"Through the broad extent of country over which you have marched by your respect for the rights and property of citizens, you have shown that you were soldiers not only to defend but able and willing to defend and protect."
—General Thomas Jonathan 'Stonewall' Jackson

Bach - Brandenburg Concertos No.3 - i: Allegro Moderato


It's a sign of age (and acquired taste,) when you grow to like classical music more than classic rock. My twenty-something years are reaching their twilight.

"We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies."
—Lt. Col. John Paul Vann

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam is an avid account of the Vietnam War centers on U.S. Army officer Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, whose life story illuminates failures and disillusionment of the United States with its intervention in Indochina. That war escalated incrementally in the decades between the 1950s and the 1970s, under the guise of a police action, and in the absence of a Congressional Declaration of War.

Vann was of humble origins. A smalltown Virginia boy born in the slums of Norfolk, Virginia, and raised in Roanoke, VA. He joined the U.S. Army after reaching hood, and became decorated Korean War veteran, following his heroism at the battle of Inchon. He eventually earned his wings, and flew Boeing B-29 bombers to bases across the Pacific. Following the post-WWII restructuring of the War Department, the U.S. Army Air Corps was spun off as the U.S. Air Force, and Vann faced an option of choosing which service branch he would belong to; but Vann stayed in the Army.

John Paul Vann became an American adviser to the South Vietnamese in the early 1960s. He fought right in the trenches with the South Vietnamese, and slept in their barracks. During the Tet Offensive, he single-handedly piloted a helicopter to repel an attack, and saved American lines from being overrun.

Vann was an ardent critic of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and, as time went by, increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. John Adams had said of the 1776 Revolution: "[It] was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution." That phraseology "hearts and minds" was used by the British during the Malaysian Emergency from 1948 to 1960, as the British employed conciliatory practices to keep the Malayans' trust and reduce a tendency to side with the Chinese communists. John Paul Vann advocate a programme for winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Vann protested that armchair generals and strategists in Washington, D.C., did not have an accurate picture of Vietnam, and they wrongly reduced the struggle to simply one of military might. For Vann, propaganda and lies concealed the failures and harsh realities of American policy in Vietnam, and how it reinforced the bad policies of the free government in South Vietnam. "If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation," remarked Vann, "and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government." Vann was realistic about the corruption that afflicted the Republic of Vietnam, and it undermined the effort to maintain a stable anti-communist political front. He criticized the Strategic Hamlet Program for alienating the peasant populace.

"If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government."
—Lt. Col. John Paul Vann

Vann was privately briefing the American press, when the brass refused to heed his exhortation, and make sensible changes. Vann was a complex figure in his own right: he truly believed that it was possible to win the Vietnamese conflict against the communists.

In particular, Vann was very critical of the U.S. military command under William Westmoreland. Westmoreland succinctly summed up the failure of the U.S. policy in the 1970s, when he declared the objective was to "rack up the body count." It became a futile war of attrition against a guerrilla army that was swelling astronomically in sympathizers by the early 1970s. In the realm of psy-ops, the U.S. government suffered an inability to recognize they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while simultaneously backing a corrupt regime. In the mid-1950s, the northern Vietnamese ruling class—consisting largely of Roman Catholic converts—were compelled to flee to the South, and were assisted by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. This Roman Catholic ruling class constituted the intelligentsia that dominated RVN politics, but they were always viewed with suspicion by the southern populace. Vann argued persuasively that many of the tactics employed by the U.S. and their RVN allies, such as strategic relocation of peasants, further alienated the Vietnamese people. Vann's tough assessment of Washington politicians was realistic and resonated with civilian advisors and low-level military brass on the ground in Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, (who served from 1961 to 1968) was an absolute jackass, and ill-qualified for the job. One only has to read his book In Retrospect to see how supercilious he was, and how endowed he was at making excuses for his own ineptness. The policies of MacNamara and his so called 'Whiz Kids' were the policies Vann so ardently opposed. He compelled a untimely across-the-board adoption of the untested M16 rifle and this was catastrophic when those rifles malfunctioned in combat. Among the absurd rules of engagement: (1) the United States was prohibited from attacking/bombing NVA/VC troops in transit along the main arteries; (2) enemies could not be pursued into surrounding areas, and they knew the borderlands were a safe haven; and (3) Northern Vietnamese anti-aircraft systems could not be bombed until they were known to be fully operational.

By the time of his death in Vietnam in June 1972 in a helicopter crash, Vann had challenged the highest military brass in Washington to reevaluate their Vietnam policy. He had earned the admiration and confidence of journalists whose reporting of the war began a general public inquiry of how and why the conflict was being fought. Had Pentagon policymakers heeded Vann's prescient warnings in the early 1970s, and actually made a concerted effort to implement his policy recommendations could, perhaps history would have boded better for the survival of the RVN. It wouldn't be untenable to say that anti-communist victory would have been impossible. But such policy changes would have required diplomatic strong-arm tactics compelling serious political and social reforms in the backward and repressive Republic of Vietnam (RVN).

The author Niel Sheehan was a UPI correspondent in Southeast Asia during the time of the Vietnam war, and chronicled much of Vann's life into a book posthumous. He isn't immune from criticism of Vann, and the book is not entirely hagiographic, as he points out frequent accusations and evidences of Vann's marital infidelity. Sheehan is the master storyteller, and this is arguably one of the best written biographical accounts of the late Vietnamese conflict because it is so realistic about its achievements and failures.

This book is indispensable to coming to terms with the tragedy of the Vietnam conflict, and understanding it. Hindsight is 20/20.

58,196 Americans gave their lives in Vietnam

"I will be the first to set foot on the field and the last to set foot off the field."
—Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, (ret.), 7th Air Calvary

The Battle of Ia Drang, Vietnam, 1965

The November 2002 issue of Army magazine, in an article entitled, "Beyond the Ia Drang Valley," noted:

In his novel of the Battle of Thermopylae, author Steven Pressfield describes a scene in which Dienekes, a Spartan officer, prepares his men for a battle against a numerically superior army of Persians. Watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, the narrator identifies the essential role of an officer in combat: to prevent those under his command, at all stages of battle-before, during and after-from becoming so overcome by terror or anger that emotion usurps dominion of the mind. "To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand"-that was Dienekes' job. Two and a half millennia later, a modern Spartan displayed similar attributes of self-restraint and self-composure when Lt. Col. Harold G. (Hal) Moore led the men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry into the Ia Drang Valley in the Republic of Vietnam in November 1965. Like Dienekes before him, Moore bequeathed a legacy of raw courage and inspirational leadership in war's darkest crucible. By his own admission, Moore is not a hero, but to his men and to a generation of future officers whom he addressed at the U.S. Military Academy, he is the penultimate battle captain. When actor Mel Gibson and his entourage visited West Point in the spring of 2002 to launch the premier of his movie "We Were Soldiers," the greatest applause was reserved not for Gibson, but for Moore, who quietly slipped away unnoticed during the film's battle scenes. Not surprisingly, in a recent survey conducted following one of his visits, the majority of cadets identified Moore as the most inspirational officer in their cadet experience.

