject of negligent handling at best or a criminal cover-up at worst. (I will sketch the tortured evidence in a passage below.)

There is one theory that covers both a lone nut gunman and a criminal conspiracy to doctor the evidence: LHO did act alone, but the state doctored the evidence in order to avoid nuclear Armageddon. We were in the Cold War: a nuclear power confrontation with the Soviet Union. Oswald was an avowed communist and a defector to the USSR with a Russian wife. Such a man murdering the American president could have triggered World War III. Because of this, it is possible that the government, in a panic, tried to sanitize the evidence. This is a tortuous theory, but still within the realm of possibility.

More than three bullets fired, however, mean more than one gunman. More than one gunman means a homicidal conspiracy before the fact. If there was a homicidal conspiracy before the fact and a criminal conspiracy to doctor the evidence after the fact, I believe that the only reasonable conclusion is that the state, or elements of the state, was guilty of the murder of the president. Only the state had the means to doctor the evidence. Not the Russians, not the Mafia, not the Cubans. A criminal conspiracy before the fact and a criminal conspiracy immediately after the fact point to a single conspiracy. If there were more than three bullets fired, elements of the state killed Kennedy.

Within the 6 seconds between the first shot and the killshot, LHO had time to work the bolt action of his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, aim and fire, three times. Three shells were found in the sniper’s nest in the Texas Schoolbook Depository (TSBD). A fourth shot means a second gunman. A second gunman means a homicidal conspiracy.

The first shot, fired from the sixth floor of the TSBD (or, possibly, the adjacent Dal-Tex building) ricocheted either from a branch or part of a street signal and hit the curb near the Triple Overpass, with fragments wounding James Tague in his cheek.

The second shot was the magic bullet. According to the Warren Commission, LHO fired it from the TSBD and it struck JFK in his upper back, exited his throat, then struck Governor John Connally in his back, exited his chest below the right nipple, then shattered his right wrist and penetrated his left thigh, then fell out.

The third shot was the killshot. Officially, LHO fired it from the TSBD and it hit JFK high on the right of his skull, tore the skull open and exited near the hairline of the right temple.

The key to the mystery of Dealy Plaza are the wounds of John Connally. If you will take the time and effort to model the shots described above, measuring their angles, both in the horizontal and the vertical, and then register these shots against the known sequence of events, evidenced as such in the Zapruder film, then you yourself can prove that there were more than three shots.

Yes, it is true that the official trajectory of the magic bullet can indeed be lined up with all of the wounds in JFK and John Connally, as shown in the diagram below:

Here is the key point, though: John Connally was not sitting in that position when the president was shot. He was wounded after JFK had been shot in the throat. At Zapruder frame Z-225, the limo emerges from behind the Stemmons highway sign. JFK has already been shot. He is grimacing in pain and raising his arms in a defensive gesture toward his throat. Governor John Connally is still seated squarely in his jump seat, looking forward. His back, chest, right wrist and left leg are not yet positioned in a line to receive his wounds. He does not begin to turn to his right until Z-236. I believe that he received his gunshot wounds at Z-244 or Z-245, as he is turning around. This is the moment that his mouth forms an “O” as if he is shouting in pain.

This agrees with his own testimony. In a 27 November 1963 interview from his bed in Parkland Hospital, he said, “And then we had just turned the corner. We heard a shot. I turned to my left. I was sitting in the jump seat. I turned to my left to look in the back seat. The president had slumped. He said nothing. Almost simultaneously, as I turned, I was hit. And I knew I had been hit badly. And I said, I knew the president had been hit and I said, ‘My god they’re going to kill us all.’” (JC did not turn to his left, but rather to his right. When he heard the first shot, he might have turned his head briefly to the left, but when he turned around to see what was going on, it was to his right. Other than that simple mistake, confusing his left with his right, I believe that JC's bed-bound testimony was accurate.)

The single bullet theory works in space, but it does not work in time. Yes, JFK’s throat wound and Connally’s wounds can be made to line up, but an analysis of Connally’s wound locations and his body position in the limo, his own testimony, and the evidence of the Zapruder film indicate that he was wounded after JFK was shot in the throat. In fact, he was wounded while he was reacting to the sound of the first shot that hit JFK.

Therefore, JFK’s throat wound and John Connally’s wounds were caused by two different bullets.

Four shots mean two shooters.

At least four shots, that is. At least two shooters. Because there was evidence for more than four shots. Four is merely the largest number that we can prove, given the evidence above.

A possible fifth shot was fired from behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll. Witnesses heard it. Some reported gun smoke. There is at least one photograph showing smoke drifting from the picket fence. The wind was blowing from the Triple Overpass. Witnesses in the motorcade reported smelling gunpowder. If the wind was in their faces and the shooter was behind them, how could they smell gunpowder? Ed Hoffman, the deaf-mute witness, attested that he saw a shooter behind the picket fence. Yet I don’t believe that this shot hit JFK. It did not cause the head wound. The trajectory would have caused massive damage to the left side of his head, never reported, and then hit or at least spattered Jacqueline Kennedy’s head.

The testimony of a score of the doctors, nurses and by-standers in the Parkland Hospital attest that JFK had a massive exit wound in the back right-side of the skull. Some of the X-rays and photographs of the autopsy suggest a cover-up of such a head wound. Given such a rear exit wound, the killshot would not have come from the grassy knoll. This angle supports a shot either from the Triple Overpass itself or a part of the picket fence much closer to the Triple Overpass.

There was evidence for other shots. There was a “through-and-through” bullet-hole in the limousine’s windshield, according to Evalea Glanges, who saw the limousine outside of Parkland. She was a medical student, later a doctor, who was familiar with firearms from girlhood. A shell was later found atop the County Records building. Eyewitnesses reported hearing many shots. And so on . . .

Four shots, however, are sufficient to conclude that there were at least two shooters and thus, a homicidal conspiracy.

What indications do we have the state doctored evidence and perpetuated a cover-up?

Well, for an example, you can take practically every bit of surviving evidence and examine its provenance and integrity. You will find indications of a cover-up, at times relatively sophisticated, at times ham-fisted. I’ll sketch some of the more salient indications of a cover-up below.

The limo was a crime scene. Within an hour, a Secret Service agent was swabbing it down. On Monday, 25 November 1963, George Whitaker, Sr., a senior Ford company manager, saw the limousine in the Rouge Plant, Detroit, Michigan, where his workers replaced the original windshield, which had “a good, clean bullet hole, right straight through, from the front.”

The Zapruder film, a priceless piece of evidence, was sold (SOLD!) to Time-Life, whose editor-in-chief was Henry Luce, a Yale graduate and a Skull and Bones member with long-standing ties to the CIA. It was kept from public view for more than a decade. With regard to the controversy about whether or not the surviving versions of the film were doctored, I believe they were. I am convinced by the testimony of Dino Brugioni, who was a senior imagery interpreter at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). Burgioni attests that he saw the original film that weekend. It portrayed a pattern of spatter from JFK’s head that was significantly different from the surviving versions. In any case, it is indisputable that the chain of custody for this priceless piece of evidence was not proper.

The tampering of the medical evidence was ham-fisted. JFK’s body should never have left Dallas before a local autopsy was performed. Secret Service agents forcibly removed the body before this happened. This violated Texas law. The discrepancies between the testimony of witnesses at Parkland and the documents from Bethesda about the nature of JFK’s head wound are significant. The naval doctors who performed the autopsy lacked the credentials and experience to perform such an important autopsy. The autopsy was performed under suspicious circumstances, with admirals, FBI and secret service agents interfering with a deliberate, scientific procedure. The doctor destroyed his original notes, then drafted his report at home, before submitting a version that was acceptable. Other highly suspect goings-on at Bethesda – including a discrepancy about what sort of casket JFK’s body arrived in – bear further study. The analyses of Doug Horne of the Assassination Records Review Board are highly recommended. If the mysteries of Dealy Plaza have not convinced you of a government cover-up, study Bethesda. Bethesda reeks of tampering.

Where are the notes of the interrogations of LHO by the Dallas police?

Where are the documents missing from the CIA’s and the FBI’s LHO case files?

Why was an LHO palm print discovered on the Mannlicher-Carcano only after two FBI agents were allowed access to his body in the funeral home?

Where in the FBI’s archives is the fingerprint that was independently identified as that of Malcolm Wallace, a convicted murderer and known associate of LBJ?

Why do witnesses have such differing reports about the state of JFK’s brain?

Why was the killer killed? How did the killer’s killer just walk into Dallas Police Department?

Why was Jack Ruby never moved to DC, as he requested, so he could speak with confidence? The killer’s killer himself said, “The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives . . . the people had, that had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world."

If any of these events had taken place in La Paz or in Bogotá, those of us who are Americans would have no problem whatsoever concluding that what happened on 22 November 1963 was a coup d’état.

Un golpe de estado.

This is something that I have professional experience in analyzing. As an intelligence analyst at the United States Southern Command between 1982 and 1985, I had a front-row seat not only for multiple actual coups, but for several aborted coups.

So I bring this background to the question, do you really believe that it is possible that oilmen, LBJ, Herbert Hoover, the CIA, the Army, the mob, the FBI and the Secret Service all conspired together to kill Kennedy?

Yes, I do.

I am not naive enough, however, to think that there was a single decision-making meeting between all of these parties, where organizational chiefs voted yea or nay. That is not how a coup conspiracy works.

A coup conspiracy begins with late-night drinking sessions among men who trust one another. Their grousing about “that f**king guy” leads to “somebody’s got to do something.” Then, like a cancer, a coup conspiracy grows.

There are fourteen stations of the cross. A coup conspiracy works like that. Each station must be visited in turn, although not necessarily in the same order every time. In Latin America of that day, for example, one of the stations of the cross was the commander of the armored battalion or regiment stationed in the capital. Everyone knew that he was a kingmaker. You can’t pull off a coup against el presidente unless the commander of the capital city armored unit was on board. Would-be coupists would have to recruit him, or, at least, get some indication that he would not interfere. So, at the right juncture, someone he trusts would have to have a quiet talk with him.

So it was with the chief of the air force. On coup day, strafing jets could really rattle people’s nerves. You wanted to convey the impression that the coup was a done deal. Taking fire from the air worked against that. So, one night, someone would have a talk with the air force chief.

Another station of the cross was the United States ambassador, or, at least, someone of high rank in the embassy. The conspiracy develops through explicit or even implicit indications that the stakeholder will support, or at least not oppose, the coup. It was vital to get a nod or a wink from the representative of the Colossus of the North. A famous example of this comes from another theater. Eight days before he invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein met with the American ambassador, April Glaspie, who said, “We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts.” A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. That’s all a conspirator needs.

The conspiracy does not have to follow the formal chain of command. Long-standing, deeply confidant relationships count for far more than any organizational chart. In this regard, the role of Allen Dulles is key. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK accepted his resignation as the director of central intelligence. Out of office, however, Dulles did not automatically lose all of his influence. He had been the DCI for eight years. His clandestine work dated back to WWII. He had many personal and professional relationships with people who remained within the Agency after his departure. The weekend of 24 and 25 November 1963, it is said that he worked out of the secret CIA facility in southern Virginia known as “the Farm,” which would have made as good a command post as any for directing a cover-up.

Logistics are involved. A coup needs operating funds. For bribes. For weapons. For hiring gunmen. Texas oil millionaires resented Kennedy’s cut-off of petroleum subsidies. Important mafia bosses resented and hated the Kennedys. Finding a sponsor with pockets deep enough to finance a hit, whether the hit took place in Miami, Chicago or Dallas, would be one of the stations of the cross.

The military? JFK had rocky relationships with much of the Pentagon brass of his day. Many thought that he was dangerously soft on communism. Four-star generals and admirals are not necessarily impressed by the strategic decision-making of a rich man’s son, whose war record’s highlight was allowing his patrol boat to be run over. On 11 October 1963, forty-two days before his death, the White House issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 263, in which JFK approved of several recommendations, including:

A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.

-- Memorandum from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor) and the Secretary of Defense (McNamara) to the President, Washington, 2 October 1963.

The Fed? JFK had issued the government’s own money, a silver-backed, genuinely federal currency, a direct challenge to the central bankers.

The mob? At the request of JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, the mob delivered the votes in Chicago needed to win the 1960 election. Then, once in power, the Kennedy brothers stabbed them in the chest. As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy was threatening to destroy them personally and to bring down the entire underground economy, that is, to destroy the mob. The Kennedys humiliated New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcelo by deporting him to Guatemala.

The CIA? They had tried to ensnare JFK into an invasion of Cuba. The CIA-trained 2506 Brigade was too large for a clandestine insertion and too small for a successful amphibious assault. As Castro’s army was tearing them up on the beach, JFK refused to call in US airstrikes, as CIA planners expected him to be forced to do. In the wake of the disaster, JFK accepted the resignations of Allen Dulles and his deputy. He probably had come to the same realization that former President Truman had come to, twenty years too late:

Merle Miller: Mr. President, I know that you were responsible as President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now?

Truman: I think it was a mistake. And if I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have done it . . . Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become . . . it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody.”

-- "Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman," Merle Miller, Berkley Publishing Corp, New York, 1974, pg. 391-92.

LBJ? He and Robert Kennedy loathed each other. Not only was he probably going to be dropped from the ticket in the 1964 election, but several investigations into his corrupt practices, such as the Senate investigation of Bobby Baker, were threatening to remove him from power, possibly even land him in jail. (Baker, a protégé and errand boy of LBJ’s, did spend 18 months in jail on tax evasion charges.) After the death of JFK, investigations into LBJ’s corruption were stopped. LBJ did not have to mastermind the assassination. Either a nod or a wink would do. Before the shots rang out, he was bent far down in the vice-presidential limo, fiddling with a radio knob, or so he claimed.

Hoover? He loathed the Kennedys. He was corrupt. After years of denying that the mafia even existed, the top cop in America was more interested in gathering dirt on political enemies than fighting the corruption that he himself was party to. For example, he and his companion, Clyde Tolson, enjoyed annual free holidays at the Hotel del Charro, La Jolla, California, a swanky get-away said to be owned by Texas millionaire Clint Murchison, who was also a patron of LBJ. The day after the political murder of the century (perhaps after that of Franz Ferdinand), Hoover did what he did every Saturday. He went to the racetrack with Tolson.

Yes, the Russians and Castro had good reasons to want to see JFK dead. He had humiliated Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedys were waging their own campaign to assassinate Castro. I don’t believe that either the Russians or the Cubans, however, were behind the conspiracy to assassinate the president. That is because of my assessment of the identity of LHO.

Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?

I believe that he was whom he claimed to be. He was a patsy.

LHO was an outcast. As a youth, he did have genuine leanings toward communism. Most importantly, however, he was a pathetic individual with a narcissistic streak of grandeur. As a young Marine, he read, “Das Kapital” in the barracks. In the late 1950s, Marines did not read “Das Kapital” in the barracks. I doubt that they do so today. That he was not beaten up on a nightly basis is an indication that he was already being groomed either by the CIA or by naval intelligence as an infiltrator. Both intelligence services had programs for trying to sneak double agents into the Soviet Union, as well they should have had.

When he did defect to the Soviet Union in 1959, the KGB wasn’t having it. They turned him away. He made a pathetic suicide gesture. Still unconvinced, but perhaps thinking that the death of an American on their hands was more trouble than he was worth, the Russians shipped him off to a radio factory in Minsk. A niece of a military intelligence officer was dispatched to keep tabs on him. He ended up marrying her. After two-and-a-half years of unsuccessful infiltration, he and his Russian bride returned to America.

He became friends with an anti-communist, White Russian expatriate petroleum engineer George de Mohrenschildt. You know, the way communist defectors do. When in 1977 de Mohrenschildt died on gunshot wounds to the head, he had the following entry in his old address book:

BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM MIDLAND.

In 1976, de Mohrenschildt wrote to H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, seeking relief from elements, including the FBI, that he believed were persecuting him. H.W. Bush replied to his request for help, saying “my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years.”

George de Mohrenschildt was one of LHO’s handlers, I believe. I also believe that the criminals who conspired to murder JFK tried to burnish LHO’s communist credentials by “sheep dipping” him in public “Free Cuba” agitation, as well as with a strange trip in September 1963 to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City.

Where was LHO when the shots rang out? I do not know. Perhaps he was up on the sixth floor and managed to get down without anyone seeing him. Perhaps he was standing in the entrance of the TBSD, where he (or someone who looked like him) was photographed. I believe the latter. I believe he turned around, walked into the break room, got himself a Coke, and about that time, he realized that whatever the conspirators had told him about his role in the events of the day was a lie. That is when he decided to go back to his room and get his pistol.

I have no idea who shot Officer Tippet or why. The reports by eyewitnesses and the surviving evidence are too contradictory. It may have been LHO. It may have been someone else involved in the conspiracy. The only thing of which I’m certain about the death of Officer Tippet is that it was not a well-managed case. I can’t swear for the standard of professionalism of the Dallas Police Department in the early 1960s, but it seems strange to me that any police department would do such a poor job of investigating the on-duty murder of one of their own.

Over a thousand books have been written about JFK’s murder. Just reading the 26 volumes of the Warren Report takes months. You could devote several lifetimes to playing the armchair detective. Still, you might prove nothing, at least, nothing that would convince people who are determined to believe the official story. Before you despair, however, keep in mind a few ideas about the nature of deception.

Two Russian words that I learned during my active duty were maskirovka and dezinformatsiya: that is, deception and disinformation. The Russians practiced it. So did we. As Winston Churchill once said:

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

-- "Eureka Summit: Agreement in Principle and the Big Three at Tehran," Paul D. Mayle, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1987.

As we citizen-investigators, we “researchers,” we arm-chair detectives, puzzle through the mountains of weird, contradictory evidence, as we confront bizarre characters and situations that stagger the imagination, such as David Ferrie, we need to remind ourselves that not only is life weird, but when we do bump up against a real conspiracy, sometimes we’re dealing with people who delight in diabolic complexity, in deception, in “operational sickness.” They enjoy a red herring. A double or triple agent is fun for them. They enjoy thinking how much cleverer they are than ordinary people.

So, peer at the puzzle long enough for some of these weird details to fade into the obscurity they deserve and for the overall pattern to merge into the big picture.

Elements of the CIA killed JFK.

With the connivance of LBJ and Herbert Hoover and those elements of the federal and local security forces that were necessary to accomplish the public execution of the president and its sloppy, ham-fisted but effective cover-up.

Why should young people care, any more than we care about who killed Lincoln?

Because this great crime has gone unpunished. They got away with it. That escape from justice, as we will see in later essays, has only encouraged this renegade, rogue and criminal behavior. We have an untamed CIA. We have loose reins, or none at all, on the anti-democratic elements of the American power structure. This does not bode well for survival of the republic nor for the freedom and happiness of the American people. Nor for the freedom and happiness of all of the world’s peoples.

So, yes, you should care about who killed JFK. Not for his sake. Not even for your own.

You should care for the sake of your children and your grandchildren.

 Our Wars X – The Vietnam War (continued)

With Kennedy dead and LBJ raised to power, the colossal American military establishment was loosed to plunge deeper and deeper into the morass. The bloody war in bloody Vietnam. This we did until we had half a million troops in country. This we did until 58,000 American soldiers died. This we did until hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died, their death tolls, civilian and military, during the long war, totaling to over three million, according to Hanoi. This we did until we dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than we ever did on the Axis powers. Ultimately, we lost. Today, communists in Hanoi rule all of Vietnam.

Why did we fight? Why did we lose?

We need and deserve the testimony of the Vietnam veterans. They returned home, though, to be shunned by much of the American public, their service despised. Yet, if you care about the nature of war, there is even today a vast reservoir of testimony available, crowding the halls of the VA hospitals and gathered in posts of the VFW and the American Legion. We should listen to them, especially those who suffered wounds in the line of duty. As in all wars, the most valuable testimony can only come from the dead.

I served from 1979 to 1999. From 2000 to 2012, I worked as a defense contractor. For 32 years, almost without exception, my supervisors were Vietnam veterans. I thought that would outlast them, but, in the end, they outlasted me. When I retired the second time, my last boss was a Vietnam veteran.

I was 13 in 1968, 15 in 1970. As I approached draft age, the controversy raging at home over the war grew less and less academic. My brother, Bill, is two years older than me, so the destiny of the first-born son was even more fraught with anxiety. My father was a Nixonian Republican, but as Bill neared draft age, it was apparent to my father that Nixon was dragging out the war for political purposes, for “peace with honor,” which was a dog whistle for an American withdrawal with a “decent interval” before the south collapsed. My father may have been willing to sacrifice his boys on the altar of liberty, but he’d be damned if he would do so for Nixon’s decent interval. He told us as much. He told us that rather than see us drafted, he would send us to Canada. This surprised us. I also felt relieved and touched by this evidence of paternal care.

I worried, though, whether I myself could in all good conscience avoid the draft. Military service was respected and honored in my mother culture, the culture of 1950s and 1960s Pennsylvania. I only learned my grandfather’s views years later and then only second-hand. My father died more vocally proud of his naval service than any of his other accomplishments, which were considerable. I and all early boomers grew up on a steady diet of WWII propaganda films. All of the old men in the neighborhood were Civil War buffs. “Army” was my favorite boyhood game. I loved “Combat!”, “Rat Patrol” and Sgt. Rock. Even my morally ambiguous hero, Bogie, fought the good fight. Now that it was my turn to stand in the line, could I really just run away?

Then, in 1971, when I was 16, the Pentagon Papers were published. A speed-reading logomaniac, I read the paperback edition cover-to-cover. This is no way to study a library of leaked secret technical studies and diplomatic and military cables and memos, but I certainly got the gist of it. As I finished the last page, I felt a deep feeling of relief. I could avoid the draft in all good conscience.

The Vietnam war was a lie. The Pentagon papers proved that the federal government was lying to us about the war in Vietnam.

That was my Red Pill moment. The moment that I realized that conventional reality, what we are taught, is an illusion and that the true underlying reality is vastly different, more complex and far uglier.

Besides the pro-war, public-diplomacy misstatements from the Pentagon and the White House, what about the war in Vietnam was a lie?

As Napoleon asserted, in warfare, the moral is to the physical as two is to one. The North Vietnamese wanted victory more than the South Vietnamese, the French, or the Americans wanted victory. If we had wanted victory as much as they wanted it, we would have invaded North Vietnam and fought the Chinese and the Russians if we had to. We didn’t. We didn’t want victory that badly. We wanted the North Vietnamese to stop fighting. We wanted the status quo. In a strange way, we didn’t want to win that particular war as much as we wanted to fight a war for the sake of exercising our military machine. For the sake of war profits. Our intent was tainted.

Our global strategy of containing communism was valid. We had a duty to oppose the communist take-over of South Vietnam, and, if that domino fell, all of southeast Asia. Yet, when you wrestle with the devil, it is vital to keep your feet under you. That is much easier, and perhaps only possible, if you fight on the moral high ground.

Who was our leader in the White House? LBJ. Even his supporters must admit that LBJ was a self-serving opportunist, a political manipulator and a bully. Given the assassination of JFK, I believe that LBJ was far worse than that. I believe that LBJ was a villain, a traitor and a murderer.

Who followed him? Nixon. A two-faced schemer. An imperial president who believed “that if the president does it, it isn’t illegal.”

Who was his National Security Advisor? Henry Kissinger. An un-American globalist. A strategic games-player. A self-appointed master of the universe. (Still up to his shady games, even in 2021 A.D.; at the age of 98, he heads “Kissinger and Associates, Inc.,” an international consulting firm.)

All three of these men were war criminals. They committed war crimes. The saturation bombing of cities such as Hanoi and Haiphong. The illegal extension of the war into Laos and Cambodia. Sanctioning Latin American-style death squads under the Phoenix Program. Condoning the murder and torture of prisoners.

Who was our ally? The CIA backed the coup of November 1963 that resulted in the deposing and assassination of Ngô ?ình Di?m. Rather than fostering the same respect for constitutional authority that is the king-post of the American military culture, we encouraged murderous and naked power grabbing. So that’s what we got. Murderous and naked power grabbing, until the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.

Did we respect the Vietnamese people? Did we respect their history and culture? Did we respect the nationalist sentiment of a people who rebelled against colonial rule?

No.

Better military minds than mine have emphasized the importance of respect. Read the Tao te Ching, The Book of Five Rings, the Art of War and On War. Lao Tse, Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi and Carl von Clausewitz will all caution you about the importance of knowing and respecting the enemy, as well as knowing and respecting the terrain and the conditions of the battlefield. Victory is not guaranteed through the application of brute, blind and massive force. That is how we lost our war in Vietnam.

Regarding counterinsurgency, my understanding of it has been formed through my experience and my reading, but, to a large degree, by the strategic thinking of two friends of mine, who were the lead analysts in USSOUTHCOM’s El Salvador Analysis Cell when El Salvador was the best country to have. These two brilliant young officers were selected to be Director of Central Intelligence Exceptional Analysts. The following strategic thinking, I believe, is harmonious with their thoughts. I submit these ideas in the hopes that they might someday do someone some good:

Insurgency, like terrorism, is perpetual. You should not hope to defeat it by eliminating it. You should instead try to knock it down to as low a level as possible, and, through the growth of liberty and prosperity, make it increasingly irrelevant. You do this by:

1) Maintaining military pressure on the insurgents. Military pressure should be strong enough to make it as difficult as possible to continue to decide to stay in the field. It should discourage recruitment of new rebels.

2) Address the basic needs of the poor for food, useful work and security.

3) Carefully consider the political objectives of the insurgents. Agree to those that are legitimate. Accommodate those that are tolerable. Oppose only those that are intolerable.

4) Learn and respect the culture, language and the ways of the people involved. Build alliances. Carefully build up detailed databases on all stakeholders, especially on the enemy and potential collaborators.

5) Create and maintain a path for peace, such as a program of demilitarization of the insurgents, which, unfortunately but necessarily, may include accepting their conversion into a legitimate political party.

These strategies are your best hope. They presume that you occupy a moral high ground. In Vietnam, we were blind to any legitimacy of the insurgency. We were heel-and-toe with the French colonialists. In fact, the bagman for the 1963 coup, Lucien Emile Conein, was a French citizen before he was an American citizen. We were oblivious to decades of anti-colonial struggle. Our attitude toward the Vietnamese people, culture and history was corrupted by the racism that had formed our military struggles in the Philippines and, in fact, the Indian wars. We called them, “gooks.” That they seemed to us barely out of the bronze age blinded us to the fact that they were the inheritors of a deep, beautiful, rich and wise culture.

We did not know nor did we respect the Vietnamese, whether enemy or ally. This is not a problem that you can solve by dropping millions of tons of bombs. Helicopters will not help.

Our war in Vietnam was wrong-headed and wrong-hearted.

We lost. People died. War industries prospered.

Elements of the CIA made money trafficking in drugs, using front companies such as Air America, a theme we shall see continued in later wars.

 The Attack on USS Liberty

On 8 June 1967, fighters from the Israeli Air Force and patrol boats from the Israeli Navy attacked USS Liberty (AGTR-5), without warning, in international waters. This attack lasted over an hour. The Israelis strafed lifeboats on deck and in the water. The attack killed 34 American sailors and wounded 173. The ship managed to stay afloat and limp to port in Malta.

Before the attack, Israeli reconnaissance aircrew identified the Liberty as a United States Navy ship. During the attack, the ship was flying either her standard American flag or an even larger flag called a “holiday ensign.” The Israelis claim that they were unaware of the ship’s nationality. This is a lie.

Under the direction of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), rescue jets that had launched from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean were directed to return to base, without helping the dying ship and her crew. Afterwards, US Navy admirals threatened survivors to keep their mouths shut for life or suffer imprisonment. The cover-up of the attack on USS Liberty continues to this day, 53 years later.

These are not merely the opinions of a retired commander. Read the findings of the Moorer commission, an independent investigative body comprised of four-star military officers, a staff judge advocate and an ambassador. ["A Report: War Crimes Committed against U.S. Military Personnel, June 8, 1967," USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc., Submitted to the Secretary of the Army, June 8, 2005. bit.ly/2uUmbRF]

Given the bizarre reaction by the LBJ White House and a cover-up that continues 53 years later, I believe that the attack on the Liberty was a failed false flag attack. In connivance with the LBJ White House, the Israelis hoped to sink the ship and kill the entire crew, then blame the Arabs, providing a pretext for direct American involvement in the war against their enemies.

That is why the cover-up continues half a century later. For much the same reasons that the cover-up of the murder of JFK continues to this day. There are those in power who seek not to govern us, but to rule us with ever-more brutal power and naked disdain.

 Watergate

Watergate is a cold case.

The file may have been closed, but I believe that we should open it up again. That’s because it was never fully investigated. Certainly, it was never properly prosecuted.

The reason it was never properly prosecuted was Tricky Dick’s last trick. His last trick was his greatest trick. It was a hell of a trick.

Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon was the 37th President of the United States. He was in trouble. Congress was about to impeach him for his involvement in felonies. Namely, a series of burglaries. His clandestine action unit, “the Plumbers,” a clutch of bozos who thought they were an elite team of political spies, had been arrested on 17 June 1972 while breaking into the national headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate hotel and office complex, Washington D.C. As the scandal unfolded and political pressure mounted, Nixon had tried to save himself by firing staff member after staff member. Like a surgeon trying to save himself from death by gangrene, he cut off his fingers, then his hand and then his arm. After he fired his own Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, he had no one left to blame. They were coming for him. There was no escape from justice.

A lesser man would have hung his head and accepted his doom. Not Tricky Dick, though. He had an ace up his sleeve. His Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had been committing felonies of his own. A product of the corrupt political machine of the state of Maryland, he had been accepting bribes ever since he was governor, even taking cash in paper bags in his offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and in the White House. He pled “Nolo contendere” (a Latin legal term which means, “If you say so”) to a single income tax evasion charge. On 10 October 1973, he resigned as Vice President.

Conveniently, this left a vacancy in the second highest office in the land. Nixon appointed a Republican Party loyalist, Gerald Ford, to be the new Vice President. Then he resigned. Ford became President. He used the presidential power of the pardon, right there in the Constitution: " . . . he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." Before Nixon was even charged with a crime, Ford gave him a complete pardon for any crime whatsoever he may have committed while president:

Now, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

-- President Gerald R. Ford’s Proclamation 4311, 8 September 1974

That’s a hell of a trick, Tricky Dick. You managed to use the Constitution to make yourself above the law.

What should have happened was that the Congress should have impeached Nixon anyway, then they should have hauled the entire case to the Supreme Court, pointing out the “except in cases of impeachment” clause, which has been right there on the parchment since it was inked by pens made out of goose plumes. If the Supreme Court upheld Tricky Dick’s pardon, then we should have had a constitutional convention to repair the now-painfully-obvious loophole in our foundational document.

But no, we all wandered off. I was 19 at the time. I remember thinking, yes, everyone is tired of all this scandal and drama. Let’s put the whole thing behind us. The bad man is gone now, anyway.

This was a huge mistake on the part of us the people and those who claimed to represent us. Nixon took a crap on the Resolute desk and he used the Constitution to wipe his ass. We the people and our elected representatives should not have allowed him to get away with it.

Why not?

Justice, surely. Agnew was allowed to get away with a “If you say so” plea to one count of tax evasion, when he should have been tried and convicted for bribery. The villain that he was, he should have been put behind bars. Nixon was forgiven for every crime he may have committed, when he should have been tried and convicted for felonious criminal conspiracy, perhaps even treason. The chief law enforcement officer in the land puts up his hand and swears to defend the constitution, but then he commits felonies with the intent of corrupting the electoral process. Maybe you could make a case of treason. Burglary, in any case. That’s a felony.

Other people, lesser people, we the people, get tried and fully prosecuted for our crimes. Every day. It usually doesn’t even make the news. Did we fight a revolution so that we could have an elite political class that is above the law?

No, I don’t think so. So, yes, justice is a good enough reason. There’s also a practical reason that Nixon should have been fully investigated and prosecuted. A reason that we should remember, the next time this happens.

To discover the truth.

What the hell were those burglars looking for?

Because we the people let the villain, Nixon, get off, we may never know the answer to that question.

In 1968, Nixon squeaked into office over Hubert Humphrey by about half a percentage point.

His opponent in the 1972 election was George McGovern, who was running a snake-bit campaign. After McGovern’s nomination, it became public knowledge that his running-mate, Thomas Eagleton, had received shock treatments for depression. McGovern announced that we would stand by his running mate, but three days later, he asked him to resign. People weren’t having it. By the time of the Watergate break-in, Nixon was running well ahead in the polls. He won by a landslide in November.

Why risk it?

Maybe Nixon was innocent. Let’s assume, however, that his denials were lies and that he knew full well what the Plumbers were up to.

What were they after? What was in the desk and safe of Larry O’brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? O’brien was an Irish American from Massachusetts. He was an ally of the Kennedys. He ran JFK’s successful 1952 and 1958 campaigns for United States Senator from Massachusetts. He directed JFK’s successful 1960 campaign for President in which JFK defeated Nixon. He advised JFK’s brother’s campaign for president, which was cut short when Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy on 6 June 1968. He was a definite “Them” to the Nixon White House.

What did Nixon himself say about this issue? Listen to what he said to his Chief of Staff, five days after the Watergate break-in:

Nixon: When you get in these people [the CIA] when you . . . get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case”, period!

-- Transcript of "the Smoking Gun Tape," conversation between President Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, in the Oval Office on 23 June 1972.

Now why would Nixon think that the Bay of Pigs would be a problem?

The failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs was from 17 to 20 April 1961. More than eleven years previously. JFK had accepted the resignations of the CIA director and deputy director. Of the Brigade fighters who had been captured, Castro had tried them all, shot the ones he wanted to shoot, then traded the rest for $53M in food and medicine and sent them back to Miami . . . all by December 1962. By June 1972, there was nothing new about the Bay of Pigs. It had been over and done with for more than a decade.

In telling his Chief of Staff to reference “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” Tricky Dick was blowing a dog whistle that he knew that the CIA would understand. He was not talking about the Bahia de Cochinos in Cuba. By the “whole Bay of Pigs thing,” he was talking about Dallas, Texas. He was talking about 22 November 1963. He was talking about the assassination of JFK.

I believe that the Plumbers were on a spy mission to find out what dirt the Democrats were holding on JFK’s assassination. Only something of that magnitude would be worrisome enough for Nixon, in June 1972, to authorize such a mission.

A wild theory? No, not really. Look at what Bob Haldeman himself later said about this conversation:

And when Nixon said, "It's likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs" he might have been reminding Helms [CIA director], not too gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro--a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.

-- "The Ends of Power: An Explosive Insider's Account of Watergate," H. R. Haldeman, Joseph Dimona, Times Books, New York, 1978, pg. 40.

Haldeman himself linked Watergate to JFK’s assassination. If you accept the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, then this linkage could have been as indirect as Haldeman suggests in The Ends of Power. If you consider the theory that elements of the CIA were responsible for the assassination, a theory to which I subscribe, then this linkage becomes much more direct. Much more sinister.

Look at who was arrested for the Watergate break-in. Look at who was part of this clutch of bozos called the Plumbers. Five men were arrested that night. Among them was James McCord. McCord had been a senior civilian, a GS-15, in the CIA. He had worked in the Security Division. He was an expert in surveillance. He resigned his government post in order to join the Plumbers.

The other four men were “Cuban American freedom fighters.” One of them was Frank Sturgis.

Frank Sturgis fought for Castro during his revolution. In the photograph above, we see him with a rifle on his hip, wearing a 26 of July Movement armband, posing on a mass grave of Batista supporters whom he helped to execute by firing squad on San Juan Hill on 11 January 1959. He later defected to the anti-Castro movement. He is said to have been involved in the planning for the Bay of Pigs and in assassination attempts against Castro.

Sturgis is said to have been a member of “Operation 40,” a CIA-sponsored anti-Castro group based out of Miami and Mexico City. Felix Bermudez AKA “Max Gomez” and Barry Seals, the cocaine smuggler, have also been linked to Operation 40. According to a declassified Inspector General report of 16 February 1962, this early anti-Castro activity began on 17 March 1960, when President Eisenhower approved a Central Intelligence Agency paper titled, "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime."

It has been said that then-Vice President Nixon chaired some of the meetings concerning the Eisenhower administration’s anti-Castro activities. These CIA-sponsored anti-Castro operations have also been linked to George H.W. Bush, who was active in the Caribbean during his Zapata Off-Shore Company days.

During the break-in, two ringleaders kept in radio contact with the burglars. One was G. Gordon Liddy. The other was E. Howard Hunt. They would be indicted by the Watergate federal grand jury on 15 September 1972. The trail to the White House was hot. When arrested, one of the burglars had E. Howard Hunt's White House telephone number in his address book.

While an officer in the CIA’s clandestine operations division, E. Howard Hunt helped to execute the 1954 coup in Guatemala against Jacobo Árbenz. He was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was an executive assistant to the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. After Kennedy was shot, E. Howard Hunt was given the plum position of living undercover in Spain. His mission: write spy novels.

According to Hunt’s son, he confessed on his death bed to involvement with the JFK assassination. During these confessions, he implicated Frank Sturgis, LBJ and CIA officers Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, David Morales and David Atlee Phillips.

So the Watergate burglars themselves were old CIA Latin American hands. They were heavily involved in CIA covert activities, including anti-Castro violence. Their ringleader, E. Howard Hunt, who served three years jail time for his Watergate crimes, confessed on his deathbed to having been involved in the assassination of JFK.

That’s why I think the Plumbers were looking for something related to JFK’s murder.

Even if that’s incorrect, the many links between Watergate and CIA covert activities, especially involving Cuba, bear official investigation.

Watergate is a cold case.

The Gulf of Sidra Shoot-down

A Freedom of Navigation operation is a short transit or exercise in international waters that have been unduly claimed by some nation as her own territorial waters. It’s like a picnic in a public park that some weird neighbor has claimed as his private property. You do it to make a point. The United States Navy, the greatest navy in history and the guarantor of the pirate-free international maritime commerce upon which the world’s economy is based, routinely does Freedom of Navigation operations all around the world. Your tax dollars at work.

I was an intelligence officer in the airwing of USS Forrestal (CV-59), when, in company with USS Nimitz (CVN-68), we conducted Freedom of Navigation operations in the Gulf of Sidra, August 1981. Libya, under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, claimed the gulf as Libyan territorial waters. The Mediterranean is small enough to begin with. We sometimes called it, “the Pond.” If we allowed Libya to close off the Gulf of Sidra and other states, from Morocco to Turkey, Italy to Israel, were to follow suit, there’s be practically nothing left except overlapping, conflicting claims. No room for maritime commerce, which is the motherboard of the global economy.

So in we went. We needed the Nimitz’s help, frankly. The Forrestal’s F-4/Phantoms were adequate against the MiG-23/Floggers on the east side of the gulf, both being, really, straight-line interceptors and not highly maneuverable dogfighters. The flippy, agile little MiG-21/Fishbeds on the west side of the gulf were much better handled by the great F-14/Tomcats in the Nimitz’s airwing.

It was to be a three-day operation. The first day was fine. A few intercepts, nothing too interesting.

The second day was spectacular. We had over 50 intercepts. Our pilots successfully intercepted every Libyan flight, maneuvering into firing positions aft of their targets, or, “in their six.” Yet the Libyans flew well enough and not wildly. In fact, the event took on the tone of an amiable competition, with pilots saluting each other, reminiscent of, say, a Dual Dagger combined exercise with the French Air Force.

Then, on the third day, some hothead in a Su-22/Fitter came roaring out and fired an air-to-air missile near one-thousand-knots closure speed into the face of one of our fighters. This was not only a dick move, but also idiotic, since the missile he fired was not designed for this type of shot. So we shot him down. We shot his wingman down. Then some patrol boat came out, acting in a hostile manner, so we sunk that, too. All of this violence was in accordance with our Rules of Engagement.