Reflections Upon the Consequences of Ia Drang
In his masterfully-written battle history of the Battle of Ia Drang, When We Were Soliders Once... and Young, one of the opening salvos of the Vietnamese conflict, Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, (ret.) offered an astute reflection upon perceptions animating that war. Hindsight was 20/20, Moore could reflect upon the strategy and politics of the war just like any other military historian.

Moore himself was a tactical commander on the ground at Ia Drang in North Vietnam during 1965. The American tactical victory in Ia Drang signaled a turn in U.S. policy to full escalation of hostilities against the communist forces. Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, in an early and prescient analysis of the course of the war made this observation:

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkreig will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war...

—Moore, Hal, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992,) p. 434.

After Ia Drang, Moore was tasked with debriefing the senior commanders, including Secretary of Defense MacNamara. "During my fifteen minutes I did my best to convey to McNamara and his party a vivid picture of the North Vietnamese soldiers who had faught against us at X:Ray:" Moore wrote, declaring them to be: "well-disciplined, determined to the point of suicidal fanaticism, and boiling down off the mountain in the kind of human-wave attacks not see seen since Korea." MacNamara was too busy thinking of superior kill rations, and how the U.S. took down NVA casualties at a 12:1 ratio. He didn't adequately appreciate their wherewithal to overcome the United States. Moore notes, "MacNamara's silence as I concluded was significant. He now knew that the Vietnam War had just exploded into an open-ended a massive commitment of American men, money, and material to a cause that he was beginning to suspect would be difficult to win" (Moore, p. 436).

Robert MacNamara, the SoD, in concert with General William Westmoreland, made requests to massively increase the number of U.S. fighting battalions. The memo declared:

We believe that, whether or not major new diplomatic initiatives are made, the United States must send a substantial number of additional forces to Vietnam if we are to avoid being defeated there. We recommend: That the U.S. be prepared to increase its deployment of ground troops by the end of 1966, from 34 combat battalions to 74 combat battalions... If the 74 U.S. battalions, together with increases in air squadrons, naval units, air defense, combat support, construction units and miscellaneous logistic support and advisory personnel which we also recommended, were to be deployed it would bring the U.S. personnel in Vietnam to approximately 400,000. The end 1965 strength of 200,000 would increase during 1966 at the rate of approximately 15,000 a month. It should be understood that further deployments (perhaps exceeding an additional 200,000 men) may be needed in 1967. (Moore, pp. 436-437)

Incidentally, my uncle had actually worked in the office of General Westmoreland at the time. During his tour of Vietnam he was lost in the jungle for days, and he also had the ignominious task of emptying the Chinook and Heuy helicopters of wounded and dead American G.I.'s, and then washing the blood out.

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
—John F. Kennedy, 1961

It was one of the bitter ironies of history that the policymakers in Washington had always marched incrementally into full escalation of the war, always afraid to admit they were really diving headlong into a full-scale war. Thinking of the war too much as a public relations matter, they sought to contain it for political reasons, and they tied the hands of the American military leadership in Vietnam in such a manner as to undermine their long-term strategy for victory—and make American G.I.'s more vulnerable. The Vietnamese ARVN and Viet-Cong forces knew this.

As Moore wrote in his book: "We knew for a fact that the three North Vietnamese regiments that we had fought in the Ia Drang had withdrawn into Cambodia. We wanted to follow them in hot pursuit, on the ground and in the air, but could not do so under the rules of engagement. Washington had answered one very important question in the minds of Hanoi's Leaders" (Moore, p. 438). General Kinnard stated:

I was always taught as an officer that in a pursuit situation you continue to pursue until you either kill the enemy or he surrenders. I saw the Ia Drang as a definite pursuit situation and I wanted to keep after them. Not to follow them into Cambodia violated every principle of warfare. I was supported in this by both the military and civilian leaders in Saigon. But the decision was made back there, at the White House, that we would not be permitted to pursue into Cambodia. It became perfectly clear to the North Vietnamese that they then had sanctuary; they could come when they ready to fight and leave when they were ready to quit. (Moore, p. 438)

To add insult to injury, Vietnam was a snake-like country that hugged the coastline of southeast Asia and the South China Sea. While its terrain varied; it was not very wide across from east to west. The communist guerrillas realized they could find a safe haven in neighboring Cambodia and Laos to the west of Vietnam. They used these countries as safe havens for hit-and-run guerrilla operations conducted to destabilize the Republic of Vietnam. And it was no coincidence that many battles were only within a few miles of Vietnam's international border. Kinnard adds, "When General Giap says he learned how to fight Americans and our helicopters at Ia Drang, that's bull--! What he learned was that we were not going to be allowed to chase him across a mythical line in the dirt. From that point forward, he was grinning. He can bring us to battle when he wants, and where he wants, and where's that? Always within a few miles of the border, where his supply lines were the shortest, where the preponderance of forces is his, where he has scouted the terrain intensely and knows it better than we do."

Military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed: "If the enemy is thrown off balance, he must not be given time to recover. Blow after blow must be struck in the same direction: the victor, in other words, must strike with all his strength... by daring to win all, will one really defeat the enemy." And these were tactics that the ARVN/Viet-Cong communists embraced.

American intervention in Vietnam and surrounding nations also lacked constitutional authority, as no Congressional Declaration of War was ever declared. The war was born in sin and illegality; and its strategy was undermined by the lack of clear objectives. Congressman Ron Paul of Texas observed three decades after the Vietnam War ended: "When Congress issued clear declarations of war against Japan and Germany during World War II, the nation was committed and victory was achieved," Paul concluded. "When Congress shirks its duty and avoids declaring war, as with Korea, and Vietnam, the nation is less committed and the goals are less clear. No lives should be lost in Iraq unless Congress expresses the clear will of the American people and votes yes or no on a declaration of war." The United States lacked a Congressional Declaration of War against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the ARVN and Viet-Cong combatants. If perhaps, it wasn't guising its intervention as a police action, and going in with a half-hearted commitment, unclear about its goals and strategy, then just maybe it wouldn't have proven such a catastrophic failure in military history.

Hal Moore's epilogue to his excellent battle history of Ia Drang, read these reflective words: "Finally—even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that had never before lost a war—some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words: 'No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.'" The communists were clear about what they had hoped to achieve, the U.S. as indicative of its oscillating policies never had a clear sense of what it hoped to do through the conflict—only a tenuous commitment to oppose the spread of communism.




The Battle of Ia Drang

"No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it."
—Carl von Clausewitz

Whomsoever I possess,
Finds the world but nothingness;
Gloom descends on him forever
Seeing sunrise, sunset, never;
Though his senses are not wrong,
Darknesses with him throng,
Who—of all that may own—
Never owns himself alone.
Luck, ill luck, become but fancy;
Starving in the midst of plenty,
Be it rapture, be it sorrow,
He postpones it till to-morrow,
Fixed upon futurity,
Can never really come to be.

We've got a blackhawk down, we've got a blackhawk down. super-61 is down

Black Hawk Down (see IMDB) was Director Ridley Scott's masterful cinematic remake of the little known 1993 American Special Forces intervention in Somalia, under the auspices of that corrupt, ineffective organization we affectionately know as the United Nations. On June 5, 1993, 24 Pakistani UN peacekeepers were ambushed and killed in an area of Mogadishu, controlled by a Somali warlord Muhammad Farrah Aidid. On June 6, the United Nations Security Council issued a toothless Resolution 837 calling for the arrest and trial of those responsible for the ambush. The U.S. Government answered the call. Operation Gothic Serpent, was authorized with the purpose of hunting down and capturing the Islamic leader and warlord of Somalia, Aidid. With an economy in shambles, the warlords reigned supreme, using the relief given from international humanitarian relief programs as a spoils system to buy influence and power. The movie-scripted conversation between one of the warlord's henchman and an American officer was particularly foreboding: "Do you think if you get General Aidid," queried Abdullah Hassan, "we will simply put down our weapons and adopt American democracy? That the killing will stop? We know this. Without victory, there will be no peace. There will always be killing, see? This is how things are in our world." Like the book, by Mark Bowden had illustrated, you realize why Mogadishu was nicknamed "the Black Sea" by the American G.I.'s that were dispatched there, as the story unfolds. Those beleaguered outnumbered American soldiers learned how fleet-footed they could be when chased down the streets by Somali mobs welding AK-47s and machetes.

Whether or not it was intended to, or not, (which I doubt it was,) this is a powerful anti-war message against American interventionism abroad. I for one have empathy for the American G.I. and the sacrifices they make, but also would like to see them alive and well in the U.S. And as one soldier said in the film, "Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that -bull- just goes right out the window." Intervention beget more intervention in this sad tale. Americans were trapped and pinned down. Then Blackhawks and more troops were called in for support. Then the Blackhawks were shot down. Then more troops were sent into rescue the rest. 'Leave no man behind,' was an honorable U.S. Army tradition, as well it should be, but I am apt to reflect on the futility of sending so many men into a futile battle in the first place. People can boast about the Army's superior kill ratios, but the 'Mog' as it was nicknamed, is but a microcosm of our government's presently costly, futile war in Iraq which commenced in 2003. America's history of military victories, are often Pyrrhic victories, or those battles won at too great a cost. In the case of Aidid, he was never captured, and there was no strategic victory.

In 1983, after the tragic bombing of the Marine barracks, then President Ronald Reagan rightly condemned it as a "despicable attack," but ultimately came to affirm the futility of American intervention in the Middle East: "Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the Marines' safety that it should have. In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing that we should do was turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there. If there would be some rethinking of policy before our men die, we would be a lot better off. If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position and neutrality, those 241 Marines would be alive today." Analogous thinking could be applied to Mogadishu in 1993 or Baghdad and Basra in 2003.

The most mesmerizing part of the entire film is when the idealist Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (played by Josh Harnett) talks to his fallen comrade on a morgue table: "A friend of mine asked me before I got here, 'Why are y'all going to fight someone else's war. What do y'all think you are heroes?' I didn't know what to say at the time. But, if you ask me again, I'd say No. I'd say there is no way in hell. Nobody asks to be a hero, it just sometimes turns out that way." It was sad. If it doesn't elicit a few tears; it should.

"O peace! how many wars were waged in thy name."
—Alexander Pope

Journalist Mark Bowden writes:

Most of the Rangers saw Super Six One going down.

Chalk Two SAW gunner, Specialist John Waddell, had started to relax, more or less, on the northeast corner. He could hear the pop of gunfire at the other chalk locations around the target block, but after 60-gunner Nelson had cut down that crowd of Somalis things had quieted at their position. Waddell heard Lieutenant DiTomasso say over the radio that they were getting ready to move to the vehicles, which meant the D-boys must be finished in the target house. He'd be back at the hangar with an hour or two of sunlight left, enough time for him to find a sunny spot on top of a Conex and finish that Grisham novel.

Then there was an explosion overhead. Waddell looked up to see a Blackhawk twisting oddly as it flew.

"Hey that bird's going down!" shouted one of the men across the street.
Nelson screamed, "A bird's been hit! A bird's been hit!"

Nelson had seen the whole thing. He had seen the flash of the RPG launcher and had followed the smoke trail of the grenade as it rose up at the tail of the Black Hawk Super Six One, which was directly overhead.

They all heard the thunderclap. The tail boom of the bird cracked in the flash and its rotor stopped spinning with a horrible grinding sound, followed by a coughing chug-chug-chug. The chopper kept moving forward but shuddered and started to spin. First slowly, then picking up speed.
—Bowden, Mark, Blackhawk Down: A Story of Modern War, (New York, NY: Signet, 2002,) p. 90

"Only the dead have been the end of war."
—Plato

My Love, you are strong and will do well in life. I love you and the children deeply. Today and tomorrow, let each day grow and grow. Keep smiling and never give up even when things keep you down. So, in closing my love, tuck my children in bed warmly, tell them I love, and then hug them for me, and give them a kiss goodnight for daddy.
—American Soldier’s Letter to His Wife, Blackhawk Down [credits roll]

Related Reading on the Consequences of Interventionist Foreign Policy:

Denson, John, ed., The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories, (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1999.) (see my book review from April 27, 2005)

Dempsey, Gary, Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters With Nation Building, (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2001.)