We waited. President Reagan had yet to complete his first year in office. He had risen to the White House with a cowboy swagger and talk so tough that one nickname at the time was, “Ronnie Ray-Gun.” Our two-carrier battle group was poised and ready for general war with Libya. If we had been seeking a casus bello, a reason to start a war, then that hothead had just handed it to us.

We weren’t, apparently. When the operation was over, as planned, we simply and quietly steamed north, out of the gulf.

I served under Ronald Reagan’s presidency for eight years. He reinvigorated the Department of Defense. If he spent far too much money on defense, doing so may have contributed powerfully to the collapse of the Soviet Union. During those eight years, the Department of Defense fought no wars. We did execute one police action over a long weekend in an obscure Caribbean island called Grenada.

That’s it. Under Reagan, we had an eight-year period of relative peace. The shenanigans in Central America and Afghanistan will be the subjects of other essays.

Was Reagan as great a president as the Republicans say he was? I don’t think so. He was mainly a talking head, who, in as much as he was a leader, seemed to have only four ideas in his head:

1) I love Nancy.

2) America is great.

3) Nothing is too good for our boys in blue.

4) I hate commies.

The entire world knew what these four ideas were. Ronald Reagan was no man of mystery. He wasn’t FDR nor was he George H.W. Bush. If you are going to have only four ideas, those aren’t four bad ideas to have. (Well, the first is a personal matter and I will quibble with the third in that investments in defense should not bankrupt the republic, but I’m 100% with you, Gipper, about America and commies.)

Yet . . .

When Ronald Reagan took office, the United States of America was the world’s largest creditor nation. People owed us money. The dollar was strong. By the time that he finished, we were the world’s largest debtor nation. Since then, we have plunged ever deeper into abysmal debt. The dollar is weaker every day.

Ronald Reagan broke up and suppressed the unions. Although many of the unions were corrupt and ineffectual as representatives of the blue-collar class, this suppression was key to the backsliding of the middle class in America.

During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Japanese selectively targeted and destroyed segment-after-segment of American manufacture. Shortly after leaving the White House, he was paid $2 million for speaking in Japan. This was not illegal. It should have been. It was certainly a conflict of interest. It was beneath the dignity of the office of the President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan allowed his CIA director, William Casey, and his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, to run amuck in Central America, which I’ll shortly discuss.

Still, he was a hard man to dislike. He and my old man would have got along. They were both handsome, bluff, genuinely optimistic Irish Americans. If Ronald Reagan told a better joke, the old man told a better story.

 The Beirut Barracks Bombing

On 23 October 1983, a suicide truck bomber attacked the barracks of US Marines deployed to Beirut, Lebanon. The Marines were in Lebanon as part of an international peace-keeping force, following an Israeli invasion of the country and chaotic violence amounting to a civil war. The attack claimed the lives of 220 Marines, 18 sailors and 3 soldiers, as well as 58 French military personnel and six civilians.

During two deployments to the Mediterranean in USS Forrestal (CV-59), we had been watching the chaos in Lebanon. By 1983, however, I was already stationed in Panamá , where our focus was on the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had seized power in Nicaragua after a successful insurgency against Anastasio Somoza; on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which was threatening to seize power in El Salvador; three guerrilla groups growing in power in Guatemala: the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR); and the decades-long guerrilla war of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

A previously unknown group calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. Support from Iran was suspected, but never confirmed.

This attack shocked us all. I’d like to say that it was the Navy department’s 9/11, as it should have been, in the sense that it galvanized us into action, into restructuring and redirecting our efforts to address these new threats: Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), insurgency, terrorism in general and Muslim extremism in particular. Some adjustments may have been made, but there was no such fundamental restructuring.

People and pundits bandy about the term, “the Intelligence Community,” as if we were a single monolithic organization. Such is certainly not the case. First, there is the CIA. Then there are the military intelligence organizations: the Army’s is the biggest, followed by the Navy’s and the Air Force’s, with a few good men and women in the Marine Corps’ organization. Then there is everybody else: State, the FBI, Treasury, the Coast Guard and so on all have their relatively small intelligence organizations. These sixteen organizations are all overseen, at least at the policy level, by the relatively new office called the “Director of National Intelligence.” Each organization has its own missions, a different set of customers and priorities, its own culture and different pipelines for professional development and advancement.

When we lost 220 Marines in Beirut, what did the thousand-some officers in naval intelligence care about?

Soviet submarines.

Then Soviet surface combatants.

Then Soviet naval aviation.

Then strike planning, merchant shipping and everything else, which we might have lumped all together and called “Pol/Mil.”

Not much else, really. Of course, we had our eyes on the ball. We absolutely should have cared about Soviet submarines as our first and final priority. We needed to have at our core, as we did, a cadre of naval intelligence officers who were experts in submarine analysis, people like Admiral Mike McConnell, who could discuss things like Acoustic Intelligence (ACINT) on a peer-to-peer basis with American submariners.

The world was changing. New threats were rising. In 1983, terrorism claimed the lives of 220 Marines. As a service, we would not respond to the new threat until after the Twin Towers fell, 18 years later, in 2001.

During my service, 1979 to 1999, US naval intelligence’s strong suit was submarines. We held a weak hand, or no cards at all, in three areas: Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), foreign area studies, and Human Intelligence (HUMINT).

LIC comprises insurgency and terrorism. It is a band in the spectrum of warfare, below “conventional warfare,” in which armies fight battles with tanks, guns and bombs, which is itself below “strategic warfare,” in which wars are fought using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) such as nuclear bombs. Each of these forms of warfare can be studied and mastered disciplinarily. A soldier who is expert in tank warfare, for example, is equipped to study or even direct a tank battle in any given theater of operations. The Navy did not care about LIC. If you stare at the sun and contemplate nuclear Armageddon, you might not even notice a 50-watt bulb of disgruntled peasants making car combs out of propane tanks.

In foreign area studies, the student learns about the languages, culture, politics and history of a given country or region. She masters domain-specific information. Expertise in Latin America, for example, may translate indirectly into understanding a similar region, such as sub-Saharan Africa, but only indirectly and partially. True expertise in a region requires years of immersive study. In fact, during the first year, you can learn only what is conventional wisdom; with perseverance, you can, from the second year onward, push back the frontier of conventional wisdom and learn some deeper truths.

The USN had no Foreign Area Officer (FAO) program, as did the US Army. We had a smattering of people who spoke other languages, such as Russian, or who had been stationed abroad or married into foreign cultures or who, like me, tried to carve out their own career in a given region. All that was personal, though. It was not part of the community’s plans or programs. Many senior officers believed that a good naval intelligence officer could land anywhere in the world, use the tools in his analytical toolbox and do a good job of analysis. This is true, but only to a limit. Professional-level analyses require a profound depth of domain-specific or region-specific knowledge. A gifted outsider can help with valuable insights, but inevitably he will make beginner’s mistakes because of his superficial understanding of the region’s dynamics, such as by taking at face value the public statements of a particular person, party or group, when a more seasoned analyst would challenge them, knowing the particular pattern of lying or bias involved.

The third thing is Human Intelligence (HUMINT). My Navy was weak in HUMINT. We were stronger in Acoustics Intelligence (ACINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imagery Intelligence (IMINT). We lacked a cadre of officers who were HUMINT disciplinarians, which may or may not have been the case with other services, and is certainly not the case with the CIA. The Navy lacked training in HUMINT. What I knew about interrogation, for example, I learned on my own initiative by reading such things as the Army’s Field Manual 30-15 (1978), Intelligence Interrogations. This was a critical shortfall.

Naval intelligence’s weak suit in HUMINT dates back to 1977, when Director of Naval Intelligence then-Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman disestablished Task Force 157, a small and troubled naval intelligence HUMINT division. I never heard of Task Force 157 until more than a decade after its disestablishment. The version of the story that I was told, passed down from sea daddy to sea daddy to me (the grand-sea-daddy being Admiral Inman himself, known as “Father” to the generation of naval intelligence officers who were my sea daddies) was that they were not acting professionally. Operations were being conducted in a slap-dash, cowboy manner. Black slush funds were being treated like a personal bank account. Reading the 31 December 1975 memo from the Task Force commander, Don Neilson, to the Director of Naval Intelligence, then-Rear Admiral Inman, I am flabbergasted by its insolence. In the culture of the Navy, subordinates do not address their seniors in this manner. This memo is an artifact that could only have been written by a man who had forgotten who he was and the nature of the culture to which he belonged. So I am willing to believe that the members of the task force had been running around, play-acting James Bond. I’ve seen this behavior myself in other HUMINT collectors and counterintelligence types.

This leering drunken cowboy half-dressed in a tuxedo approach to HUMINT operations is a pitfall of the discipline, as we shall see in later essays. It is not good for the republic. By the 1970s, the lack of respect by the CIA and the military intelligence organizations for the constitution, for the law and for human rights – evidenced by coups, assassinations, mind-control experiments, infiltration of American political organizations and so on – forced Congress to initiate reforms. In 1975, the Pike, Church and Ervin committees spear-headed a reform movement known as Intelligence Oversight, embodied in federal law and a series of executive orders inked by presidents from Carter through Bush 43.

I was the designated Intelligence Oversight officer in a couple of my commands, responsible for training the rest of the staff, so I became familiar with instructions such as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits spooks from joining American political organizations undercover, assassinating people or experimenting on their little human brains and bodies. This executive order and military regulations such as DoD Manual 5240.01, Procedures Governing the Conduct of DoD Intelligence Activities prohibit the nation’s spy organizations from spying on American humans, companies and organizations (known as “US Persons,” since, as we all know, corporations are persons, too), except in the cases where they’re breaking the law, involved in drug-trafficking or terrorism and so on. Unless the directors of their organizations, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General have signed off on it. This was the regime in which I served from 1979 to 1999, so I walked between the raindrops of the wild west of the 1970s and the Orwellian nightmare of the 21st century. Strangely, even today, I believe that it is absolutely essential that the spy organizations of a republican democracy operate in accordance with the law, especially with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which guarantees that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” In short, our own government should not spy on us. We also should not be relying on our spooks to effect regime change through assassination. If we need to change a regime, Congress should declare war and the Department of Defense should stab the bad guy in the chest, right there on the nightly news. More on this quaint thought later.

In any case, in the decades to come, the Navy department’s weak suit in HUMINT would handicap hundreds of naval intelligence officers who would find themselves assigned to joint staffs and deployed units from Washington D.C. to Kabul and from Tampa to Baghdad, confronting Low Intensity Conflict, but lacking training and experience in the essential discipline of HUMINT.

Looking back, it’s obvious that the deaths of 220 Marines in 1983 should have been enough to drive these points home. We probably even should have slugged over 150 to 200 naval intelligence officers to the Marine Corps (the ones who could do 10 or more pull-ups) and issued them new uniforms, strengthening Marine Corps intelligence and focusing it on the LIC threats of which the Beirut barracks bombing was an outstanding example.

We did not. Khobar Towers, 1996, didn’t do it, either. Naval intelligence would not begin to focus on LIC until the Twin Towers fell, 2001. We remained all about submarines.

 Our Wars XI – Wars in Nicaragua – The Sandinistas and the Contras

On 19 July 1979, the day the Sandinistas took Nicaragua, I went out and got drunk. I was a student at the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center in Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado. None of my fellow students or instructors cared about Nicaragua, but, for me, it was a cause for celebration. Not because I liked the Sandinistas, but because I hated Somoza.

I’d get to know the Sandinistas better in just three years. In the meantime, I felt glad that the Nicaraguan people had been freed from Somoza’s caudillo, or “strong-man,” rule. Somoza inherited the fiefdom of Nicaragua from his older brother and his father, landed oligarchs who had risen to political power through their control of the National Guard, which was formed following armed interventions by the US Navy and the US Marine Corps in 1912 and 1927-33. Yet another galling example of the United States supporting feudal rulers, contrary to the intent and spirit of the American revolution. The corrupt self-interest of such rulers rose to international attention following the devastating earthquake of 1972, which barely left standing any buildings in Nicaragua taller than two stories. Somoza and his henchmen used land swindles to siphon off millions of dollars of relief funds. This excessive greed cost him a lot of domestic and international support. Jimmy Carter, perhaps the last Christian moralist to occupy the Oval Office, wasn’t having it. Neither was I. Call me a starry-eyed idealist if you must, but I don’t think rich, brutal oligarchs should steal relief money while the people sleep in the rubble-strewn streets.

Torture and death squads don’t burnish your reputation, either, except as a brute.

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) flew the red and the black, the colors of anarchy, just as Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement had done. The FSLN was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group, modeled after and supported by Castro, but with three factions:

1) The Prolonged Popular War faction, led by Tomas Borge, believed that a Maoist, foco-based rural insurgency was the path to victory. They were wrong.

2) The Proletarian Tendency, led by Jaime Wheelock, were good, doctrinal Marxists, who believed that the proletariat was the revolutionary class. They were wrong. Lacking industry, Nicaragua had no proletariat worth the name.

3) The Terceristas or Insurrectionists, led by the Ortega brothers, Humberto and Daniel, believed that discontent with Somoza was so general, both inside and outside of Nicaragua, that now was the time for a broad-based uprising. They were correct. By playing down their Marxist-Leninist character, a strategy of which the ever-sneaky Lenin would have approved, they lead a broad coalition that included students, farmers, businessmen and liberals – anyone, really, who was against Somoza. They also had help from noncommunist foreigners, such as the president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Carazo Odio.

Using the war name Commandante Cero, one of the Tercerista leaders, Eden Pastora, led the capture of the National Palace, 22 to 25 August 1978. Disguised as National Guardsmen, the guerrillas took over 1,500 hostages, which they held in the National Palace until Somoza agreed to their demands, paid $500,000 ransom, allowed the broadcast of a manifesto, freed 59 Sandinista prisoners (including Tomas Borge and Daniel Ortega) and let the guerrillas escape the country. (This was one of the most successful Hostage-Barricade Incidents (HBI) in history, worthy of study along with the Munich Massacre, 1972; the Raid on Entebbe, 1976; and the Takeover of the Japanese Ambassador’s Residence, Lima, Peru, 1996-97. As Somoza learned the hard way, politically the worse thing the government can do in an HBI is to surrender to the demands of the terrorists. Let me add that Eden may have been Cero, but the coolest commando under pressure was Commandante Dos, Dora María Téllez.)

This victory sparked a popular uprising in September 1978 known as the War of the Scarves. Malcontents from across the country, from the indigenes of Monimbo to the youths of Matagalpa, disguised themselves with bandannas, erected barricades in the streets and fought the National Guard with the weapons at hand, alongside a cadre of Cuban-trained and -armed Sandinista guerrillas.

The National Guard reclaimed control of the streets. The Sandinistas, new recruits in tow, retreated to the mountains. Over the next six months, international political and logistical support swung in the favor of the insurgents. When combat recommenced in 1979, it was nation-wide, at a higher level of intensity, with the insurgents increasingly taking the form of a guerrilla army in the field and the National Guard faltering, losing ground, then disintegrating. Somoza fled the country on 17 July 1979. He had enough time to ghost-write an aggrieved memoir, “Nicaragua Betrayed,” before he was killed by a Sandinista hit squad in La Paz, Bolivia.

Once in power, the Sandinistas gradually shed their nationalist personas in favor of a more candid one of internationalist Marxist-Leninists. Humberto took command of the Army, Daniel became president and Borge became the Minister of the Interior, whose secret police enjoyed Cuban and East German support. The Sandinistas in turn provided logistical support to the FMLN in neighboring El Salvador.

1979 was not a good year for American empire. The Shah of Iran fell, a US puppet replaced by rabidly anti-American Shi’ite fundamentalists. Somoza fell. El Salvador was teetering. Guatemala was under pressure. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The US economy was weak.

Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. The worm turned. Reagan assumed office in January 1981. His vice-president was George H.W. Bush, a former director of the CIA. Reagan’s CIA director was William Casey, who could not pronounce the word, “Nicaragua,” (“Nic-a-wa-wa” was as close as he could get), but he knew a commie when he saw one. His strategy was to punch a commie in the face.

To oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA began to equip and train guerrillas. These included Afghans and international Muslim fundamentalists, such as the Saudi Arabian rich kid, Osama bin Laden. No possible blow-back, there. A database of international fighters, called “al-Qaeda,” or “the base,” became the name for the group.

Initially, Congress allowed tens of millions of CIA and DoD funds to be diverted to support the anti-Sandinista guerrillas called the Contra, as in contrarevolucionarios. When Congress prohibited funding them through intelligence organizations, the scalawags in the National Security Counsel, Robert McFarlane, Admiral Poindexter and Lt. Col. Ollie North, USMC, decided that they weren’t intelligence, so they felt themselves free to funnel millions of dollars to the Contra. Their out-of-the-box idea to raise money was to clandestinely sell arms to Iran, despite a pledge from Reagan not to deal with nations who support terrorism, which Iran did. North and McFarlane flew to Tehran using false passports and presented the Iranians with a kosher chocolate cake.

Here we see that the bozo factor in the basement of the Reagan White House was alarmingly high. We see a reckless disregard for the rule of law. This stupid, devious and illegal scheme led to McFarlane and Poindexter losing their jobs, North losing his freedom and Ronald Reagan being embarrassed. He had to say, “I don’t recall” 88 times during an Iran-Contra investigation hearing in 1990.

Who missed getting tarred by the Iran-Contra brush? The vice-president, the former CIA director, George H.W. Bush. The man whose name was in the address book of one of Oswald’s handlers. Who was George H.W. Bush’s assistant at this time? Felix Rodriguez, known as “Max Gomez.” More on these two in a moment.

I was the head of the Nicaragua analysis cell in the United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) from 1984-1985. It was a three-person cell. Analytically, Nicaragua was the second-best country to have. El Salvador was the most desirable, because that was a Department of Defense war. The Contra war belonged to the CIA, not to us.

My office was a former broom closet in the back of a 100-meter-deep tunnel in the side of Ancon Hill, Panamá City, Panamá. I read between 100 and 300 messages a day, from news reports and State and CIA cables to communications intercepts and imagery interpretation reports. Every now and then, someone would bother to talk with me. Important people would talk with my boss, four-star General Paul F. Gorman, USA. He showed some appreciation for my analyses, once inking one, “Good report, G,” which was, from him, praise so effusive that we analysts gazed at it in wonder. He allowed me to brief four-star visitors in his office. I used flip charts. Mainly, though, what I think I was doing was providing him another, somewhat independent perspective on events for which he had much better, insider information. [I once wrote him a white paper that I titled, “Fissures in the Pyramid: Mexican Democracy – A Critical View,” in which I suggested that the political and economic contradictions of the rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) might make Mexico the powder keg at the end of the Central American fuse. A short time after that, General Gorman made similar suggestions before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Mexican Foreign Ministry called his remarks “silly and dangerous” and said that they ''reflect a lack of knowledge of Mexican reality from the political, geographical and historical point of view.'' The controversy was briefly in the pages in the New York Times. (nyti.ms/39Ti5Zz) This was heady stuff for a navy lieutenant. Gorman, bless him, didn’t fire me. I think maybe he thought our criticisms were valid, despite the blowback from the Mexicans.]

Nicaragua was a great country to study, 1984-85. It had a successful insurgency, which is rare enough, but also a counterinsurgency, a Soviet-backed military build-up, Cuban intervention, support for regional insurgency, popular discontent and an economy being managed by Marxists who had never finished high school.

I never met nor talked with Ollie North. I knew of him only as a Lieutenant Colonel who felt he was important enough to yell at the president of Costa Rica over the phone. From a Marine intelligence officer, I heard that he was an arrogant jerk. According to this gossip, the Commandant of the Marine Corps was waiting for him to return to the Corps, so that he could hammer his tits for insolence. This was not Ollie’s fate. He was headed for community service, then a right-wing political career.

I knew of “Max Gomez” as some crazy guy who was willing to strap into and fly a jet taken down from a static display. He would pop up, here and there in Central America, up to some such bit of derring-do. Years later, I would meet Felix Rodriquez AKA Max Gomez at a friend’s suckling pork barbecue in Miami. I would read his book, “Shadow Warrior,” which includes a picture of him and George H.W. Bush in the White House.

JFK. LHO. George de Mohrenschildt. George H.W. Bush. Felix Rodriguez AKA Max Gomez. That’s four degrees of separation. Themes include the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and a reckless disregard for the law.

After my watch, the Sandinistas used a Soviet-supplied SA-7 surface-to-air missile, which the Nicaraguans called an “arrow” (“flecha”) to shoot down an aircraft smuggling weapons to the Contra. On 5 October 1986, the Fairchild C-123 cargo plane broke up and crashed. It had been carrying 50,000 AK-47 rounds, 60 AK-47s, RPG-7 grenade launchers and jungle boots. Three aircrew died. One survived. His name was Eugene Hasenfus. While imprisoned by the Sandinistas, he fingered Felix Rodriguez AKA Max Gómez as one of the coordinators of the supply flights between bases in El Salvador, Honduras and Contra forces in Nicaragua.

Read “Shadow Warrior.” Felix Rodriguez had an epic career. He helped the Bolivians to track down and kill Che Guevara. He was one of the last people to speak with Che Guevara alive. He was part of Operation 40. This was an early CIA-sponsored anti-Castro Cuban group. Two other members were said to be Frank Sturgis and Barry Seals. Frank Sturgis would be arrested as one of the Watergate burglars. Barry Seals flew hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine into an airbase in Mena, Arkansas, back when George H.W. Bush and Felix Rodriguez were in the White House and Bill Clinton was the governor. Ronald Reagan gave a speech condemning the Sandinistas as drug-runners, using some pictures taken by Barry Seals during a drug run. How do you think Reagan got his hands on those pictures?

Felix Rodriguez gave them to Bush and Bush gave them to Reagan, would be my guess.

JFK. Watergate. Iran-Contra. There’s a theme of anti-Castro Cubans. A theme of CIA involvement. This is a connection that bears study and official investigation.

Do I wish I had been invited to those particular meetings, the ones with Lieutenant Colonel North? Or poked around more in Honduras? I’d like to think so. Maybe not. What I did was my job, which was sit in a broom closet, read, think and write. It’s like I had a television, I had cable, I had HBO, but I didn’t have Cinemax. That’s how compartmentalization works. In 1985, I transferred to the Naval Postgraduate School and turned the page.

The Contra war bothered me, though. In my analysis, the level of violence was below what either side claimed, but it was real, endemic and on-going. People were dying. The strategy of backing ex-Somocista National Guardsmen seemed to me morally bankrupt and politically counterproductive. The best excuse for that strategy I was ever offered was “those are the only guys who know how to fight.” Eden Pastora had defected from the Sandinistas and opposed them militarily from Costa Rica, but what he seemed to be doing mainly was sitting in a hammock in the jungle and giving interviews. Looking at Pastora, I couldn’t argue the point. I did try to keep track of Contra leadership. As time went on, more field commanders were drawn from non-Somocista ranks. I liked Mike Lima, who seemed an effective non-Somocista field commander. Even by the end, though, the chief of the main Contra group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (FDN), and two-thirds of his field commanders remained veterans of Somoza’s National Guard. To me, trying to take back Nicaragua with those guys was like pissing up a rope. Even the Nicaraguans who hated the Sandinistas didn’t want Somoza’s crew back in charge.

The cowboy nature of the war bothered me, too. Motoring up and down the coast in a Boston Whaler, shooting up POL storage tanks with a .50 caliber machine gun, and then returning to base in time for pizza and beer. Slap dash. Fun and games. Say what you will about Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups like the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, those guys suffered for their cause. Year after year, with little real hope of victory. Read, “Days of the Jungle” by Mario Payeras. By comparison, the CIA-backed Contra war seemed like a clown show.

In 1984, the mining of Corinto harbor and two other ports in Nicaragua particularly bothered me. The FDN claimed responsibility, but no one in the whole wide world believed it was anything but a CIA operation. As a sailor, I took this attack to heart. Mining a harbor is an extremely serious act, as legitimate a casus bello as any, and, obviously, a threat to maritime commerce and the safety of innocent mariners. It is not a responsible act.

At a wine-and-cheese party on the lawn of the commander’s residence, with a panoramic view of the canal and the silvery Bridge of the Americas below, I shared my misgivings with a CIA staffer, also in his late twenties. He smiled ruefully and said, “Yeah, I know. But these guys, what they like to do more than anything else is to go black and do their op.”

George Washington did not “go black and do his op.” He put his life on the line many times. He suffered. My great-great-great-grandfather, Johann Jacob Bottomer, suffered. Mario Payeras suffered. These men were revolutionaries. They believed in and suffered for their causes.

These tricksters, these smugglers, these drug-trafficking hooligans, were not revolutionaries. They were dilettantes, gamers, boys playing at war, funding other people to fight and die as if it were a sport to subcontract murder. Irresponsible. Sowing the wind and leaving the reaping of the whirlwind to others.

It was during my tour as the senior Nicaragua analyst, 1984 to 1985, that I learned to despise and distrust the CIA.

 Our Wars XII – War in Panamá - Operation Just Cause

Now we come to the strange case in which our hero’s country invades the country of his beloved wife.

Eva, my wife of 35 years, is a Panamanian American. She is a Chinese from the province of Bocas del Toro. Our two children are able to claim Panamanian citizenship, at least as far as Panamá is concerned. I have lived in the Republic of Panamá four times, from 1982 to 1985, 1995 to 1997, 1999 and October 2019 to the present day, for a total of seven years. Our little beach house, La Villa Evita, in Chiriquí, Panamá, is the only home that I own right now. It is the place from which I have written this book, either sitting in my bohio, with the sea breeze on my side or the north wind on my back, or, as I am now, sweating at my desk in the upstairs bedroom. The power is out.

In Panamá, as in other Latin American nations, zoning is not as rigorously enforced as it is in America. The rich live cheek-to-jowl with the poor. On the south side of La Villa Evita, a rich family has a beautiful villa that they use a few times a year for reunions and parties. On the west side, just over the chain link fence, are a row of block houses with zinc roofs, cobbled together by fishermen and day laborers and the unemployed. Roosters crow around the clock. Dogs bark. Mothers scream at toddlers playing in packed-dirt yards.

It takes five minutes to walk from our little A-frame home to our beach, from which the view of the mountains is a vision of a tropical paradise, although the break is sandy and lethal, since millions of yards of the sands were stolen and sold to China.

I am an American living in a post-American Panamá. Eva and I live in a modern, jet-age Panamá that none of us, frankly, envisioned twenty years ago. At least, none of us who are American.

I stood tall in my khaki uniform when the American flag was lowered for the last time at Quarry Heights, Panamá. The government of Panamá sent a single functionary from the Ministry of Education to the ceremony, a well-calculated diplomatic slap in the face. I sat in the bleachers with Dignity Battalion members, who were chanting, “Bajalo! Bajalo pronto!” (“Lower it! Lower it fast!”), when the American flag was lowered for the last time at Albrook Air Force Base. Today, Albrook is the site of a multi-modal transportation center, where a huge bus terminal connects with a subway station.

A subway station! The Panamá City of 2021 A.D. has so many skyscrapers, some of them over 100 stories tall, that its skyline looks like those of Singapore or Dubai. I feel awe and pride when I see what the Panamanians have accomplished since they took over the canal. They got the Chinese to build them a third set of locks, capable of handling much bigger traffic. The ports on both sides of the Isthmus have expanded greatly. The Panamanian economy is the fastest growing in Central America. The people have much of the alegria of the early 1980s, but now they have more confidence and self-respect. I would feel better about Panamá, however, if it weren’t for the fact that so many of these skyscrapers are international banks. I worry that Panamá has crawled out from the oppressive weight of a 19th century national empire, only to find herself now in thrall to a 21st century international empire. I don’t trust the banks to care, when the going gets rough, which, if history is any judge, it surely must, sooner or later.

I was on the United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) staff when we relocated the command from Panamá to Miami, Florida. I was the leader of the J2 rear party that conducted the final security sweep of all of the command spaces. I gave a tour of the tunnel in Quarry Heights to its next occupant, a Panamanian counterdrug chief dressed in a thousand-dollar wool suit, who was disappointed by the squalid, cramped reality of the mythic tunnel. I know for a fact that the command hoped, almost to the last month, that the government of Panamá would allow some sort of post-2000 US military presence in the country. We bargained for the bases of Fort Clayton, Rodman and Howard. We got nothing. The Torrijos-Carter treaties were implemented in their entirety. Although over 80% of Panamanians favored some sort of continued American military presence, the Panamanian political class, particularly the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), the party of Torrijos and Noriega, was adamant: Yankee go home.

So we did. Today, the Southern Command sits in its new, splendid headquarters in the Doral neighborhood of Miami, Florida. The only American military presence in Panamá today, besides the Marines at the embassy, are a few hundred old, retired veterans like me, with long, successful marriages to Panamanian wives, who got the memo that we weren’t welcome anymore, but decided to stay anyway.

We keep our heads down, especially on the 20th of December. You can’t buy beer or liquor on that day. That day is the commemoration of the anniversary of Operation Just Cause, which was the invasion of the United States of the Republic of Panamá during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.

Noriega was a villain. He was a thief, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant. Read his book anyway. It tells some lies, but mainly, it doesn’t tell the whole truth. The truth it does tell, however, is worth reading. Particularly interesting is the villain’s account of his relationship with American intelligence. Vernon Walters, a man I once met when he visited us junior officers in the USS Forrestal, figures in the story. During his early years, Noriega was considered a useful conduit between the Americans and Castro. When George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA. Noriega’s take on Ollie North is interesting.

Noriega attempts to wrap himself in the national flag, all red-white-and-blue (the Panamanian flag is a derivative of the American flag, just like Liberia’s, both states having been created through American agency). I don’t buy it. The slang in Spanish for traitor is “vendepatria,” literally, one who sells his country. Noriega was an egoist, not a patriot. He sold his country, bit by bit, when it was to his personal financial benefit.

Under General Omar Torrijos, who rose to power in a 1968 coup, the Panamanians did try to steer a non-aligned course. Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981. I don’t know why the plane crashed. Maybe Noriega killed him. Maybe the plane just crashed. The only thing we know is that Torrijos died. He was no saint, but he was a genuine Panamanian patriot. Yet he was a dictator. After the good king comes the bad king. After Augustus comes Caligula. After Torrijos comes Noriega. Let us have no kings.

Noriega was skilled at playing all sides against the middle, but, as his testimony attests, there comes a time when the boat is so far from the dock that a person trying to straddle the boat and the dock has no choice left but wet. Once George H.W. Bush was president and he was no longer just hobby-shopping the Contra war from the basement of the White House, Noriega’s refusal to support the Contra war became unacceptable. That much of the villain’s testimony I believe. Noriega’s, I mean.

Let us assume that he was a murderous, drug-trafficking scumbag, as he was portrayed. I personally believe this, but, let us take it as an assumption. Let us further agree that he had to be removed through military force. A couple of US-inspired coup attempts had failed, as had economic pressure. In that case, O my brothers and sisters, what should have America have done?

Congress should have declared war. We should have removed Noriega and the leadership of the Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) as surgically as possible.

What did we do instead?

Once again, Congress failed to live up to its responsibility to declare war.

George H.W. Bush, as a kingly President of the United States, initiated a brief but overly violent invasion of the country. We used the F-117/Nighthawk stealth bomber, for example, to bombard the PDF’s headquarters building in the El Chorillo neighborhood of the capital. Hundreds of innocent civilians were killed, needlessly, including a friend of my wife’s. Eva was godmother to the woman’s son, actually.

I say needlessly, because a US special forces commando had been in the Commandancia hours before it was flattened. They successfully rescued a spook that the PDF had arrested. If they wanted to take down the Commandancia, they could have done it with a single laser-designated 1000-pound bomb. Or a Technical Sergeant standing on Quarry Heights could have done the illumination.

The strategy of quickly achieving victory through the application of overwhelming force was a reaction to the Vietnam War experience. General Schwarzkopf discusses this approach in his book, “It Doesn’t Take a Hero.” In the 1980s and 1990s, this generation of Vietnam veterans deliberately conducted military operations using overwhelming force. They were not interested in half-measures and slogging through the nightmare morass of year after year of escalation and bleeding in the mud. Hit them twice as hard as necessary. Get it done quick.

Militarily, this approach worked. Operation Just Cause was over as fast as a schoolyard dispute between a senior high school football jock and a grade-school punk.

Politically, it was stupid. The resentment caused by this latest of many American military interventions in Panamá cost us any chance of remaining in country, post-2000. We probably would have been shown the door even if we had snatched Noriega ninja-style, but, if we had acted surgically, we might have had a better chance to accomplish this strategic goal. In either case, the amity between the peoples and governments of the two nations would have been less damaged.

How many American lives are worth the life of a single innocent foreigner? The answer cannot be zero. Not unless we are willing for all the world to hate and fear us.

We American patriots should want the freedom-loving peoples of the world to rally to the red-white-and-blue, not run from it, screaming in horror and terror.

The other lesson we should have learned from Operation Just Cause is the need for more planning and operational focus on the post-combat phase. In other words, how to handle security in the streets once the fighting is over. We eliminated the security forces in Panamá but we didn’t replace it with our own security control until after at least 72 hours of almost total chaos. Looters emptied stores and warehouses throughout the country, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. This disregard for post-combat security would happen again, after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As a personal postscript, let me add that by 1989, I was on the staff of the United States Pacific Fleet (USPACFLT), in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Eva and I were on Christmas leave in Austin, Texas. The night of 20 December, the furnace failed, so we bundled on all our packed clothes, and, as fat as Michelin tire men, we sat, watching CNN at 3 AM in the morning. As the initial reports from Panamá City were broadcast, we called my brother-in-law, Armando, woke him up and told him to tell Eva’s family to stay home the next day. Armando had thought the sounds of exploding bombs had been thunder.

No, Armando. That was not thunder. That was the sound of my country invading yours.

 The Collapse of the Soviet Union

At 06:00 on Monday morning, 26 August 1991, I was clean-shaven and sober, dressed in freshly starched wash khakis. I had a barely acceptable shine on my black leather shoes. Standing on the steel deck plates of USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), underway in the Arabian Gulf, I gave the morning brief to my boss, Rear Admiral Timothy Wright, the commander of the carrier battle group. I told him something that the N2 had ensured that he had heard the day before, but which, as a morning brief item, deserved a mention: Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, had dissolved the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resigned as the party’s general secretary and dissolved all party units in the government. The Soviet Union itself would formally dissolve before the end of the year.

No one had expected this. Containing the Soviet Union had been a multi-generational project. I think that we all expected to die, our children and grandchildren taking their place in the line opposite the Soviet Union. If anyone called the ball, he or she must have done so quietly, because it caught everyone I knew, from the Director of Naval Intelligence down to the deck plates, flat-footed and flabbergasted.

In my more acute hindsight, I believe that four events convinced Gorbachev and the three pillars of power in the Soviet Union – the Army, the Party, and the KGB – that things had to change. That restructuring (“perestroika”) and openness (“glasnost”) were necessary strategies:

1) Defeat in Afghanistan. As Ronald Reagan, Charlie Wilson and the CIA had hoped, Afghanistan turned into Russia’s Vietnam. Ten years of casualties, billions of rubles wasted, and in the end, a humiliating defeat and retreat, 1988-89. This was a major blow to Soviet confidence.

2) US military build-up. The surge of defense spending under Ronald Reagan, especially in high-tech areas such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, convinced them that the US was not decrepit, as they had perceived us to be under Jimmy Carter, but, with a bigger economy and a more advanced technological base, we would continue to match or overmatch them in defense spending and development of combat power.

3) Chernobyl. State secrecy and genuinely inferior high technology came within days of turning the Ukraine and much of Europe into a radioactive wasteland. The Army, the KGB and the Party may have lied to the Russian people and to all the world, but they themselves, at least at the top, knew the true problems and the true costs of this hideous catastrophe. It shook them.

4) Japan’s economy outstripping Russia’s economy. When this happened, they realized that not only was the Second World not going to keep up with the First World, but parts of the Third World, like Japan and South Korea, were going to pass them by.

They hoped to change and to adopt their political and economic cultures so they could compete in the 21st century. The Russians are strategic thinkers, grand masters of chess, able to think beyond the next fiscal quarter and the next election cycle. At the top, the kings of bullshit knew the truth: the Soviet Union was not working.

In a repressive society, a little bit of freedom is a difficult thing to control. You cannot let air out of a balloon with a pin, unless you are ready for the pop. Things quickly spun out of control. The next thing you knew, Boris Yeltsin was standing on a tank with a megaphone. The Soviet Union collapsed into the dust bin of history.

As our battle group steamed east in the Pacific, I remember taking a break topside, which I tried to do for a few minutes every day, watching the escort ships under the brilliant blue sky, and I wondered what naval service would be like now that Mordor had fallen. We’d be smaller, I thought, with my charming naivete. It’d be boring, but peaceful. Kind of like the Canadian navy, I thought. It might be nice.

Over the next decade, I was surprised by the inertia of history. No one seemed adequately concerned about the fact that the Russians still had thousands of nuclear warheads and that Yeltsin, their man in charge, was obviously a terminal alcoholic. We did drastically reduce our nuclear arsenals from the absolutely insane levels of the 1980s (over 70,000 warheads) down to today’s merely terrifying levels (about 13,400 warheads), but we did not achieve a true rapprochement with our former Cold War rivals.

We Americans seemed to stumble about, punch-drunk, dazed and confused, but content to be the last man standing. We failed to recognize and to capitalize on this historic opportunity to shape a more rational, peaceful world.

In fact, under President George H.W. Bush, in 1991, we fought our first major war since Vietnam.

 Our Wars XIII – First War in Iraq - Operation Desert Storm

This should have been my war. I am sorry to disappoint the patient reader, if any, but the truth is that in twenty years of naval service, I had zero days in combat. I walked between the raindrops of Operation Desert Storm.

After Hawaii, I was transferred to the staff of Commander, Carrier Group Three (COMCARGRU 3), homeported in Alameda Naval Air Station, California. This was in 1990, back in the days when the United States Navy had a home port in the San Francisco Bay. We were hated out of that community. The San Francisco Fleet relocated to homeports in Washington state that were physically less, but culturally more, receptive. It’s a shame, because it was an unique experience to stand on the deck of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier and look up at the understructure of the Golden Gate Bridge and hear the metallic roar of traffic noise reverberating between the steel deck below and the steel bridge above.

Underway for hostile waters, half a world away.

All things go, all things go . . .

My second sea-going tour was officially designated by the Navy as “exceptionally arduous sea duty.” This is because the COMCARGRU 3 staff would cross-deck between carriers, avoiding long turn-around periods ashore for refits and repairs in favor of being perpetually haze gray and underway. In the 27 months I was on the staff, I spent 15 months on a ship at sea. Living in a ship became the new normal.

My first deployment with COMCARGRU 3 was my third, since I’d done two in USS Forrestal. We were embarked in USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). Forrestal burned diesel fuel marine; Vinson was a nuke. Forrestal had F-4/Phantoms; Vinson had F-14/Tomcats. Forrestal was big; Vinson was huge. Forrestal popped into and out of ports in the Med every few days; Vinson steamed for weeks across the wide Pacific and Indian Oceans before finally making a landfall.

The Atlantic Fleet had a tense, crabby streak in its culture, inherited from its mother culture of the East Coast. The Pacific fleet was every bit as professional, but upon its heart there shined just a little bit of aloha. A little Hawaiian liquid sunshine. At least in the way that we treated one another.

Two different navies, actually. It’s a big watery world, large enough for the United States Navy to have two fleets, each larger than the navy of, say, France.