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.
—Colossians 4:6

This is memory verse I picked up with regard to conduct of speech; it's an area I want to recommit too. The admonition of the Apostle Paul is certainly more than just shunning cursing; it's also, how we interact with others, how we discuss and present information. I need to be more edifying. I am not sitting on a holier than thou pedestal. I am sinner, and I look to the tender mercies of my Lord Jesus Christ, and His meritous works. "...my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (James 1:19).

"When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, But he who restrains his lips is wise."
—Proverbs 10:19

"He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city."
—Proverbs 16:32

"He who restrains his words has knowledge, And he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding."
—Proverbs 17:27

"Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, For anger resides in the bosom of fools."
—Ecclesiastes 7:9

"At this time Peter stood up in the midst of the brethren (a gathering of about one hundred and twenty persons was there together."
—Acts 1:15

"Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it."
—James 4:11

"Bravo, Ryan Setliff is one of the most erudite writers I have come across on Amazon or anywhere else, including most historical journals."
—Clinton Ervin

Yep, erudition—that's my specialty. Too bad, it rarely pays. Well, it's good to know somebody thinks highly of all of my voluminous research, writing and scholarship. I hope my research might translate into a fellowship or scholarship one day; and that I could be jurist God willing.

South Carolina, the Palmetto State, and the home of great American soldiers and statesman like Francis Marion, Robert Hayne, John Calhoun and Wade Hampton has lead the charge for liberty in 1776 as surely as they did in 1861. Perhaps they can usher in the Ron Paul Revolution. Their state's Republican primary vote is coming up some for the Presidential nomination. Paul's campaign site is running a fund-raising drive for his SC campaign. Help out if you can!

Woo-hoo! We can thank Uncle Sam for letting federal spending skyrocket and go out of control with his trillion-dollar war and his costly new entitlement programs. History shows that socialism advances even faster under a GOP Congress and White House collectively than it does under a divided government. It's seriously not that funny. It plays no small part in the reality, young persons get out of college to find a labor market devoid of any meaningful opportunities.

As of now, the national debt stands at an astronomical:

So each citizen's share of this debt is over $30,262.93 and growing. The naive Vice President Dick Cheney naively says, "Deficits don't matter."

My generation, and even worse my posterity's generation are going to pay for the years and years of reckless runaway spending, in the form of diminished economic opportunity, spiraling inflation, a dying U.S. Dollar, the crushing weight of taxes, and the continual numbing dead-weight of all of government's taxes and regulations. All of this economic stagnation collectively acts to sap the nation of its economic vitality, the potential for a broader, more affluent middle class, and a deeper distribution of private property in this country. History shows that a republican society needs a broad-based middle class, not a radical disparity between rich and poor.

Big Government advocates of the status quo of stagflation Keynesian economics make up excuses, such as "It's just money we owe ourselves," but in reality, this money we just owe ourselves is increasingly owned by foreigners who hold the interest-bearing T-Bills. Moreover, the interest on the national debt, consumes a great and greater share of tax receipts with each passing year.

I got ticked off listening to the hypocrites in Congress grovel after the Enron and Worldcom scandals, because the United States government sure as heck isn't following generally-accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and they are cooking their accounting books too. They conceal their sins, by inflating the Dollar to pay debts, and stealing money from the so called Social Security Trust Fund to cover the real staggering size of the bloated half-trillion-plus annual budget deficits.

"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
—Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson's legacy to Americans was an earnest commitment to republicanism and a recognition of the follies of exorbitant public expenditures, deficits, and debts. He warned about the establishment of a central bank and its susceptibility to manipulation by politicos. Jefferson wrote his friend John Taylor, in 1798 declaring: "I now deny [the Federal Government's] power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender." Following his election in 1800, he took steps to effectuate the retirement of the national debt, something Hamilton created with the hope of making it as a permanent fixture of government. Jefferson succeeded in large part, but his campaign was interrupted by the War of 1812. Jefferson warned his generation of Americans against the folly of having an inflationary currency (which we have today) and favored reliance instead upon precious metals as the common currency.

"The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions. Till then, we must be content to return quoad hoc to the savage state, to recur to barter in the exchange of our property for want of a stable common measure of value, that now in use being less fixed than the beads and wampum of the Indian, and to deliver up our citizens, their property and their labor, passive victims to the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers."
—Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:185

Is College Worth It? - Forbes

Is your degree worth $1 million -- or worthless? - MSN

Is college worth it? That's what I ask myself after the fact. One can feel like that troll Gollum, with the dissociative disorder, from Lord of the Rings in contemplating this question. "No-ooooooooooooooohhhh!!!! College helped buttress my professional credentials." "No-ooooohhhh!! College was an unequivocal waste of time and money." Then comes the rationalization: "Okay, college was a waste of time and money, but had a lot of cute girls in attendance there."

So, I got a four-year bachelor's degree in pre-law, and briefly attended law school pursuing Juris Doctorate. I thought I could get a scholarship and go U.S. Army JAG. All of it was too costly, and left me with an astronomical debt load of student loans. Part of the reason for resolving to finish undergrad was that I tried to go the entrepreneurial route at 18 while studying part-time concurrently.

Initially, I was convinced for a while that I was going to be a young adult prodigy, forgo finishing college and get my Internet company financed in a multi-million dollar venture capital deal, but then the deal fell apart. Some of the Third party content providers folded. Too much money was chasing similar ventures, and the bubble burst in the market. It taught me that success is learned by past failure and overcoming it however.

Also, supposedly studies show that people with college degrees are more apt to be successful than those with just high school diplomas. But I think this is misleading for several reasons. It is granted that most Americans are idiots. They are incapable of rational thought, basic arithmetic, and remedial writing, and yet they still have high school diplomas. But I am thinking about the relevance of college to people that are above average with IQs above 110. So, I think its a post hoc fallacy to say that college degrees are what made people successful when in reality it came from applied intellect and hard work on the job. Most intellect is innate based on genetics, and is merely cultivated and harnessed by contemplation, intellectual exercise and continuous study. Only on rare occasions, does a higher education contribute to someone's success.