I flew from Hawaii to the Philippines, just in time to look down through the airliner window and see the Vinson standing out to sea from Cubi Point. The next day, I arrested aboard in a C-2/Greyhound, a transport aircraft equipped with a tailhook. That deployment in Vinson was fairly unremarkable. As the assistant intelligence officer, I served as the operations officer of the Supplementary Plot (SUPPLOT), a carbuncle on the flag combat information center responsible for processing sensitive compartmented information (SCI). The highlights of that cruise were personal. Without meaning to, I wrote a novel, JUNGLE, PYRAMIDS, WATERFALLS, MUSHROOMS. Eva and I had a second honeymoon in Hong Kong. My old man joined the ship on the homeward-bound leg between Hawaii and San Francisco, one of over 800 “Tigers,” male relatives who were guests of crewmembers. Although he was not supposed to go anywhere without me as his escort, during my first watch with him onboard, the old man roamed all over the ship. He sweet-talked his way into the flag bridge, where he chatted with RADM Wright over a cup of coffee, and into the armory and down to the depths of shaft alley, but he was politely turned away by the Marines on guard duty outside the reactor spaces. My father died in 2015. I’m glad we shared that experience.

That was about it. Just a routine aircraft carrier battle group deployment. At the very end of it, however, in late July 1990, as we and our Tigers were in the eastern Pacific heading to San Francisco, Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, began to assemble combat forces along the border of Kuwait. He was rattling his saber convincingly. He claimed that Kuwait had been drinking his milkshake with long straws, to use the metaphor from the movie, “There Will Be Blood:” stealing Iraqi oil by drilling across the border diagonally.

Living in SUPPLOT, I had access to all of the fleet’s information about the military build-up. I fully expected Vinson to be turned around and sent back to the North Arabian Sea. I expected back-to-back six-month deployments, that is, a year at sea. Something similar had happened to USS Nimitz when the Iranians took the US Embassy in Tehran, 1979. Nimitz was two months into a routine Med deployment when the students captured the embassy and took over 50 hostages. She was sent to the Gulf of Oman, served as the launch platform for a failed rescue effort involving helicopters and commandos, then finally returned home in May 1980, ending a deployment of 8.5 months.

I thought it was strange that the air wing was allowed to fly off. I thought it was strange that the deck crew stripped the flight deck of its arresting cables, even while we were still at sea. I thought it was strange that we pulled into our homeport, NAS Alameda, as scheduled, on 31 July 1990.

That’s what we did. Two days later, on 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Those sorts of decisions are made by the National Command Authority (NCA). That is, by President George H.W. Bush.

You’d have to ask RADM Wright, but my memory is that the ship and the airwing were in fine combat readiness. Morale was high. In fact, we could have turned right around and steamed west at classified speeds. Doing so, at least, would have been a significant military demonstration. Such political statements, using the placement of our power pieces to make certain points, are one important reason why the US taxpayer funds the routine deployments of multi-billion-dollar aircraft carrier battle groups. (The real fleet is submarine.)

Glad to be home, of course. It’s a hell of a thing to leave your five-year-old daughter and your three-year-old son behind for six months at a time. Some of my favorite memories in all my life were the golden hours that I pulled them in a Burley bike trailer to little neighborhood playgrounds on Bay Farm Island and sat there, smoking a Honduran cigar, while they played together.

Soon after our homecoming, however, RADM Wright was sent forward to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Desert Shield. My boss, the N2, Commander R.H., went with him. I expected the N2 to send for me, too, in a few weeks. I told him twice, over the secure phone, that I was ready to go. He never did call for me, though. He told me instead that the remnants of the staff left behind in Alameda needed my support, which I knew that they did not. I was giving them the classified news. The commander and the N2 were half-a-world away, preparing for war.

I don’t know why. Usually, an N2 handpicks his assistant. CDR R.H. was refused this privilege. We both suspected that the Pacific Fleet N2, who knew us both, had made the decision. CDR R.H. and I got along well enough, I think; he never destroyed me with a scathing fitness report. His destruction of the careers of underappreciated underlings was so notorious that when I told my peers who I was going to sea with, two of them hissed and made a cross with their index fingers. “Good luck with that!” most said.

We did get along. I shared my Clausthaler non-alcoholic beers (I had semi-smuggled 2 cases aboard) most Saturday nights, which was pizza night. I enjoyed his company. He was funny. He could talk. He always knew good gossip, which I did not. We might have gotten along better if I had not believed that an assistant should wear his boss’s head, thinking as him and thinking for him. That can be acceptable ashore, but perhaps it gets wearing onboard the ship, where you can’t escape your shipmates, day after day after day. A shipmate who is trying to wear your head may become tedious indeed.

I had briefed the commander six days a week. Maybe I once said something careless and he lost faith in me, at least in a combat situation. Like many warfighters, he was quick with a story of bad intel that had almost killed him: his story involved SA-2/Guideline missiles, big as telephone poles, roaring past his F-4/Phantom, fired from an island that a junior intelligence officer had assured him was safe.

I don’t know. As we approached combat, however, and fully a third of the cadre of naval intelligence officers were going forward into the desert – desk wienies from DIA were going forward – I, a fleet Lieutenant Commander on a warfighting staff, with my N2 and commander forward, was reading about it and sleeping with momma every night.

So, no, I wasn’t there.

Here’s what happened: Saddam Hussein lined up his army in the desert. Our air forces bombed the living daylights out of them around-the-clock for over a month. They sat there and died, the survivors slowly going insane. Then, when it was finally the army’s turn, Barry McCaffrey and his 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) came roaring out of the western desert and rolled them up like a rug. The Marines, the Airborne Corps, the British and the French, advancing from other sectors, crushed the Iraqis on all fronts. Saddam Hussein directed a retreat. We slaughtered them as they tried to struggle northward on the Highway of Death. President George H.W. Bush declared a cease-fire on 28 February 1991. The ground campaign had lasted only 100 hours. By the end, the Iraqis were surrendering en masse to reconnaissance patrols. One unit even tried to surrender to a hovering drone.

We killed over 100,000 Iraqis. American combat losses were under 400.

So I guess America does take a position with regards to internal Arab conflicts.

Maybe Ambassador Glaspie misspoke. Her 25 July 1990 assurance to Saddam Hussein that America had no opinions on your Arab-to-Arab conflicts was a simple mistake that contributed to an unnecessary war. Maybe she delivered the message that the George H.W. Bush White House wanted her to deliver, because this war was example of creating chaos in order to establish opportunities. She did mention that she was authorized to communicate our indifference by Secretary of State James Baker. Maybe we didn’t care in July, but we began to care in August when the House of Saud saw Saddam Hussein rolling south and they collectively lost their shit.

I don’t know. All I know is that both wars in Iraq might have been avoided if Ambassador Glaspie had sternly warned Saddam Hussein not to invade Kuwait. Turning around USS Carl Vinson so fast that she kicked up a five-story rooster tail might have helped, too.

Even though I watched the combat phase from California, I did earn a Liberation of Kuwait medal. The staff embarked in USS Lincoln (CVN-72) for her maiden deployment, 28 May to 25 November 1991. We spent about three months in the Arabian Gulf beginning on 11 June 1991. Combat operations were over, but the skies over Kuwait were full of black smoke from burning wells. Operating in the confines of the Arabian Gulf, we worried more about the Iranians than we did about the Iraqis. The Iranians were flying; the Iraqis were not. Still, that time in the Gulf qualified us for the medal.

We had bombarded many targets in Iraq. We caused a lot of destruction to its infrastructure. Together with the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations, this destruction caused a lot of suffering among the Iraqi people. Yet Saddam Hussein remained in power until the second Iraq war, when the son of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, became the commander-in-chief.

 What Things Are & What Things Seem: DC and Bill Clinton

Washington D.C. is a weird little town. We would have done better to leave our nation’s capital in Philadelphia. Creating the District of Columbia was a compromise between North and South that forestalled but failed to prevent a bloody civil war. It occupies a drained swamp. It’s too hot in the summer and it’s too cold in the winter.

Its city plan and architecture are weird. The influence of the Freemasons has stamped it with many pre-Christian symbols. For example, the most salient landmark in DC, the Washington Monument, is an Egyptian obelisk. That’s an architectural form that dates back to the Pharaohs. It’s a big pointy phallus that pokes up through the vulvic folds of two intersecting oval sidewalks. There are reflecting pools everywhere: as above, so below.

The city is a necropolis, a city of the dead. Symbols and monuments of death and abodes of the dead are everywhere. From the giant obelisk of the Washington monument, usually seen only in cemeteries, to Civil War statues, to a marble temple for a murdered president, to monuments for all our wars, with their reflecting ponds and black glassy walls, to the plots of tens of thousands of our war dead and the perpetual flame over the shattered bones of JFK.

Everywhere, we see imposing neoclassical buildings and imperial eagles, strong wings outspread, evocative of imperial, not republican, Rome. It is a disturbing iconography for a democratic republic of, by and for the people. I’d rather see turkeys, myself. I think Ben Franklin had the right idea.

D.C. is a weird little town. It straddles Virginia and Maryland. It has no industry. It sucks in four trillion dollars a year and blows out five trillion.

I had one D.C. tour, 1992 to 1995. My kids and I frolicked in the same snowstorm in which frolicked Chelsea Clinton and her dad, William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton. As a lieutenant commander, I was a program manager for small software development projects in support of military intelligence analysis, sponsored by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). By small, I mean about $2M/project/year, which in those days hired about a dozen programmers. The Joint National Intelligence Development Staff (JNIDS) was an ad-hoc collaboration between the Air Force and the Navy. (The Army didn’t participate, devoting its software pin money to its own artificial intelligence group.) Under the intellectual leadership of Major Christine W. Haapala, USAF, we pioneered a user-centric, iterative development methodology, a prototypic Scrum or Kan-Ban.

It is one thing to hear about government waste. It is another thing to work as a minion, deep within the sub-sub-basement of the sausage factory, busily working your own little crank. My experience was that people in D.C. did not talk about politics. They did not talk about sports. When they made small talk, they talked about the traffic. Otherwise, they talked about money: how to get more and how to spend what money they had before the end of the fiscal year. They didn’t talk about how to save money so they could return the surplus to the treasury. That doesn’t happen, but if it were to happen, the offending party would have his or her program cut the following years. If you can’t spend the money you’re given, why should Congress give you more?

The obvious, common-sense solution to government overspending would be to incentivize the civil service, so they would get, say, .001% of the money that they saved. If we did that, believe me, the government would run in the black the next fiscal quarter. The suggestion itself, though, is worse than lunacy. It’s heresy. The purpose of the machine is to suck in four trillion dollars and to blow out five trillion dollars. The extra trillion dollars is put on our grandchildren’s tab.

Like all program managers I ever met, I truly believed in the goodness and importance of my programs. They all failed. I learned a lot from my failures. I believe that if I had been given the opportunity, I could have failed well at larger and larger programs, until finally I was failing at truly important programs. In D.C., if the vertical axis of your bar chart is scaled $M, you are a putz. The big boys and girls fail at the scale of $B. Those are the big programs, the serious programs, the major leagues.

We have had and sometimes continue to have successful programs. The F-14/Tomcat was a great fighter. The M1/Abrams tank is a great tank. The Los Angeles-class submarines are great submarines. UHF Satcom. Global Positioning System. If your success code is footprints on the Moon and a bunch of moon rocks, Apollo was amazing.

Our batting average may be falling off. The F-22/Raptor, the biggest combat aircraft program ever, is a failure, in my opinion, since I am skeptical of the wisdom of trying to build one airplane that meets the importantly different requirements of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Regardless of win, lose or draw, however, the name of the game is to get more money and to spend the money you have. If you don’t get that, you don’t get D.C.

It’s a weird little town.

A funny thing happened to me in D.C.: I was passed over for promotion to commander. This JNIDS gig was a utilization tour of my computer subspecialty. Of the nine naval intelligence officers with computer subspecialties, all nine of us were passed over. That year, the Navy’s N6 (the command, control, communications and computers directorate) had taken over a shipboard computer program previously run by the N2 (the intelligence directorate) and some busy idiot told the promotion board that naval intelligence didn’t need computer subspecialists anymore, so they round-filed all nine of us. My previous bosses were wonderful enough to come to my defense. The next year, I and several other computer subspecialists were “deep selected,” that is, promoted a year late. It was a long, hard year. Like divorce, a blow like that changes not only your present and your future, it changes your past. If I wasn’t the hero my fitness reports and award citations had assured me that I was, then who was I? Not that I would ever have chosen this path, but having trudged down it, I was glad that I learned that my wife, Eva, truly loved me. Not just that guy in dress whites. She loved me.

A funny thing, or two, happened to our president, Bill Clinton. The Republicans dogged him from day one. Arkansas is our fiftieth state, when rank-ordered. A strange state to resource your presidential talent. Rumors of sexual shenanigans and shady business dealings had followed Bill and Hillary for years. A special investigator, Ken Starr, dug into suspected felonies in real estate deals called Whitewater, but he could prove nothing, when Susan MacDougal took one for the team and subscribed to omerta, despite an 18-month prison sentence. Ken Starr eventually found out the president was having extramarital sex. When the president lied about it under oath, he was impeached and censured for his lies, but not removed from office.

Weird, yes, especially since you’d think that the governor’s possible culpability in the CIA’s trafficking of hundreds of millions of dollars of cocaine through Mena, Arkansas might have been a more fruitful line of investigation.

Weirder, still, though, when you consider that Clinton’s five major accomplishments during his regime were traditional Republican objectives: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Crime Bill of 1994, welfare reform, deregulation of the banks and telecommunication companies, and balancing the budget. It was under Clinton, for example, that the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was modified, restructuring the banks so that they all, investment banks or savings banks or whatever, could gamble with other people’s money. This led to the financial melt-down of 2008. It was under Clinton that the Democrats shifted their power base from the unions to the corporations, so that today, the rich fund the campaigns of both parties. Under Clinton, our duopoly of political power became a two-faced monopoly. Today, except for branding, there is no more difference between the Republicans and the Democrats than there is between Coke and Pepsi. They are both caffeinated sugar water and bad for your health. The parties continue to morph. They seem to be heading toward totalitarian dogmas, either of the fascist or communist stripes. I'll let the reader guess which is headed in which direction.

Maybe the Republicans had him in a rear naked choke. He had to do what he needed to do to survive. Maybe he was a minion of George H.W. Bush, the East Coast monied oligarchy and the Bilderbergers, all along. I don’t know. All I know is that in D.C., two things different are what things seem and what things are. We can listen to what our politicians say, but we must watch what they do. Every one of them, from Carter to Trump, have promised that they are going to drain the swamp. Yet the swamp grows wider and deeper every year.

It’s almost as if the “leader of the free world” is influential, but not in charge. The last POTUS who acted as if he were in charge was a reckless young man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was publicly butchered.

Clinton met JFK as a starry-eyed young Democrat. He entered the Oval Office, wondering who had killed the hero of his youth. He delayed a year in naming the members of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). He allowed the CIA to delay its document turn-over until after the ARRB had closed its doors. As the chief law enforcement officer in the land, he himself launched no investigation. If Clinton ever found out who killed JFK, it must have been in a private conversation, perhaps in the context that bad things can happen to pussy-hound presidents who don’t mind their own business.

Even under Trump, who said that he would release all documents, thousands of documents have still not been released. 56 years after the crime. A year after their planned release date. All because of “national security concerns.” That’s because elements of the CIA killed Kennedy, and presidents such as LBJ, George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon had too many fingerprints near the scene of the great crime. Learning this might undermine the public’s faith in our federal government and the duopoly of our two political parties. Maybe that’s the national security concern. Since the documents remain secret, we don't know why this claim is being made.

It’s a weird little town. Disturbing, too, if you think about it too much. In 1995, for Eva’s sake and the good of our marriage, I asked for orders back to the United States Southern Command in the Republic of Panamá.

This was my final tour of active duty. As the deputy J2 for plans and programs, I concentrated on building up the J2 and the Joint Intelligence Center – South to full strength, and then planning the move of the organization from four buildings on three bases in two countries into a single new facility in Miami, Florida.

I believed in the importance of the region. I felt that the J2 had been underresourced vis-à-vis the bigger, better-looking commands, such as the Pacific, European and Central commands. So I fought for more money. I spent the few millions I got.

My second J2, BG Richard J. Quirk, III, USA, was a strategic thinker. I helped him to staff the Strategic Intelligence Assessment for Latin America and the Caribbean. JIC-South did a good job, highlighting the fact that although most of the region was doing OK, Colombia was circling the drain. The level of violence was unbelievable. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was using drug money to build and maintain a guerrilla army in the field, the final stage before insurgent victory, but, because it had become a drug-trafficking organization, it was also interested in maintaining the status quo. So all of Colombia was locked into an endless nightmare of violence. Congress took note of our warnings and those of the ambassador and of anyone who was paying any attention whatsoever and funded a $2B Plan Colombia. This provided helicopters and other vital equipment to the heroic Colombian army. Despite great risks to themselves and to their families, these Colombian patriots managed to fight the FARC back down to a more manageable stage.

So I was more than a little busy. Not to mention getting tagged with two special projects: a four-star change-of-command ceremony and a cabinet-level visit. With my focus on Latin America, I did not give a damn about Kosovo. I still don’t.

Even today, I cannot bring myself to focus on Kosovo, except from 35,000 feet in altitude. I have to squint and ignore all the history and other ethnic divisions. Only by squinting so hard that I see only Christians killing Muslims do I feel that I have anything to say.

Who are we, those of us who call ourselves Christians?

 Jesus as Cypher

The Old Testament and the New Testament are ruins.

When we see a ruin, we must remember that they have been subjected to three kinds of ravages: time, vandalism and reconstruction. The ravage that is most often overlooked is reconstruction. The roof of the tower in the Palace of Palenque, which is pagoda-like, was pure conjecture. The megaliths of Stonehenge have not been stood back up to everyone's satisfaction. Once accomplished, though, these reconstructions, correct or incorrect, partial or total, take on a life of their own. For every subsequent generation, the reconstruction represents its own concrete truth.

So it is with these ancient texts. We are lucky to have those frail fragments and bashed clay cylinders that we do have. The ancient Jewish scribes were punctilious with their sacred books. They prayed, abluted, fasted and transcribed with all possible precision. Yet a fair-minded reader can see the hands of editors in the book of Job, for example. Once the devil has been allowed to inflict Job's body, the dialogues with his friends make no sense. We don't see a consistent arc in Job's faith. His friend's arguments are too monotonously pious. At least one of them, I would guess, argued the existential point of view. Another was probably an early-day Alister Crowley, a do-as-thou-wilt villain. Clear, cogent arguments against faith in God or attacks on the character of God have no place in sacred texts, later editors decided, so they bowdlerized a book of the Bible that should have been Shakespearean in its greatness.

Although more recent, the New Testament has also suffered during its transmission down the ages. None of them were written in Hebrew or Aramaic during the life of Jesus. Matthew was written by someone with a weak understanding of the geography of the Holy Land. Matthew, Mark and Luke, although “synoptic” (seeing things with one eye), conflict in important parts of their stories, such as the movements of his parents or the savior’s last words. John, the most recent gospel, differs dramatically in tone and intent from the older books. The oldest surviving gospels were all written in Greek, long after the death of Jesus of Nazareth.

These books are not shining temples. They are mold-covered, tumbled-down ruins. As we visit them, we must ask ourselves, what must have been the whole, true story, when Jesus was alive?

Who was this Jesus?

 Jesus as Character

Perhaps Jesus is a character in a fable.

Outside of the books of the New Testament, no historical or archaeological evidence has survived that would indicate that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived. This lack of evidence should trouble believers, moreover, since some of the events recounted in the Jesus story, such as the sun turning black upon his death or Herod's massacre of the newborns of Galilee, would have been worthy of mention by then-living historians such as Josephus. This lack of reporting undermines the argument for the historical existence of Jesus.

So let us consider the possibility that there was no Jesus. Someone made him up.

Who could they have been? Why would they do it?

The imperial Romans were good at absorbing the peoples they conquered. They demanded the payment of taxes and the acceptance of the divinity of the emperor. In return, they allowed the conquered peoples to continue to worship their own local gods. They might even induct good local gods into the pantheon of gods venerated in Rome and throughout the empire.

The ancient Jews, however, were a stiff-necked lot. First, they didn't allow any effigies of their god. They venerated empty altars, weirdly enough. Also, the zealots among them took the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” to mean not only that Yahweh must have pride of place, but that they were forbidden to worship or even recognize any other gods whatsoever.

That was a deal-breaker. After decades of civil unrest, uprisings and repression as only the Romans could repress, Rome sent in fresh legions, killed everybody within stabbing distance and destroyed the second temple.

It was in this historical context that the cult of Jesus Christ began to arise. Although he was said to have lived in the beginning of the first century, his cult began to arise in the end of the century, after the second temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., and along with it, much of the religious class of the Jews.

Since the gospels were written in Greek, it’s possible that early Christianity was a fabrication of the Greco-Roman world, with the goal of fabricating a new variant of Judaism that was more amenable to Roman rule.

This theory has some support in the texts. We meet centurions, who, to the ancient Jews, were as evil as Nazi Storm-troopers would become to 20th century Jewry, but in these books, the Romans are depicted in a fairly positive light. For example, one centurion shows an admirable faith in the hero. Jesus dines with tax-collectors, who, in reality, were knuckle-dragging thugs subcontracted by the Romans to extract as much wealth as possible for the empire and then to extract as much as they could for themselves. Jesus specifically tells us to pay our taxes. Herod, the imperial governor of the province, is reluctant to condemn Jesus. The blame is shifted onto the temple priests and the people, who cry for Barabbas. Overall, the Romans seem to get a big pass in the gospels.

Another source of the Jesus story may have been some dissident subcultures of the Jews. One theme that is strong throughout the gospels is that Jesus had a beef with the temple, with the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes. His ministry began with his baptism by John the Baptist, a dissident and itinerant preacher. His teachings were heterodox, or contrary to the official religion, such as his insistence that words and deeds were more important than observing rituals. He attacked the temple’s money-changing industry. In return, the temple targeted him for assassination. Early Christianity was apocalyptic. The Essenes, heterodox hermits based in Galilee, were also apocalyptic. The Jesus story may have been an oral tradition of one of these heterodox, outsider groups, a story that grew in the telling.

So I cannot dismiss either of these possibilities: a Roman invention or a dissident Jewish invention. Either could be true. Or the Jesus story could be a weird blend of the two. It also could have borrowed ideas from other eastern Mediterranean myths.

Yet enough of the ruin has survived. The testimony of the gospels themselves convinces me that there lived a historical Jesus of Nazareth. Enough of his life and teachings have survived the ravages of time, vandalism and reconstruction. We'll examine the magical and divine Jesus in later essays, but first let us examine the historical Jesus.

 Jesus as Preacher

Joseph, the father of Jesus, wasn't a carpenter, necessarily. He was a tekton, which means a craftsman. He could have been a mason. The historical Jesus grew up in an iron-age village in a region where the economy included fishing, farming, herding, trade and artisanal manufacture. Jerusalem, the big city, was in the south. Having been conquered by Alexander the Great and then the Romans, his home turf of Galilee had a lot of Greek and Roman cultural influences. Baalbek, built on the ruins of a cyclopean megalithic temple complex, was the Disney World of the Roman Empire, hosting huge bacchanals and orgies in celebration of the cults of Venus and of Bacchus. From the town of Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus preached, it was about 120 kilometers south to Jerusalem and about 150 kilometers north to Baalbek.

Israel sits at the crossroads of Asia and Africa. The ancient Jewish people and culture were heavily influenced by many great Asian and African civilizations. Abraham, the ultimate patriarch of the Jews, was born in Ur, in the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization. Moses was raised in the court of the pharaoh of mighty Egypt. The Jews had lived in Babylon for generations.

By land and by sea, by trade and by conquest and by the travels of wise men and preachers, these ancient lands and their traditions were connected. The Jews had their own wisdom traditions, drawing on these other cultures, and those of the pre-Canaanites, and perhaps civilizations as far away as ancient India and far-off China, all of them drawing, probably, from antediluvian civilizations of which we know little. The Jewish story of Noah, for example, echoes Babylonian stories of the flood.

Jesus the preacher did not arise from a vacuum. He was born in a historically deeply interconnected world, awash in wisdom traditions only fragments of which have continued to survive to our modern day.

We do not know about his education. As a boy, he was able to astound the elders in the temple. After that, we know nothing of his life and travels, until the day his ministry began.

Perhaps, like Shakespeare, his genius allowed him to leverage a mediocre education into the mastery he demonstrated. Perhaps he spent years in an Essene cult, studying various wisdom traditions. (It was the Essenes who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls, when the Romans came to destroy everything, following Jewish rebellions after Jesus died.) Perhaps the young Jesus traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles. We don't know, but given what has survived, I believe that his formative years were spent in an Essene cult, not far from his hometown. There he may have met travelers from distant lands or at least been exposed to their wisdom traditions through esoteric studies.

The early books of the Jewish bible already existed, but the temple was even then developing the doctrines which, centuries later, would mature into the religion that we would recognize as modern Judaism. In Jesus' day, there was a disagreement, for example, about the possibility of resurrection after death. One Jewish sect, the Sadducees, thought, no, while another, the Pharisees, thought, yes. Yet even then, the faith of Abraham was old. Rituals were well-established in the culture.

John the Baptist was a dissident itinerant preacher with a large following. He was an ascetic, or pleasure-denying holy man, who wore a garb made of camel hair. He subsisted on wild honey and insects. He practiced baptism, a ritualistic ablution, using the waters of the Jordan River, which flowed south from the lands of modern-day Lebanon. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph, joined his cult and was duly baptized by John.

Jesus felt the call to preach himself, though. He met with so much early success that the disciples of John became jealous. His teachings were broader and more revolutionary in the spiritual and cultural senses, but not in the political sense. Like John, he preached that the kingdom of God was at hand and all people must be ready at all times to meet their maker. He preached that the Kingdom of God was a spiritual state, what we might call today a virtual reality, that one entered when one subsumed his or her own desires to the will of God. He preached that what one said or did was more important than what one ate, when one worked or rested, or with whom one associated. He was a spiritual absolutist, who preached that the intention to commit a sin was as bad as committing the sin itself.

He preached an absolutely extreme form of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. He applied the Golden Rule to all people and all circumstances. Even under duress, under attack, while being exploited, we should continue to do to others as we would have them do unto us. Moreover, he preached, we should love them who hurt and abuse us. In fact, we should love our enemies as much as we love ourselves.

This strange edict was surpassed only by the edict to love God with all our hearts, souls and minds.

He was a social revolutionary. He sat at table and broke bread with outcasts, sinners, prostitutes and tax-collectors. He preached that gentiles could be as virtuous as Jews; that tribes were not as important as the spirit.

John the Baptist ran afoul of the authorities. They murdered him.

Jesus' ministry grew. He attracted disciples and ever-larger crowds. The temple got wind of him. The priests sent agent provocateurs against him, again and again, trying to trip him up, to catch him in an offense that would allow him to be neutralized, maybe even stoned to death. Every time, he side-stepped their traps, while deftly advancing his own mission and teachings.

He grew more vocal in his criticism of the temple. He denounced the professional preacher class as hypocrites. They preached piety, but they were corrupt.

During the major festival around Passover, he dared to enter Jerusalem itself. Throngs of his followers and admirers welcomed him. He visited the outer courtyards of the temple and harangued against corruption. The elites of the temple were making profits by demanding payment for sacrificial animals in shekels, then charging unfair rates for money exchange. He demonstrated his opposition to this practice by physically upsetting their changing tables.

The temple elite had had enough of this dissident preacher. They bribed one of his followers, Judas, to betray him. They convinced their imperial overlords to sentence him to death.

He was tortured, whipped, humiliated in public and assassinated on the cross.

Although his followers abandoned him during the crisis, they banded back together and carried forward his message. Despite suffering horrible repression themselves, they remained ardent in the mission of spreading his word, which became the religion, two thousand years later, of over two billion people.

 Jesus as Magician

Thomas Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the New Testament. He cut out the supernatural and threw it away. He pasted together the "fine morals." His redaction is known as the "Jefferson Bible,” which is traditionally used to swear in congressmen, if they don't elect to use a family bible. In the previous essay, I sketched the historical Jesus and the tops of the waves of his teachings; it probably is harmonious with the Jefferson Bible. Now we'll turn our attention to the parts of the Jesus story that Jefferson threw away: Jesus the Magician. Jesus the Miracle Worker.

He turned water into wine. He cured the sick. He cast out demons. He raised the dead. He multiplied fishes and loaves. He walked on the water. He calmed the storm. He himself arose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

Magic was an essential art in the ancient world. Moses himself dueled with pharaonic magicians. Matthew and Mark emphasize the miracles. In those gospels, we meet most directly with Jesus as magician.

I myself was never particularly moved by these stories. I grew reading a red-letter King James Bible, for which I'm thankful. The focus was on what Jesus said. His words were blood red in a sea of black ink. As a quadpolar Christian-Taoist-skeptic-Stoic, I'm still underwhelmed by the tales of magic.

I would not, however, go as far as Jefferson. The miracles of Jesus deserve contemplation, not contempt. We should extend the text more courtesy, especially when we consider the tradition of Hebraic literature, in which any passage is credited to simultaneously have three layers of meaning: the literal, the metaphoric, and the esoteric.

At the literal level, the skeptic, as a reflex action, will dismiss the miracles as fabrications. Fairy tales, meant to dupe the stupid, the ignorant and the credulous. Primitive people who did not know about schizophrenia blamed demons. They did not know about germs, so leprosy was a spiritual affliction, susceptible to a miracle cure. And so on. Everything we know about charlatanism of fakes and fraudsters should make us skeptical of any report of supernatural phenomena. We know many magician's tricks.

Even we skeptics, though, should periodically open the doors of perception. Psilocybin will do the trick. We need to remind ourselves that we exist in a Universe that is awash in miracles. Literally everything, in fact, is a miracle. Or, if mind-bending hallucinogens are not your cup of tea (and I certainly don't recommend them universally), spend some time studying quantum mechanics. Then spend some more time. Then ask yourself, do you, or does anyone, understand the fundamental nature of our reality?

The answer is no. As much as we do understand, we can see that matter is energy and time is not what we think it is. Quantum mechanics is inexpressibly weird. It does not jibe with everyday experience. If that which we may call the divine were to project itself into our mundane world, we would not recognize it. We might have no other word to call it except magic.

So I would never tell the faithful that the stories of the miracles of Jesus on the literal level are simply not true. They are not where I meet his divinity, but I lack the confidence in my own understanding of reality to make such a dismissal.

They do work for me more on the metaphorical level. I always liked that his first miracle was at a wedding in Cana, where he turned the water into wine. Fine wine, at that. The healing of the sick, of their mind and body, the multiplication of the fishes and loaves, all have a deep metaphorical meaning. Belief in the Lord brings with it spiritual healing and gifts of strength. Of nourishment. Even of joy. You need only ask and have faith in the asking.

He cleans the corrupt spirit. He renews the life of the spirit. These are the metaphorical meaning of the miracles of healing and resurrection.

I love, too, the theme of water, of the sea and of fishes, that runs through the miracles of Jesus, as well as other aspects of the Jesus story, such as preaching from a boat or recruiting fishermen as his first disciples. Metaphorically, the sea is the domain of the spirit. We breathed salt water long before our brains slithered ashore, as the poet John Haag said. It is our mother element. In his miracles associated with the sea, Jesus is exercising his mastery of the spiritual realm.

Of the esoteric or occult level, I can say little. I am not a student of the Kabbalah. I don't even know if the ancient Greek of the New Testament lends itself to this sort of cryptic analysis, as does the ancient Hebrew of the Torah. Someone who works in the sub-sub-basement of the Vatican library may know.

Like the gold fringe of a flag or the coruscations about the Virgin of Guadalupe, the miracles of Jesus are radiations of his glory. More than mere adornment; indicative, but not intrinsic; expressive, but not essential.

 Jesus as Messenger

I believe that Jesus was a messenger from higher dimensions.

It is difficult to envision objects of higher dimensions. Since we are three-dimensional creatures, it is easy for us to envision objects of one, two or three dimensions, but it is difficult to envision objects of four, five or more dimensions. Those of us who have gifts in spatial intelligence may have an easier time of it. I am not that spatially intelligent. The final loop of a hitch-knot confuses me. Half the time, I tie a granny knot.

So let's not even try to envision, say, a four-dimensional cube. To try to understand this Jesus, let's pretend we are, first, one-dimensional creatures, then let’s pretend that we are two-dimensional creatures. How would we perceive a three-dimensional object, such as a sphere, if it passed through our universe?

If we are one-dimensional creatures, our universe is a line:

Here comes a sphere:

There it is.

Its center passes through.

Its top passes through.

Now it’s gone.

As one-dimensional creatures, we would perceive a sphere as a line that gets bigger, then gets smaller, then disappears.

Now let's envision a cube as it passes through.

Here comes the cube.

Its bottom passes through . . .

Its center passes through . . .

Its top passes through . . .

Now the cube is gone:

Now, the brightest of the one-dimensional creatures among us will study these weird apparitions. They would tell us that they think our visitors from higher dimensions have certain shapes.

The visitor who starts small, gets bigger, then gets smaller, could be a diamond.

Trying to envision a two-dimensional diamond absolutely bends their one-dimensional minds. The amazing “circle” never occurs to them.

They’re done. They certainly never envision spheres, cubes or anything 3-dimensional.

Let's do this mental exercise one more time. Let’s pretend that we are 2-D creatures:

Our 2-D creatures have different shapes, such as squares, circles, diamonds:

The paper on which these illustrations exist is practically 2-dimensional, so, in order to illustrate a third dimension, I'm going to tilt the 2-D universe like this:

And zoom in on the Up / Right one:

Here comes our 3-D sphere:

This is what the sphere looks like as it passes through the 2-D universe:

Then it gets smaller and disappears:

Now, the two-D geniuses envision two possible shapes of the visitor:

The visitor could be a 3-D sphere or a 3-D object made up of two cones joined at the base. We can see that creatures of a 2-D universe can gather more information about a 3-D universe than 1-D creatures can gather about a 2-D universe. As the universe itself expands in dimensions, insights into higher dimensions become richer. Yet creatures of lower dimensions must always strain their imaginations. Their perception and understanding of the higher dimensions will always be limited.

So, it is with Jesus, a messenger from higher dimensions. The essence of his teachings makes no sense in our world. They only make sense when we consider that they come from a higher dimension, that is, the kingdom of heaven. He was a spiritual absolutist. The absolutism of his perspective is not of this world. It comes from heaven, that is, it comes from God.

Three of his teachings, one of which is at the very center of his message, are evidence of this divine perspective.

First, he taught us that thinking about a sin is as bad as a sin:

Matthew 5:28: But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

This makes no sense to our simian brains. We know that if we contemplate a sin, such as murder or seducing the spouse of a friend, but then decide not to commit the sin, then we have chosen the good. We have properly exercised our free will, we have demonstrated the purity of that will and we have avoided, not committed, a sin.

Consider that process from a higher dimension, from the perspective of pure spirit, in which only the spirit has a true reality and the physical is merely a shadow in a lower reality. Now it makes sense. If we think about committing adultery with our friend's spouse, we have committed one sin. If we think about doing it every time the spouse wears tight blue jeans and bends over, then we have committed 1,000 sins. We have junked up the higher dimensions with a lot of static.

Second, at the core of his message, he taught us to love our enemies:

Matthew 5:44: But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!

Loving your enemies makes no sense. Enemies who rob, assault and murder us and our families are not lovable. Maybe it makes sense to forgive those enemies who have wronged us, but who have seen the light, repented and promised not to do it again. He taught us to forgive those people, but he also taught us to forgive those who have wronged us not once, not twice, not thrice, but 7 times 70 times, which is 490 times, that is, practically, as many times as we are sinned against. This is beyond our sense of belief. It makes no sense. Anyone who abuses us so often has made us into a slave. Submitting ourselves to slavery makes no sense.

It only makes sense from an absolutely spiritual perspective. If we truly and completely forgive someone, we forgive and forget. We return to a spiritual place, vis-a-vis those who have wronged us, as we were with them before they wronged us.

You know and I know, however, that is not the way we humans forgive, on those rare occasions when we do forgive at all. We manage to forgive, perhaps, but we do not forget. If we are sinned against a second time, our immediate reaction is, that son-of-a-bitch! He did it again!

If we are a long-suffering spouse or a parent desperate to save a troubled child, we may try to forgive a second time, a third time, and so on. Each time, forgiveness is harder, memory is more bitter and patience is eroded. No one forgives anyone 490 times. It’s inhuman. No human would counsel such unrealistic behavior.

A spiritual absolutist might. Someone who is a messenger from heaven, where divine forgiveness is to human forgiveness as a rose is to a picture of a rose. As a real sunset is to a child's crayon scrawl of a sunset.

It gets more challenging than merely forgiving those that trespass against us, even 7 x 70 times. At the core of Jesus’ message is the edict that sets it apart from all other teachings: we should love our enemies:

Luke 6:27-31: But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Let's closely examine this teaching. I'm going to remind ourselves what our enemies do to us. The following paragraph is a charcoal sketch of the face of the D---l. Avert your eyes, if you do not want to stare into the darkest pit of evil:

Our enemies rape and kill us. They bind our hands behind us. They force us to watch as they rape, torture and kill our spouses. Our children. They push buttons and incinerate cities, killing millions of men, women and children. They force us into bondage, then sell our spouses and children as chattel . . . and so on . . .

Our enemies range from the next-door bully to the most perverse, the most diabolical, the evilest creatures imaginable, and beyond that, to twisted people who are capable of evil that is beyond the sane imagination. Now think about how we are not only supposed to forgive our enemies, but we are supposed to love them.

That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, here in our world. Love is the good recognizing the good. It is not the good recognizing the bad. By definition, we cannot love what is bad.

The essential teaching of Jesus Christ makes no sense.

Not in this world.

It does in the kingdom of heaven. From the divine, the absolutely spiritual perspective, we are all sinners.

The killer in me is the killer in you.

The differences between most of us sinners are usually a question of circumstances. Whether or not a gene is mutated, or, in the particular shuffle of the genetic deck, any one of us is dealt a certain hand, for example, a tendency for high aggressiveness. The chaos of life. The tabula rasa of amoral children, born at random in a given society, perhaps a perverted society, for example, a society that celebrates war as beneficial. Someone may be born to Imperial Rome or to Nazi Germany. To Carthage or Kattegat. Or they are born relatively free but, when young and vulnerable, they fall victim to corruption. And so on.

We tell ourselves that we should hate the sin but love the sinner. How many of us even try? Of those of us who do try, how successful is our attempt? How capable are we, even, of hating the sin, but loving the sinner?

Not much. Such love is superhuman. If it appears in this world at all, it is a visitation from a higher spiritual dimension.

Third, and finally, let's examine one of his teachings that is rarely discussed in a sermon: that if a body part leads us into sin, it would be better for us to cut it off.

Matthew 5:29-30: If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to depart into hell.

We like our eyes and hands, even if they get us in trouble. Guard your crotch, though. It gets worse. Jesus says that if our gonads lead us to sin, then we would be better off castrating ourselves.

Matthew 19:12: For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.

Even the most literal interpreters of the Holy Bible, who believe that it is the absolute truth received from God himself, tend to say that Jesus was speaking metaphorically here. What if he meant exactly what he said? What if it is literally true that it is preferable to maim our bodies rather than to allow our bodies to commit sin?

Only a fool would say that?

Whatever we know about Jesus, he was certainly no fool. He was the king of come-backs. "It is you who say I am." "Those who are without sin, cast the first stone." "Render unto Caesar what is Caesars and render unto God what is God's." He demonstrated time and again transcendent wisdom and rhetoric.

Only a religious fanatic would say that? Well, maybe, but given his other teachings, what sort of religious fanatic?

A spiritual absolutist.

Someone with a divine perspective.

A man who resided in the kingdom of heaven.

A visitor from a higher dimension, who knew, in fact, that eyes and hands and gonads simply do not matter. They are shadows on the wall of a cave in a lower dimension. Truly only the spirit matters.

The proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ is not in the stories of his miracles. Such stories may be invented. The proof of his divinity is in the essence of his teachings. He was a man who did not talk as a man would talk. He spoke as God himself would speak.

He visited us from a higher dimension. His words shine out, across barriers of language, culture and time, to give us proof that our world is but a shadow of a higher world, a world of the spirit, the kingdom of heaven.

According to one theory, the true number of dimensions of our universe may be eight. We all know what a cube looks like in three-dimensions:

If there are truly eight dimensions in the universe, this is what a cube truly looks like, at least, rendered in two dimensions:

Maybe this is the true reality. It is from the true reality that we have received messages from the spiritual absolutist, Jesus Christ.

 Jesus as God

John 1.1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1.2: He was with God in the beginning.

John 1.3: Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

John 1.4: In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

John 1.5: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Now let us examine the complex nature of the Christian God. It is bizarre and baffling, but it illuminates beautifully by the light of other mysteries: the question of why a benevolent god would allow so much pain and evil in our world; the paradox of omnipotence; the moral mechanics of forgiveness; and the reason for the crucifixion.

First, let's define our terms. Those of us who are Christians are monotheists. We believe in one God. Our God, however, has three aspects: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. This is called a triune god. Each of these three aspects simultaneously is and is not the other: that is, God the Father is and is not God the Son; God the Son is and is not the Holy Ghost; the Holy Ghost is and is not God the Father. This complexity is best understood using the analogy of water: liquid water is and is not steam; steam is and is not ice; ice is and is not liquid water. In both the cases of the Christian God and water, the things are essentially the same, but present different aspects in different times and places.

As three-dimensional animals moving down the arrow of time, our hardware cannot host the mind of God. In the tradition of Christianity, however, we believe that our God has four powers: omnipotence (able to do everything); omnipresence (being everywhere); omniscience (knowing everything); and omnibenevolence (being wholly good.) He is the Creator, who made the Universe. He is eternal, existing outside of time. His names are God, God the Father and Our Father.

God the Son is Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin Mary. He was conceived by the Holy Ghost. He was a man. He lived. He died. He was resurrected bodily. Since then, he has resided in heaven at the place of highest honor beside God the Father.

Let's delay defining the Holy Ghost until we have illuminated this triune God by the lights of other mysteries.

First, the paradox of omnipotence. Let’s assume God can do all things. There is nothing that he cannot do. Therefore, he can create an immovable object. If the object is immovable, then he cannot move it. If there's something that God can’t do, he is by definition not all-powerful. This is a paradox.

This paradox grows thornier when you consider omnibenevolence. A god who is all-powerful and all-good can do all things, less commit evil. If there are things the god can't do, then he cannot be all-powerful.

We’re having mechanical problems. Let’s try to fix them. We don’t know how the higher dimensions work, but let’s see if we can infer something about the mechanics of heaven, based on what has been revealed to us. For this exercise, we'll use the most essential Judaic and Christian teachings:

(1) Genesis 1.1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

(2) Genesis 1:31: God looked over all that he had created and saw that it was very good.

(3) Exodus 20:13: “You shall not murder."

(4) Matthew 22:36: “Rabbi, which is the greatest commandment in the law?”

:37: Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'

:38: This is the first and greatest commandment.

(5) :39: And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’

:40: All the law and the writings of the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

(6) Matthew 6:9: “This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, whose name is holy,

:10: may your kingdom come and your will be done on Earth as it is done in heaven.

:11: Give us today our daily bread.

:12: Forgive our sins as we have forgiven those who have wronged us.

:13: Do not put us to the test, rather, deliver us from evil. Let it be so.'"

(7) Luke 17:3: "So take care of yourselves: If your brother or sister wrongs you, rebuke them; if they repent, forgive them."

(8) Matthew 18:21: Peter asked him, "Rabbi, how many times should I forgive someone who keeps wronging me? Seven times?"

:22: Jesus replied: “Not seven times, I tell you, but 70 times!"

(9) Genesis 2:7: Then the Lord God formed a man out of earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils and the man became a living being.

By (1) and (4), we can infer that God the creator of the universe is good. He is as good as we are capable of imagining, knowing or feeling. By (2), we see that this Universe, in the judgment of God himself, is very good, despite all the violence, pain and suffering of which we mortals are only too familiar.

By all the commandments, of which (3) is the most exemplary, we see several things: there are sins, which are things that God does not want us to do. These are bad things. It also implies that we can do these things. By (9), God created man; by (3), man can sin; therefore, by (3) and (9), God created a creature who can sin.

By (7) and (8), we can infer a mechanism for forgiveness. The guilty party must be made aware of his trespass. He must ask for forgiveness. Once he asks, he can be forgiven. By (7) and (8), he can be forgiven on the earthly plane by man. By (6), he can be forgiven on the heavenly plane by God. Moreover, by (6), there appears to be a moral calculus by which this forgiveness takes place: we are forgiven by God as we have forgiven our fellow man. This implies that if we ask for forgiveness by God, that he will do so, using this moral calculus, which takes into consideration how we have forgiven other human beings who have wronged us.

Let’s first abstract a meta-point: there are laws at work. There are laws in heaven that project down to us on Earth. In Taoist terms, we might call these laws aspects of the Way. Some things are good; some things are bad. Actions have consequences. Moral actions have moral consequences.

Consider these laws in the context of Newton's Third Law of Motion:

FaB = - FbA

which states that FaB, the force of object A on object B, is equal and opposite to FbA, which is the force of object B on object A. Or we may say:

For every force, there is a force of equal and opposite reaction.

This law is so important to the mechanics of our Universe that it invites us to wonder whether a similar property exists in the higher realms. For every sin, there must be punishment. Someone must pay. Now, if we accept this as a moral law, we can arrive at the standard Christian understanding of the mystery of the crucifixion, which is:

Why would an omnipotent being allow himself to be publicly humiliated and then excruciatingly assassinated on the cross?

Because someone had to pay for our sins.

Jesus was the sacrificial Lamb. The blood of the Lamb paid for our sins.

If God had just forgiven us, without the sacrifice of Jesus, then he would have condoned our sins. “No big deal. Just forget about it.” Condoning our sins without payment may be morally equivalent to committing the sins himself.

But didn’t God himself doom us all to die?

Here we are wrestling with “theodicy,” the mystery of why a benevolent god would doom us to a planet with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, pandemics, comet strikes, coronal mass ejections, gamma ray bursts . . .

Doom us to a life with the agony of bone cancer, death during childbirth, heart attacks, fatal falls, drowning, strokes, madness . . . the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

By (1), we see that God made it so, and by (2), he judged that it was “very good.”

Jesus had one bad day. We are having a bad billion years. Where is the balance in that?

Remember the attribute of omnipresence: God the Father is always present. If he is pleased at the good, then he is displeased at the bad. He is displeased at our sorrows and suffering. In a way that we cannot comprehend, he suffers outside of time. I believe that the Passion of the Christ was not so much as payment in full, but rather a pointer toward the suffering that God has endured and endures and will endure – endures eternally -- having elected to allow such a Universe to exist.

Better universes exist. We call them, heaven. As we see so abundantly in Nature, however, God is a lover of life. He knew what it would cost, both to us and to him. He judged that it was very good.

Someone would have to pay. That someone was God in his aspect of Jesus Christ. This sacrifice was a necessary part of the decision to create this world.

The enabling principle.

The Word.

The Logos.

Thus it was that Jesus Christ was with God before Time itself began, and through him, all things were made, and without him, nothing that was made has been made.

This is the cosmic Christ, the enabler of all creation.

Now let’s turn to the Holy Ghost, also known as the Holy Spirit. I prefer “Holy Spirit,” because “Holy Ghost" implies a phantasm that left the body of Jesus when he died and returned at his resurrection, an absence of only a few days. The Holy Spirit is vastly more than that. The Holy Spirit is that aspect of both of the Father and of the Son, that exists outside of Time itself but that projects into our reality, the logos or word through which this Universe was created and that aspect of divine omnipresence that inhabits our world and that is available for our perception and communion.

Having defined the triune God in this way, let’s take a look at how these three aspects interacted during the life of Jesus.

Since he is omnipresent, God the Father was with Jesus of Nazareth all his life, but we are specifically told that the Holy Spirit descended at his baptism:

Luke 3:22: and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in a bodily form like a dove and a voice came from heaven: “You are my beloved son. With you I am well-pleased.”

Although fully God, Jesus was also fully man, and, like all men, his communion with the Holy Spirit was not constant and was not perfect. This was not a moral defect, but rather a consequence of inhabiting the human condition. One of the most telling insights of this unique relationship was when a woman in a crowd, seeking a divine favor, touched the hem of his cloak:

Luke 8:42: As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him.

:43: And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her.

:44: She came up behind him and touched the hem of his cloak and immediately her bleeding stopped.

:45: “Who touched me?” Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, “Rabbi, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

:46: But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

He felt the divine power flow through him, but he didn't know where it was going to. He was not an omniscient god, walking the earth and exercising his omnipotence at will. Through the Holy Spirit, he was the living conduit of God's power, but his own understanding of the workings of that power was not perfect.

He prayed to God the Father. Only because the Son is not the Father could he have provided a perfect example of how we men and women should relate to the Father: how, for example, we should ask that his will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. His prayer, on the eve of his passion, in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he sweats blood, and prays that this cup be taken away from him, is a most telling insight into this complex relationship. If his communion with the Holy Spirit was constant and perfect, he would have known the future and calmly accepted his fate. He did understand what was coming and he dreaded it, but he also hoped other outcomes were possible. Only by communing through the Holy Spirit with God the Father could he find the strength to accept his mission, which he did.

Finally, on the cross, he called out:

Matthew 26:46: About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Elí, Elí, lemá sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

This most troubling detail, thankfully, has not been edited out of Matthew. It provides us insight into his mental, emotional and spiritual state, in that moment, which I believe, was the low point of the passion. While he was dying, nailed to the cross, came the most intense moment of his suffering. He fully inhabited the human condition, agonized, betrayed, tortured, humiliated and far from the comfort of God.

Then he arose to a more perfect communion with the Holy Spirit:

Luke 23:46: Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit.” After he said this, he died.

Only by being fully human, and therefore imperfect, could Jesus be the perfect exemplar for humanity. Most importantly, his sacrifice is the principle upon which the decision to create this Universe is eternally based.

The Holy Spirit is always on, always clear, but it is quiet: you have to adjust your antenna in the right direction. You have to tune in and listen.

God the Father suffers eternally, but he does so for our sakes.

This is my best understanding of the triune God of Christianity.

 Jesus as Lord

When I was a small boy, our elementary school in Rennerdale was visited by a science exhibition. They had a large silver gyroscope in a black suitcase. They spun up the gyroscope and invited us children to carry it around the gym. Amazingly, the suitcase only wanted to go in one direction: along the plane of rotation of the gyroscope. It was possible to tug it, resisting, in another direction, but it was calm only in moving in that one direction. They explained that gyroscopes were used in ships and airplanes for “inertial navigation.” 

So it is with me and my Lord, Jesus. Whether or not he was God, or the Son of God, or a messenger, or a preacher, or a character in a fable, I have that within me who is Jesus. Perhaps it is the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it is a Theory of Mind, based on hundreds of hours of reading and contemplation. I cannot prove either case. 

Yet, in any situation, I know what Jesus would have me do. His counsel is always wise, always benevolent, always in favor of peace and charity. 

Sometimes, his guidance seems more like Polaris, the North Star. Always visible, always true, but ethereal, not of this world. A direction in which to steer, but not a goal that can be reached by such as me. 

Have I always steered toward the true North? 

Ask those who know me. I imagine that they'll say I've spent plenty of time floundering, veering far off course, sometimes, sadly, steaming in company with the Ship of Fools toward the venereal west. 

I'd like to think, however, that overall my track has been northward. I hope that I shall end up further north than where I began. 

In any case, Jesus is within me and so he shall be, this and every day until the end of days. 

Jesus is Lord. 

 Meaning in a Meaningless Universe I

The apparition of genocidal Christian warriors interrupted the survey of our wars. We shifted into an examination of Jesus through different lenses. Before we return to our Christian warriors, however, we'll examine the evidence for higher dimensions and introduce the Tao, or, the Way. 

First, though, we are going to scour our skulls clean of belief. Look at the Universe afresh from the point of view of the skeptic. Nothing is supernatural. There are no deities, there are no demons. 

Let us see the Universe with the eyes of a scientist. 

Who made the Universe? We do not know. If you think about it, a god is no help in answering the question. If a god made the Universe, who made the god? It can’t be turtles all the way down. 

The Universe simply is. It was not designed and created by a supernatural agency for any particular purpose. It just is. This may be a profoundly unsatisfying answer to the ultimate, “Why?” but this is what Stephen Hawking has said. Professor Hawking understands the workings of this Universe better than me or you. 

Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky. 

Just a big soup of chemicals. Chemicals with certain properties. They behave in certain ways. 

That's it. 

Oh, there's phenomena like gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. There are ways that things behave, which we can call, “laws,” but they're really not “laws,” because there is no lawgiver. It’s just a set of descriptions about how things behave. One of them is entropy, which is the tendency of heat to disperse. Things tend to break down into simpler and simpler forms. 

Swimming against the inevitable tide of entropy – which results in the Heat Death of the Universe, eventually – is the tendency of atoms to bind into molecules and molecules to bind into bigger molecules. 

Hydrogen and oxygen can become water. Or they can become hydrogen peroxide. One happens to be a happy medium for life forms, the other, an antiseptic. If you add carbon to the mix, with its promiscuous outer rings, then lots of different chemicals can be made. C6H12O6, for example, is alcohol. 

A class of carbon-based atoms can make up amino acids. Amino acids can make proteins. Proteins can make up membranes and these membranes can take the form of organic life. Single-cell life forms can consume each other, even co-exist in mutually beneficial ways. They can form multi-cellular creatures. These creatures can develop brains, and ask, “Why?” 

There is not necessarily an answer, just because the question can be posed. The Universe simply is. 

Now, eat something rotten. Allow it to churn in your stomach until you're gripped with feelings of nausea, revulsion and impending doom. Stand under a dark night sky. Contemplate the hell planet of Venus. Consider the lethal coldness, emptiness and loneliness of space. Every star is going to die. So are you. None of it means anything. This is the existential angst part of our tour.

Vomit, rest and eat and drink something that's good for you. We got a life to live in this meaningless Universe. So what shall we do? As skeptical scientists, we have zoomed from the microscopic to the galactic in search of meaning. We have found none. We have found only chance and sets of behaviors. 

Perhaps our survey was too sketchy, though. Let’s take a closer look at a very special molecule. Let's look at DNA. 

DNA is a code. By definition, it is meaning. In a meaningless universe, meaning has arisen through chance. 

Our electronic digital computers store their programs and data using a binary code. A “bit” is a “binary digit:” 

0001 is one

0010 is two

0011 is three

0100 is four

DNA doesn't use two characters. It uses four: these are the nucleic acids guanine (G), adenine (A), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Its encoding could have been binary. It could have used other molecules. As luck would have it, it arose as quaternary (“four digits”) using G, A, C, T. Every animal, plant and fungus on planet Earth uses DNA made up of G, A, C and T. When we finally meet the aliens, it will be interesting to see what makes up their DNA.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, we used the medium of paper tapes. You don't see these anymore, but the tapes looked like this: 

They were read in, left to right. The holes represented bits. A reader translated the holes into electronic digital data. 

DNA works exactly like that. DNA is the master library that contains all the programs that the organism needs. The same DNA is in every cell of your body. Whether the cell in question is in your fingernail, brain, stomach lining or bloodstream, the same DNA is there. 

Heart tissues, fingernails, white blood cells, and so on, however, need different parts, or subroutines, from the master library. To do their jobs, they have to manufacture different proteins, in different quantities, under different environmental conditions. The cell has molecular machines for doing all of that. Little machines that know what to do, where to start and where to stop, break the DNA strand into two, then copy one segment for the code that the cell needs. That segment is called Ribonucleic acid (RNA), which you can think of as messenger DNA. The molecular machines then put the DNA back the way it was.

The RNA goes outside of the nucleus into the body of the cell. There, a molecular machine of staggering complexity, the ribosome, reads in the RNA and uses its instructions to create the proteins, and therefore the tissues, that are needed.

This process is going on right now in every one of the 37 trillion cells in your body. In fact, each cell is performing 30,000 calculations every second. 

Every living cell is a computer. Your brain is not a single computer made up of 86 billion wires. Your brain is a hypercomputer made up of 86 billion networked computers. 

All of this emerged in a meaningless universe, by chance. In a universe ruled by entropy, the remorseless tendency toward simpler forms, toward disorganization, toward chaos, these systems of staggering complexity have emerged. 

By chance. 

We're only been able to read the human genome since 2000 A.D. (That is, read it at the lexical level, or seeing all the letters and words. We’re still learning how to read it at the syntactic and semantic levels, that is, the levels of how its grammar works and what everything means.) We're making progress every year in reading the genome at these deeper levels. Geneticists thought, for example, that a majority of the genome that wasn't being transcribed for protein production was useless or “junk” DNA. They've more recently discovered that some of these “junk” sequences are used to control the turning on, turning off and “volume control” of the protein-encoding sequences. It looks like genomic functioning is less digital and more analogue than we originally thought: In fact, there's a whole subfield called “epigenetics,” in which environmental conditions such as diet, stress, gut bacteria, stimulus, education, and so on, can have profound effects on genomic functioning. We're just starting to understand that. 

As much as we can read DNA in 2021 A.D., however, we see a lot of randomness. It does not read cleanly. It does not convey the impression of a single, rational author. There are repeated passages. Backwards passages. Palindromic passages. New sequences (as opposed to new combinations of old sequences, which can be chosen through sexual selection) seem to come about through random mutations caused by cosmic rays, chemical damage or copy errors. Most of these make no sense. A few are fatal. A few may one day turn out to provide some sort of advantage. 

Meaning has emerged in a meaningless universe, but by chance, and the slow, patient work of Time. Of Nature. Because some things work. Most things don't. 

Some things work. 

Most things don’t. 

A species of lion that eats all its prey starves to death. That doesn't work. 

A species of lion that eats some of the offspring of its prey and eats the old, sick, weak and slow actually helps its prey to thrive. That works. 

There is a way in Nature that shapes all forms. 

I do not know what to call it. 

So I call it the Tao. 

The Way. 

 The Way

I.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name.

The Unnamable is eternally real.

Naming it manifests ten thousand illusions.

Without desire, you can see the mystery.

With desire, you see only its manifestations.

Yet the mystery and its manifestations

Emerge from the same source.

This appears as darkness

Darkness within darkness

The gateway to all mystery.

II.

Beauty is beauty

Only because of ugliness.

Good is good

Only because of evil.

Life and death create each other.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Therefore, the sage does without trying.

He teaches without talking.

He lets things come,

He lets things go.

He creates but does not possess.

He works without taking credit.

Work is done, then forgotten.

Therefore it lasts forever.

XXV.

There was something perfect, without form,

Before the Universe was formed,

Standing alone and unchanging,

Ever present and in motion.

It is the Mother of the Universe.

I do not know its name,

So I call it the Tao.

It is great.

It flows through all things.

It returns always to its source.

The Tao is great.

The Universe is great.

Earth is great.

Man is great.

Man follows the Earth.

Earth follows the Universe.

Universe follows the Tao.

The Tao follows what is natural.

XXXI.

Weapons are tools of fear.

All creatures hate them.

A wise man avoids them.

If compelled, he uses them with restraint.

The sage loves peace.

Victory is no cause for rejoicing.

If you rejoice in victory,

You delight in killing.

Observe victory like a funeral.

XXXIV.

The Tao flows everywhere.

It nourishes everything,

Yet creates nothing.

It accomplishes great wonders

But does not claim them.

It nourishes infinite worlds,

Yet does not master the smallest creature.

It does not seek greatness.

Therefore, it is truly great.

XCL.

All movement returns to the Tao.

Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.

Being is born of not being.

LCXXIII.

The Tao is always at ease.

It does not compete and yet it wins.

It answers without talking.

It does not command, yet it is obeyed.

Its net covers the Universe.

Although its meshes are wide,

Nothing slips through.

XXXII

The Tao is nameless and unchanging.

Infinitesimally small,

Yet nothing can contain it.

If leaders could follow the Tao,

The world would be at peace.

Naming divides,

The Tao unites.

The Tao in the world

Is like a river flowing home to the sea.

 Evidence of Higher Dimensions

In previous essays, I've said that I believe that there are higher dimensions, more than the three or four that we can observe. How are we to know that this is not just a delusion, a new-age, crypto-Christian, quasi-Taoist fancy? Do we have, in fact, any evidence of higher dimensions? 

Yes, we do, in fact. Thank you for asking. Let's take a quick look at some of this evidence. 

First, let's review our four dimensions, as we experience them in our everyday world. We have up-down, left-right, and forward-back. These are the three spatial dimensions. 

Time, as we experience it, is an arrow that moves from the past to the present toward a future. It “moves” or transpires at a constant rate, that is, a second takes a second, a minute takes 60 seconds, etc. 

Things, like matter and energy, occupy space. At any given moment, something like a billiard ball occupies one particular space. If it is at rest, it will continue to occupy that particular space. If it is moving a moment later, it will occupy some other space. We could depict this in a couple of different ways. This is one way: 

Here is another way: 

This way helps us to see that the cue ball has moved two feet in a tenth of a second. It has a speed, therefore, of 20 feet per second or 20’/sec. Having this speed, of course, in no way changes the cue ball's other properties such as its color or its mass.

Matter is matter. It's solid. Energy, such as light or electromagnetism, is energy. You can feel its effects, but you can't feel its surface, because energy isn’t solid. Matter is matter and energy is energy. Matter is not energy. Energy is not matter. This is the world we live in and experience, or at least, it’s the world that we think we live in and that we think we experience. It’s a world with three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, which we call “3-D,” even though “4-D” might be a better label. 

It turns out that we are wrong. This is the world that we perceive and that we think we live in, but it is, in fact, not our world. Our world is far more complicated and is in fact so weird, so counterintuitive, that we must begin to suspect that we are trying to comprehend a hyperdimensional reality with 3-D minds. Just like the 2-D creatures trying to comprehend our 3-D world, our perceptual framework just doesn't fit what we are, in fact, experiencing. 

Enter Einstein. 

Enter his theory of relativity. 

He's going to bend your 3-D perceptual framework into pretzel-shapes and then Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and the Quantum Mechanics crew are going to stomp all over what's left until you're a meshugga wretch. You will not understand it. You may accept my contention that you cannot understand it, because you are trying to understand hyperdimensional phenomena using a 3-D perceptual framework. 

First, matter is energy. 

where E= energy, m = matter, and c is the speed of light. 

You may take this to mean that we can convert matter into energy, say, by banging two rocks together. You’d be right, as long as those rocks are made of highly enriched uranium. A more profound understanding, however, is that matter and energy are the same thing, just in two different states. One day, say, a million years from now, we may know how to convert energy into matter, since, after all: 

So matter and energy are not what we thought they were. Neither is time. Time does not move forward at a constant rate. The faster you go, the slower time moves. Not only that, but the faster you go, the “heavier” or more massive you get. 

It's 10:10 AM on both of these sister ships, which each weigh one metric ton. They are parked on either side of space coordinates 0,0,0. They are going to race. They start the race, but rocket B's engine doesn't work. An hour later, it's 11:10 AM in rocket B and it still masses one ton.

On rocket A, however, it is only 10:30 AM. Also, rocket A now masses 1.5 MT. The crew in rocket A are growing older slower than the crew in rocket B. 

Rocket A is quite the speedster. By the time it is 12:10 AM on Rocket B, Rocket A has accelerated almost to the speed of light. Its mass is a bazillion megatons. Time has slowed to the slowest of crawls. With its engine powered by Unobtanium, it can accelerate as much as it wants, as long as it wants. It will never go faster than the speed of light. 

There is a speed limit in this Universe. It is the speed of light in a vacuum: 

1c = 299,792,458 m/sec 

Nothing goes faster than this. Nothing can go faster than this. 

You may think that the reason for this is that as an object approaches the speed of light, it approaches infinite mass and therefore it becomes impossible to exhaust enough propellant backwards to accelerate any further. When I was a teenager, that's what I thought was true. That's what I thought Einstein was saying. 

Well, it may be true enough, but that's not exactly what Einstein was saying. What he was really telling us was that we don't exist in a Universe with 3 spatial dimensions with a separate temporal dimension. We exist in a universe of SpaceTime. It can be rendered in two dimensions as follows: 

No matter our speed through space, whether we're at rest or approaching 299,792,458 m/sec, we are always moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light. 

At rest, we are moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light. 

Moving as fast as possible, we are moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light. 

Say we are at rest in space: 

When we are at rest in space, we are moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light. In this case, how long does a second last? Quickly, now . . .

A second lasts one second. Cheers to all who got that one right.

Now, say we are moving through space at the 149,896,229 m/sec, which is half the speed of light.

In this case, how long does a second take?

If you guessed two seconds, because the clock inside the ship is half as slow as a clock at rest, you are on the right track, but a little too bold in your prediction. The correct answer is 1.15 seconds. The slowing down of time with increased speed is not linear. Called “time dilation,” the slowing down of time with increased speed looks something like this:

Time dilation doesn’t really get going until you’re flying at 0.9c, or nine-tenths the speed of light. At 9.9c, time really slows down. The more “9s” you add after the decimal, the slower time gets. At 9.9999999, it slows to a crawl: 

We’re still moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light. Since we’re moving at almost the speed of light through space, time has all but stopped. A second may take millions of years.

This invites us to imagine that within light itself moving through a vacuum, there is no time. If there is an interior to light itself, it is eternal. The physicists don’t talk about this. If they do, they’ll say something about how one divided by zero is undefined, then they’ll change the subject.

Before we bid adieu to dear Professor Einstein and subject ourselves to the severe beatings of the Quantum Mechanics crew, let's do two things. 

One is to note that Einstein's math checks out. It is not just a set of weird equations that may or may not describe reality. They do describe reality. For example, the satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) have internal clocks. Because of the speed with which these satellites are moving through space, these clocks are slower than our clocks on Earth, just as Einstein predicted. If we didn't take into account the relativistic difference between the clocks in the satellites and the clocks on Earth, GPS would not work. All of our reported positions would be wrong.

Second, since you and I and everyone we know are all moving through SpaceTime at the speed of light and light is the speed limit of the Universe and time itself may cease to exist within light, making it eternal, let's cleanse the palate with a poetic interlude. What have our poets had to say about light? 

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

-- Genesis 1:3

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

-- John 1:5

Praise especially to brother sun,

who fills the day with light

— through whom you shine!

Beautiful and bright, magnificent with splendor,

He shows us your Face.

-- "The Canticle of Brother Sun," Francis of Assisi

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!

Or of the Eternal coeternal beam

May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,

And never but in unapproachèd light

Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,

Bright effluence of bright essence increate!

-- “Paradise Lost,” Book III, John Milton.

So, light seems to us divine. In any case, light is vastly important, is it not? We may say that light is fundamental. If it is so fundamental, perhaps we should try to understand it better.

What is light? Is it a particle? Or is it a wave? 

Well, sometimes it acts like a particle, that is, like a discrete packet of stuff, like a ball. We can call it a photon and depict it as such: 

Sometimes it acts like a wave. We could depict it this way: 

This is called the “particle-wave duality” of light. To convey this duality, I could draw it this way: 

We're going to conduct an experiment into the nature of light called the “double-slit experiment.” It's going to have some shocking implications regarding the nature of our reality. First, let's establish some basics about how waves work. We’ll use a pond. First, let’s look at it sideways. Imagine drops of water falling on the pond, one at a time. 

The drops launch waves in the water. The tops of the waves are “crests” and the bottoms are “troughs.” 

Now let's look at the same thing, but from above. In this view, the crests are depicted as lines. 

When waves meet, the crests and troughs either reinforce or cancel each other, or something in-between, depending on how in phase they are. 

In phase, the crests and troughs double each other: 

Out of phase, two identical waves cancel each other out:

Slightly out of phase, the waves interact with varying degrees of reinforcement and cancellation: 

All of this is as it should be. The more you add, the more you have. The more you take away, the less you have. 

Let's look at how two side-by-side waves interact with each other: 

Where the crests overlap, the waves will reinforce each other. Same with the troughs. In between, they'll cancel each other out. The two waves interact in a complex manner. Take a look a depiction of this complex interaction in the next graphic:

Notice that the reinforcement of the crests is strongest in the middle. The reinforcement creates bigger peaks in the middle, with lower, wider peaks further out. Notice also that the troughs are narrower and steeper in the center and wider and shallower on the outsides. This is called an “interference pattern.” When viewed from the side (as if the crests and troughs are hitting the shore), an interference pattern looks something like this: 

with the thickness of the lines indicating the intensity of the light. An interference pattern is the fingerprint of two waves interacting with one another. When you see an interference pattern, you know that you’re dealing with two waves interacting.

Let's start our experiment simply. We have a gun that can fire one photon at a time through a single slit in a barrier up against a screen which has sensors that detect where the photon landed: 

This is what you'd expect. The photons acted like particles. The particles landed in a vertical band on the screen. 

Now let's try two slits. We’re still going to fire one photon at a time. Based on the results of the first experiment, you'd expect them to land in two vertical bands on the screen, like this: 

This is not what you get. What get is an interference pattern. 

Now, that's weird. With two slits, instead of acting like particles, the photons are acting like waves. They're creating an interference pattern, but how could they interfere with each other? They're getting shot through one at a time. We better put a sensor on the path to the screen and see what's going on: 

Yikes! It just got weirder. As soon as we put a sensor on the path to the screen, the light starts to act like particles. 

Light changes its behavior depending on whether it's being observed or not

We are through the quantum mechanics looking glass. A fundamental natural phenomenon, light, is changing its behavior, depending on whether or not it is being observed. It doesn't matter whether there's a human in the loop. Just having a mechanical sensor there is enough. 

Let's go back to that weird interference pattern. How can a single photon interfere with itself? 

Meet the biggest bruisers in the Quantum Mechanics Crew: Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. (For fans of Breaking Bad, yes, that Heisenberg. The one with the alive/dead cat in the box.) In 1927, they offered up the Copenhagen Interpretation, which says that as long as it is unobserved, a photon travels as a wave of probabilities. It is not in one place at one time. It is traveling as a wave or distribution of possible positions. This is called super-positioning. It is, in fact, interfering with itself, because it is simultaneously existing in several positions at once.

Then observation forces the super-positioned photon to collapse into one position. That's why observation forces the photons to act like particles. 

Ah, no. Sorry. Reality doesn't act like that. 

A thing isn’t in more than one place at a time. A thing is in one place at a time. Things don't change their behavior because they're being watched. (Well, animals do, but things like balls and waves don’t.) 

Wrong again, old boy from Rennerdale. Things do occupy more than one space at a time. Things do change their behavior depending on whether they are being observed. Because this experiment doesn't just work with light. It works with electrons. It works with molecules. 

Let's take it one step further. Let's delay our observation until after the light hits the screen. We'll do this by using prisms and by splitting the light into twins called “entangled pairs” (themselves, their own form of counterintuitive quantum mechanical madness, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”), but I'll simplify my diagram as such: 

The light hits the front screen first. Then it hits the back screen. If the path to the back screen is observed, the front screen shows a particle pattern. If it is not observed, the front screen shows an interference pattern. Observation even after its collision with the front screen forces it to collapse from superpositions to a single position before its collision with the front screen. 

This is the “delayed choice experiment.” It seriously challenges our fundamental understanding of the nature of time itself. 

I don't get it. 

You don't get it. 

Professor Albert Einstein didn't get it. He didn’t like it, either.

No one gets it. 

No one can get it. 

Because we are witnessing a hyperdimensional phenomenon projecting into our 3-D world. Time, space, matter and energy do not mean what we think they mean. The reason we don't get it is that our 3-D perceptual and conceptual framework is inadequate for understanding the true nature of our reality. 

In our true reality, time and space, matter and energy, are expressions or projections of things within dimensions that we can neither perceive nor comprehend. 

Of things within the fifth dimension? 

The sixth...? 

The seventh...? 

The eighth...? 

Yet the nature of these higher dimensions projects into our 3-D world. By studying what we can perceive, we find concrete evidence of the higher dimensions. 

If all of this confuses you, as well it should, let me leave you with the following two simple but important thoughts:

Our reality is not what we think it is.

Our reality is larger and more complex.

 Meaning in a Meaningless Universe II – Living in the USA

Viktor Frankl was a psychologist. He was the director of the neurology department in the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, Austria, when, in 1942, the Nazis seized him and his family and condemned them to concentration camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz. He survived the death camp, part of a genocidal program to eliminate Jews from Europe through systematic mass murder - the Nazi's “final solution.” He was liberated in 1945. 

In this hellish laboratory of human behavior, Frankl continued to observe his fellow man. One thing he noted was that human beings can tolerate extremes of hunger, overwork and torture, as long as they maintained the will to survive. If they lost that will – if they gave up – they would die within a day or two. He noted that some survivors were motivated by a desire to return to their families, some by a drive for personal survival, while others burned with hatred for the Nazis. It didn't matter. What mattered was that they believed that something had meaning. As long as they were able to retain that belief, they lived. When they lost it, they died. 

He developed this observation into a philosophy and a psychological therapeutic technique that he named, “logotherapy.” His highly recommended book, “Man's Search for Meaning,” begins with his testimony about Auschwitz and ends with his argument for logotherapy. Meaning, he argues, is not so much revealed or discovered but invested into life by the practitioner. One logotherapy drill, which I did for a year, is to use a daily page calendar. At the end of the day, write on the back of the page a note about what you did that day that you believe had meaning. At year's end, review the notes, think about what has had meaning for you and then throw the calendar away. 

Meaning, Frankl asserts, is an individual process, not an objective thing. Our lives became meaningful when we invest meaning into them. We must decide or realize what has meaning for us: it could be raising a happy, safe child. It could be solving the mystery of the Great Pyramid. It could be landing a triple lutz. After the child is raised, the mystery solved and the lutz landed, we can determine a new meaning. We can invest the rest of our days with that. 

All this I believe to be true and extremely helpful, especially for the present generation. There are now almost 330 million Americans. I was a boy in junior high school when we went over 200 million. I remember a universal optimism. My father told me that I could be anything I wanted. I believed him. We all believed in the Horatio Alger myth: a young boy with pluck could work his way to the top. Our mailing address was Carnegie, Pennsylvania, for goodness sake. Dale Carnegie started as a delivery boy and, through pluck and hard work, he became the richest man in the world. My own father, abandoned by his father when he was 13, used the GI Bill to put himself through school. While married with two sons, he studied overtime, worked a 40-hour-week every week in a steel mill and earned a 4-year college degree in 2½ years. He became an executive, eventually rising to the position of president of one of BF Goodrich's companies. 

Those of us who were African American had a different perspective, stamped by 400 years of oppression and cheated opportunities. Those of us who were women saw an uphill struggle ahead. Throughout the culture, though, there was this wide-spread optimism.

What happened to that optimism? 

Sheer numbers, for one thing. The country didn't feel so crowded, back then. You felt that there was room for you. You were needed. Your ability to contribute to the community was valued. Today, everyone labors under the stress of feeling valueless and supernumerary. Young people are desperate to fit in somewhere, anywhere, so that they can make a decent living and have some sort of public identity.

Back then, there were more opportunities at the ground level. Mom-and-pop stores were everywhere. You could get an entry-level job from an uncle or a neighbor. You could start your own business. Today, the big box stores and international chains have eaten up most of those businesses. You can get a job, but usually you’re flipping burgers or greeting shoppers. You can advance, but only as a slightly larger cog in a colossal enterprise that you know does not give one damn about you as an individual. The government, meanwhile, through excessive taxation and overregulation, has made it extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to start and operate a small business. Most small business owners struggle desperately; many are forced to cheat. Taxation and overregulation have become so burdensome that a small business needs full-time legal, accounting and clerical support. Such support is often too expensive to allow the business to operate at a profit.

People used to save and start their small businesses using their own capital. Thanks to our overspending government and the Federal Reserve Banks inflationary policies, today’s savings earn almost no interest. In fact, any money “saved” gets less valuable every year. The government, the banks and the consumerist culture that they have encouraged have almost eliminated the concept of “delayed gratification.” This is a term that you never hear anymore, but which was common when I was young.

I remember when Diner’s Club introduced the consumer credit card. People were suspicious of it. They did not like to borrow money. Borrowing was un-American. Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson said so. If those two giants were not spokesmen for the American character, whoever was?

Today, almost everyone is submerged in debt. The young people stagger under a burden of student debt that had grown to 1.7 trillion dollars. To start and operate a small business, such as, say, a chicken farm, you have to go so deeply in debt that you can’t afford to pay yourself a living wage. To run a business, you have to work a 60-hour week, even an 80-hour week, under intense physical and emotional stress. Then pay yourself less than you would earn flipping burgers.

The struggle between the classes did not start in 1963. It has been fought for centuries, both in Europe and in the Americas. The coup d’état of 22 November 1963, however, was a decisive victory for the oligarchy.

My parent’s generation had much more confidence in their government. Those of us who are Boomers, Gen-X, Millennials and Gen-Y have much less faith. We are not so stupid that we have failed to notice that the federal government is not acting for our benefit, but rather for the benefit of the wealthiest of the oligarchy: not even for the 1%, but rather for the .001%. If the system were only a little less vampiric, we would have more opportunities for meaningful work. We would have less a feeling that we are struggling to survive in an unfair system. We would have more of a feeling that we are participating in a fair system. That our work contributes to the commonwealth. That it has meaning.

The situation is bad, but it’s going to get worse. Automation is going to make more and more people unnecessary. For example, once we trust self-driving trucks, over one million truckers are going to be put out of work.

Today, out-of-work miners are told to learn to code. This flippant advice is given by politicians and pundits who have never written a line of code in their lives. Well, to be a code-slinger today, you have to compete with millions of coders throughout the world. With millions of coders in India and China.

Increasingly, all of us humans are going to have to compete with the machine. We do not have to wait for the Singularity, when systems become self-aware, for the day when programs are writing programs. They are doing so today. Genetic programming uses Darwinian principals for machines to develop best-of-breed programs with only top-level guidance from humans.

In discussing meaning, why does this essay stress work so much? In 1967, Harlan Ellison’s far-seeing anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, included a story by Philip José Farmer titled, “Riders of the Purple Wage.” He envisioned a society of obsolete humans, all living on a dole called “the purple wage.” Today, some progressive politicians are advocating “Universal Basic Income.” Money for nothing. Maybe UBI would answer the question, how will our consumers keep consuming if they have no real work and no money? Does it answer the question: how important is work to a meaningful life? 

I agree with Frankl, but I believe that meaning is not entirely arbitrary. We have to consider our nature as living beings. Let's do that on 3 levels: human, simian and animal.

Let’s talk about us humans. What makes us humans unique among the simians? Three things: big brains, upright posture and really handy (or “prehensile”) hands. Usually, this discussion about humanness focuses on the amazing brain, but let’s talk about those hands.

Which came first? The brains, the posture or the hands?

First, we stood up. 

Then our front paws got handier. 

Then our brains got bigger. 

As our hands got handier, we needed bigger and bigger brains to learn how to make and wield tools. Chimps use tools. So do crows. But we humans are the masters of tool-wielding. We got crescent wrenches?and nine irons. Rudders and topgallant masts. Airbrushes and retractors. Plumb bobs and presses. Jigsaws and carabiners. 

Tools, baby. We got tools. 

Why? 

Because we love tools. We love to wield tools. We love to make things. The making of things is a quintessentially human activity. We like work. We need work. 

Machines will not do it all for us. As long as we live in an imperfect world, there will be work that needs to be done. People want to work. Accept the enduring truth of that. Disabuse yourself of the notion that people can find meaning in their lives by doing drugs and playing video games. There is work to be done. As humans, we need to work. 1 + 1 = 2. Do the math. Live and govern according to this truth. 

Let the people decide what they want to build. Let them build it. You'll see some wastefulness, but sooner rather than later, you will see a world that is far better than anything any central planner could ever have envisioned. 