My 20 year-old sister who lives in Florida went to Governor's School which is for the academically talented amongst Virginia high school students. She even got an accelerated year of college credits under her belt, but now she has decided not to go to college. Originally, I was trying to talk her into going to community college instead of an expensive four-year school out-of-state during her sophomore year. Now, she doesn't think it is worth it, and frankly, I am apt to think she might be right. Frankly, without some specialized professional degree after college, one is better off finding an entrepreneurial or sales niche after high school.

I have friends that are very intelligent, and some didn't get a 4-year degree, just an associates' degree, and I sense sometimes that they beat themselves up for never going all the way. In fact, unless one is going all the way to be an attorney, medical doctor, or engineer, it might not be much point in going to college longer than two years. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, for example, dropped out of college.

Objection 1: Higher Education is sometimes wasteful. College doesn't prepare young people for real world or cultivate job skills proportionate to the expenditure made. I read in an article once that in the Raleigh-Durham area, the high-tech employers complain that even with their affluent educated labor market, they have Duke, NC State, and UNC grads who come out with essentially useless liberal arts degrees. Their studies did little of nothing to enhance their job skills, and then they go apply to be bankers, brokers, and information technology gurus. Even computer science programs are so antiquated that one has to practically be trained again in certification programs geared to the modern software and computing languages.

Objection 2: Many college professors are complete morons. I also learned in college that just because a person is very educated (with a string of letters behind their name) doesn't mean those ideas are particularly bright or erudite. In fact, some of the most idiotic and immoral ideas are espoused by radical Leftist ideologues that hold doctorate degrees and are professors. These people are so educated, their brains are falling out. While one might be hard pressed to find a full-fledged Marxist in eastern Europe, they are alive and well on American college campuses. In fact, in the late 1980s, Duke University purportedly had more avowed Marxists on campus than any university in the United States. There is a little irony in groveling about the bourgeoisie while you make $80,000-120,000 per annum and driving a $20,000+ car. But hypocrisy is common to the academic class. I even got in an argument with an idiotic professor who was lauding the ideology of Karl Marx. He then tried to distance the Soviet Union from Marx, and passed over Stalinist crimes, claiming Marxism and Soviet ideology are not the same thing. Richard Weaver once posited that ideas have consequences. No matter how many times, one tries to implement the flawed Communist Manifesto, the same tyrannical results will ensue. And outside of class, I argued with one of those brainiac professors from North Carolina giving a lecture on the separation of church and state before a crowd of fifty. I put him in place, because he was just making up things and distorting historical fact. People need to have some gumption to tell people that are allured to dumb ahistorical ideas, and especially totalitarian ideologies, (i.e., fascism, radical Islamism, Marxism, et al.) that they are amoral and their ideology is morally repugnant. And to think you have academic freedom to criticize a professor is a mistake. You will probably have to drop out of a class to avoid reprisal on your academic marks.

Objection 3: College costs too much; and does not have high standards. With thousands upon thousands of dollars in debt, I confronted a reality that most employers really don't care about college degrees, particularly if you're not an attorney or engineer. As a matter of fact, the common perception is that college just prolongs immaturity. Most colleges are perceived as places where young people goto party for four years and not really get challenged that much. The standards are brought down to the lowest-common denominator. And most colleges care more about lining their pockets than teaching.

While it's tough to get into an Ivy League school; those institutions are not what they used to be. They don't really teach anything worthwhile, and they inflate their grades, because they want to keep their status as a ranking institutions, and play off their institution's prestige and goodwill as a center of higher education. Alexandra Robbins, a Yale graduate says it is basically true.

Law School Reminiscenes
An attorney once told me that I should see a law degree for what it is: nothing more than a bureaucratic hoola-hoop to jump through so that the state bar will give me permission to sit for the bar exam. From a constitutional and legal standpoint, one can learn more of the core principles of law in undergrad pre-law studies, (assuming the school is not Left-wing.) More importantly, simply studying books from the Liberty Fund and ISI over the course of five years would be the best philosophical ground for practice of law. In Virginia, it's actually possible to sit cfor the bar without attending law school with a law firm sponsor. When American founding fathers studied law, it wasn't the exorbitant costly affair it is today, even inflation-adjusted. They often just apprenticed under a lawyer, studied Blackstone and Coke for several months, or maybe went a year or two at William and Mary, and they became a lawyer. Also, their credentials were really established in their applied experience through the actual practice of law, not in their education credentials. An expert on both history and law, jurist Kevin Gutzman has some choice words for the way law is taught today:

Legal education today is much different from what it was in John Marshall’s day, or even early in the twentieth century. When Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, John Marshall and Patrick Henry studied law, they did so by reading treatises in what was called the science of law. Common-law study was in its nature historical and theoretical, and familiarity with the history of England was essential to it.

Now, however, American law students are almost universally subjected to the case method. Their texts are collections of judicial opinions, or in a few cases of statutes, with absolutely no historical context…. In short, if the judges make a particular false assertion about the Constitution in numerous cases, students reading those opinions have no way of recognizing that assertion’s falsity. They are provided no tools for analyzing judges’ claims – only with scads of the opinions incorporating those claims.

The Virtue of Autodidacticism
I always hear about the intrinsic value of learning and the value of a balanced liberal arts education. But there are arguably better ways to learn than institutionalized academia. I easily blew $50k on college. If I just expended 1/4th of that building up a more sizable library than I have now: complete with bookshelves, and a broad array of books across the spectrum of disciplines (i.e., history, jurisprudence, philosophy, science, theology, et al.) including multimedia study aids from companies like ISI, the Teaching Company and the Vision Forum, then I would have procured a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom far more valuable than I got from institutionalized higher learning, and at a fraction of the price. Besides, I am an autodidact learner anyway.