I am a tool-wielder. My tools, right now, are a Sharpie Ultra Fine Point marker and an unlined, acid-free, 10” x 14” bound sketch book. I am a writer. My work is writing books. This is how I invest my days with meaning. 

As humans, we are also simians. As simians, we are tribal. We care what our fellow tribe members think about us. Large areas of our brain are dedicated to recognizing their expressions and to developing Theories of Mind about them, especially the leaders, those who have the power to hurt us, and those who may make good mates. As simians, we are hierarchical. The military is so explicitly hierarchical that we walk around with our ranks on our shirt collars. Utopian experiments aside, every known society is hierarchical. As simians, we are hard-wired for hierarchy (the Whigs groan; the Tories cheer.) As humans, we need to be aware of this simian characteristic and to manage it. 

We need to be accepted by our tribe. In the modern world, this has translated into a hunger for fame. Millions, it not billions, of people today believe that their lives have less meaning, or even no meaning at all, unless they are famous. Many of the kids want to be media stars. They wanted to be journalists or rock stars, then rappers; then reality TV stars; now, Instagram celebrities. Depression is increasing because of social media. Kids are judging their self-worth, the meaningfulness of their lives, based upon the number of subscribers, likes, swipes right and comments. 

Andy Warhol said we'd all be famous for 15 minutes. A great thing to say. In the age of reality TV, with its talentless Kardashians, it seems that way, but it just is not true. Only a tiny percentage of us will become globally famous. More of us may become nationally famous. More than that, regionally famous. Thankfully, there's plenty of opportunity to become locally famous. 

Our patron saint in this regard should be Vincent van Gogh. He achieved an audience of two people, his brother and his sister-in-law. He went mad, despaired and killed himself. His brother died. It was his sister-in-law, as a widow, who began to sell his paintings. His fame spread. Today he is an immortal icon. Vincent should be our hero for two reasons: one, as much as any work can be said to be intrinsically valuable or objectively beautiful, the oils of Vincent van Gogh were valuable and beautiful, with or without an audience. Two, you never know. You can die in obscurity and your work can become immortal. 

So temper your desire for fame. It is a pit of despair. Continue to seek an audience. It is important, but if your work helps you to connect with only one single person, then consider yourself successful. Your single-person fame is all you need for your work to have meaning. 

Besides, remember what Bill Murray said: “People who want to be rich and famous should try being rich first. See if that doesn't cover most of it.” The famous tell us that fame is a pain in the ass. 

Finally, let's examine meaning at the animal level. We were animal before we were simian. Meaning to an animal is the most fundamental, the most basic and the most important. 

As animals, we want to survive and to procreate. That is hard coded in the DNA in every cell in your body. That goes all the way back through monkeys to rat-like mammals to amphibians to fish to one-cell creatures. 

Survive! 

Procreate! 

If, as a human, you elect not to have children, or cannot, then consider finding meaning in helping those children who already exist. Your second spouse's grandkids. Orphans in Africa. There are hundreds of millions of children who need help. Help them. To be human is not to deny our animal nature. It is to focus and maybe one fine day, channel or even control it. The paternal and maternal instincts are strong in us. You can find deep meaning through these primal instincts. 

There is only one imperative that is stronger. Survival. 

If you are afflicted with despair, with depression, with an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness in a meaningless universe, I've got good news. You have available to you a fountain of incredible power. I'm not talking about Jesus, though, believe me, Jesus has the juice. 

Let me guess. You're eating every day, probably too much and probably bad food. You're not getting any exercise. You're sleeping poorly. You're seeking comfort in unnatural activities, like drugs, video games, TV or pornography. 

If most of the above is true, the problem is not just the problems that you know about. Yes, those are real problems. You're going to have to deal with them, eventually, too, even if dealing with them means accepting them and living with them. The fundamental problem may be, however, that you are not tapping into your animal will to survive.

Stop eating. Fast for one day. Try a fruit-juice fast for 3 days. Observe Ramadan: eat only at night and fast during the day. Just stop eating until you are truly hungry. Nothing awakens the beast like hunger. 

Get some exercise. Go for long walks in the sunshine. Carry some bricks. Get outside. Sleep by yourself in the wilderness. Don't indulge in suicidal activities, like base jumping or free climbing. Stay at least one body-length back from the precipice, but find some activity that awakens the animal in you: white-water rafting, camping, exploring . . .

When you eat, eat whole foods. Eat stuff that a caveman would eat.

Turn off all electronic media.

Talk to people.

Our modern lifestyles separate us from our animal nature. Find a way to tap into your animal nature.

Navy SEALs know a lot about life pushed to the extremes. David Goggins, a former SEAL, said that when you think are totally exhausted, you have burned up only 40% of your capacity. You have another 60% to go. As a human animal, you have far more power and resilience than you believe you have.

I am a graduate of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program at Naval Air Station Brunswick, Maine. I am forbidden to discuss the details of the program, but I can testify that for 48 hours, I learned something about the power of the will to survive. Every other day in my life, I have drifted in a dream. In a survival situation, the real juice turns on.

Find a way to tap into that juice. Because survival is the ultimate meaning. If you are not feeling that, take a brass brush to your charge posts of your animal battery.

The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of meaning. It is an inalienable right.

 Christ, Christianity and Christendom

Understanding Christ does not mean that we understand Christianity nor Christendom.

Christianity, the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, has been hijacked at least three times.

Perhaps the first time was by a group of his disciples. I don’t know. I don’t think enough evidence has survived about the period between the death of Jesus and the rise of Peter and Paul as leaders of the church. The depiction of the disciples that has survived in the gospels leads me to suspect that there was squabbling among them, probably even a struggle for leadership. The bit in Matthew 16:18-20 where Jesus anoints Peter as “the rock” upon which he will build his church, then immediately tells the disciples to keep quiet about his Christhood, always rang a little false to me. Why would Jesus make such important announcements in secret? Why don’t we see Peter playing a stronger role while Jesus was alive?

Who was the disciple whom Jesus loved? Why is he or she never named? Or even mentioned except in John? Unfortunately, the picture of the disciples that has survived lacks a lot of detail. We may understand Judas and know something about Peter and even Thomas, but, overall, there’s not a lot of characterization, except for a general lack of faith, according to their rabbi. This leaves me with an impression that either he didn’t organize the disciples for the post-crucifixion or there were power struggles among the survivors.

The first hijacking of Christianity of which we can be certain is perhaps the most important one. Saul of Tarsus, a Jew and a Roman citizen, never met Jesus of Nazareth. He was a minor security official who was persecuting the early Christians. On the road to Damascus, he had a religious experience that blinded him temporarily and changed his life permanently. He experienced a divine revelation: he heard the voice of Jesus from the sky. He became known as Paul. His writings, teachings and leadership among the faithful have made him the most important figure in the development of the Christian religion, second only to Jesus himself. For example, it was under Paul’s leadership that the sect was extended beyond the tribes of Israel.

The second certain hijacking was under the rule of the Romans emperors. Emperor Constantine (272 A.D. – 337 A.D.) may have had his own divine revelation: seeing a cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 28 October 312 A.D. Maybe his biographer made that story up. He himself didn’t convert to Christianity until he lay in his deathbed. That conversion may have been something the dying emperor was subjected to, rather than chose. In any case, it was under Constantine that Christianity became an acceptable religion in the Roman empire. Through the Council of Nicaea, 325 A.D., the basic dogma of Christianity was established. It was encoded in the Nicene creed, the modern form of which follows:

I believe in one God,

the Father almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God,

born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried,

and rose again on the third day

in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead

and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Note that the creed doesn’t include one word about the teachings of Jesus. It concentrates solely on his divinity and his agency in creation and redemption. Important, yes, but if we so revere Jesus Christ, why is there not a single word about his teachings?

The Council of Nicaea did not, in fact, formally establish a cannon of books as the official scripture. It did not assert that others were false, heretical or apocryphal. That was a gradual process that took centuries more. Through the Nicene creed, however, the council did establish the central dogma of the religion, one that stressed the divinity of the Christ over the teachings of Jesus the messenger. Subsequent establishment of the cannon, the official New Testament, would be made by the light of that creed, which is still held as orthodoxy today throughout Christianity.

Neither did Constantine make Christianity the state religion. He merely allowed it as one of the many acceptable religions practiced throughout the Roman empire. He himself continued to worship the Sun until he was converted to Christianity on his deathbed. Constantine did begin a process, however, that culminated in 380 A.D., forty-three years after his death, when emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

This was bizarre. Some things don’t go together, like top hats and Speedos, or, pineapple juice and ice cream. Jesus’s eternal message of peace and the bloody Roman empire do not go together. In fact, Christianity is fundamentally incompatible with any state as long as that state is created and maintained through the violence of arms, which is the case of every state so far in history. Christianity is not suited to be a state religion.

“Cognitive dissonance” is when a person holds two contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. In musical terms, it is not harmony; it is disharmony, dissonance or cacophony. It sounds bad. Christianity as a state religion is a contradiction unless that state is founded on peace. Beginning in the fourth century, this cognitive dissonance has reverberated with nerve-wracking obnoxiousness throughout the history of Western civilization.

I suffer from it.

I am a Christian warrior.

I am not a Christian warrior.

Picture a Knight Templar in full chain mail and armor and helm, about to cleave your skull in two with a broadsword, his white shield emblazoned with a red cross, and you have in your mind the perfect symbol for the contradiction between Christianity and the violence-based state:

Only through massive denial and hypocrisy has it been possible to maintain this contradiction. Those of us who call ourselves Christian warriors are the biggest hypocrites on Earth.

This is one important reason why, I suspect, that the Roman Catholic church emphasizes the mysteries, rather than the teachings, of Jesus. Week after week, year after year, I have gone to mass while our nation has been at war. The only thing the priests ever said about it was, Let us pray that our soldiers come home soon and come home safe.

The third hijacking was partial. It is still on-going. It is the Protestant reformation. Reformers like Martin Luther believed that the Church of Rome had become too corrupt. They objected particularly to practices like selling indulgences, which were “get out of hell” cards. Today, there are dozens of Protestant sects, some of which, like the Mennonites and the Society of Friends, popularly known as “the Quakers,” have managed to move closer to the pacifistic teachings of Jesus. They tend to respect the scriptures over ecclesiastical and temporal authorities. In other words, they are trying to listen to Jesus.

By and large, though, most of the West continues to struggle with this contradiction at the heart of our society. We do not practice what he preached. Many churches don’t even preach what he preached. Today, there are over two billion nominal or so-called Christians. The societies of Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand are still mainly Christian. This is a geopolitical bloc that used to be called, “Christendom,” but this is a term that is rarely used anymore.

Many Americans believe that the United States of America is a Christian nation. It is not. The USA is not a Christian nation in several senses.

First, a nation is not a person. (Neither is a corporation nor any other organization, the truth be told.) A person has a body and a mind and arguably, a soul. Nations do not. Only a person can have faith in a religion. Perhaps we can say that a church, a collection of like-minded coreligionists who are united in a communion of faith that is greater than the sum of its parts has a religion, but, otherwise, we can make no such claim for other organizations, such as nations.

Second, the USA was specifically organized as an un-Christian nation. The First Amendment of the Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . “

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and many of our founding fathers were not Christians. They were Deists. They believed in a God as a designer and creator of the Universe. Many Enlightenment thinkers with Deist bents imagined a god who designed the laws, wound up the clockwork of the Universe and then stepped back, allowing what might happen to happen. The Jefferson bible, the only book that Jefferson ever wrote – and he wrote it with scissors, not a pen -- explicitly rejected the divinity of Jesus. George Washington used to attend Sunday service, until his minister scolded him for leaving before communion. Washington’s response was to stop attending service altogether. Both of these Founding Fathers respected the morals of Jesus, but they did not accept his divinity. In any case, having witnessed the bloody turmoil in Europe between Catholics and Protestants, which went on for centuries, the Founding Fathers hoped to avoid such strife in America by allowing freedom of religious worship, to include no worship at all, outside of the domain of the state.

Third, any nation that practiced Christianity would be overrun and enslaved by its nearest neighboring non-Christian state, whether heathen, Islamic or whatever. If a nation always turned the other cheek and gave up its shirt when it was mugged for its coat, it would be deemed weak and decadent by its enemies, who would delight in taking the place over.

Fourth, we Americans have not acted in a Christian manner. We cheated and oppressed the natives. We enslaved, murdered and tortured the Africans. We bombed the hell out of everyone else.

So, what is the destiny of Christendom, a political entity that no longer dares to use its own name? Here in the 21st century, it seems to many observers to be collapsing under the weight of our own contradictions. The center could not hold. It started to crack at least by the 19th century. The hellscape of the 20th century witnessed more disintegration.

Now, state after state is lowering its borders. Muslims by the millions are flooding into Germany, Sweden, the UK, Canada and the United States. Our politicians keep chanting that “diversity is strength,” with little evidence to back this assertion. Tolerance may be resilience. Resilience may be strength, but unity, not diversity, has commonly been viewed as strength. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” as Abraham Lincoln said.

We dream of a day when there is no more “Us and Them.” When all peoples realize that there is only “us.”

Yet knife attacks, acid attacks, gang rapes, terrorist bombings, no-go zones and the presence of millions of strangers who reject our religion and resist our culture and who demonstrate every intention of clinging to their own religion and culture, makes embracing this enlightened point of view a difficult challenge for many.

Now that we know something about Jesus, about Christianity and even about Christendom . . .

Who are these Muslims?

 Islam Is Not a Religion of Peace

It is strange to learn about a religion because of truck bombs, suicide bombers and terrorists hijacking airliners and using them as missiles against office buildings. Growing up, I never met a Muslim. If the Middle East had been at peace during my lifetime, I probably would have gone to the grave knowing and caring as much about Islam as I do about Jainism, Zoroastrianism and other religions the names of which I cannot even spell.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand my own mystery religion, Christianity, as much as I do. I understand Taoism probably as well as any Pittsburgher you know. The next religion on my to-do list is Buddhism. While knowing next to nothing about Buddhism, sometimes I wonder, am I a Buddhist? If it weren’t for the terrorism, I doubt that I would have ever gotten around to Islam.

Yet the Beirut barracks bombing did get my attention. I’ve tried to learn something about the religion. I have read the Quran, for example, in translation. Even so, I don’t feel qualified to speak on the subject of this essay. The fact that every war we’ll cover in the rest of this series of essays is a war in a Muslim land, featuring spectacular terrorist attacks blamed on Muslim extremists, I find myself compelled to write about Islam.

Just the tops of the waves, then.

Islam is not a religion of peace.

Islam is a monotheistic religion in the Abrahamic tradition. Its followers, the Muslims, revere one god, Allah. His prophet is Muhammad, ca. 570 A.D. to 8 June 632 A.D. He was an undeniably historic individual. Muslims believe that he received their holy book, the Quran, as the perfect work of Allah. In addition, there is a large body of traditional sayings and teachings called the Hadith, which is also considered authoritative.

Muslims recognize Jesus as a prophet but deny his divinity. They have a complex relationship with the Jews and with Judaism. Muhammad inherited some ideas from Judaism, such as monotheism, but eventually his relationships with the Jews of his time became hostile. A strong strain of this hostility has survived in the Quran and the Hadith.

The Arabic root of “Islam” is S-L-M, which can be taken to represent the word, “salaam,” or “peace.” It actually represents the word, “aslama,” which means, “to submit.” The central teaching of Islam is that all humans should submit to the will of Allah.

The mercy and forgiveness of Allah is re-iterated throughout the Quran. Mercy is a defining characteristic of the Muslim god. Submitting to the will of Allah places one in harmony with him. The believer enters a state similar to the Christian “kingdom of heaven,” where the believer becomes an instrument of God’s will on Earth. Doing so, he or she enjoys a personal communion with the divine. As a reward and as a sign of divine favor, upon death, the believer enters paradise.

How Muslims are supposed to deal with non-believers or infidels is directed in the Quran and in the Hadith. These directions, however, range from celebrating diversity through conquering them to killing them. This means that Muslims, depending on the circumstances, can find ample scriptural support for as hostile a policy toward “them” as the situation seems to warrant. Unlike Christians, they are not doctrinally shackled to peace, which has resulted in our cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.

We’ll take a quick look at some of the more warlike scriptures, often referred to as “the sword verses:”

Quran 2:191: And kill them wherever you find them and drive them out from whence they drove you out . . . if they fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.

Quran 9:5: Slay the idolaters wherever you find them and take them captive and besiege them and prepare for them every ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the alms for the poor, then leave their way free. Lo, Allah is forgiving, merciful.

Quran 9:29: Fight those who do not believe in Allah . . . fight until they give jizyah [a tax on non-Muslims] willingly, while they are humbled.

Quran 47:4: Now when you fight in battle those who disbelieve, then smite them in the necks until you have routed them, then make fast their bonds, and afterward either set them free as a favor or ransom them until the war ends.

Even these “sword verses” include conditions. They call for violence, but only until the infidel submits, then the killing stops. The conquered infidels are not forced to change their religion, but they are forced to pay ransoms and taxes and to live as second-class citizens.

This approach in their scriptures is also authenticated in the life of their prophet. Muhammad is considered to have led an ideal life. He is an eternal example for Muslims to follow. He was a prophet and religious leader, but he was also a warlord. Of the 80 military expeditions against the enemies of Islam during his lifetime, he participated in 27.

After his death, Islamic armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and spread the dominion of Islam to the north, west and east. By the time of the Umayyad Caliphate, 661 A.D. to 750 A.D., the Islamic empire stretched from Spain across northern Africa through the Middle East to Iran.

Over centuries, Muslim armies attempted to conquer all of Europe. They would have succeeded, if it were not for the opposition of Christian armies from Spain, France, Russia, Hungary and elsewhere.

Slavery, which of course is based on violence, was practiced throughout the Muslim world for centuries, as recently, in fact, as the 20th century.

Finally, Islam endorses violence against apostates, that is, back-sliders who renounce their religion:

Sahih Bakhari 4:52:260: “If someone discards his religion, kill him.”

Islam is not a religion of peace. Those who say so are either fooling themselves or they are trying to fool you.

Today is 21 March 2020. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Republic of Panamá will suspend international flights as of midnight tomorrow. Eva and I have decided to ride out the crisis here in La Villa Evita. This decision means that I will be stuck overseas, far from my homeland, even if society disintegrates.

Here we have 1200 square meters of yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. The tropical sunshine disinfects, one hopes, but in any case, it grows lovely as it reddens every evening among my mangoes and limes.

We have wealthy neighbors. We have poor neighbors. Even in normal times, there have been home invasions here in Nueva Gorgona, Panamá. If society disintegrates, if invaders jump the fence, if anyone threatens us, I have told Eva to stand behind me. I will allow the invaders to steal anything they want. I may be shot in the chest. I may be hacked apart by machetes. But I will not be disarmed. Not without a fight. For the defense of La Villa Evita, I have a three-inch Spyderco jackknife.

I am a Christian warrior.

I am not a Christian warrior.

Perhaps what I am, after all, is a Muslim. Maybe I should have been a Muslim. The important thing to remember is that if my parents had been Muslims, I would have been born a Muslim. Only by an accident of birth am I a Christian. After 65 years of prayer and contemplation, my faith is one of love, but I will stand, knife in hand, between a rapist and Eva. I am a Christian warrior. At the end of the day, how different am I, morally, from a Muslim?

There are almost two billion Muslims in the world. For many of them, I must hope, their religion is a religion of peace. They do not focus on the sword verses. Their minds dwell on the compassion and mercy of Allah. They wish only peace upon his prophet, Muhammad. They have only love in their hearts for all their brothers and sisters, even those of us who are Jews.

Even if they do not yet feel such love, I must remember that just as I could have been born a Muslim, they could have been born a Christian.

The Amman Declaration of 2004 includes this statement: “Islam honors every human being, regardless of his color, race or religion.” Repelled by the barbarism of the sadist, al-Zarqawi, clerics from the major sects of Islam affirmed tolerance of the other sects. No Sunni may declare fatwa on a Shi’ite, simply because he is a Shi’ite; no Shi’ite may declare a fatwa on a Sunni, simply because he is a Sunni.

War coarsens. If we, Christian, Jew and Muslim, continue to abuse one another, because we are “Us” and they are “Them,” then the murderous message of moral monsters such as al-Zarqawi will make more and more sense to the widows, orphans, wounded and repressed peoples of the world. We must have peace. All of us – Christian, Jew, Muslim and skeptic – have a lot of work to do in the world and in our own hearts.

 Genocidal Christian Warriors

Having examined Christianity and touched on Islam, we are finally ready to consider genocidal Christian warriors.

For centuries, the Balkans have been the battleground between Islamic empires and Christendom. Within the valleys of the Balkan Mountains are different ethnic groups, isolated in time and space, retaining memories of centuries-old wars.

In the Bosnian War, 1992 - 1995, Orthodox Christian Serbs slaughtered 100,000 Muslim Bosniaks. This was the first genocide in Europe since Hitler.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an American-led military alliance formed to deter a Soviet invasion of Europe. Under President Bill Clinton, NATO forces bombed the Christian Serbs until they saw the error of their ways.

That’s the Bosnian war. I’m not counting it as one of our wars, though maybe I should. In terms of military forces contributed, NATO is 80% American.

 9/11

Like millions of my fellow Americans, I watched the Twin Towers fall, live on television.

One year later, on 11 September 2002, I walked off an airliner onto the steaming tarmac of U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. It was the first of three trips. I was there to help them with their counterterrorism databases.

Guantanamo, or “GITMO,” is a strange place. We Americans signed a perpetual lease for it with the government of Cuba, back when we needed it for a coaling station. Back when warships burned coal. After Castro took over, he invited us to leave. We’d thought we’d stay, thanks. In accordance with our perpetual lease, we send Havana a check every year. The Cubans never cash them.

It’s an isolated military base. Once you’re in GITMO, you’re stuck in GITMO. There is no leaving base. The reason that GITMO was chosen as the site for our prison for detainees in the Global War on Terror is that isolation. The detainees are in legal limbo. They are not within the continental United States, where they can appeal to American law. They’re not in any other nation, either; at least, any nation that we Americans recognize as having legal jurisdiction over our activities on base.

Note the correct terminology: they are “detainees.” They are not “prisoners,” they are not “prisoners of war.” Being “prisoners of war” would give them rights under the Geneva Convention. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Guantanamo “the least worst place.” What he was talking about was this status of legal limbo. The George W. Bush administration did not want to declare war and then treat any detainees as prisoners of war. They did not want to argue cases in American civil courts. They wanted an American gulag. They got it in GITMO.

In order to help to design the system that became the Joint Detainee Information Management System (JDIMS), I interviewed members of the staff from the task force commander to the interrogators, translators, analysts, guards and agency and command representatives. I witnessed three interrogations, sitting on the farside of a one-way mirror. I didn’t see everything – the CIA had its own little compound, next to the main one, where we Department of Defense types were not typically invited. Although the detainees were literally treated like dogs when they first arrived, penned in little hurricane-fence hutches, by the time I got there, they had adequate cells. I myself never saw anyone mistreated. The detainees whom I saw seemed defiant. One requested that his female interrogator dress in a black pantsuit. She complied. So, as far as I can testify, they were treated humanely, besides the main problem of their extralegal, indefinite detention. Hundreds of detainees at GTMO have been released or transferred, but as of April 2020, the camp remains operational, with about 40 detainees still held there.

In any case, no one ever asked me for my legal opinion. I was a computer system engineer there to help to design a database and to establish a program to develop it. This we did. It may have been a mistake. Maybe we should have adopted the Combined-Theater, Analyst Vetted, Relational System (CT-AVRS) used by the United States Central Command, which USSOUTHCOM was supporting, but since CT-AVRS didn’t conform to the first normal form, was iBase proprietary and didn’t address many of our local functional requirements, such as cell assignments and interrogation schedules, we developed our own system. I expected them to merge in a few years, but they never did, as far as I know. The “not-invented-here” syndrome, on both sides.

So that was my contribution to the unending Global War on Terror.

I’ve been thinking about terrorism ever since the Beirut Barracks bombing. This is what I’d like to say about our endless Global War on Terror:

Terror is an emotional state. Terrorism is a tactic. It is a tactic as eternal as ambush, crossfire or frontal assault. We should not attempt to make war on emotional states or on tactics. We might want to make war on specific groups of terrorists. Wars with specific goals. Wars with end dates.

About 9/11 itself, I know nothing more than the average American. Except I’ll say that having lived and worked with aviators for so many years, I have developed a healthy respect for the profession of aviation. I understand the value of training and stick-time. Therefore, I have a difficult time believing that those young terrorists, with the training that we are told about, flew those airplanes as well as they flew. With the last-second corrections near the towers and the difficulty of flying hedgerow-high to hit the Pentagon, that was some competent flying.

In any case, as we saw with USS Maine, it doesn’t have to be a false flag to start a war. According to the testimonies of Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and chief counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney immediately reacted to 9/11 as a casus bello against Saddam Hussein of Iraq. This despite the fact that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it.

As an old Latin American hand, I worried that my nation would fall into the trap that I had seen smaller nations fall into, when confronted with extremist violence, of abandoning civil liberties. I was saddened to see the gusto with which we passed the Orwellian P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and consolidated federal bureaucracies into a creepy behemoth named “Homeland Security.”

I thought it was weird that George W. Bush told us that he didn’t worry about finding Osama bin Laden. I thought it was disturbing that the world’s most wanted man was finally run to ground in a neighborhood of Pakistan that was a retirement haven for high-ranking military officers, near the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. That he wasn’t captured but was shot on sight. That the killer was killed.

Frankly, the whole thing disturbs me on many levels. Unfortunately, I possess no special knowledge. I can only testify to my feeling of dissatisfaction. It will probably follow me to my grave, unless the state’s attorney generals launch their own investigations and trials.

On 11 September 2001, terrorists murdered citizens of almost every state in the union. Those of us who are dissatisfied with the reaction by the federal government can only hope that the states investigate and defend their citizens themselves. Especially the great states of New York and New Jersey, which lost at least 1,764 and 385 citizens that day. Also, the states of Massachusetts (92 citizens murdered), Connecticut (65), California (48), Maryland (47) and my home state of Pennsylvania (30). Even states that lost relatively few citizens that day, such as the great states of Florida and Texas, have lost many of our native sons and daughters in the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. All of the states of the USA should hold their federal government responsible for finding out the truth of what happened on 11 September 2001. Even better, they should find out that truth themselves.

For our federal government seemed to react only to advance other agendas, such as increased control over the citizenry and wars, as we shall see, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 Our Wars XIV – The Afghanistan War

I have never been to Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of my brothers and sisters in arms have. I will leave the description of the people and place to their far more valuable testimony. I will limit myself to a few observations.

Our casus bello was 9/11. Three weeks after the Twin Towers fell, President George W. Bush announced the beginning of the war in Afghanistan:

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaida terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

-- George W. Bush speech, 7 October 2001

During the Battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, 6 - 17 December 2001, CIA, Army and British special forces, backed by US Air Force strike aircraft and Northern Alliance fighters, battled al-Qaeda fighters. If enough US forces, such as Army Ranger, airborne or Army or Marine Corps mountaineering units, had been deployed, we may have been able to trap and to capture Osama bin Laden. Instead, he escaped to Pakistan, where he was given refuge.

That was nineteen years ago. Today, the war in Afghanistan is still on-going. The United States has drawn down to 2,500 combat troops. The following is a line chart depicting our force levels:

2,448 US troops have died in Afghanistan. 20,662 have been wounded. [Casualty figures are from icasualties.org.] The war has cost us two trillion dollars.

The Taliban is still active. Despite signing a peace deal with the Americans in February 2020, they continue attacks. On 20 March 2020, the Taliban attacked and destroyed an army outpost, killing all 24 men inside, before escaping to the mountains. Five turncoats inside the outpost aided in the attack, then escaped alongside the attackers.

The Afghan government is a mess. Three of the four presidential elections since the American invasion have been bitterly contested. In March 2020, both President Ashraf Ghani and his chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah, took the oath of office as the president. In May 2020, the rivals agreed to a power-sharing scheme.

Since the US occupation of Afghanistan, opium production has quadrupled. This spike in drug trafficking must call to mind CIA involvement in drug trafficking of heroin in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and cocaine during the Contra war. Wherever we see the CIA fighting its own war, with its own clandestine air forces available for smuggling, we seem to see dramatic increases of drug-trafficking. All illicit, untraceable funds earned through criminal activities make the CIA ever less accountable, ever wilder upon the world stage.

In January 2021, the DoD confirmed that there are still 2,500 US service members in Afghanistan. In addition, there are about 10,000 other foreign combatants from 38 nations. In March 2021, President Joe Biden said the 1 May 2021 deadline to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan will be "hard to meet." During the year 2020, eleven American and British troops in Afghanistan were killed.

 Our Wars XV – The Second War in Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom

I have never been to Iraq. The closest I ever got was the Arabian Gulf. I encourage the tens of thousands of my brothers and sisters in arms who have served in Iraq to share with the world their necessary testimony.

During Desert Storm, we destroyed a lot of the country’s infrastructure. We dropped bridges and short-circuited power transformers. Between our two assaults on Iraq – that is, between 1991 and 2003 – the United States exercised a weird hegemony over Saddam Hussein’s regime. Through the United Nations, we imposed economic sanctions. We also forbid the Iraqis to fly in parts of their own airspace.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but he had nothing to do with 9/11. Under George W. Bush, we invaded anyway. I can think of three reasons for this aggression.

One: oil. Both Bush and Cheney were oil men. Iraq had one of the richest oil fields in the world.

Two: the “great game” of geopolitics. Since the days of George H.W. Bush, the House of Bush and the House of Saud have had important ties. The Saudis hated and feared Saddam Hussein. So did the Israelis. Since the fall of the Shah of Iran, the United States has sought to replace him with another kingpost of American influence in southwest Asia. With both Iran and Iraq hostile to the United States, our only strategic partners of that weight in the region were Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Both the Israelis and the Saudis are problematic in their own ways, but the current US-Israel-Saudi Arabia alliance, I suppose, is no more bizarre than the alliance between the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union. We’ll look at these weird geopolitical alliances through the lens of the Babylon System in a later essay.) The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a conservative think tank that included such Bush regime stalwarts as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself, in 2000, published a white paper that crowed about America’s pre-eminent power, Pax Americana, yet advocated building our military even stronger to create “tomorrow’s dominant force,” but fretted that such transformation may be slow:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

- “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” Project for a New American Century (PNAC), September 2000.

This visionary statement followed open letters in 1998 to President Clinton, signed by PNAC members such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Woolsey, Abrams, Rumsfeld and Bolton, calling for the invasion of Iraq.

Three: the young King had taken personally an attempt on his father’s life. In 1993, when the elder Bush was visiting Kuwait, a ring of terrorists was busted. Under torture, they said the target for their car bomb was the American ex-president. On 26 September 2002, at a fund-raiser in Houston, George W. Bush said about Saddam Hussein, "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad." This feudalism is condemnable if the planned attack was genuine; damnable if it was manufactured.

Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and top counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke have all reported that the immediate reaction of both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to 9/11 was to link it to Saddam Hussein. As early as the next day, they were directing the national security and intelligence organizations to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had been behind the attacks. No such evidence was forthcoming, since, in fact, he had had nothing to do with it. He himself regarded al-Qaeda as a security threat. Cheney’s disappointment with the intelligence community’s failure to provide a casus bello against Iraq was so strong that he formed his own analytical cell, which tortured and twisted whatever reports were available to fit this political agenda.

Still, it was a no-go. Emphasis sifted to Saddam’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a post-9/11 traumatized world, the sound bite was, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Saddam had, in fact, been developing chemical weapons like Sarin. He once had a serious program to develop a nuclear bomb. He dismantled those programs, however, following his brush with regime death in 1991. The Iraqis denied having WMD programs, but their credibility was so low that many of us had come to believe that if their lips were moving, they were lying.

Still, we didn’t have an on-going inspections program, so hard evidence one way or the other was sparse. An overseas Iraqi codenamed “Curveball” was reporting on-going programs, so Colin Powell, despite his misgivings, acted like a team player and made as strong a case as he could for continued Iraqi WMD programs in a historic speech to the United Nations on 5 February 2003.

This paved the way for UN resolutions and a Congressional bill authorizing the president to decide whether or not to go to war in Iraq. Once again, we saw the US Congress not living up to its constitutional responsibility of deciding whether or not to declare war.

We began to deploy combat forces to the theater. Regional support was not as universal as it had been in 1991, but we were able to shift US combat might from around the world to the borders of Iraq. Once we started to move major armored units from the continental United States to southwest Asia, I knew that we were going to go. After a tipping point is reached, events have an inertia of their own. In any case, at that point, the commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, was probably fully resolved to invade, despite anything that Saddam Hussein might say or do.

So we invaded. On 19 March 2003, we began a bombardment of Iraqi political and military targets often called “shock and awe.” This did not decapitate national command authority, but it did send it on the run.

Ground forces attacked the next day. Crushed in 1991, never fully rebuilt and reeling from a 21st-century combined arms assault, the Iraqi army and Republican Guard collapsed within three weeks. US armored reconnaissance units penetrated the national territory so swiftly that they just kept on going. They had so much heavy armor and mechanized infantry behind them that just the fuel bill was millions of dollars a day. By early April, the battle for Baghdad had begun. The United States declared victory on 14 April 2003. Saddam, like Noriega, was on the run, until he was finally discovered in a “spider hole” on 13 December 2003. He was tried for war crimes and hung on 30 December 2006.

After the collapse of the Ba’ath regime, chaos ensued. Just as in Operation Just Cause in Panamá, the United States had planned and organized for combat, but not for victory. Looting was widespread. In Iraq, tragically, this looting resulted in the theft or destruction of invaluable treasures from the dawn of civilization itself.

There were no WMDs. Saddam Hussein had been telling the truth. Curveball, a dissident politician in exile, had been lying. The case that Colin Powell had made for Iraqi WMDs had been incorrect.

But there we were.

When asked whether we had come as liberators or as conquerors, we had no ready answer.

Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had made public statements that they expected our invasion forces would be “greeted as liberators.” Although some Iraqis did celebrate the fall of the dictator, we drastically underestimated the importance of Iraqi and Arab pride. Occupation equals resistance. We also made some huge strategic errors.

We did not send the “A-Team” to Baghdad. The image of Paul Brenner, a Kissinger and Associates grad, the “provisional coalition administrator” of Iraq, glopping about in a wool suit and combat boots is the perfect visual for how poorly prepared we were for victory and how clownish we were as conquerors. Most of the functionaries whom we sent to the “Green Zone” in Baghdad were Republican Party donors and loyalists. They couldn’t speak Arabic. They knew nothing about Iraq. They lacked the organizational and engineering skills needed to rebuild a devastated nation and the political and social skills needed to interface with Iraqi society. Her Sunnis. Her Shias. Her Kurds. Twenty-first century Americans were playing the Great Game with none of the ability and finesse of the Victorian English. Or the Georgian English, for that matter.

We needed to de-Ba’ath-ify the Iraqi armed forces. Perhaps we should have fired everyone above the rank of major. Perhaps we should have hired informants to rat out the worst of the officer cadre and fired or imprisoned them. In 1945, we left too many Nazis at their desks, but what we did in Iraq was criminally stupid.

On 23 May 2003, Paul Brenner signed “Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2: Dissolution of Entities.” This order from the imperial governor disbanded the Iraqi military, security and intelligence forces. Now, every Iraqi soldier, everyone who was trained to fire a gun, was out of a job.

How do you think they reacted to that?

Insurgency in Iraq heated to a boil quickly. Our lopsided victories and ham-fisted occupation had offended Arabic, Muslim and Iraqi pride. Out-of-work soldiers discovered meaning as resistance fighters. Kurds saw a glorious opportunity to create Kurdistan. Shi’ites wanted liberation from Sunni dominance, perhaps even a political confederation with their co-religionists in Iran. Islam extremists like the Jordanian sadist, al-Zarqawi, had a new jihad, one against the infidel American invader. Thousands of radicalized youths flocked to their cause. Iran, hating America to begin with and fearing that she might be the next target in the Great Game, began funneling in Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and other materiel support. Popular discontent was high. The economy was ruined. Tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. The infrastructure was in shambles. Entire cities lacked electricity for months on end. Several insurgencies erupted so quickly and so hotly that the level of violence soon matched and surpassed that of the worse days of chaos in Colombia, when she was circling the drain to hell. Day after day of major car- and truck-bomb attacks, roadside IED attacks.

We were manned, equipped and trained for combined arms combat on a conventional battlefield. This we did very well. We were not ready to suppress insurgencies, provide security and rebuild a nation under fire. It would take us years to re-orient to these new missions, which we only accomplished partially, even then.

General David Petraeus, USA, helped to rewrite Field Manual 32-4, “Counterinsurgency,” the Army and Marine Corps manual on the subject. Tens of thousands of additional troops surged into Iraq between 2006 and 2009, as shown in the chart below:

We managed to build coalitions with important tribal leaders and implement other strategies outlined in the new field manual. Focused teams of intelligence officers, including analysts from the CIA, and special forces, backed up with 21st century air power, became highly proficient in hunting and killing cells of terrorists. The surge did not win the war in Iraq, but it prevented a catastrophic loss. By 2010, we were drawing down forces, yet we continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on military bases and combat operations in Iraq.

Corporate media ignored the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the greatest extent possible. Attacks that caused US causalities were mentioned as succinctly as possible, then the sideshow of national distraction continued. The brunt of the hardships of warfighting fell on a relatively tiny minority of the population, the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) and their families. During Vietnam, the draft had guaranteed wide-spread popular involvement in the politics of war. Such was not the case in the endless Global War on Terror. A standing professional army, the AVF, backed up by modern mercenary armies known as “security contractors,” focused the stress of combat on a small segment of the population, one that was committed to serving without complaint. Multiple combat tours, often back-to-back, continue to rack up stress on the soldiers and Marines and their families. Divorce, alcoholism, suicide and spousal abuse rates climbed in proportion to the stress. Yet this generation of American fighting men and women lived up to the legacy of their forefathers. The people of the United States of America has incredibly deep reservoirs of strength. Although retired, a mere engineer, I was proud to work alongside these men and women, back from the desert and destined and determined to return.

Our women, too. Now the American soldier was joined in combat by the American Woman. Despite having to endure a macho culture, despite sexual harassment and abuse, the American Woman now went to war. The line between combatant and noncombatant blurs when the enemy is everywhere and there is no front.

I began my service in an all-male fleet and ended my military and contractor careers 32 years later having witnessed the emergence of much more fully integrated armed forces. In integrating the sexes, we experienced every problem imaginable and some that were beyond the imagination. I believe that we are stronger for it. As we have seen in this series on war, many catastrophes can be attributed to failures to adequately understand and to respect the enemy. Men, especially men who are fighting mad, tend to view the world as an ax head views the wood. Those of us who are men are vulnerable to this limiting sort of groupthink. As military women rise in rank and draw closer into the councils of war, they will bring the female mind to bear, especially its genius in emotional intelligence. We will better understand and respect the enemy and those who surround and at times support him. We will better plan for the time after the victory. When we cut, I hope and trust that we will cut with more lethal precision.

Our women suffered in Iraq, as all our troops suffered, but we managed to suppress the insurgencies to a more acceptable level.

In the 17 years since the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, 4,904 US and coalition troops have died there. Estimates of civilian deaths range from over 100,000 to over two million. The war in Iraq has cost the US taxpayer over three trillion dollars.

On 5 January 2020, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution calling for all foreign troops to leave the national territory. The USA has drawn down her military presence in Iraq, yet our military presence continues to this day. In September, 2020, US combat forces in Iraq drew down from 5,200 to 3,000. During the year 2020, twelve US & UK servicemembers were killed in Iraq. In January 2021, the DoD confirmed that there were still 2,500 US servicemembers in Iraq.

 Our Wars XVI – The War in Syria

I can force myself to discuss our war in Syria only because I know that this is the last essay in “Our Wars” series. Not because American wars have ended, but because I have completed my job. I started with the French and Indian War. I end today with our war in Syria. It is 11 April 2021.

Syria is an ancient land. Her peoples are the survivors of many epochs, migrations and wars. Sunni Arabs predominate, but Syria also has Christians and Jews, Turks and Kurds, and many other peoples. The President of Syria is Bashar al-Assad. He and his family are not Sunni, but rather Alawite, which is a sect of the Shia. He has been president for almost 21 years. He inherited his rule from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who was president for 29 years. Syria, therefore, is nakedly a feudal state, although it retains democratic frills.

Some Syrians are not content to live under a feudal lord, so they have taken up arms against the al-Assad regime. There has been a civil war in Syria since 2011, when pro-democracy protests were met with repression.

The al-Assad regime is a client state of Russia. The Russians support Syria, much the same way the United States supports Israel. Syria is not a friend of Israel. Syria has never recognized the legal existence of the state of Israel. Syria does not trade with Israel. Since 1948, Syria has fought three wars with Israel.

Originally, Al-Qaeda was focused on three issues: Christian military presence in the holy land of Saudi Arabia; American mass murder in Iraq; and American support of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. This is according to their two manifestos, "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" of 23 February 1998 and “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” of 23 August 1996. In 2003, the United States withdrew its military forces from Saudi Arabia and based them in Gulf States such as Qatar. We have killed a lot more Iraqis since 1998. We also continue to support Israel. So we have addressed only one of al-Qaeda’s complaints. Politically.

With the killing of Osama bin Laden and battlefield losses, al-Qaeda has been knocked back, but it has been joined by a new, hyperviolent group, founded by the Jordanian sadist, al-Zarqawi. “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIL (originally known to us as “ISIS”) has declared a worldwide caliphate. That means that they think they’re in charge of Muslims everywhere. Even worse than that, whereas al-Qaeda was focused on getting the United States to leave the Middle East alone, ISIL, by declaring a worldwide caliphate, has taken the position that all of the world should be under extremist Muslim rule.

Their signature move is the beheading of captives, which they tape and broadcast. They also kidnap groups of young girls and turn them into sex slaves.

Their flag is black.

So it looks like we may have made a bad situation worse. ISIL took over a lot of Iraq and Syria:

We responded with 34,464 airstrikes. We trained, supplied and augmented the Iraqi army and anti-Assad guerrillas so that they could fight and destroy ISIL.

For years, we have been conducting air strikes in the same battlespace with the Russians, but not under a joint command, but rather separately and with different targets. Against different enemies. With different allies. A good recipe for World War III, but, so far, we have managed to get through this stupid and dangerous situation without triggering a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.

ISIL has lost its territories in Iraq and Syria. Many of its fighters have been killed. Al-Zarqawi is dead. The group continues to operate in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. During March 2020, for example, two US Marines were killed during a raid on ISIL hide-outs in caves in northern Iraq. At least 29 Malian soldiers were killed during an attack on their base in northeast Mali. ISIL launched a rocket into a crowd gathered for a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing at least 27 and wounding 29.

In January 2021, ISIL terrorist bombs in Baghdad killed 32 people and wounded 110. In March 2021, ISIL attacks in Afghanistan killed eleven people and wounded two.

ISIL is not dead. Neither is al-Qaeda. They are like cancers that will always come back, given the right conditions.

The civil war in Syria continues. Estimates of war dead range from 400,000 to almost 600,000. Millions of Syrians have fled as refugees into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Europe.

About 500 US troops remain in Syria. In November 2019, the commander of the Central Command said that he had “no end date” for direct US military involvement in the war.

Here the “Our Wars” series ends. US combat forces remain in Korea, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars continue. Damages done and problems unsolved by violence and problems worsened through violence during all of our sixteen wars and all of our other wars continue to reverberate down through the living generations. They will continue to reverberate down through time, long after my death and the death of my last reader.

Until the day that our children’s children and their children have no memory of any time except a time of peace.

 The Federal Reserve Bank

Leviticus 25:54: " If he isn’t redeemed by these means, then he shall be released in the Year of Jubilee: he and his children with him."

The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) is a cartel of private banks that control the money supply and monetary policy of the USA. Every nation on Earth has its own central bank, with the exception of Cuba, North Korea and Iran.

The FRB is not part of the federal government. The president nominates the FRB chairperson. The Senate confirms the nomination. After that, the government has no power whatsoever over the decision-making of the FRB. It is up to the FRB, in fact, to decide how much to tell anyone, including the government, what it is doing. After the 2008 economic crisis, the FRB told everyone about a seven hundred billion dollar ($700B) bailout program for the banks, but it also created another program ten times that size, about which they did not even tell Congress. A first-ever audit by the Government Accounting Office in 2011 discovered that the Fed had distributed over sixteen trillion dollars ($16T) to bail out banks following the financial meltdown, which had been caused by the banks’ own practices of selling fraudulent securities backed up by shoddy and shady home loans.

Who makes up this organization with the power to invent money and dictate monetary policy?

Even the membership of the banking cartel is secret. It is not given the citizens of the United States to know which banks make up the FRB. Based on which banks received bail-out money and which CEOs were given bonuses for surviving the wreckage of the world economy, the FRB might be made up of companies such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley. Large portions of the stock in the Federal Reserve System might be held by even bigger banks, such as the Bank of China or the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Huge percentages of its shares may be held by foreign nation’s sovereign wealth funds, such as those of China and Saudi Arabia, with whom we have such large trade imbalances. Maybe the Rothschilds own it all. I do not know. You do not know. The President does not know. No one but the banks know because it is a secret. We do not know who controls the money supply and monetary policy of the United States.

The FRB decides how many dollars exist in the world. They invent money out of nothing. The FRB decides how much money should exist, then it tells the new number to the Department of the Treasury, which operates the printing presses that churns out the new Benjamins. That’s only for the physical bills needed for cash transactions. A lot of money is simply created on-line, by data entry: just log-in, click “Create,” and keep hitting the “0” key.

By increasing money supply, the FRB can allow the federal government to continue to spend money it doesn’t have. This is called, “deficit spending.” To continue deficit spending, the government borrows money from the banks, then pays them back at interest. As of April 2021, the Federal Reserve System has invented at least $6T for COVID pandemic relief and stimulus. In addition, President Biden intends to spend over $4T on infrastructure repairs. This is money we don’t have. Money that is created out of thin air by hitting the holy “0” key. So the numbers are hard to keep up with, but, as of April 2021, the US national debt is about to go over $28T – that's six trillion dollars more than it was when I wrote the first draft of this essay, a year ago – and our yearly costs for servicing this debt – that is, just making interest payments to the banks – had climbed to over half a trillion a year (over $522B for FY2020, according to the Department of the Treasury.) That is your tax dollars at work.

Lest we forget, the Constitution gives the power and responsibility over our money to the Congress. Section 8 of the Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power . . . To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof . . .” This same section does give the Congress the power to borrow money, but it specifically states that the responsibility for regulating the value of the money belongs to Congress, not to a shadowy cartel of banks which may or may not be foreign. The Federal Reserve System is unconstitutional.

It is also unnatural. There is, in fact, a nature to the way in which wealth is generated and money is earned.

Farmers work for their money. Farmers create real wealth. They turn dirt, rain and sunshine into wheat, corn and apples. They increase value.

Miners work for their money. Miners create real wealth. They turn a hole in the ground into gold, silver and titanium. They increase value.

Factory workers work for their money. Factory workers create real wealth. They turn rocks and black slime into automobiles, respirators and computers. They increase value.

Construction workers work for their money. Construction workers create real wealth. They turn sticks, wire and mud into homes, skyscrapers and bridges. They increase value.

You can argue about the rest of us – all of us teachers, nurses, writers, artists, masseuses and so on. I say that we may make things better, but we don’t create real wealth. I say that only farmers, miners, factory workers and construction workers create real wealth. We could argue about that, but there’s one thing we can’t argue about. The rest of us have to work for our money.

Except bankers. They can invent money out of nothing. They do not create real wealth. They do not increase value. They just create the tokens with which the game is played. They also make up the rules of the game. No surprise: they are winning.

The financial sector’s share of the economy is growing. In other words, the banks are getting bigger relative to the sectors of the economy that actually generate wealth. This is the real score card.

Well, that and the percentage of all wealth held by the rich. Let’s check that score on the scoreboard . . .

According to inequality.org, the richest 1% of people in the world own about 44% of all the wealth in the world. Their share of the wealth is increasing. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the global economy, with millions of businesses shuttering and tens of millions of people losing their jobs, but, strangely enough, the ultra-rich have done quite well during the crisis. As reported by inequality.org, “According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $1.138 trillion (39 percent) between March 18, 2020 and January 18, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $4.085 trillion. Of the more than 600 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk) saw an 85 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $358 billion to $661 billion.”

So keep your eyes on those percentages:

* Percentage of the national debt relative to Gross Domestic Product. (This is called the “debt-to-GDP” ratio.) This will show you that regardless of what “a dollar” means, we are getting deeper and deeper into real debt. That means that your children and your grandchildren will increasingly be working for the banks. Right now, it’s about 107%. That means that to pay off our debt, we would have to use all the money earned by everyone and everything in a year, but even that still wouldn’t be enough.

* The percentage of the economy devoted to the financial sector. The banks have tripled in its share of the GDP in the past 60 years. Taking over more and more of the economy is a good score for seeing that the banks are winning.

* Percentage of all wealth held by the very wealthy. Maybe that’s the best score to watch. You can really tell who is winning the game that way.

Money itself doesn’t mean anything. It used to mean something. Money used to be backed up by something real, that is, ingots of gold. Not anymore. Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard in 1971. Since then, our money is something we call “fiat currency.” That means that it is a piece of paper that claims that it is worth one dollar, whatever that means.

Here’s what it means:

So keep your eyes on the percentages. As the inflationary practices of the FRB continue, the absolute numbers of dollars will grow increasingly meaningless. You can’t really tell what is happening without looking at the percentages.

(The figure above uses 1913 as its starting date because the FRB was created in 1913. That’s a good story in itself. A secret meeting on Jekyll Island. It’s also good to learn about the struggle between the Americans who fought the establishment of a central bank and the bankers who wanted a central bank. Andrew Jackson, for example, fought against it. He got shot, but he survived. He won. He believed that preventing the creation of a central bank was the biggest achievement of his administration. The interesting history of this struggle, however, is beyond the scope of this short essay.)

Beautiful paper. Pretty paper. We all love it. Next time you study all the pretty engravings and counterfeit countermeasures and such, just notice a couple of things: It says it’s a “federal reserve note.” That’s because the FRB issues it. Also, note the word, “debts.” That should remind you that is in fact a debt note.

Guess who the debt is owed to.

The government? Not really. The government does collect the money that is owed. That’s the job of the Internal Revenue Service. The government, however, is paying forward the money to the banks.

So maybe the more correct answer is: the debt is owed to the banks.

We are all increasingly working for the banks.

They in turn are funneling the money up to the very richest of the rich.

So maybe the truly correct answer is: the richest of the rich.

We are all increasingly working for the richest of the rich. The oligarchy. Billionaire families that think mere millionaires are wannabes and the rest of us are schmucks.

Why have I written this essay? Why did I include it immediately after the “Our Wars” series? Isn’t this essay about money a jarring departure from the theme of war and peace?

No. It is not. None of us can understand why we fight the wars that we fight without understanding this essential part of the military-industrial-congressional complex. That mechanism that is so wildly out of control. You have to understand the money. You have to look at this trillion-dollar coin on both faces.

Wars cost trillions of dollars. We can’t fight wars unless we spend the money. The fantastic system of money invention that this essay sketches is how the money is invented that finances all these wars. If money meant something, politicians would have to make hard choices, such as: fight this war or build a superhighway system? Keep the peace or raise taxes so we can fight a war? Since under the FRB, money means nothing, the politicians are free to fight as many wars as they feel like fighting.

Here’s the other side of the coin: spending money that we don’t have is the point. The more the government spends, the more it borrows. The more it borrows, the richer the banks get. The richer the banks get, the richer the richest of the rich get.

If you think spending trillions of dollars blowing things up and killing babies is a shame, you’re a schmuck.

Spending trillions of dollars we don’t have is the point.

 End of Privacy, End of Secrecy

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is protected explicitly and implicitly in the Constitution of the United States, the document that our elected leaders and servicemembers have sworn to defend.

Explicitly, in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . “

Implicitly, in the Ninth Amendment, the one too infrequently mentioned, but which the Founding Fathers included because they were afraid that if they listed our rights, some jackass down the line would think those were the only rights that we have: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Privacy is defined as a fundamental human right in many international declarations and laws. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, asserts privacy as a fundamental right: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence . . .” Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted this document, which was approved by the United Nations, communists abstaining.

Before electricity, surveillance was the domain of Human Intelligence (HUMINT), which is the domain of the spy, the traitor and the informer. This is one important reason that many of our Founding Fathers, such as George Washington and Ben Franklin, belonged to secret societies such as the Freemasons. They needed some privacy to conspire against the King. Without such privacy, the rebels ran the risk of being denounced, seized, tortured and hung dead.

Prior to the Civil War, it was not the business of the federal government to know how much a citizen earned nor how much he or she had in the bank. Taxes and tariffs were imposed in the public marketplace. Because of the need to generate income to fight the big war, beginning with the income tax of 1861, it became the business of the government to monitor and to tax the incomes of its citizens. By 1933, the federal government had grown so dictatorial that FDR thought that he had the right to seize everyone’s gold. So he did.

Benjamin Franklin founded the United States Postal Service with the idea that the privacy of our correspondence would be protected. Over the years, this trust was eroded. By the 1970s, the FBI, the CIA and other spook organizations had programs for intercepting and reading our mail.

Today Americans are generally aware of what little privacy we have left. Most of us would be shocked, however, to learn not only how much data about us is being gathered by the government and by the corporations, but also how sophisticated the artificial intelligence algorithms have become that allow these superhuman-scale organizations to analyze and profile our individual and mass behaviors. Our browsing histories, credit and debit card transactions, telephone logs and social network postings are incredibly rich sources of information about who we are, what we like and dislike and with whom we associate.

We are the most surveilled population in history. The secret police and security goons of Stalin’s Russia, Ceausescu’s Romania and Mao’s China would salivate buckets at the idea of having the tools and massive data repositories available today to modern governments and corporations.

George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned Big Brother spying on everyone through cameras in the walls. How shocked Orwell would be today, seeing us walking around with our monitoring devices always in our hands, pointed at our faces.

Smart phones are communication devices that can be used as surveillance devices. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS) feature can be used to track our movements. So can the triangulation of signals to and from the cellular towers. The emerging Wi-Fi standard called 5G will facilitate precise tracking, also. The cameras and microphones in these smart phones can be activated remotely. They can record and transmit even when they appear to be off.

A person used to be able to disarm all of these features by removing the battery. Try doing that today. There is no reason why the smart phones of today couldn’t be designed so that the user could remove the battery with a shove of the thumb. Do you think that it’s a coincidence that battery removal today is designed to be a maintenance-level operation?

Cameras and microphones are now built into more and more consumer goods. Our smart phones have them. So do our desktops, laptops, pads and televisions. I have a camera pointed at my face right now.

People are buying security and internet access devices with live microphones and cameras. We are installing them in and around our homes. Think about that: we are paying for the hardware needed to spy on us. We’re even doing the installation for free!

Ask Alexa: “Alexa, are you spying on me?”

Alexa will say that she doesn’t understand or she will say, “No.”

The answer to the question, “Are you spying on me?” is always “No.” It is one of a few possible questions that only has one answer. Trouble is, how can you tell when the answer is a lie?

Closed circuit television cameras, stoplight cameras, dashboard cameras, chest cameras, spyglass cameras, etc., are becoming ubiquitous. They’re everywhere. London and Beijing are leading the trend. Facial recognition algorithms have become so sophisticated and reliable that the government can track one person as she moves through a city of millions.

With technologies such as Bluetooth, 5G and the Internet of Things, we will all soon be ensnared in a web of surveillance that is total, if it isn’t already. Even if we escape to the woods or to the desert, we have to keep an eye out for drones. The more sophisticated drones, by the way, are high enough and quiet enough that you can’t hear or see them.

I hate to say it, but that Unabomber had a point. The growth of technology does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with the growth of human freedom.

The naïve might ask, “If we’re not doing anything wrong, why should we mind?”

Well, there’s several good reasons why we should mind:

One, it’s creepy. I don’t want a corporation or a government perving on me as I go about my private affairs and as I engage in my most intimate relations and as I perform my most personal functions. Thank you, but no.

Two, where is the elbow room to live? Rather than watching me every second, waiting for me to make a wrong move or say something that betrays WrongThink, why don’t you just worry about serious crimes like assault, rape and murder? I’m pretty boring, but what if I wanted to live like James Dean, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando or Hunter S. Thompson? What if I wanted to act like an American?

Three, and most importantly: even if we trust this government, what happens when it changes? After the good king comes the bad king. After Caesar Augustus comes Caligula. After William Penn come his sons. After von Hindenburg comes Hitler.

A democracy can fail in a single election. You only have to lose to the Nazis once. They will take it from there.

If good, honest, law-abiding citizens allow themselves to be ensnared in a web of total surveillance, then they will be putting their necks and the necks of their children and grandchildren into a noose. Eventually, someone will pull the lever on the trapdoor. When they do, America could become North Korea overnight.

So we the People have no privacy.

Do the corporations, banks and governments have secrets?

Get a piece of paper. Take ten minutes. Write down a list of things that you would like to know about corporations and the government, if you were told that you could get true, full answers to any question that you might ask. Come back and compare your list to mine. I’ll spend a few minutes with Mark Twain, thinking about ubiquitous surveillance . . .

OK. Got your list? Here’s mine:

* How much gold is there in Fort Knox?

* Who owns the Federal Reserve System?

* How many trillions of dollars are there in banks in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Panamá City, Zurich and Hong Kong?

* Who are the richest people in the world?

o How much money do they have?

o Where is their money?

* What was the agenda for this year’s Bilderberg Group?

o Last years?

o 1995’s?

* What did Dick Cheney have in his man-sized safe?

* Who is taking bribes from the Mafia?

o Los Zeta?

o The Russian mob?

* How many front companies does the CIA have?

* Who killed Martin Luther King?

* What are the Skunk Works flying recently?

* What stories has the BBC suppressed?

o Fox News?

o CNN?

o Time?

* What is the infrastructure of the Continuity of Government (CoG) program?

o How does it compare to the infrastructure for civil defense (the rest of us)?

* What’s the truth behind every corporation’s annual stockholder report?

* What are the results of product safety tests done on in internal corporate laboratories, say, about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), for example?

* What’s the black budget?

* What happened to the $2.3 trillion dollars that were not accountable in the Pentagon’s budget? (The $2.3T that Rumsfeld mentioned on 10 September 2001.)

* Where did Vince Foster die?

* What were the Plumbers looking for?

* What was the relationship between Governor Bill Clinton and Vice President George H.W. Bush?

* What did Bill Clinton do on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island?

* Who could have Jeffrey Epstein implicated, if he hadn’t killed himself while in federal custody?

* What did LBJ know?

* Why do we have two Popes?

* Who sets the price of gold?

Well, anyway, those are just a few of the questions that I might ask, if governments and corporations were as transparent as us the people.

In the meantime, knowledge is power. If they remain opaque and we remain transparent, human freedom will fail.

Problem is, I don’t think we’ll ever get back all of our privacy. Not like Mark Twain had, back in the days when we first started stringing electric lights.

So I guess the only real alternative we have is to end government and corporate secrecy. They’ll claim they need to keep everything secret, as an important feature of national security. For our own good, you know.

Let’s take away their secrecy anyway, for just a quick look, just in case they’re lying and all that secrecy is about the hiding of great crimes. Maybe our states attorney generals could help us with that.

 The Crisis I: The Toxicity of Our Technology

We love technology. It may kill us all.

It is commonplace to say that technology is neutral; that good or bad results from how technology is used. This is not entirely true. Weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them. (Gun enthusiasts love guns when they hold the grip. They hate guns when they stare down the barrel.) Weapons are essentially hateful. A nuclear bomb is hateful. A Sarin warhead is hateful. Weapons are not neutral. They are purpose-built tools of hatred, fear and destruction.

Yet every tool, even weaponry, has a strange allure. We do not decide whether to use a tool. If we build it, we use it. The grip yearns to be gripped. The button cries out to be pushed. The switch itches to be thrown. In the history of technology, all grips are gripped, all buttons pushed, all switches thrown.

Why? We are tool-wielding animals. The most exciting tool is the new one.

Nevertheless, we cannot blame our tools. The fairest way to state the problem is that our cleverness has far outraced our wisdom. In 2021 A.D., we are using technologies that might be wielded much more wisely after another ten thousand years of social and spiritual development. We are like monkeys juggling grenades. This will not end well.

So let us survey some of our dizzying array of technology. Let’s apply a few important concepts from operations science and computer science to them.

My great Navy is a leader in operations science, which is the systematic study of systems. Using operations science, the analyst quantifies things like queues, servers and throughput to develop a comprehensive understanding of how a system works . . . or fails. I am no expert, but the Naval Postgraduate School made sure that I took one graduate-level course in operations science. The world would be a better place if our leaders took the same course.

Let’s start with the most obvious suspect. The nuclear bomb. Rather, its aggregate, our system of nuclear deterrence.

We are told that we invest trillions of dollars into these weapons, of which we maintain thousands, as well as their extremely expensive launching platforms such as stealthy bombers and nuclear-powered submarines, because they are weapons of such horrifying destructive power that everyone will be afraid of provoking their use.

Let’s repeat that more simply: we maintain a nuclear arsenal because it is so destructive that everyone will be afraid of provoking its use.

During the height of the Cold War, the nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union was called “Mutual Assured Destruction,” or MAD.

We’ll take this doctrine at face value. We won’t consider the possibility that the D---l is having a laugh at our expense. He enjoys that sort of humor, right before the pitchfork digs into the throat.

We must think that our system of nuclear deterrence as a system. Because it is. Actually, it is a system of systems of systems. One of its components, the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, in fact, is one of the most complicated machines ever made.

In studying systems, one thing that we observe is that all systems fail. Accept the truth of this as brutal fact.

All systems fail.

It is not a question if a system will fail. It is a question when a system will fail.

The operations science term for this is “Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).” The intervals between failures of a system can be measured, if you have enough data, or estimated, if you don’t. The average of those intervals is the MTBF.

You can increase the MTBF through clean design, the use of proven technologies instead of experimental technologies, redundancy, feed-back and fail-safe mechanisms, as well as superior manufacturing, training and operational practices. You cannot eliminate it. Sooner or later, the system will fail.

I would hope that far better scientists than me, with terminal degrees, working in research facilities such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have done highly classified, highly detailed studies of the MTBF of all of our machines, systems of machines and systems of systems. That they have identified areas for improvement. That we have invested in making these improvements.

At an unclassified level, however, let’s do a back-of-the-envelope estimate. What is the MTBF of our system of nuclear deterrence?

Here is one crude measure: how long was it between the moment that we knew nuclear bombs could work and the moment that we dropped one, killing tens of thousands of human beings?

The Trinity test was on 16 July 1945. Hiroshima was nuked on 6 August 1945. That's 21 days.

So by this historical measurement, the MTBF is 21 days. This might not be fair. One way of looking at the nuking of Hiroshima is that it was not a failure, but rather a success. So let’s be generous and discount Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We used nuclear bombs, yes, but we built those nuclear bombs to use them. We didn’t build those bombs to not use them. Today, we build nuclear bombs and missiles to not use them. This could be considered a different system than the one that we built in WWII.

Nagasaki, the last time we exploded a nuclear bomb as a weapon, was on 9 August 1945. Today is 11 April 2021, which suggests a MTBF of at least 75 years, 8 months and 2 days. Using these data, if we extrapolate a MTBF of 100 years, we could expect system failure around the year 2045 A.D.

Given the importance of the subject, though, we should take a closer look. Have there been times when we came close to system failure? If we consider such close calls, we should get a better estimate of the MTBF.

The Cuba missile crisis, 16 - 28 October 1962, is considered the closest we have come yet to nuclear holocaust. We went to Defense Condition Two (DEFCON 2), the only known time that we have gone that high.

The Soviets were installing tactical nuclear missiles in their client state of Cuba. Although the USA had similar weapons positioned near the Soviet Union, President Kennedy and his hardline military leaders considered such a deployment unacceptable. This played out as brinkmanship, or “playing chicken,” between the two nuclear powers. A few aspects of the Cuba missile crisis are noteworthy in the context of our analysis.

The US thought the missiles in Cuba were not yet operational. In fact, some were already operational. The Russians had planned to turn over control of the missiles to the Cubans but had not yet done so. During the crisis, Castro was reported to have advocated preemptively launching the missiles, so we were lucky that the Russians had not yet turned over control.

The Joint Chiefs advocated airstrikes against the missiles. The Russians were prepared to launch the missiles if they had been so attacked.

The Joint Chiefs recommended evacuating the White House. Kennedy insisted that they remain in place. The evacuation of national command authority to bunkers is a classic indicator of impending warfare. If we had evacuated the White House as the Joint Chiefs wanted, it could have convinced the Soviets that we were that much closer to nuclear war. This would have tightened their own trigger fingers.

During the tensest phase of the crisis, the US imposed a naval blockade of Cuba, asserting the right to board and search all Russian ships for contraband. One of the Soviet submarines sent to the Caribbean in support of the missile deployments, Foxtrot class/B-59, was out of contact with Moscow. Under depth-charge attack, her captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, wanted to launch a nuclear-armed torpedo. The commander of the submarine flotilla, Vasily Arkhipov, embarked in B-59, refused. If that one Soviet submarine officer had thought differently, they would have launched a nuclear weapon in combat at a US Navy ship, almost certainly triggering World War III and a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.

We would all be dead.

On 27 October 1962, the system of nuclear deterrence came as close as one man’s thoughts to failing. If it had failed, then a MTBF of about 17 years is suggested.

There have been reports that we went to higher DEFCONs in October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks. We know that leaders get nervous when wars start or leaders get shot. So JFK’s assassination on 22 November 1963 and the day Reagan was shot, 30 March 1981, could be added as data points. On those two days, there were serious concerns, at least on the American side, that the assassination might trigger or indicate a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

On the Russian side, there have been a few other tense moments: during the 19 - 22 August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet empire on 26 December 1991 and the 21 September - 4 October 1993 coup attempt against Yeltsin.

Have there been times that one side or the other thought mistakenly we might be going to general nuclear war? How about the false reports of airborne missiles during the Suez Crisis of 5 November 1956 or during the Yom Kippur war, 9 November 1979?

Have there been serious accidents involving nuclear weapons?

On 24 January 1961, a B-52 Stratofortress carrying two nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air. On 13 July 1950, a B-50 carrying a nuclear weapon crashed in Lebanon, Ohio. On 10 March 1956, a USAF B-47 Stratojet crashed with two weapon cores. On 3 October 1986, a Soviet Yankee ballistic missile submarine exploded and sunk off of Bermuda. On 12 August 2000, Kursk, an Oscar II attack submarine, sunk off Murmansk, killing all 112 crewmembers. I don’t know what she had onboard, but the Oscar II class is one of Russia’s biggest, most modern and most capable nuclear-powered attack submarines.

There have been other accidents, other losses of nuclear weapons, other incidents of increased military tension and other incidents of mistaken indications that the other side had launched. These are just a few known examples.

The government should tell us about all these incidents. We should keep a running dashboard that we can check when we’re curious about the end of the world, but the federal government and the Department of Defense don’t seem to be that forthcoming. Perhaps it is from a concern that we might worry. Worrying is bad for our health. Perhaps it is from a well-founded anxiety that if the public knew the truth about these sorts of accidents, mistakes and ratcheted-up tensions, then we would demand an end to this insane system of nuclear deterrence. So best to keep it quiet. Let’s pretend that all of this is normal.

Given the above data points, my gut feeling is that the MTBF for our system of nuclear deterrence is not 100 years, but probably less than half of that. Let’s say, 50 years. If true, we were due for system failure, probably resulting in a nuclear holocaust, sometime around 1995 A.D. In which case, we are living on borrowed time.

That’s just the American and Russian side of the problem. In fact, we Americans and Russians spend more on command-and-control of our nuclear arsenals than do other nations. We have more built-in redundancies. Other nations have shoddier systems. Also, some nuclear powers are even more volatile than we are. America has yet to fight a war with Russia (ignoring our failed expedition against the Bolsheviks, 1918-1920 A.D., as we tend to do.) Since its creation in 1948, Israel has fought at least four wars with her Arab neighbors. Israel is a nuclear power. Since its independence from the British Empire in 1947, India has fought four wars with Pakistan. India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. North Korea is still at war with South Korea. North Korea is trying to become a nuclear power.

The bottom line is that there is a Mean Time Between Failure. Estimates can vary. The only certainty is that if we continue to arm ourselves with these horrible weapons, someday the system of nuclear deterrence will fail. Cities will burn. Civilization may end.

Total disarmament is the only solution.

Let’s avert our eyes from this stupid horror and consider the nuclear bomb’s ugly little sister, nuclear power.

In the 1950s, when commercial nuclear power was a new technology, the catchphrase promoting its adoption was that nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap to meter.” Electricity would become so plentiful that it would become virtually free. Even though the construction of a nuclear power plant was a billion-dollar investment, the plant would quickly pay for itself, then power would be essentially free.

The key concept from operations science that we are going to apply to nuclear power is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To figure out the Total Cost of Ownership of a thing, you have to count not only the purchase price, but also the costs to maintain and to operate the thing, as well as deal with its side-effects, and eventually, the costs of getting rid of the thing.

A common example is a sailboat. The purchase price of a sailboat may be steep, but the costs for berthing, equipping, operating and maintaining a boat can add up so high that many disillusioned sailors define a sailboat as “a hole in the water that you pour money into.”

So it is with nuclear power. The TCO must properly include the disposal of nuclear wastes, the damages caused by nuclear accidents and the costs to remediate those damages. Far from being “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power may turn out to be the most expensive enterprise ever undertaken by mankind. A thousand years from now, or ten thousand years from now, nuclear power may be the only thing for which our living generations will be remembered. World War II could be an endnote. The invention of the electronic digital computer not worth a mention. We will be remembered solely as the people who poisoned the planet with nuclear radiation, because our distant descendants will still be paying the costs.

The disposal of nuclear wastes is a prime example. The first American commercial nuclear power plant began operations in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, on 26 May 1958. As of 2021 A.D., 63 years later, the United States does not have a viable national program for the disposal of nuclear waste. After spending fifteen billion dollars ($15B) in studies and partial construction of a disposal facility in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, that site remains incomplete and unused.

It is a deeply serious problem. We generate nuclear wastes constantly. Some are low-level, such as wastes from medical imaging and cancer treatments. Some are high-level, such as wastes from bomb manufacturing and from power plants. Millions of pounds of these poisons, some of which remain lethal for tens of thousands of years. Nowhere safe to put it.

This is due to a flaw in our forms of capitalism, as historically practiced. The TCO of a product has not been properly calculated. We have included only the costs of manufacture, transportation and sales. We have not included the costs of disposal of the product nor the costs of remediation of the pollutants that are generated by the product. These have been just dumped into the nearest river or sent up through a smokestack into the atmosphere or buried in a landfill. Someone else’s problem.

I am from Pittsburgh. In my hometown, the TCO of steel products was not calculated to include the remediation of coal smoke and other pollutants. These were simply vented into the sky or dumped into the mighty Monongahela River. For that reason, one of the nicknames of Pittsburgh was “Hell with the lid off.” As a girl, my mother and her classmates had to clean out their nostrils with handkerchiefs, after their walk to school, so that they could breathe during the school day. Sometimes the coal smoke was so thick that the sky was as black as midnight. At noon.

During the Renaissance of the 1960s, the city forced the mills to spend about $1M each for scrubbers on their stacks. The Pittsburgh of my youth still made steel, but the skies were blue. This government interference with the brutal form of capitalism, sadly, is one reason that the steel industry in western Pennsylvania collapsed. (Hostile management/labor relations, steelworker intransigence over workplace rules, over-extension, competition from non-union mills in the south and abroad and depletion of near-by raw materials were some of the other reasons.) Eventually, these same mills were sold as scrap to China, which practices her own weird form of brutal capitalism. The Chinese re-assembled some of these “scrap” mills. These old Pittsburgh factories are still busily gushing coal smoke today, burning soft coal in western China, making Chinese steel and polluting the atmosphere of the self-same planet.

As a boy, I would stand on the trestle and throw rail bed rocks down into the sucking black mud on the banks of Robinson’s Run. That black mud was some of the TCO of industries and depleted oil wells upriver, which the owners never considered nor paid.

So it has been with nuclear power. The true TCO estimates for nuclear power may not have competed that well with, say, coal-generated electricity, when such things as the disposal of wastes was included, so they just skipped that. In Fukushima, for example, depleted radioactive rods were simply stored in the same building as the reactors. Near a seismic fault line. In a tsunami danger zone.

Which introduces the costs of accidents. We have yet to learn the total damage that Fukushima will cause. The earthquake and the tsunami struck on 11 March 2011. Ten years later, Fukushima is still an ongoing disaster. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has 1.37-million-tons storage capacity for contaminated water. Since this capacity will be exceeded by 2022, TEPCO is deliberately discharging radioactive water into the Pacific. The total costs of damage to the littoral and marine environments of the broad Pacific Ocean are as yet unknown. Recent estimates for the costs of the Fukushima disaster have ranged from sixty to over seven hundred billion dollars ($60B to $728B). I suspect that the true costs will climb into the trillions of dollars before the site is finally safe, perhaps thousands of years from now. Add that to your TCO, TEPCO.

During the Chernobyl disaster, the reactor was only weeks away from a melt-down through its containment floor that could have caused an explosion, the fall-out of which could have rendered Europe uninhabitable. What would have been the TCO of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, then?

What comes after trillions?

Quadrillions. That’s right. The TCO of that plant could have been in the quadrillions of dollars.

Those are the costs of the damages. The costs for remediation are additional. For Chernobyl, the Russians had to deploy a quarter of million men for years to clean up. The new sarcophagus, installed in 2018, cost $1.6B. It is designed to last for 100 years. Other containers will have to be built. The melted core of the reactor known as “the elephant’s foot” will not be safe for 20,000 years.

Add that to your TCO.

Fukushima was a bad design and an act of God. Chernobyl was a bad design and operational error. We have yet to see deliberate attacks on nuclear power plants or waste storage facilities, either by disgruntled employees, madmen or as acts of war. A reading of our history suggests that such attacks are inevitable.

Yes, we can design safer reactors. Yes, we can establish more realistic storage solutions. We must remember two things, though: This is a disaster-prone planet. Our history richly documents that we are a violent, destructive species. With this planet, with this species, is any sort of nuclear power a good idea?

No, I don’t think so. I believe that nuclear weapons and nuclear power are sucker questions on the IQ tests of technologically emerging species. Our answers of “yes” are incorrect. I believe that this may be the standard answer, since technologically emerging species love technology. If so, this may be one reason that we haven’t found any alien civilizations. Some people call this possibility “the late filter of intelligence.” I call it, “monkeys juggling grenades.”

Hanging in there? I apologize. I know that I am being bad company. I know that this isn’t fun to read. It isn’t fun to write, but we are not yet done with this brief tour of the toxicity of our technology. For the sakes of our children, we must consider our emerging technologies to reinvent life itself.

Gene editing.

We have been manipulating the gene pools of domesticated plants and animals for millennia, the old-fashioned way: selective breeding. Some species are genetically plastic. That’s how we made Shih Tzus and Great Danes out of wolves. Dogs have slippery, redundant DNA. Even so, the most intrusive we ever got was grafting, where the gardener splices one plant onto the stem or branch of another. Selective breeding and grafting are relatively safe, sustainable technologies. It is only within my lifetime that we have developed the technology to directly edit the genomes of plants, animals and humans.

Did we wait for a generation so that we could test these technologies in the safety of the laboratory? Or did we grab this shiny new tool and start to wield it immediately? Of course, we grabbed the shiny new tool and started to use it immediately.

Monsanto. Frankencorn. Round-up. Insert frothy-spittle rant here.

Another example: in 2018, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced the first-ever editing of the human genome. That was the dawn of the era of the transhuman. We should have waited until 2118 A.D., when we would have had a better idea of what we were doing.

Technologies such as CRISPR, which began to have emerge in the 2000s, will allow much more powerful editing of genomes. The era of gene editing is dawning all around us. It will be a new world, as significantly new and different as the world became when we harnessed electricity. When we developed nuclear power.

The concept that I want to apply to gene editing does not come from operations science. It comes from my own field, computer science. I believe this is appropriate because DNA is a code. We computer scientists have two generations of experience in editing large legacy programs. Because that is what DNA is. It is a large legacy program. We did not design it. We did not build it. We inherited it. It came to us, vitally important, but lacking any sort of documentation whatsoever. It’s a huge, weird, extremely buggy program.

We computer technologists have two generations of experience dealing with such programs. They are out there today, still executing: million-line programs written in languages such as COBOL, written in languages that are basically dead, but are still understood by a handful of programmers, solely for the reason that there is a tiny but important niche market in keeping such legacy programs going.

The important concept from computer science that I want to apply to gene editing can be said in two words. These are my two favorite words in computer science:

Unforeseen interaction.

We have been writing large, multi-million-line programs since the 1960s. One thing that we have learned is that a fix in one module of code can have unforeseen interactions with other modules of code. A fix of one bug can strangely cause bugs in other parts of the program. Only after some real head-scratching and retroactive testing do you develop the hindsight to discover these interactions. In doing so, you arrive at a more profound understanding of the code.

That’s scary enough but think about this: the nature of sex. That is the mechanism by which DNA works. It works through sex, but what is sex?

Sex is the random shuffling of the genetic code every time reproduction takes place. By definition, sex re-combines the DNA code in ways that are unpredictable. Every time a sexual bacterium, plant, animal or human being reproduces, the large, weird, buggy program gets shuffled and re-combined in a way that is unpredictable.

We don’t understand the entire buggy program yet. We thought there were large parts that were just “junk,” but we’ve recently learned that they’re important, too. This is the state of affairs under which we are having the incredible, the mind-boggling, the jaw-dropping arrogance to go in and start making changes.

Oh, foolish monkeys . . .

This will not end well.

 The Crisis II: Human Population Explosion

“Overpopulation” is a description of a problem with an implied sinister solution. The term implies the problem is too many people, therefore, the solution is less people. Any reading of history suggests a nightmare scenario. For a fictional example, read my novel, INFECTRESS.

There are too many people. The ecosystems of Earth would be in much better shape if there were one billion human beings, not eight billion. Or 11 billion. Or 14 billion.

Study the last chart, though, which depicts population growth by age group. The problem isn’t that there’s too many babies. The situation is that people are living longer. This is good news. The planet is growing more crowded because we are leaving behind primitive subsistence societies and progressing into the modern era.

We can hope that as the extremely poor and the poor people of Asia and Africa continue to rise to a decent standard of living that birth rates will drop. This is what the UN is predicting. Then we could grow down to a more sustainable population size.

It’s going to be rough, riding out the storm of the human population explosion. It’s going to require a fairer distribution of wealth, a concerted effort by the developed world to help the people in the developing world, investments in life instead of in death and adjustments to our lifestyles.

Only the psychopaths among us are going to think that mass murder is the solution. But beware: there are psychopaths among us.

 The Crisis III - Climate Change

“Global warming.”

“Global warming.”

“Global warming.”

“Global warming. Global warming. Global warming . . .”

A few years ago, the phrase, “global warming” was mouthed incessantly by pundits and politicians, activists and news anchors. Today, these same people talk about “climate change.”

What happened?

Inadequate modeling happened. 99% of the world's climate scientists may not have been wrong, but that doesn't mean they were right. (By the way, it was never 99%. That was one of those truthy numbers. 99% of no group of humans agree on anything.)