The Future in Prospective
Finally, I wrestle with the necessity of procuring funds for higher education for my posterity. Children are swamped with debts coming out of college, and many well-educated adults are not in a financial position to buy a house well into their late thirties as a result. Regardless, of my sentiments, I am still apt to believe I owe my future posterity a shot at becoming an architect, attorney, engineer, medical doctor, or pastor by procuring savings for their college. My father had an IQ of 143 in his prime, graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. There is always a chance I could have a kid brighter than myself, when those recessive genes kick in. A mind is a terrible thing to waste! Those aforementioned professions are nigh on impossible for young adults to reach without parental support and/or a scholarship. There are education savings accounts which enjoy the benefit of tax-deferred compounding, and just a $1,000-2,000 saved every year from the time a child is born until they are able to start college would help them immensely. Maybe, as a kid comes of age, it could be a time to contemplate whether college is right for them or not, and if so: how much education, and the purpose of pursuing it. And if for the sake of argument, they didn't use the money for college, it could be used for vocational certification programs. Moreover, it's only a 10% penalty if it is not used for academic use. They could use any residual savings for a down payment on a house. Just the virtue of saving and compounding itself overcomes that menial tax penalty.

So, I am cutting the ground out from under everything I said about how college is useless? Or just questioning whether college is right for everyone. It's circumstantial. Some of my dad's good friends never finished school, much less a two year degree, and earn over six-figures as entrepreneurs. College doesn't make the man. Rather ingenuity, hard work, determination and a little providential blessing helps the most.

Seriously, at a 10% annualized return which is possible with a good mutual fund; a base contribution of $2,000 per child, plus $1,000 added to that every year until their eighteenth birthday, afterwards, they could easily have a nestegg of $55,719.01 by their eighteenth birthday. The problem is most parents have not the discipline to save or invest, but I think I owe it to posterity.

Struggling for Life: How our Tax Dollars and Twisted Science Target the Unborn, (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, 2006.) $9.00.

Publisher's Description: The most dangerous time in any child's life is his or her first nine months. That's because abortion takes one out of every four children conceived in America, making the route from womb to tomb very short for millions of unborn boys and girls. "Struggling for Life" provides a shocking glimpse into how your tax dollars and twisted biomedical research are targeting the unborn. Written by Dr. Kelly Hollowell, WND contributor and founder of Science Ministries, Inc., this riveting, sometimes personal account details the gushing flow of federal dollars into the coffers of America's leading abortion performer.

It doesn't help that American taxpayers underwrite the nation's leading abortion performer, Planned Parenthood, which took in $265 million in government grants and contracts in 2003-2004 and killed 244,628 unborn children. Now taxpayers are being asked to fund medical research that kills five- to seven-day-old humans in order to harvest their stem cells. We are in an historic struggle to protect life from those who seek to profit from the unborn.

"Struggling for Life" also scrutinizes the inflated claims of those in the scientific community who want taxpayers to pay for research that destroys human embryos. Dr. Hollowell, a Senior Bioethics Strategist at the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, also lays out an innovative four-step strategy to restore legal protection to unborn children.

Commentary: Jefferson once said, "To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." So how much more tyrannical is it to compel a man to subsidize with his taxes something that he believes to be murder? The U.S. Government, a corrupt and unconstitutional trustee that egregiously usurps the authority and powers delegated to it, as we, the people, routinely are forced to subsidize abortions with our federal tax dollars. If we refuse to pay this extortion to subsidize murder: then it's quite possible the government will come arrest you for tax evasion. But naturally, since the President supports a culture of life—which somehow allows for a needless war in Iraq that has resulted in 600,000+ casualties, he can find a little room subsidizing the murder of a quarter-of-million unborn children with our federal tax dollars.

In antiquity, the pagan Canaanites would erect sacrificial temples to slaughter the unborn to appease the deities of Baal and Moloch. A firey-hot hand of a statue was utilized to hold the infant before they were slid into the flames. To modern ears, this is barbaric and heinous, and yet in the United States of America we have tolerated the legal murder of over 50,000,000+ unborn children since the national legalization of abortion by an illicit court ruling without any constitutional authority. Babies are butchered in their mother's womb. Our immoral culture will not accept the consequences of intimacy: namely pregnancy. It wants convenience and immediate gratification to rationalize murder. The judiciary in providing intellectual cover for this immorality invented the genius sophistry that the right to privacy has a concomitant right to murder. The death toll of legalized abortion exceeds the number of casualties in World War II; it exceeds the numbers of Holocaust victims; and it exceeds the number of people who died in Joseph Stalin's forced famines in the Ukraine and Russia in the 1930s. All of it has the full blessing and even financing of our amoral U.S. government. Jefferson once said of slavery, "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." How much more should we tremble at the specter of culture that is so casual towards infanticide that its tax dollars are used to support it?

Uncle Sam turns our tax dollars into blood money under the auspices of Title X. of the Health and Human Services Budget. None of this constitutional and contravenes natural law. It violates the 10th Amendment and the 14th Amendment. To add insult to injury, our sitting President who always is mugging for cameras while talking about the culture of life he supposedly supports, never vetoes this legislation, but instead signs it into law. That's rubber-stamping murder. It's not like he does not know what it is for either.

Blame George W. Bush. Laura Bush says of Roe v. Wade, "No, I don't think it should be overturned." Such is the Bush family commitment to pro-life issues. Her husband lied and told you that he won't use tax dollars to fund abortions in 2004, after he had being using your tax dollars to fund abortions for the first four years of his administration. Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that says, "The buck stops here." The simple of fact of the matter is Bush can veto abortion subsidies, and it would take 2/3rd of the Congress overrule him, and even then the President could be just in executive interposition to arrest the practice because it's not constitutional anyway. This business of subsidizing abortion might have started under Clinton, but for all of George W. Bush's duplicitous hue and cry about how he supports pro-life issues, he does nothing at all to interpose his presidential authority and arrest this heinous evil. The Bush Justice Department never exercised any of its legal muscle pursuing cases against partial-birth abortions when Congress made it illegal. It was a hollow political gesture.

Author Kelly Hollowell has a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology and a J.D. from Regent University School of law. Kelly is president of Science Ministries.

Softcover, 111 pages. Published January 2006

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
—Edmund Burke

"Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting. away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots."
—Allen Tate

Imagine an America where the U.S. Government, particularly the Congress, confined itself to the powers enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. There is no U.S. Department of Commerce, no U.S. Department of Education, no U.S. Department of Energy, no U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, no U.S. Department of Homeland Security, no U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a downsized U.S. Department of Defense and a downsized U.S. Department of Justice.

Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence."
—Paul Simon

Movie Review - Flywheel

Flywheel (Director's Cut) is a small-budget film from the makers of Facing the Giants. Used car salesman Jay Austin (writer/director Alex Kendrick) makes a dishonest living by swindling his customers and teaching his assistant salesmen to do the same. Head over heels in debt, he operates dishonestly to make ends meet--even overcharging a Christian minister. Eventually, amidst the criticisms of his wife and family, he does a reality check. He sees that he cannot even command the respect of his own son, as he overhears his young son's conversation with a friend about his dishonesty. In the backdrop of this moral struggle, Jay and his father restore a classic car, a Triumph.

While the wisdom of Proverbs acknowledges the necessity of profiting from labor, when does overstepping fair business practices for profit become dishonest? This is a dilemma Jay wrestles with. Selling far in excess of the Blue Book market value or misrepresenting deals is sadly common to the car business. (And so is misrepresenting the compensation packages that salespersons receive.) Some businesses push their salespeople to close deals by dishonest negotiating and misrepresentation. This is what Jay does. As Christians, we cannot in good conscious compartmentalize our spiritual life from our professional life.

I tried my hand at sales once... if the criticism I get is "quit being an advocate for the customer" than at least I know I was doing something right. I think if an entrepreneur prides themselves in building a business based on reputation for honesty, quality customer service, and a reasonable profit, than they can succeed. If the recipe for success entails resorting to misrepresentation (in violation of the UCC) and using behaviorist psychological techniques to manipulate and beguile customers, it will hurt the business in the long-run. Your sins will find you out. Many customers are fools enough to be suckered; but wise enough to know they were ripped off after the fact. Dishonest business practices undercuts the ground of repeat businesses. Whether as individuals or businesses, we should seek to establish our reputation by integrity and a sense of fair play. It's not simply a matter of getting away with what you can. We reap what we sow when we don't embrace integrity in our professional lives, and it hurts us in the long-run.

The movie has a strange and ironic turn at the end, which there is no point in spoiling. But overall, this is a Christian film that offers a profound message of redemption.

"I just wanted to finish well."
—Jay Austin

"It is nothing to be a republic, now a mere name without substance or character."
—Julius Caesar

For those who were educated in public schools, and don't recollect much about history, or never studied the Latin classics: let me offer a refresher.

Julius Caesar was an infamous Roman military and political leader and arguably one of the most influential men in antiquity. He was a politician of the populares tradition, in much the same way his modern forebear Napoleon was, he placated the miserable masses with bread and circuses—and demagogic rhetoric. (So, he was sorta like Ted Kennedy, albeit he was not an obese drunkard, and never drowned his secretary in the Rubicon.)

Caesar wasn't born emperor of Rome, however, he usurped the law to claim his high throne. In 50 BC, the Senate ordered Gaius Julius Caesar to return to Rome and disband his army as his appointed term as Proconsul had reached its climax. Moreover, the Senate forbade Caesar to stand for a second consulship in absentia. Caesar's motivations are complicated to analyze, but no doubt he realized he would be marginalized if he entered Rome without the immunity enjoyed by a Consul or the power of his army. Pompey accused Caesar of insubordination and treason. On January 10, 49 BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon (the frontier boundary of Italy) with only one legion and ignited civil war. When Caesar sat on the banks of the Rubicon, deciding whether or not to strike down the beleaguered Roman Republic, he reasoned, "It is nothing to be a republic, now a mere name without substance or character." Upon crossing the Rubicon, Caesar is reported to have quoted the Athenian playwright Menander, saying alea iacta est, "the die is cast". With Caesar's ascent and coup d'état came the death knell of the Republic, and Rome made mesmerizing transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire. The refusal of Julius Caesar to abdicate his office along with his forbidden march into the grand city plunged Rome into a cataclysmic civil war. Rome would keep some of its republican vestiges, forms and persisted as a Republic if only in name. Julius Caesar inaugurated a new age for Rome-the age of Imperial Rome, which was marked by a succession of demagogues and the occasional philosopher-king. Despite the brief peace during the Pax Romana, war became the new order of the day. Nothing excited the passions of the mob that was Rome like war. It appealed to their base instincts, and their sense of pride.

"Crossing the Rubicon" is a popular idiom meaning to go past a point of no return; the river was a Roman boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy. Julius Caesar crossed the river in 49 B.C., which no Roman legion was permitted to do, and quite deliberately as an act of war. Historian Suetonius quoted Caesar as having said, "the die is cast."

When did the United States of America cross her Rubicon?

Hypothesis One - The Civil War. Some southerners have always pointed to the 1860s. The imagery of the movie Gods and Generals encapsulates that view, when Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's character avowed:

In the Roman civil war, Julius Caesar knew he had to march on Rome, which no legion was permitted to do. Marcus Lucanus left us a chronicle of what happened. "How swiftly Caesar had surmounted the mighty alps and in his mind conceived immense upheavals, coming war. When he reached the water of the little Rubicon, clearly to the leader through the murky night appeared a mighty image of his country in distress, grief in her face, her white hair streaming from her tower-crowned head, with tresses torn and shoulders bare, she stood before him and sighing said, "Where further do you march? Where do you take my standards warriors? If lawfully you come, if as citizens, this far only is allowed." Then trembling struck the leader's limbs, his hair grew stiff and weakness checked his progress, holding his feet at the rivers edge. At last he speaks, "Oh Thunderer, surveying Rome's walls from the Tarpeian Rock. Oh Phrygian house gods of Iulus, Clan and Mystery of Quirinus who was carried off to heaven, Oh Jupiter of Latium seated in lofty Alda and Hearths of Vesta, Oh Rome, equal to the highest deity, favor my plans! Not with impious weapons do I pursue you. Here am I, Caesar, conqueror of land and sea, your own soldier, everywhere, now too, if I am permitted. The man who makes me your enemy, it is he who be the guilty one." Then he broke the barriers of war and through the swollen river swiftly took his standards. And Caesar crossed the flood and reached the opposite bank. From Hesperia's Forbidden Fields he took his stand and said, "Here I abandoned peace and desecrated law; fortune it is you I follow. Farewell to treaties. From now on war is our judge!" Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!