There is a broad-enough scientific consensus that anthropogenic (or manmade) global warming (AGW) is real. It’s a fairly big planet, but one with a relatively thin atmosphere. Our bonfire of wood, coal, gas and oil has released billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the thin mix, changing its reflective and refractive properties, trapping solar heat, yada yada yada. The pundits have drilled this story into all of our heads by now.

I believe that AGW is real. What comes next may be just as real and even more horrifying.

Dozens of major factors drive the machinery of climate. Volcanic activity. Biological activity. Fluid dynamics of ocean currents. The albedo, or reflectivity, of clouds and snowpacks. The planet's orbital mechanics, such as its elliptical orbit, axis tilt and the precession, which is the millennia-slow wobbling of that tilt. Cometary strikes.

There is an 800-pound gorilla in that cage. A gorilla about which our climate scientists have been strangely quiet. The reason for their silence is that this gorilla has been relatively quiet himself for the past century. His relatively minor fluctuations during the past century have not been driving the changes in global climate that we have been seeing. That may be about to change, perhaps, because the 800-pound gorilla is . . .

The Sun.

Nothing drives the climate on planet Earth more powerfully than the Sun. The Sun has many cycles, which we are only beginning to understand. One of those cycles is sunspot activity.

We all know sunspots are dark splotches on the face of the Sun. Many of us know that they are caused by the electromagnetic activity inside the Sun. None of us know exactly what that activity is and why it is cyclic. Or why a decrease in sunspot cycles corresponds with a slight dimming of the Sun. A dimming that can cause the Earth to cool down. The last time that happened was between 1645 A.D. to 1715 A.D. It was called the “Maunder Minimum.” The Sun dimmed enough that we had a mini-Ice Age. Temperatures dropped. Snowfall increased. Glaciers advanced.

A mini-ice age? Oh, good, you might think. That would cool down the global warming. (That’s what I thought . . .)

Yes, it would. Then keep on cooling things down. Keep on cooling things down until you can't grow crops in many regions where we currently grow crops. Keep on cooling things down until hundreds of millions of people are threatened with starvation. During the Maunder Minimum, growing seasons shortened. Crops failed. People starved. Some nations lost between a tenth to a third of their populations.

In December 2019, we entered Solar Cycle 25, which is expected to be a relatively weak cycle that peaks in 2025 and lasts until about 2030. On 15 September 2020, the co-chair of Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, a NOAA and NASA committee, stated that “There is no indication we are approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity.”

Despite this assurance, some independent observers fear that we may indeed enter a grand minimum, similar to the Maunder Minimum. Their fears are based on evidence such as the relatively weak recent solar cycles and the dramatic wandering of the north pole (the Earth's magnetic field is influenced by the Sun's activity. The north pole is now wandering at over 30 miles/year.) If we do enter a grand solar minimum, it might last 50 years.

No one knows. The last time a minimum happened, we were excited about the brand-new technology called “telescopes.” Now we have sun-staring satellites. Whatever the Sun does next, we’re going to learn a lot.

There are other factors that could go either way. Will the methane ice under the sea and under the tundra melt and vaporize? Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Such a melting of methane could be a violent tipping point. Will we be hit by a comet the size of the one that hit around 10,800 years ago and caused the wild swings of the Younger Dryas? Swings that caused or strongly contributed to the extinction of the Clovis people and the megafauna, which are big animals such as the Short-Faced Bear, the Saber-Toothed Tiger and the Giant Sloth?

Volcanic activity may increase. Supervolcanoes belching billions of tons of dust and gas into the atmosphere would cool down the Earth. Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in April 1815 A.D. The following year was the famous "Year of No Summer." After Mt. Pinatubo blew in 1991 A.D., the global temperature dipped almost a degree for a couple of years.

As I mentioned, the Earth is magnetically influenced with the Sun. Changes in the Sun's magnetic field cause changes in the Earth's magnetic field. The wandering of the north pole is worrisome, because there is strong evidence that the poles periodically flip, with north becoming south and south becoming north. All of these changes have effects. In the case of polar flip, we might have terrible earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as the innards of the Earth adjust to the new magnetic orientation.

A weakening of the Earth's magnetic field, as it prepares to flip, also lowers its shield against cosmic bombardment, mainly the solar wind and cosmic rays. Increased cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere generate more cloud cover. This cools the climate. Increased cosmic rays also have subtle but important effects on human health, especially on the brain and the heart. Cosmic rays are not good for those of us with pacemakers. No one knows what effects it may have on our thought processes or our moods. We may get grumpier, stupider and more violent.

Who knows? Maybe no one. The only thing that we know for sure is that we live on the surface of a planet, part of a solar system, which are mind-numbingly complex and, at times, hyperviolent. Drastic climate change is something that we have to prepare for. Dodge left or dodge right, change is coming. Some changes will be gradual; others will be superhumanly dramatic. In order to adapt, we need a loving, mature, resilient political/economic system that can react to these changes.

We do not have a loving, mature, resilient political/economic system. We have fragments of brittle, exploitative political/economic systems. Given the increasing loading of the system due to “overpopulation,” this lack of maturity of our political/economic systems does not bode well for our ability to react to whatever this planet, and this fat old Sun, hurl at us next.

 The Crisis IV – The Babylon System

Those who were and those who would still be masters of us have always been masters of horse. They know how to harness the beast and to direct its energies by spur, whip and bridle. They know how to geld. They understand the value of the blinder.

The mounted man is like a centaur; the king in his chariot is like a god. For the thousands of years that mankind has organized under the Babylon system, our kings and queens have been masters of horse. Even today, the symbol of the elite is the horse. The racing of thoroughbreds, dressage and polo are their pastimes. By dominating the horse, the elites of the Babylon system have learned how to dominate their fellow man.

The Babylon system has held sway over us throughout all of human history. From the age of cuneiform clay tablets to the age of the thumb drive. It has assumed various faces – the facades of the palaces have had various ornamentations and paint jobs – but the foundations and the framework have endured for millennia.

At the top of the system is the warrior King.

Here is Esarhaddon, an Assyrian ruler, celebrating his victory in 671 B.C. over the pharaohs of Egypt. In his left hand, he holds a battle mace and a tether that binds his vanquished enemies. In his right hand, he raises a goblet of wine to his sneering lips.

He is the alpha male. Through violence, fear and a system of patronage, sharing the spoils of war and taxation, he has mastered all the other males. He has led them in war to victory over the other King and his army. This is the essence of the Babylon system.

The Army is the other defining feature of the Babylon system. Whether they love their King or hate their King, they ultimately fear him. They respect his authority over them, whether it is called divine right, discipline, law or justice. The Army is equipped and trained for war. If the soldiers survive the battle for conquest, they have a share of the spoils. If the peasantry rises up in rebellion, if only through avoidance of paying their taxes, the King’s Army will repress the rebellion, often with harsh reprisals meant to terrorize the people and to discourage future rebellions.

Another defining element of the Babylon system is the Priest. He is the keeper of arcane or occult knowledge. He consecrates, anoints and coronates the King. His rituals help to bind the tribe together. His promise of heavenly rewards helps the common people to accept their lot on Earth.

All three of these roles have evolved from primitive times, where they began as tribal chief, hunter and witch doctor. The roles are characteristic of the human animal. We have seen these roles played out, again and again, across all human societies.

After the development of agriculture, we have seen additional roles making up the Babylon system: the farmer, whose labor allows the population growth needed for large armies; the artificer, who invents and makes tools and weapons; and the scribe, who maintains tax accounts and assists in the dissemination of information, originally only in occult or secret channels.

These have been essentially male roles, although some women have fulfilled them, in varying degrees in different societies, even despite the sexism of our most patriarchal societies. Elizabeth I as Queen of England and St. Hildegard of Bingen, a polymath abbess who was never formally made a priest, are examples. The role of the herbalist/witch doctor/shaman, in particular, may have been more of a feminine role in our pre-history. Throughout all of the existence of the Babylon system, however, the roles of King and Army have been overwhelmingly male, since the system is built on violence. We are a dimorphic species: the male is much larger and stronger than the female. This is also true, for example, of the gorilla. Testosterone, the hormone of rage, is also higher in the human male. For these reasons, the roles of King and Army have been characteristically male. In fact, the hormone of rage has fueled and given form to the Babylon system.

It would be a fatal mistake to confuse individual or even subgroup enlightenment for enlightenment of the system. Just because you know better does not mean that the system knows better. You must look past the hypocrisy, past all the high-sounded rhetoric and noble words, and study how the system behaves. Do not pay as much attention to what our so-called leaders say. Pay more attention to what they do.

Truly, the situation is worse than the above paragraph implies. Even using the word, “leaders,” implies that there is someone who is in control of the system. It might be more accurate to say that the system is in control of them. Once the first chief led his hunting party to raid the first peaceful settlement, he set in motion the Babylon system. War has a logic of its own. The system works, or, at least, it has worked so far. The cycle of violence may be a downward, tightening spiral. Those who are enlightened enough to attempt to escape merely become the next victims. The true sons of Babylon will label them weak and decadent. They will invade their territory. They will slaughter and enslave them.

Are you not convinced that you live in Babylon? Have your comforted yourself, as I once did, with a conception of Man as essentially peaceful? That violence is only an aberration?

Here is a test to see whether you live within the Babylon system:

Stop paying your taxes.

A man will come to your door. He will be carrying a gun.

He brings you greetings from Babylon.

 The Crisis V – COVID-19

This morning, 14 April 2021, Eva and I received good news. Our nurse texted us that we will be able to get our COVID-19 vaccinations here in two weeks.

Since March, 2020, my wife and I have lived together, effectively self-quarantined in La Villa Evita, our little beach house on the Pacific coast of the Republic of Panama. During these thirteen months, I have not sat inside a motor vehicle nor been inside a room with another human besides Eva. I have written two and a half books, including this one.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a light onto many of the issues facing the American democratic republic and the cause of freedom worldwide. Many of the issues are the reasons why I felt compelled to write this series of essays. So let's use this crisis to shine a light on these systemic problems.

30,888,765 Americans have contracted COVID. 545,761 Americans have died from COVID. By comparison, Vietnam has had 2,707 COVID cases and 35 deaths. Not 35 deaths a day. 35 deaths total. Vietnam has crushed COVID-19. Sixteen months into the crisis, the USA is still floundering stupidly, sickening and dying by mass numbers and providing the world's biggest reservoir for the virus to survive and to mutate. [Data derived from the Centers for Disease Control (covid.cdc.gov).]

I say that we are poorly led. When I say that, I am talking about things like our response to COVID-19. I am also thinking of piss-soaked San Francisco or demolished Detroit or war-torn Newark, compared to more vibrant cities, such as Singapore, Shanghai or Panamá City. I am thinking about our head-of-the-line privileges for all wars everywhere. I am thinking about our national debt, the debasement of our currency and the lack of care about the societal and economic needs of the vast majority of the citizenry, when those needs conflict with the interests of the ultrarich. COVID-19 has illuminated all of these problems.

Anyone who has examined the business career of Donald J. Trump should not have been surprised by his ineptitude, his wanton sloppiness and his abysmal failure to care about and for the American people. Books will be written about his criminal buffoonery. I'm not going to bother here. Even today, millions of Americans, trapped inside the Red Echo Chamber, believe that he did a great job. Operation Light Speed, the fast-tracking of the vaccines, was successful (or it appears today that it will have been successful), but the failure to develop a national plan, to clearly and honestly lead the many-minded American people and to mobilize national resources to provide personal protective equipment, establish procedures, provide training, manufacture respirators, field clinics, provide housing and sanitary conditions for everyone, including the homeless, and establish an effective testing and tracking system were all tragic failures.

Books will be written. For the purposes of this short essay, however, I am going to focus on one issue.

The N95 mask.

This is what a true leader would have said: “To stop or at least slow down the spread of this disease, we all need to wear masks. The best mask is the N95 mask. Because we are a nation of about 330 million people, we need at least one billion N95 masks a week. Unfortunately, we don't have the capability to manufacture that number of masks. So we're going to have to make do with what we have, even if it's only cloth bandanas. Until we ramp up our production capability, we have to reserve N95 masks for front-line workers such as doctors and nurses. We have some domestic capability to make the masks we need, but since we've outsourced most of our manufacture to Asia, we are dependent on them for literally almost everything, including these masks. So we're going to mobilize as fast as we can to dramatically increase our domestic production capability.”

But this truth-telling would have exposed the big lie of globalism: that it is in everyone's interest, and not just in the interest of the economic elites, to outsource manufacture to the cheapest labor markets.

“We can't make it here anymore” is the literal truth. The USA has lost the capability to make the things that she needs. We are dependent on foreign sources, most especially on China, which is a totalitarian regime of nondoctrinal communists, who believe in “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” under which generals can own factories and become wealthy. The current Chinese system of “capitalism” is something that the Nazis might have recognized as “national socialism.”

What were our top business leaders and politicians thinking when they joined the globalist movement?

I know what they were thinking. I know because my father was a Nixonian Republican who worked his way up from the floor of the Jones & Laughlin steel mill to the presidency of a company of a major international corporation, B.F. Goodrich. I know because he pressed, “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand into my hands and he told me that I had to read it.

And I read it.

You want to know what our business leaders were thinking?

They were thinking, the hell with you.

The hell with you and your unions and your whining and your demands for high wages, safe working conditions, medical care, paid vacations and all that rot. Ayn Rand has shown us the light. We businessmen, we entrepreneurs, are the ones who make the economy work. We are Atlas. We hold up the world. Because of all your whining, laziness and self-serving greed, Atlas is going to shrug. We are going to let the world go to hell, while we billionaires wait out the chaotic interregnum – get this – in a valley in Colorado. (As if the rest of us were so stupid that we couldn't figure out that “Colorado” was code for Switzerland.)

A thoroughly mediocre novel written by a woman who grew up in Russia, a communist country that had no capitalism. She never talked to a coal miner in an Appalachian company town, where miners had to buy their family's food from the company store at inflated prices, going more deeply into debt every day that he worked. She didn't chat up Dale Carnegie, who rose from delivery boy to the world's richest man, looked the other way while Pinkertons busted up the unions, then spent his dotage building libraries and museums. Never interviewed J.D. Rockefeller. Never met Steve Jobs. Died before Elon Musk got pubes.

But, boy, she wrote a whole book telling these self-appointed Masters of the Universe that they were indeed Masters of the Universe, a message that they had no problem believing.

Self-interest is a driving force, but if it's your only driving force, you're on a one-way street to Me-ville. Population, 1 + my family, maybe. Self-interest works, private ownership is a fundamental human right, capitalism works while communism doesn't, but savage capitalism cannot work indefinitely, because savage capitalism is tyranny and tyranny cannot abide.

Savage capitalism is not a theory in America. We have suffered under it. Slavery is the cheapest labor you can find, I suppose. Well, we tried that. We also toiled in nonunion mines, mills and meat-packing plants. All of that has been documented. Blood-soaked testimony has been delivered to the ages. Savage capitalism is not a good idea.

But let me explain why those who think so, think so, in the way that my father explained it to me. He did so with one story. Back in the early 1970s, when B.F. Goodrich and other manufacturers such as Goodyear still made tires in Akron, Ohio, the United Rubber Workers went on strike. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of B.F. Goodrich, my dad's boss, was elected to represent management at the negotiations. After months of a strike, with the factories shuttered and the workers close to going hungry, management had agreed to all of labor's demands except one: they wanted a provision for piece-work, where the worker got a stipend for every tire he built. Management wasn't having it, so, one day, the CEO said the following:

“I'm walking out of here. I'm going downstairs to my limousine. I'm taking my limousine to the airport, where I'll be boarding my corporate jet and flying home. If this union hasn't accepted these terms by the time I land, I'm going to sell this company and get out of the rubber business.”

According to the old man's story, this is what he did. When the CEO landed, he was told that the union had agreed to the negotiated terms. A few years later, after another strike, they got the piece-work provision they wanted, which provided a bonus for every tire the workers made after a quota. Because of peer pressure, though, the rubber workers would make their quota of tires by noon, shower, change into clean clothes and take a nap on their benches until quitting time.

I don't know whether this story is true. If it's only a fable, it's a telling fable, kind of like “Atlas Shrugged.” I know that my father believed it.

I'm from Pittsburgh. My city used to make steel. We made 95 million tons of steel during WWII, which helped us to win that war. We don't make steel in Pittsburgh anymore. We have shuttered all those plants, sold them as scrap or let them stand and rust.

It's a good idea to outsource most of your manufacture to China, until you need something like masks. Or, god forbid, you go to war with China. But that's the ugly truth at the bottom of globalism. That's why, during a year of incessantly chanting “wear a mask,” corporate media never mentioned our ability or inability as a nation to manufacture enough of the N95 masks that we have needed. Neither CNN nor Fox.

That's why our leaders, even Dr. Fauci, were ambiguous in the first weeks about whether we needed masks or not. They knew that we needed them, but the nurses and doctors needed them more, so they told us that we didn't need them.

We did need them. We needed them in February 2020. We have needed them every month since then.

I just went to Amazon. After a year of not being able to order N95 masks, I just ordered 30 at $2.56/each.

Maybe because supply finally caught up with demand, because demand is nowhere near as high as it should be, after a year of disinformation. Millions of Americans are running around, not wearing any masks at all. Partly as a consequence of the generations-old circumstance of not being able to trust our own government to tell us the truth. A lot more than Kennedy died on 22 November 1963.

This past week, the trend is upwards, with tens of thousands of new infections in the past week in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Florida and Texas.

We are poorly led. Don't get me started on the clown-fest riot at the Capital, Trump's putsch-posturing and Nancy Pelosi's weak-ass impeachments. Go away now. Grandpa is going to drink a beer.

 The Crisis VI – The Pivot Point of History

It is 2021 A.D.

Our living generations – we the old, the middle-aged, you the young and all of your babies – have had the incredible luck to be born at the pivot point of history. All of the factors that I have sketched in this series will collide with each other during our lifetimes. How we react will determine the fate of our species. Of our planet. Conceivably, of the success or failure of this entire Universe. In the case that we are alone, how we react – whether, in fact, our species manages to survive – may define all of this realm of existence. Whether or not this entire Universe succeeds or fails.

A pivot point is a place of great power. It gives us incredible leverage. In judo, a child can throw a charging man. The child can do so by pivoting.

By remaining calm and by turning.

If there is a special nobility in choosing the good in a chaotic universe, then how much greater would be the honor of our living generations, here at the pivot point of history, if we choose the good?

Even, perhaps, if we try to choose the good?

If our intent is pure? From the perspective of the higher dimensions, perhaps the emergence of a purity of intent is the highest victory.

How to act is another question. I do not know. But before I tell you what I think, let's hear from wiser heads of mine. Let's hear from Washington, Thoreau, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy and King. Within the context of their far more important messages, I will share with you my own thoughts, for whatever they may be worth.

 President George Washington's Farewell Address, 19 Sep 1796

[Standing in a throng of hundreds of millions of citizens, across the span of two centuries, we hear the voice of the Father of Our Country, clear and solemn but distant and faint, in snatches, carried by the winds of time . . . ]

Friends and Fellow Citizens:

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant . . . I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made . . .

. . . a solicitude for your welfare . . . and the apprehension of danger . . . urge me . . . to offer . . . some sentiments . . . which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people . . .

. . . it is easy to foresee that . . . much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of . . . the immense value of your national union . . . you should . . . watch . . . for its preservation with jealous anxiety . . . indignantly frowning upon . . . every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest . . .

. . . every part of our country . . . must derive from union an exemption from . . . wars . . . which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter . . . they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty . . . your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other . . .

. . . it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western . . . they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection . . .

. . . The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists . . . is sacredly obligatory upon all . . .

All obstructions to the execution of the laws . . . are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community . . .

. . . a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian . . .

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another . . .

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle . . .

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear . . . towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant . . .

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?

. . . nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded . . . just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation . . .

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

. . . If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when . . . we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel . . .

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them . . .

. . . it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another . . . There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation . . .

In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend . . . I . . . flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism . . .

How far in the discharge of my official duties I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated, the public records and other evidences of my conduct must witness to you and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is, that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them . . .

. . . I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

 "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau, 1849

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least,” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe: “That government is best which governs not at all,” and when men are prepared for it that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure . . .

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then . . .

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her, the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor . . .

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

 The Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln, 19 Nov 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Farewell Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 17 Jan 1961

Good evening, my fellow Americans . . .

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen . . .

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration . . .

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its few spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; and that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Now on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it. Thank you and good night.

 President John F. Kennedy's “Peace” Speech

. . . I have . . . chosen this time and this place to discuss . . . the most important topic on earth: world peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament--and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude--as individuals and as a Nation--for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again.

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace -- based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions -- on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace -- no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process -- a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor -- it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it . . .

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage . . .

So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal . . .

 “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.

So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice; now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy, which has engulfed the Negro community, must not lead us to a distrust of all white people. For many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, “When will you be satisfied?”

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No! no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering.

Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama — with its vicious racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification — one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be plain and the crooked places will be made straight, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brother-hood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire; let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York; let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania; let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

 How to Live, What to Do

Matthew 26:52: Then said Jesus to him, “Sheathe your sword. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”

Matthew 7:12: “Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.”

Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat 31a: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the commentary. Go and study it.

Sukhanan-i-Muhammad (Teheran, 1938): Seek for mankind that of which you are desirous for yourself, that you may be a believer.

Taittiriya Upanishad (Shikshavalli, Eleventh Anuvaka): Those acts that you consider good when done to you, do those to others, none else.

Newton's Third Law of Motion: FaB = - FbA, where FaB is the force of object A on object B and FbA is the force of object B on object A: For every force, there is a force of equal and opposite reaction.

 The Wisdom of Crowds, or, What Is To Be Done

This is my fifth attempt to write this essay.

All may be vanity, but even a vanity such as mine does not extend to the delusion that the world cares a nickel's worth about my opinions nor to the hope that any advice that I might offer would have any effect on the tremendous inertia of history.

On the other hand, TESTIMONY did not seem complete – nor, more importantly, honest – in drafts in which I sketched so many of our problems, then powdered off with a cheery, “Good luck with all of that!” The last draft of TESTIMONY included a satirical essay, “If I Were King,” in which I indulged in a fantasy of kingly presidential power and, with the support of a like-minded Congress, ruled with justice and wisdom and fixed a lot of our problems. It was disrespectful and unrealistic.

I recently remembered that intelligence officers, when asked, tell the boss what they think is going to happen next. The following is offered within this context of my professional job description, as well as with this idea: there is a wisdom in crowds.

Individuals have different opinions. Many are ignorant. Most are underinformed guesses. A few miss the mark wildly high or low. When you take the average of all opinions, though, they approach the truth. This has been proven. Fill a jar with jelly beans. Ask a crowd, how many jelly beans are in the jar? Many guesses will be realistic; some high, some low. The average will be near the correct.

This is the best hope for democracy. This form of government may work out yet. We'll never know, though, unless we speak our minds, listen and consider the opinions of others.

War

The United States has fought too many wars. We never would have created his country, if we had not fought and won some of them, but in addition to those wars, we have fought unnecessary wars. We are a nation founded by revolutionaries with a profound distrust of standing armies. We are a people who, with bellicose blood coursing in our veins, have nevertheless yearned for peace in our time. Today we find ourselves in a New Normal of perpetual war.

Often, we have fought with counterproductive savagery. We have not always done a good job of planning for victory, nor, as conquerors, of creating the political and economic conditions that lead to justice, peace and prosperity.

We Americans should think about the following:

• Avoidance. Can we avoid this war? Study the policies of Washington and Jefferson and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister (1895 - 1902). Warfighting presidents and kings are historic, but so also are those leaders who avoid unnecessary combat. Read Lao Tse and Sun Tsu. The best victories are those that are achieved without fighting.

• Entangling treaties. Our founding fathers warned us not to get entangled in political alliances. We cannot fight and win the world's perpetual wars. Today, we have far too many treaty obligations, which guarantee us head-of-the-line privileges for every war fought anywhere. We have pinned upon our chest the badge of World Policeman. I don't think we should disband NATO nor abandon the Korean peninsula to Pyongyang, but I do think we need to overhaul our treaty obligations and the assumption that if there is a war anywhere, Americans should be in the front line, fighting it. If we keep up this incessant warfighting, eventually, the rest of the world will be united in only one opinion: we need to get rid of these trigger-happy Americans. The Stars and Stripes should be the rally flag of freedom, not a battle ensign.

• Declare War. We should fight no more wars without Congress declaring war. If we are pulling triggers anywhere in the world for longer than a long weekend, the United States Congress should live up to its constitutional responsibility to declare war. Our Senators and Congresspersons should tell all the world why they support or oppose this war. They should marry their political futures to their vote for or against war, just as the men and women of the armed forces are going to dedicate their lives and limbs to victory whenever Congress pulls the trigger.

The declaration of the war should be specific. It should name the nation or group that we are going to fight, why we are going to fight them and what we hope to accomplish. Somehow the declaration of war or Congress's procedures should ensure that the war is not perpetual. How, I don't know; I don't think we should put a stop date in a declaration of war, because that will give our enemies a goal for resistance, but neither should we declare unending wars along the lines of the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. Being at war must be an extraordinary circumstance for a republican democracy. Perpetual war usurps too much power to the federal government. Perpetual war is inimical to our liberties.

• Focused violence. Militarily, overwhelming violence is the path to victory. Politically, it can be counterproductive. Our Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of Defense should make clear to the Department the political objectives of the war. Then they should step back and let the warfighters earn their salaries. We should apply force as quickly, as forcefully and as surgically as possible to defeat the enemy and to achieve victory. We should maintain the moral high ground. We should fight in accordance with the laws of war. We should minimize “collateral damage” to the civilian populace and the target nation's infrastructure. We should fight like professional warriors, not only because it is morally and legally correct, but also because it achieves the most effective victory. We, who practice the art of war at the highest level, should not judge ourselves on whether we won the war, but on how well we won it.

• Plan and prepare for victory. The war does not end with combat. The end of the beginning is not the end. We need to have a plan – and we need to have the troops, equipment and training for things such as Military Police battalions – to establish order over the territories that we have conquered. The war is not over when they stop shooting at us. The war is not yet over when we have Gis standing on the street corners handing out chocolates to kids and nylons to girls. It's over when the GIs are home, at their kitchen tables, reading about how that nation in which they fought, suffered and saw their friends draw their rattling last breaths is doing OK. And who's playing this weekend?

• Rehabilitation. Do not leave the Nazis at their desks. On the other hand, do not disband the Iraqi security forces. Between the extremes of these two historic errors, we need to figure out how to rehabilitate the government that we have removed from power. Do not use the lazy excuse, “Well, these are the only people who know how to do the job.” Of course, these people will tell you that they're the only ones who can do the job, because they're the only people who have been doing the job. Find out who else has the education and training. Import what expertise you have to. Do it yourselves for 364 days.

A Standing Army of the Republic

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would scream in horror.

I will always be proud to have served as an officer in the greatest navy that the world has ever seen, and, hopefully, will ever see. I do not understand why the United States of America spends more on our military than the next nine nations combined.

It's a mystery to me. I have a couple of theories.

I doubt it, but maybe we are being manipulated into the role of the World Police so that we can advance the agenda of the globalists, the New World Order types, the guys and gals with subscriptions to Foreign Affairs and invitations to Bilderberg shin-digs. I don't think this is true, because if these globalists were in control and if they had a grand secret strategy, then they would not have allowed the US to grow so dependent on China for manufacture. As awesome as the US Department of Defense is, we are nowhere nearly powerful enough nor does the United States any longer have the industrial infrastructure to run the board and conquer the planet. China and Russia are too powerful. Plus, I think that anyone who came close to winning the Big Boy's Game of Risk would trigger a nuclear holocaust. Coming close to conventional world conquest would end of the world as we know it. Anyone who thinks that China, Russia and America would co-operate to create a One World government probably has never spoken with any Chinese, Russians or Americans. So this theory doesn't explain the current position as we see it.

What I think is more likely is that the Military-Congressional-Industrial complex is a mechanism that is out of control. It works because it works as well as it does, with the rich get richer and most Americans, high and low, feeling safer because we have a powerful military. [Congress votes for all this defense spending. In return, the defense contractors fund campaigns and spread their work around every important congressional district. Eisenhower used the term, “Military-Congressional-Industrial complex” in an early draft of his historic speech. He struck “Congressional” for political reasons; he didn't want to alienate his fellow politicians in Congress.]

Maybe I'm wrong. It is a head-scratcher.

In any case, we cannot afford the defense establishment that we field. If we are to re-introduce the notion of fiscal responsibility to the American economy, we have to scale back. Also, the perpetual maintenance of a titanic federal security force is a danger to the republic.

Washington warned us. Jefferson warned us. Eisenhower warned us. Kennedy warned us. I am warning you. What more do you need? A huge standing army is a danger to a republican democracy.

Now, because I have served, because I have lived and worked among us, I have high confidence in the tradition of the subordination of the US armed forces to civilian authority. That is the kingpost of our military subculture. We all have taken the oath to defend not one person nor one party, but the US constitution. [Speaking precisely, there is no single “military subculture,” nor even a single “Navy subculture.” The culture of Naval Aviation is different from that of Surface Warfare, which is different from that of the Submarine community, which is different from that of the SEALS. And so on. Naval intelligence is different from Army intelligence. Ask any Marine whether the Corps has a culture different from that of the Army. Get an earful.]

But the situation might get tricky.

We have all sworn to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . " If there are enough bullets in the air of Detroit and Portland and the Commander-in-Chief says that “those people over there are communist bastards” and the Secretary of Defense agrees, then things might go south, but fast.

Cultures change. I watched the US Army go from a garrison force, constantly “hoo-ahing” and demonstrating their allegiance to the code of military toughness by working crushing but meaningless office hours to a calm, quiet warfighting army, too keenly aware of the difference between the important and the unimportant, which we in the Navy have always known because the sea teaches us. We change history; history changes us. We American fighting men and women have been at war since 2001. The cultures of the services are different today than they were on 10 Sep 2001.

We all wear uniforms, but our minds are not uniform. We are of many minds.

Heterogeneousness and the tradition of obedience to civilian authority set aside, anti-communist right-wing conservatism is the predominant political strain in our officer classes, if I may judge from everything that I heard and read in 32 years of doing the job. Obeying orders is high in our decision-making matrix. Doing what you are told is first and foremost, especially among teen-agers, junior officers and field grade officers who have sworn to defend the constitution, but who have never read it. We do as we are told. Obedience may not be our honor, but it is our habit. We will defend the Constitution, until the enemy is you. In that state of emergency, you might have problems. It might come down to a coin-flip of four-star leadership.

I would not have indulged in this particular hand-wringing, given our other problems, if it weren't for the warnings of our presidents and the events of the most recent transition of power.

On Monday, 9 November 2020, President Donald J. Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, via Twitter, saying that he had been “terminated.” Esper and Trump had clashed over the issue of using DoD troops to quell civilian riots. In his stead, Trump placed Christopher C. Miller, a man whom Trump may have calculated would be loyal to him personally. Miller served 27 years in Army special forces, retiring in 2014. No report that I can find mentions the rank at which he retired. My guess is that he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. If he had retired a Colonel, he would have let us all know. After a contractor stint, he began to work for the White House as a special assistant to Trump. In two-and-a-half years, from Mar 2018 to Nov 2020, Trump elevated this staff officer to a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) to an Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) to the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF).

I have nothing against Mr. Miller. I have to say, though, that I found this career trajectory clutch-your-crotch alarming, especially given Trump's emphasis on personal loyalty, which raised the hackles of many people, including the self-righteous busy giant, James Comey, whom Trump fired as Director of the FBI on 9 May 2017. Firing the SECDEF via Twitter while you're contesting the results of the presidential election . . . if that doesn't twitch the needle in your Coup gauge, tap the glass.

Whether you call the clown-fest a demonstration, a riot or an insurrection, the phrase “peaceful transition of power” will always have a 6 Jan 2021 asterisk on it.

On 5 Jan 2021, Trump tweeted the following:

The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.

Pressure from Trump, in private and in public, upon Vice President Mike Pence to meddle in the outcome of the presidential election puts the clown-fest attack on the Capitol the next day, 6 Jan 2021, into an hideously sinister context.

Having botched the 2019 impeachment of Trump (only the third impeachment of a US president in history), Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on to botch the 2021 impeachment of Trump. The House of Representatives did not conduct an investigation. It did not interview witnesses. It did not gather evidence. It limited debate to a two-hour speed-round of one-minute sound bites.

During this televised show, on 21 Jan 2021, the Representative who came closest to the mark of the truth of this impeachment process was Chip Roy (R-TX):

The President of the United States deserves universal condemnation for what was clearly, in my opinion, impeachable conduct, pressuring the Vice President to violate his oath to the Constitution to count the electors.

His open and public pressure, courageously rejected by the Vice President, purposefully seeded the false belief among the President's supporters, including those assembled on January 6, that there was a legal path for the President to stay in power. It was foreseeable and reckless to sow such a false belief that could lead to violence and rioting by loyal supporters whipped into a frenzy.

Unfortunately, my Democratic colleagues drafted an article that I believe is flawed and unsupportable, focusing on the legal terms of incitement and insurrection . . .

Madam Speaker, we must end this. Let us condemn that which must be condemned and do so loudly. But let us do it the right way, with deliberation and without disastrous side effects. We must end tearing apart our Nation by social media and sound bites. Let us stop. Let us debate. Let us sit down and lead this Nation together.

-- Chip Roy (R-TX), Congressional record, 13 Jan 2021 bit.ly/3dtbusO

A single article of impeachment was shoddy. To make it work, you would have to prove that the clown-fest was an insurrection. You would have to prove that Trump's public statements were part of a conspiracy fomenting insurrection.

The House should have emphasized the rule of law by following legal procedures. It should have investigated, gathered evidence, taken depositions and debated. If it had done so, then it could have marshaled evidence that Trump had committed impeachable offenses. If Mike Pence, a god-fearing man, had put his hand on a Bible, then he would have sworn the truth about the pressure that Trump had put on him. That alone would have done the trick. Even if the articles regarding insurrection and election-tampering had failed, the Congress could have destroyed Trump on his failure to discharge the duties of his office as chief law enforcement officer of the land, since he failed to call for his supporters to stop and go home while the riot was taking place.

If the Democrats had done their job, they would have gathered enough evidence of Trump's malfeasance that many, if not most, Republicans would have decided that now was the time to scrape the Trump shit off the sole of the party's shoe. A properly run impeachment would have resulted in Trump being barred from federal office for the rest of his life.

Why did Pelosi and her crew do such a poor job?

Incompetence is a theory that cannot be discounted. Anyone who has visited San Francisco or Los Angeles in recent years and who has seen and smelled these great cities degenerated into urine-soaked refugee camps cannot assume that these left-coast liberals aren't incompetent.

I don't know. Here's my leading theory, though: the Democrats didn't destroy Trump's political future because of political calculations. Following the failure of the second impeachment, a Suffolk University-USA Today survey indicated that 46% of Republicans would abandon their party and support a new third party formed by Trump. I don't know whether the Democrats are hoping the Republic party will tear itself in two so that they can win every election until 2050 or whether they are dreading the political instability of this scenario. I don't know what conversations the Democrats had among themselves, nor with the Republican congresspersons, nor what conversations, if any, took place between the White House and Congress, during all this Third World ruckus and strong-man posturing. Let's hope the books that reveal these mysteries won't take twenty years to be written. Grandpa may not be around to read them.

My first-take analysis is that the single-article impeachment was a political show. It was a political, not a constitutional process. Given two failed impeachments of a president by the rival party, the Democrats have turned impeachment into a smear tactic, a piece of political theater. This undermines the authority of the Congress. It also might undermine the respect that future presidents hold for the supremacy of constitutional law.

"A lady [Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia] asked Dr. Franklin, 'Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?'

'A republic,' replied the Doctor. 'If you can keep it.'”

-- 18 Sep 1787, papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1787

Electoral Reform

As the German people learned in 1932, the first time that you elect the Nazis is the last time that your vote will matter. We the American people need to have confidence that our electoral systems are honest. That our votes count.

As a computer scientist, I assure you that we cannot trust electronic digital data. It is fungible. Flipping zeros to ones is what computers do. The voices of contractors, civil servants, volunteers, politicians and pundits may be reassuring, but they may be lying or they may be mistaken. In order to trust our electoral system, we the people need to be able to prove to ourselves that the system is honest. For that, we must have a paper trail.

Every time that we vote, we should get a printed receipt. It should look something like this:

In this example, the receipt has three parts, each part identical, except the second and third parts lack my name: they maintain “ballot secrecy,” which wiser heads than mine have decided is important for people to vote freely. The barcodes are identical. They can be scanned quickly. The data in the barcodes includes the voter number, “12345611234561,” and how I voted – the same information that we can read on the right. The barcode does not include my name.

I keep the top part for my own records. If I want, I can cut off part 3 and share it with any number of helpful folks, perhaps in booths outside the polling place: news organizations, pollsters or election monitors. If the election turns out to be controversial and there's a recount, I can share part 2 with people who are looking into it.

As soon as the polls close and the data are crunched, I can go on-line and verify, yes, voter 12345611234561 voted for Thomas Jefferson.

With a system like this, losers can howl, pundits can rant and conspiracy theorists can mutter. It's all noise. We will be able to verify and statistically prove that the election was honest.

It's our democracy. We need to put in place the systems that we have confidence in and that work for us. Three other suggestions that I would make:

• Get rid of the Electoral College. The college is a vestige of a republican idea, but since each state has different rules for how their electors may vote, the republicanism has been muddled. Instead it's a perverse and frustrating numbers game. The system of “winner-takes-all,” state by state, doesn't empower the states. It has resulted in presidents getting elected who failed to win the most votes. Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. Getting rid of the electoral college would reassure the disillusioned voting public that their votes count.

• Throw out razor-thin victories. Establish a rule that the margin of victory must be over 1% of the votes. If there is less than 1% difference between the top two candidates, hold a second election two weeks later. If necessary, hold a third election two weeks later, winner take all. Yes, this would be a pain in the neck, but there were big differences between Kennedy and Nixon as well as between Gore and Bush. Differences big enough that we should ensure that the result is the decision of a significant majority of voters, not the happenstance of a rainy Tuesday.

• Remove big money from campaigns. If money is speech, big money is a huge megaphone that drowns out the voices of the little guys and gals. We, the US persons who are not corporations. Today both parties are captive to an electoral system that requires billions of dollars. Politicians must spend many hours, day after day, working the phones and eating rubbery food off $1000 plates. The politicians who can stomach this sort of humiliation and drudgery are the ones who can win election, so, through a Darwinian circumstance, it may prove impossible to change the rules. The winners have won because they can stomach it. But I hope that enough of them are still human enough to despise this ugly part of their professional lives. Let's forbid all campaign contributions over $100. Let's make the airways available to the candidates: 40% for you, 40% for them, 20% for those people. Let's rescue our political class from their sordid existence. Let's pull the battery on Big Money's megaphone and let the voices of the people be heard again in America.

The Duopoly – The Republican Party and the Democratic Party

When I was a boy, the Democratic Party represented the blue-collar class: the working man and the working woman and their families. The mainstay of the Democratic Party were the big unions, such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the United Rubber Workers (URW), the United Steel Workers (USW) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The party had a big “L” Liberal ideology, which holds that the march of progress should include richer, more empowered lives for the working classes and for the poor.

The Republic Party represented the white-collar class: the upper-middle class of managers and executives, like my father, as well as the monied oligarchy, like his boss. The party was supported by and represented the interests of big business, including such giants of manufacture as Ford, GM, US Steel, B.F. Goodrich and General Electric as well as Wall Street, the big banks and the financial sector. The brand of the Republic Party was big “C” Conservatism, which holds that the values and structures that made this country great must be defended and must endure.

At least, those were our perceptions. A lot has changed in my lifetime. One of them is that the USA went from the world's biggest creditor nation to one of its biggest debtors. (Today, we rank as the biggest debtor nation the world has ever seen as measured by total debt (According to the IMF, in 2020, the general government net debt was $21.597 trillion, the largest in history. As percentages of our Gross Domestic Products (GDP), the USA may rank 20th or so.) ) Another is that we have outsourced much, although not all, of our manufacture. Many behemoths of industry such as Bethlehem Steel have gone out of business. Many such as Magnavox survived for a while as a brand used by a foreign company. Others such as Whirlpool have evolved into multinational corporations with most of their employees living and working overseas. Given these massive changes in our economy, fiscal posture, industrial infrastructure and social classes, the two dominant political parties have changed.

Today my perception is that both political parties are in the thrall of a globalist monied elite, more dominated by the financial sector than by the manufacturing sector. Money talks, nobody walks. Big money shouts when it needs to, but once money is big enough, a whisper will do. Really big money only has to lift an eyebrow. In the up/down scale of politics (up being rich, down being poor), both parties are acting largely at the behest of those who are up. Really up. Not the top 1%. The top .001%.

In the left/right scale of politics (left being communist, right being fascist, a Moebus-strip of political opinion that meets in the back where the pigs dine with the farmers [ANIMAL FARM, George Orwell, Plume, New York, 1945.]), it seems to me that the Democrats are slewing further left and the Republicans are slewing further right. A lot of this is fashion, branding or political posturing, but not all. Since the blue-collar class has withered, the Democratic Party has increasingly come to represent an aggrieved underclass. The Republic Party, particularly its Trumpian manifestation, has come to represent an aggrieved nativist population: white people, that is, who may or may not have a job, but who are Americans who feel that we are losing America.

When we consider political dynamics in America, we should keep in mind a few other big changes:

• Gerrymandering. The duopoly of Elephant & Donkey have carved up many voting districts in ways that facilitate the re-election of one party or the other. Gerrymandering means that a district that is full of supporters of “their” party is diluted by extending its area to include enough supporters of “our” party. Below are two examples, the 2nd Congressional District of Texas, gerrymandered by elephants and the 3rd Congressional District of Maryland, gerrymandered by donkeys:

Gerrymandering institutionalizes partisan political control. It should be unconstitutional. Although the Supreme Court has ruled against some gerrymandering, it has allowed others to stand. So this underhanded tactic has a considerable influence today on the maintenance of political power by the duopoly.

* Red Echo Chamber vs. Blue Echo Chamber. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) used to have a “Fairness Doctrine,” which required broadcasters to present both sides of an issue, but the Fairness Doctrine was killed in 1987. Since then, broadcasters have become increasingly biased until we have the state of play today, represented by the polar opposites of the right, Fox News, and of the left, CNN/MNBC. These “news” organizations have blended reporting with editorial commentary. They select what information is presented and emphasized and, even more importantly, what information is never mentioned. This blending of reporting with commentary and selective presentation of information has become so extreme that their viewers now inhabit either a red echo chamber or a blue echo chamber. We are no longer live in a world where we share our facts and differ in opinion. We now live in two worlds, in which each has its own facts. We inhabit separate realities. There is a Red America and a Blue America, a Red Earth and a Blue Earth. Furthermore, we are encouraged to bicker with one another, even hate one another, simply because we are “Us” and they are “Them.”

It is still possible to gather a more complete picture of what is going on by reading books. Unfortunately, many Americans do not read that many books. [YouGov/Huffington Post survey, 27-28 Sep 2013, bit.ly/3gSUC0S]

Reading books is declining in popularity. According to a Pew Research poll in 2019, more Americans are reading no books at all and less Americans are reading more than 20 books a year. [Pew Research Center surveys, 8 Jan - 7 Feb 2019, pewrsr.ch/3tAp9E1]

The digital revolution, one would have thought, would have worked against the echo chamber effect, since in the Internet, each of us is now located right next to everyone else. We are all able to talk to each other and to exchange information and opinions. In the late 1990s, we thought that this would have a liberating effect on public enlightenment. Perhaps for some people it has, but a much more powerful influence has emerged, one which not many, if any, of us digerati foresaw, back when the World Wide Web was young. That is the incredible power of the social media platforms to impose GroupThink. People, being tribal, tend to gather in like-minded groups. This tribalism is re-enforced by the simian behavior we witness in on-line interactions. Every digital forum seems overrun with “telephone tough-guys” who live only to insult anyone with a dissident opinion. Any “other,” any “them” is attacked viciously. This on-line enforcement of GroupThink has become even more virulent in recent years, given the rise of the tyranny of Political Correctness. GroupThink is further increased by the tendency of people to “follow” the people whom they agree with and to filter out the opinions of all those annoying bad people, just by clicking, “unsubscribe.” Another new problem that social media has posed is that it empowers agents of influence. Hostile parties and nations can field agents of influence, re-shaping the information space and distorting tens of millions of people's perceptions of what we might still label, “reality.”

We will work through many of these new issues. The questions are, will we work through them fast enough? Will we increase or decrease the freedom of speech?

• The science of campaigning. Another development that will effect the futures of our two parties is the growth of the science of campaigning. Back in the day of electric street cars, campaign managers based their advice to their candidates on what they heard from their cronies, mentors, sponsors, union shop representatives, journalists and ward heelers. In other words, hearsay. Today, campaign managers have an incredible wealth of information available on the voting public: who we are, how much money we have, what we spend it on, what websites we visit, who our friends are, and on and on. The most expert of them, campaign managers of the Karl Rove class, can mine all these data and isolate a single issue, such as gay marriage, that can win their candidate the next election. Electioneering has always had a game-playing aspect, but the emergence of this science has the danger of eliminating sincerity, doctrine and any real plan for change (or for conservation), because campaigning will become a matter of wearing brown suits, not blue suits, and harping on emotional issues, such as whether gay people should be allowed to marry. The death of democracy as a marketplace of ideas and heart-felt belief equates to the failure of the American experiment.

Given these trends, what will happen to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?

The trend of the Democratic Party is toward socialism. Savage capitalism has given capitalism a bad name. The current economic and political systems are not working for too many of the young. As deflated as our optimism was, particularly following the assassinations of 1968, the outlook of us Boomers generally has never sunk to the depths of those now characterizing Gen X and the Millennials. The Democrats in bellwether regions such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Vermont are slewing to the left. The party seems to be embracing identity politics, where aggrieved minorities and women are defined by the historic and present-day injustices inflicted upon them as representatives of a group. Dole programs, such as free health care, free public university education, free water, free cell phones and even free money (Universal Basic Income) are meant to address these injustices, co-incidentally suborning the loyalty of large voting blocs.

The problem with this trend is that it lacks a grounding in fiscal reality. It is delusional. In the words of the economists Walter Becker and Donald Fagen,

I heard it was you

Talkin' 'bout a world

Where all is free

It just couldn't be

And only a fool would say that.

– “Only a Fool Would Say That,” Steely Dan, 1972.

We are a century away from a utopia where robots do the work and we humans live in luxurious retirement. Even a nation awash in petrodollars, such as the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, cannot endure, giving away billions and billions. Money for nothing leads to nothing money. These types of socialist pipe dreams could never have emerged in America, a nation with an intense tradition of hard work, except in the beyond-the-looking-glass wonderland generated by the Federal Reserve System, which has been creating so many trillions of dollars out of thin air that many people, including some of our leaders, believe that such behavior is sustainable. It is not. We are living in a Ponzi scheme. When the dollar has been sufficiently debased, the house of cards must fall.

Even in a vibrant economy, we should not give away things of value, not to anyone who could work for them. It debases their value. For example, if water is free, then what is the motivation to turn off the faucet? To fix that drip? Water is free, so it doesn't matter. Until we have wasted so much water that there is nothing left to drink, water the crops or run our industries.

On the other hand, the party of Lincoln seems to be embracing a nativist, even a bigoted, point of view. Trump's racial slurs, such as tarring illegal Mexican immigrants with rape and describing what used to be called Third World countries as “shit-holes” have been the clearest expressions of this trend, but it pre-dates Trump. When the Republic Party embarked on “the Southern strategy,” it succeeded in displanting the Democratic Party in the south, but it also affiliated itself with a racist outlook not confined in the south, but, in Jim Crow and slavery, with deep southern roots. The party lost some of its soul, just as the Democrats lost some of our soul when we allowed the blue-collar class to be sacrificed on the altar of globalism, without making any more noise about it than a few mewls and squeals.

If these perceptions are correct, then the Republicans, like the Democrats, have chosen to frame everything in identity politics. We have merely chosen for our powerbase a different aggrieved class. One shortfall with this strategy is that it is swimming against the demographic tide. Those of us who are white Americans will increasingly be in the minority.

The real problems with these strategies, however, is that they will not work. They encourage faction. They do no encourage cooperation. They lack plans for solving our problems.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a systemic inertia to the duopoly. Yes, our parties are changing, but are they changing enough and in helpful directions? Not that I can see. My guess is that the duopoly will chug along until we are in a crisis big enough for either one or both of the parties to break into two. Out of this chaos, new versions of the parties will emerge. None of them will be viable, however, unless there are leaders inside the parties today who understand these issues and who stake their political futures on moving their party in helpful directions. Then when things break, they can break toward a new effective beginning.

An alternative and a more hopeful possibility is that strong leadership will emerge from one or both of the parties. They are both big tents, with lots of different heads beneath the canvases. In my lifetime, the Republicans have fielded such divergent characters as Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, McCain, W., Webb, Paul and Trump. The Democrats have fielded a similarly motley crew: JFK, LBJ, RFK, Clinton, Obama, Sanders, AOC and Biden. Villains and heroes of varying stripes. It's possible that as the crises increase in severity, an understanding will spread among the voting public and party leaderships that continuismo, the same-old-same-old, will no longer work. In this scenario, either party is capable of re-inventing itself. There are leaders in both parties today who are pushing in helpful directions. Siempre hay esperanza; always, there is hope.

In the meantime, we the people should do what we can. Turn off the echo chambers. Take a deep breath. Assume good faith. Don't argue with zealots, but accept opportunities to discuss what's going on with someone who disagrees with you, but who is capable of having a normal, adult conversation. Then think about things from their point of view, remembering, whether we win or lose, we'll all be doing it together, except for those of us who bugger off to Switzerland.

While we still can, we should read more books that are trying to publish the truth, especially by authors who are, sadly enough, one of “them.”

Lawyers to the Rescue

In the Constitution, the Founding Fathers devised a federal system with checks and balances. Our government was designed to be self-correcting. If the system is as out of balance as I believe it is, then a new balance may emerge from the effective functioning of the judicial branch.

We are a nation that still believes in the rule of law. Government by law, not by men, is the bedrock of our democratic experiment. Our legal and judicial systems do not work perfectly – they seem to work as well as they do, too often, depending on the quality of the defense lawyers one can afford – but they do work. Bad guys are arrested. They are tried. Fairly. Some of them even go to jail, depending on whether or not they used a gun or a calculator to steal the money.

Since I was a boy, the legal system has not changed that much . . . except that there are a lot more lawyers, a lot more laws and a lot more people in jail. Even so, I view these changes as a difference in degree, not in kind. In the United States of America, it is the law that rules. Not one person, not one group of people, not one nor the other party. The law.

As long as the law is supreme and the Constitution is the capstone of the law, we have a future before us.

In addition to our legislators and our executives, our lawyers and judges are sworn to uphold the law. They have that sacred duty. We will know that they are fulfilling that duty when the politicians start to scream about “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.” Until we hear these squeals of pain, we will have to conclude that the lawyers and judges are just going along for the dark, dark ride. The rejoinder from the bench should be that the legislatures have pumped out so many laws, many of which the legislators not only never wrote, but which they never read, that the judicial branch finds itself in a position where it must enforce the subset of the vast libraries of laws that are demonstrably constitutional.

I have great hopes for our States Attorney Generals. The historic floundering of the federal government is their opportunity to re-assert the rights of the states under the Tenth Amendment, which asserts that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." I have hopes that they will defend the rights of their citizens, despite federal excuses in the name of “national security.” There is no national security, if the Constitution is being trampled and the rule of law disrespected.

I have hopes for our Supreme Court. Some of the recent appointees are not the people I would have picked, but nevertheless, a beautiful thing happens when our justices don those robes. They have a job for life. More than anyone else in the federal system, they are free to act in accordance with their consciences. They are beyond party. In as much as they love the Constitution and they have the bravery to face down criticism – remembering that their decisions are subject only to the judgment of history – they may save us all yet.

I believe that most cops are good guys and gals. Not all, but most. Most of them want to do the right thing. They want to maintain the peace, not to repress an underclass nor to stop people from having their misguided fun. It is they, the cops in the streets, who know the most about what is really going on in this country. They have to confront every problem we have, every day, sometimes – potentially, at all times – at the risk of their lives and limbs. Their testimony is invaluable. We should listen to what the cops are telling us. What laws work and what laws do not work. What problems they should be asked to confront and what problems should be somebody else's responsibility.

The power of the presidential pardon should be used to conduct the purging that is required of our law enforcement, judicial and political systems. Corruption is a stain that spreads. Ever since its inception, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has reported on the damage that drugs and drug-trafficking have inflicted on our nation, never once mentioning the issue of corruption. Prohibition does not work. It empowers and enriches the very worst elements of society, psychopaths like Al Capone and Pablo Escobar. It leads to the corruption of our cops, lawyers, judges, jailers and politicians. Until we start talking about that and doing something about it, the stain of corruption will continue to spread. The only way that we can clean it up is by investigating, prosecuting and offering pardon to those people who are brave enough to recant and to testify to the truth.

Journalists

Young people today who want to do the important work of journalism have a great challenge. Increasingly, all broadcast networks, city papers, national magazines – the so-called “Mainstream Media” – have become ever-more-thoroughly weaponized. No one is telling the kids the whole story. Everyone is encouraging the kids to bicker.

We still have the freedoms of speech and of the press, but we do not practice them. Inside almost every newsroom, there is a large, whirring buzzsaw. Grizzled editors may occasionally warn cub reporters about it, but generally, no one talks about it. Everyone ignores it. Every now and then, an idealistic reporter will stumble into it or even bravely walk into it. The buzzsaw will slice them into two and throw splatters of blood and guts for a dozen yards. The careless journalist will be professionally dead. Someone will clean up the mess, then polish and oil the buzzsaw. Those journalists who continue to work in the newsroom will have learned, “Stay away from the buzzsaw. There are things we report on. There are things we don't.”

If you don't believe me, read "Into The Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press," edited by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, New York, 2004. Today, this book is out of print, but available on Kindle (amzn.to/3emxKUt). If it ceases to be available altogether, you will know that you are working in a coal mine where the canary is dead.

The Internet is lousy with hate speech and misinformation. As the big social media platforms “clean all of that up,” they are also going to establish an information regime as disciplined as that of Mainstream Media. The billionaires who own platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being increasingly pressured to do the job of Joseph Goebbels: decide what is true and what is untrue. Independent content producers are being censored: demonetized, demoted in search rankings, banned altogether, all of their content deleted into oblivion.

Many of our universities, which should be intellectual communities where the exchange of differing opinions is a cherished and strongly defended tradition, have instead become political battlegrounds, where any one of “them” who dares to speak WrongThink must be shouted down, de-platformed, censored, fired or even physically attacked.

With regards to access to information and dissident perspectives, we should live in the freest society that the world has ever seen. We do not. Most people live deeply within a Red Echo Chamber or a Blue Echo Chamber. This has not happened by accident. All information has been weaponized; almost all information forums have been shaped to deliver the weapons.

Freedom of speech is not the end-all and be-all of freedom. The farmer doesn't care what his cows moo about nor how much mooing they do, as long as they feed at the trough, submit their udders to milking and herd into the slaughterhouse. Even if we Americans are allowed to rant all we want, it won't matter, unless we are also free to act and free to make systemic changes in our own society.

Yet freedom of speech is the necessary first freedom in any such liberty. We need to be able to talk to each other, to hear each other and to think about what the others are saying. We must jealously guard our freedom of speech, even, and perhaps especially, when that speech has been smeared with the pitchy brushes of “hate speech,” “terrorism,” “fringe,” “pseudo-science” and “conspiracy theory.” There is a word for allowing only those with whom we agree to speak. It is “censorship.”

What is a journalist to do? I don't know. Most will go along to get along. A few will have the bravery and the integrity to report the truth as they have discovered it, using whatever means of communication are available to them.

In the meantime, wouldn't it be nice to have a national fact-checking center? A collaboration between journalism, government, laboratories, academia and nongovernmental organizations, publicly and privately funded, that has established procedures for checking facts and publishing their analyses? A Snopes.com on steroids?

Let the liars lie. Let the hateful speak, as long as they aren't conspiring to commit felonious violence. We should not blot any other lies and hateful speech from existence. We should include a hyperlink to the truth. The truth, as best we morals may know it. There are many shades of gray. At times, there is a stark contrast between black and white, between what is true and what is not true.

Let freedom ring.

Churches, Mosques and Temples

There is a wisdom in crowds. Some of the most important crowds – perhaps the most important – are those that fill our churches, mosques and temples. As the crises worsen, how our religious communities react may be decisive. Our country has experienced many spiritual awakenings. We are, in fact, a nation under God and the spirit of the Lord has swept over the land many times. As things heat up, it surely will again.

We have to understand what the First Amendment says about religion:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; . . . “

This “separation of Church and State” means that the State stays out of religion. It does not mean that religion stays out of politics. The government cannot declare one religion to be true and the others false. The government cannot stop any of us from practicing whatever religion we want, including the negative religions of atheism, skepticism, agnosticism or indifference. The ancestors of our Founding Fathers fought those bloody wars in Europe. The Founding Fathers were determined that we would not fight them here.

This does not mean that our religious communities cannot organize to cause political change. We have that freedom. If we are to listen to our gods and our prophets, we also have the duty to do so.

As Americans, we might shudder in horror at the notion of the legislation of morality. From the herbalists of Salem to the dope-smokers languishing in jails today, we should have a healthy fear of theocratic overreach.

So what is the appropriate political role for an American spiritual leader?

Ask Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ask him, today. If you cannot hear his voice, ask yourself the following question:

Do you think that if he were alive today and that if he knew that the things that he said and the things that he did would result in his assassination, would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., go into hiding? Or would he pick up his cross?

Then you will have your answer, right there.

Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers

Rally around the family. Honor and respect your parents and grandparents; shelter them as best you can.

Band with your brothers and sisters. Your siblings are the people in this life who are most closely going through all of this together with you.

Fight for your grandchildren and for their children and for their children's children . . .

The natural unit of humanity is not the individual. Any one of us is incomplete.

The natural unit of humanity is the family.

Rally around the family.

Automatic Love

The little girl in the picture above has just been pulled into the water by a 650-pound carnivore. She is looking up at her family who are still on the pier. She is trying to swim to safety. The splash that is about to crest over her head, the splash to her left, has been caused by her grandfather. Within a second-and-a-half of the sea lion snatching his granddaughter – while the other adults are standing around in a state a shock, shouting, “Oh my god!” – while the adult holding the smartphone continues to record – her grandfather, without thinking, has leapt into the water. He will gather his granddaughter into his arms and shove her to safety back up onto the pier.

In that moment, the grandfather was a hero. If you were to ask him what he was thinking in that moment, he would tell you that he wasn’t thinking anything. Time and time again, we have the testimony of such heroes. Many say much the same thing.

On 9/11, two young men were evacuating the North Tower. As they descended the crowded, smokey stairwell, they came upon a paraplegic woman stuck in a wheelchair. They didn’t know her. Without much thought, without much discussion, these two men, Mike Benfante and John Cerqueira, transferred her into a lighter wheelchair and carried her 68 floors down to safety. The North Tower collapsed five minutes after they exited.

If you read the testimony of heroes who have won our nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor, they will often say much the same thing. Often, they do not think about their own personal safety, calculate the odds and decide that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. Often, they react automatically. They perform incredible acts of self-sacrifice and heroism. They save their comrades in arms. God bless our Navy corpsmen, whose sacrifices have won them so many of these awards.

Our brains are hard-wired for saving our fellow humans. When our sensory systems detect a danger to one of our brothers or sisters, it alerts a lower, older region of the brain, by-passing the more recent cerebral cortex, kicking in automatic reactions. When our heroes testify that they decided to help people without much conscious deliberation – whether they knew them or whether they were strangers – they are not being humble. They are giving honest testimony about what happened in their brains.

We are hard-wired to love and to save our fellow humans. There are many sorts of love, many that involve the highest regions of the mind and of the soul, but at the bottom of the human mind is this hard-wired love. This automatic love.

It has been a rough billion and a half years. We have evolved, every flip of the flipper and every step of the foot, pursued by jaws. For millions of years, we were little, hairy monkey-like primates who managed to survive somehow, even though we could not outrun nor outfight a lion, a Short-faced Bear, a pack of jackals nor any one of dozens of other predators. Yet we survived.

One way that we survived is that we banded together. In the moments of crises, individuals committed acts of heroism in defense of their fellow men, women and children. We have saved one another, time and time again.

Yes, aggression is the nature of the beast. We cannot hope to control it unless we have the courage of confront it. Meanwhile, we must remember many other aspects of our characters. Love is all around us. We can see many forms of it every day.

In times of crises, a powerful form of love can emerge. This is automatic love. Since we are all programmed for self-preservation, this selflessness, this generosity, amazes us. We do not know what to call these people, so we call them heroes.

The same mechanism resides in each of us. This wiring is there because it works. Nature has given birth to it, Chaos has given it form and Time has selected it as worthwhile.

We would have not made it this far without it.

Perhaps it will save us yet. It may not, though, I believe, until we do the work that we must do in our own minds and hearts. We must realize that all of us, all seven billion, seven hundred million of us, are our brothers and sisters. This is not something that we say because it sounds virtuous. This is something that we say because we have realized that it is true.

Once we are no longer confused on this issue, the many forms of love that are in our hearts can save us, including this most ancient one, this automatic love.

 Love, Respect and Tolerance

Now I must bid you farewell, O my brothers and sisters. All things go, all things go, and so must I. Please forgive me for imposing my strange thoughts, wise or otherwise, upon you as much as I have, just as a host may forgive a tardily departing guest: he stayed too long because he was enjoying the party. Forgive my self-indulgence, but I did not know how else to share my testimony without including the checksum of my ignorance as well as the highwater mark of my wisdom. As inadequate as this testimony has been, I am content. In all of human history, only this one could have possibly strung these particular words together in this particular order. For whatever it is worth, you hold within your hands the impress of my living mind. This is my testimony.

I have burdened you with my ideas about how to solve our many problems. In bidding you farewell now, sitting here in my bohio, with the north breeze of summer upon my back and my eyes brimming with tears, I realize that the true answer to all our problems was taught to us by such messengers from a higher realm as Jesus of Nazareth and Lao Tse. It is a single solution that we have all too infrequently attempted to put into practice.

All our problems, all the many ills of this world, will go away, once we begin to practice that love of one another that resides in each of our hearts.

Love one another. Treat your fellow man and woman as you would be treated. Let the Golden Rule be the only law of humankind.

This revolution of the spirit will not happen simultaneously across all peoples or all nations. Those of us who lead the way must be prepared to suffer the cruelest, the most unfair of blows. Pray for strength. If forced to fight in defense of your home and your children, beware of the darkness in your own heart. If you do not, you will become your enemy.

Failing love, respect your fellow men and women. Every person alive today has earned the same right as you to stand upon the surface of this unique planet. We are all the survivors of a billion-year-long obstacle course. We have all made it this far. If we can respect one another, we will live to see the death of the Sun.

Failing respect, tolerate the ways of the strange-seeming people with whom you share your neighborhood, your city, your nation and your planet. Tolerate their stupid beliefs, their noisiness, hygiene habits, folkways and manners. You don't have to agree with them, because you were raised right, weren't you? Perhaps they were, too, just differently. Tolerate all that you can, even the seemingly intolerable. Tolerate everything, in fact, except intolerance.

First love, then respect, then tolerance. The lesser of these virtues will allow us to survive one another. The greatest of these, love, will allow us all to thrive.

So let that be the most important lens that you look through, as you try to puzzle out who is doing what in this strange world. Ask yourself, rhetoric aside, are the end results of the actions of this particular person or group evidence of love? Or are they not?

Nations have no friends. Corporations have no soul. The people who direct them do . . . or at least, they should. At the very least, they should act as if they do.

Soul. Spirit. The one quantity in Nature measurable only by its absence.

With this ancient advice, too infrequently tested, I take my leave of you. I wish you farewell. My last thought to share with you is my assurance that I love you as deeply, as intensely, and as purely as I love my beloved grandson, Leonardo King Cool Shunney. Because his life is your life.

I give thanks to God Almighty for the blessing of having glimpsed eternity.

I love you. God bless us all.

Farewell.

-- La Villa Evita, Panamá

October 2019 – April 2021

 End Notes

Recommended Reading & Viewing

“God”

◦         “Just Six Numbers: the Deep Forces that Shape the Universe,” Martin Rees, Basic Books, New York, 2000.

“War”

·       “Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples,” The Right Honorable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, 1955, arranged in one volume by Henry Steele Commager, Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1995.

·       "Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme," Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1988.

·       "History of Warfare," Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993.

·       "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War," Mark Bowden, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1999.

·       "War is a Racket," Smedley D. Butler, Major General, USMC (ret.), Round Table Press, Inc., New York, 1935. Also, audiobook, YouTube, bit.ly/3bzMld0

·       "Eisenhower's Farewell Speech," Gen. Ike Eisenhower, USA (ret.), January 17, 1961, YouTube, bit.ly/2HqHFZb

·       "The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex," Senator John McCain, (R, Arizona), Capt., USN (ret.), Congressional Record Vol. 157, No. 193, Senate, December 15, 2011. bit.ly/2vuBmBc

·       “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," directed by Stanley Kubrick, Colombia Pictures, 1964.

·       “Fail-Safe,” directed by Sidney Lumet, Columbia Pictures, 1964.

·       “Alas, Babylon,” Pat Frank, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1959.

“Our Wars I – The French and Indian War”

•        "King Philip's War: The Most Important American War You've Never Heard Of," YouTube channel, Atun-Shei Films, bit.ly/2ZrKTph.

·       "The War that Made America : a Short History of the French and Indian War," Fred Anderson, Viking, New York, 2005.

·       "The Indian wars of Pennsylvania: An Account of the Indian Events, in Pennsylvania, of the French and Indian War," C. Hale Sipe, 1880. Wennawoods Pub., Lewisburg, Pa, 1995.

·       "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West," Dee Brown, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1970.

·       "The Conquest of New Spain," Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1496-1584), translated by J. M. Cohen, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1963.

·       "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent," Monthly Review Press, New York, 1997.

·       "America Before : the Key to Earth's Lost Civilization," Graham Hancock, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2019.

“Our Wars II – The Revolutionary War”

·       Declaration of Independence, National Archives, bit.ly/2wCYm1x

·       The Constitution of the United States, National Archives, bit.ly/3bsLklY 

·       "John Adams," David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001.

·       "John Adams," (miniseries), directed by Tom Hooper, HBO, 2008.

·       "Common Sense," and "The American Crisis," Thomas Paine, 1776 – 1777, collected in "Thomas Paine: Collected Writings: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason," Library of America, New York, 1995. 

·       "Alexander Hamilton," Ron Chernow, Penguin Press, New York, 2004.

·       "Benjamin Franklin : an American Life," Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003.

·       "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," Benjamin Franklin, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.

·       "Washington : a Life," Ron Chernow, Penguin Press, New York, 2010.

·       "Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power," Jon Meacham, Random House, New York, 2012.

“Our Wars III – The War of 1812”

·       "Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U. S. Navy," Ian W. Toll, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2006.

“Our Wars IV – The Mexican-American War”

·       "The Alamo," directed by John Lee Hancock, Touchstone Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, 2004.

“Our Wars V – The Civil War”

·       "The Civil War" (TV series), directed by Ken Burns, Kenneth Lauren Burns Productions (Florentine Films), 1990.

·       "Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies," John W. Blassingame (editor), LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 1977.

·       "The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War," Michael Shaara, Modern Library, New York, 2004.

·       "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," James McPherson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1988.

·       "Gettysburg," directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, Turner Pictures, Esparza/Katz Productions, TriStar Television, New Line Cinema, 1993.

·       "Lincoln," directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Reliance Entertainment, Participant Media, Amblin Entertainment, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2012.

“Our Wars VII – World War I”

·        "They Shall Not Grow Old," documentary, directed by Peter Jackson, House Productions, 2018.  imdb.to/2T8mNLA

·       “Verdun - Shell Shock,” aWhiteAngel channel, YouTube, clips from "Les Grandes Batailles- Verdun aux Portes de L'enfer" and "La Premiere Guerre Mondiale-Verdun, le Cauchemar" bit.ly/3bW2cCN

·       “The Effects of Shell Shock: WWI Neuroses,” War Archives channel, YouTube, bit.ly/39PugpA

·       "World War 1 Shell Shock Victim Recovery (1910s)," War Archives channel, YouTube, bit.ly/39PugpA

·       "Shell Shock - The Psychological Scars of World War 1," The Great War channel, YouTube, bit.ly/2T1atNe

 “Our Wars VIII – World War II”

·       "The Lords of Creation," Frederick Lewis Allen, Harper & Brothers, New York, London, 1935. amzn.to/2PgZHRV

·       "Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II," Jennet Conant, Thorndike Press, Waterville, Me., 2002. amzn.to/2v6GR9d

·       "Bodyguard of Lies," Anthony Cave Brown, Harper & Row, New York, 1975.

·       "The Second World War: Milestones to Disaster, Alone, The Grand Alliance, Triumph and Tragedy," Sir Winston Churchill, narrated by Christian Rodska, Cassell and Co. Ltd, 1959; the Estate of Winston Churchill, 1990; Audible, Inc., 2014.

·       "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay," Warren Kozak, Regenery Pub., New York, 2009.

·       "Nimitz," E.B. Potter, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1976.

·       "Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography," John Toland, Doubleday, New York, 1976.

·       "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany," William L. Shirer, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1960.

·       "Treblinka," Jean-Francois Steiner, Signet, New York, 1979.

·       "900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad," Harrison E. Salisbury,  Avon, New York, 1977.

·       "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State," ("Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution'," (original title)), directed by Uwe Boll, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2005.

·       "Band of Brothers," HBO/BBC Productions, 2001.

·       "D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II," Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014.

·       "Conspiracy," directed by Frank Pierson, HBO Films, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2001.

·       "Saving Private Ryan," directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Mutual Film Company, 1998.

·       "Schindler's List," directed by Steven Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment, 1993.

“Our Wars IX – The Korean War”

•        "Chosin: Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War," Eric M. Hammel, Vanguard Press, New York, 1981.

“The Assassination of JFK”

·       "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government," David Talbot, Harper, New York, 2015.

·       "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War,"  Stephen Kinzer, Times Books, New York, 2013.

·       "Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II," Robert A. Caro, Knopf, New York, 1990.

·       "Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy," Jim Marrs, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 1989.

·       "The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ," Roger J. Stone, Mike Colapietro, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2013.

·       "Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK," Mark Lane, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2011.

·       "The JFK Assassination Evidence Handbook: Issues, Evidence & Answers," Mike Davis, independently published, 2018.

·       "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America," Russ Baker, Bloomsbury Press, London, 2008.

·       "Rush to Judgment: a Critique of the Warren Commissions' Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald," Mark Lane, Bodley Head, London, 1966.

·       "Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK," John Newman, Skyhorse Publishing, New York2008.

·       "A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy," Lisa Pease, Feral House, Port Townsend, 2018.

·       "CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why US Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK," Patrick Nolan, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2013.

 “Our Wars X – The Vietnam War”

·       "The Pentagon Papers, as Published by The New York Times,” Bantam Books, New York, 1971.

·       "The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam 1945-1975," Michael MacLear, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1981.

·       "Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam," Orrin Deforest, David Chanoff, 1990.

·       "The Phoenix Program," Douglas Valentine, William Morrow & Company, New York, 1990.

·       "When Hell was in Session," Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., (ADM, USN, ret.), with Ed. Brandt, Readers Digest Press, New York, 1976.

·       "We Were Soldiers Once...And Young: La Drang, The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam," Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway, Random House, New York, 1992.

·       "Code of Honor," John A. Dramesi, (COL, USAF, ret.), Norton, New York, 1975

·       Tao te Ching, The Book of Five Rings, the Art of War and On War. Lao Tse, Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi and Carl von Clausewitz.

“The Attack on USS Liberty”

·       "Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas," by Ernest A. Gallo, Ronald G. Kukal and Phillip F. Nelson, Trine Day, Walterville, OR, 2017.

·       "Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship," James M. Ennes Jr., Random House, New York, 1979.

·       "A Report: War Crimes Committed against U.S. Military Personnel, June 8, 1967," USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc., Submitted to the Secretary of the Army, June 8, 2005. bit.ly/2uUmbRF

“Watergate”

·       "All the President's Men," Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1974.

“Our Wars XI – Wars in Nicaragua – The Sandinistas and the Contras”

·       "Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua: June 1978 - July 1979," Susan Meiselas, Pantheon, New York, 1981.

·       "Fire from the Mountain: the Making of a Sandinista," Omar Cabezas, New American Library, New York, 1986.

·       "Days of the Jungle: the Testimony of a Guatemalan Guerrillero, 1972-1976," Mario Payeras, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983.

·       "Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family," Shirley Christian, Viking Press, New York, 1986. Nicaragua Betrayed, Anastasio Somoza

·       "A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs," Theodore Draper, Hill and Wang, New York, 1991.

·       "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, 2007.

·       "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987," Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987.

·       "Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion," Gary Webb, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2014.

·       "Under Fire," directed by Roger Spottiswoode, Orion Pictures, 1983.

“Our Wars XII – War in Panamá - Operation Just Cause”        

·       "America's Prisoner: the Memoirs of Manuel Noriega," Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner, Random House, New York, 1997.

·       "Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affair with Noriega," Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1990.

·       "In the Time of the Tyrants: Panamá, 1968-1990," R. M. Koster, Guillermo Sanchez, W.W. Norton, New York, 1990.

“The Collapse of the Soviet Union”

·       "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley, Praeger, New York, 1963.

·       "Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: an Experiment in Literary Investigation," Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged by Edward E. Erickson, Jr., Harper Perennial, New York, 2007.

·       “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine,” Robert Conquest, Hutchinson, London, 1986.

·       "The Liberators," Viktor Suvorov, H. Hamilton, London, 1981.

“Our Wars XIII – First War in Iraq - Operation Desert Storm”

·       "It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General Norman Schwarzkopf," Norman Schwarzkopf, Bantam Books, New York, 1992.

“Jesus as Cypher”

·       "The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus," Robert W. Funk, HarperOne, San Francisco, 1996.

·       "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant," John Dominic Crossan, HarperCollins, New York, 1992.

·       "Mere Christianity," C. S. Lewis, Harper, San Francisco, 2009.

·       "The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity," Hyam Maccoby, Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1998.

“Meaning in a Meaningless Universe I”

·       "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," Carl Sagan, Random House, New York, 1996.

“The Way”

•        “Tao te Ching,” Lao Tse, translated by Gia-Fu Feng, with photographs by Jane English, Vintage, New York, 2011, amzn.to/3d9QDsp.

 “Islam Is Not a Religion of Peace”

·       "Islam - A Religion of Peace?", Apostate Prophet YouTube channel, 2017. bit.ly/3aBWOUq

“9/11”

•        "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," Richard A. Clarke, Free Press, New York, 2004.

 “Our Wars XIV - Afghanistan”

·       "First In: How Seven CIA Officers Opened the War on Terror in Afghanistan," Gary C. Schroen, Presidio Press, New York, 2005.

“Our Wars XV – The Second War in Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom”

·       "Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Vintage, New York, 2007.

·       "Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War," Evan Wright, Putnam Adult, New York, 2004.

·       "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," Thomas E. Ricks, Penguin Press, London, 2006.

“Our Wars XVI – The War in Syria”

·       "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS," Joby Warrick, Doubleday, New York, 2015.

“The Federal Reserve Bank”

·       “End the Fed,” Ron Paul, Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2009.

·       "The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve," G. Edward Griffin, American Media, Inc., New York, 2010.

·       "The Big Short," directed by Adam McKay, Regency Enterprises, Plan B Entertainment, 2015.

·       "Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve," directed by Jim Bruce, Liberty Street Films, 2013.

·       "Inside Job," directed by Charles Ferguson, narrated by Matt Damon, Sony Pictures Classics, 2010.

“The Crisis I: The Toxicity of Our Technology”

·       "Chernobyl,” (miniseries), written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, HBO, Sky UK, Sister Pictures, The Mighty Mint, Word Games, 2019.

The Crisis II: The Human Population Explosion

·       "The best stats you've ever seen," Hans Rosling, TED YouTube channel, 2007. bit.ly/2yrtodv

“The Crisis V – COVID-19”

·       "Disease and History," Frederick F. Cartwright, Marboro Books, New York, 1991.

·       "The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus," Richard Preston, Anchor Books, New York, 1999.

·       "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, 1987.

“The Wisdom of Crowds, or, What Is To Be Done”

·       "Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau, 1849.

·       "Walden; or, Life in the Woods," Henry David Thoreau, 1854.

·       "Essays: First Series," by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841, especially, "Self-Reliance."

·       "I Have a Dream," speech, Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963. bit.ly/3e27zCw

·       "Building Peace in Our Time," speech, John F. Kennedy, American University, 10 June 1963. bit.ly/32lGF2I

 Licenses and Acknowledgements

 About the Author

Tom Cool is my pen name. Th. C. Cool is my art name. My true name is Thomas Clark Cool.

I am a novelist.

From 2000 to 2012, I worked as a computer systems engineer for The MITRE Corporation in Miami, Florida.

From 1979 to 1999, I served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy. During my naval career, I was stationed in Pensacola, Denver, Norfolk, Ciudad de Panamá, Monterey, Pearl Harbor, Alameda, Washington D.C. and Miami. I made four deployments in aircraft carrier battle groups to the Mediterranean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Gulf, with workups in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

I earned a Master of Science, Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, in 1987. My undergraduate studies were at The Pennsylvania State University, where in 1976 I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with honors in the honors program and a dual major in Literature and Creative Writing. I studied under S. Leonard Rubinstein and John Haag. It is Professor Rubinstein who taught me that we owe each other our testimony.

I am a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My wife, Eva, and I have two children, Raquel and Alex, and one grandson, Leo.

The following are my works to date:

Immolated Novels:

1) SENTINELS, 1970

2) AMBASSADOR of CERES, 1972

Unpublished Novels:

3) THE PHOENIX DREAM, 1983

4) FOREVER TOWARD VICTORY, 1985

5) JUNGLE, PYRAMIDS, WATERFALLS, MUSHROOMS, 1990

Published novels:

6) INFECTRESS, Baen, New York, 1997.

7) SECRET REALMS, Tor, New York, 1998.

8) SOLDIER OF LIGHT (with John de Lancie), Pocket Books, New York, 1999.

On the market:

9) STAR ENVOYS Selection (2017)

10) STAR ENVOYS Rogue Planet (2018)

11) TRANSGENIC (with Dr. Stu Lessin) (2018)

12) TESTIMONY (essays) (2020)

13) STAR ENVOYS Sun Queen (2020)

Works in Progress:

14) THE BIG EMPTY (ca. 2021)

15) THE MAYOR OF ME-VILLE (ca. 2021)

Stories:

* "Universal Emulators," published in Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), July 1997 and anthologized in David Hartwell's Year's Best SF 3, Harper’s Voyager, New York, 1998.

* "Frozen," published in the anthology, "Treachery and Treason," editors Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddler, Roc Books, New York, 2000.

* "Hornet and Butterfly," with Bruce Sterling, F&SF, May/June 2020.

I can be contacted through LinkedIn (bit.ly/2UDnehN) or tomCool@mail.com.

 Download the entire book for free

Download