During this time, Lincoln had unconstitutionally suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus, punished and imprisoned dissidents, jailed the legislators in Maryland to prevent their secession, and claimed a right that neither the Constitution nor the American founders acknowledged: to coerce the sovereign states. The political climate leading up to the war was sad. America tore herself apart, to placate a political class that benefited by onerous tariffs at confiscatory rates. Lincoln said keep your slaves, but pay your tariffs. The conventional sanitized historiography to give the north moral high ground is rooted in a misrepresentation of historical fact and circumstance. Slavery and segregation were a leaven that sowed discord in the American body politic no doubt; and eradicating those institutions provided the pretext for centralization which trumped the federal polity of our forefathers.

Bibliography:

• North Against South: The American Illiad 1848-1877


• The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and to form one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may make their own of such territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingling with or near them who oppose their movement."
—Abraham Lincoln on the floor of Congress, 13 January 1848, Congressional Globe, Appendix, 1st Session 30th Congress, page 94

Hypothesis Two - Comrade Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Roosevelt Myth is the definitive polemic against the patron saint of modern statist liberals. FDR remains a demigod amongst liberals who gloss over his nostalgia for Stalin and communism, his idolatry of big government, and his homegrown New Deal fascism. They can't bear the bittersweet reality that his policies deepened and prolonged the Depression rather than actually alleviate the economic crisis.

The New Deal legacy was: Price controls that caused shortages! Paying farmers to destroy crops and livestock to raise prices! His corporatist policies were inspired by Mussolini's Italy with New Deal "fair competition" statutes and forcing businesses into cartels under "code authorities" which set prices, production, etc. The list of asinine New Deal policies and meddlesome regulations were endless.

FDR was the original "I feel your pain" guy and the self-styled friend of the common man. Even neoconservatives have an affinity for the old buzzard, but conservatives see him for what he was... a demagogue and a skilled rhetorician that thumbed his nose at constitutionally-limited government and garbled his homespun socialist rhetoric in red, white and blue nationalism. His Republican predecessor Hoover, for all his faults, lamented that Roosevelt took the country "too far into fascism" with his New Deal. If ever Hoover was right on something, it was here! When Mussolini heard of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), he said of FDR, "Behold a dictator!" John T. Flynn notes, "[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to combine."

John T. Flynn offers a masterful polemic against the commie-coddling President that made the world safe for communism. He relegated Eastern Europe, China and over 750 million people to a half-century of communist slavery after his compromises at the Yalta and Tehran conferences. Even Stalin was surprised by his generosity! As Senator Burton K. Wheeler has surmised, "Communism is the greatest threat to this country and Roosevelt helped put it there." And his significant other, Eleanor, as Flynn reveals, made a spectacle by parading around with beatnik communist youth activists while sulking at Republican legislators in the House Office. Eleanor broke all the social stigmatisms of restraint and sobriety that First Ladies should exercise. Flynn spares no punches in his polemic against Roosevelt and company, but is hardly making use of exaggeration and hyperbole. He just tells it like it is. FDR left us with an albatross collectivist welfare-warfare state, a mammoth bureaucracy that has entrenched itself, and onerous confiscatory taxation that approached 90%. The Roosevelts remain a pretentious aristocratic family that professed a concern and identification with the common man to mask their self-aggrandizing and self-serving ways. FDR was a slacker student, a mediocre civil servant, whose big break came when he went from local politics to a federal appointment riding on the family name. The rest of his career was spent espousing class warfare and wallowing in his perverse love affair with state power and Joseph Stalin.

There remain four great commemoratives to FDR's legacy... The first three are candid tell-all books:

• FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell


• How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution by Richard A. Epstein


• The The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II by Thomas Fleming


• and this book by John T. Flynn.

FDR sought to find constitutional cover for his unconstitutional Deal by overthrowing the U.S. Supreme Court, and stacking it with justices favorable to the New Deal to diminish the voices of those who favored judicial restraint. It helped that some justices retired and died immediately afterwards as well. Post-New Deal jurisprudence like that absurd case Wickard v. Filburn turned the Tenth Amendment inside-out and upside down, with its absurd reasoning. At some cosmic level everything effects interstate commerce, so it was vouchsafe for unlimited federal power.

"You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I'm perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths..."
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Hypothesis Three - The U.S. Patriot Act of 2001.

I would be spraying perfume on the lilly to rephrase what I just wrote in my previous post Unpatriotic Acts, and my article on Constitutional Chaos. The gist of the thesis is that Bill of Rights has received its knock-out blow by the post-9/11 police state. 9/11 was a tragedy. But fighting terror doesn't require the delusion that we are up against an evil so great that we must dispense with the rule of law, the Constitution, and our precious liberties in the name of justice. As Ben Franklin purportedly said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

In the past, we exposed ourselves to temporary expedients that trampled due process and civil liberties in the name of expedient justice. But the storm passed, and the calm returned, and normalcy came back to the institutional standards of justice. Now, the Writ of Habeas Corpus is discretionary. Feasibly, you could be singled out by the powers that be, detained indefinitely, and without a trial. Those Right-Wing fans of the surveillance state think it will only be used on Muslims, but don't have the foresight to see that innocent Second Amendment or Pro-Life activists might become targets. It's quite possible under the reign of Hillary Clinton.

The only restraint left in a system of government that eradicates its constitution, checks and balances, is the sense of virtue, honor and restraint among the magistrates and officers who supposedly enforce the law. John Taylor observed, "The more a nation depends for its liberty on the qualities of individuals, the less likely it is to retain it. By expecting publick good from private virtue, we expose ourselves to publick evils from private vices." The founders basically concurred as John Madison wrote in Federalist #51. You cannot depend on human virtue, and historical experience has taught the necessity of auxiliary precautions to sustain free government: accountability, divided power, checks and balances, free elections, and judicial oversight over law enforcement. Our whole system of government was rooted in a mistrust of human nature. As Jefferson proclaimed, "free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

When we abrogate those checks in favor of autonomous discretionary power, we expose ourselves to the evils of human nature, because the only restriction left is the conscious of the individual officers to restrain themselves. Can anyone doubt that in a system that dispenses with meaningful Forth Amendment protections and due process that convictions are not occasionally secured with frame-ups, perjury and entrapment? Or that investigations mysteriously metamorphosize into instigations and out-and-out harassment? We can't have a free constitution when the officers who enforce the law "do that which was right in [their] own eyes."

When did the United States of America cross her Rubicon? That's a moot point. But I cannot help but to reflect studying American constitutional history, that a contemporaneous study reads like the obituary for our constitutional republic. Who can doubt that the Constitution of our forefathers is gone and exists only in name? Forrest McDonald, one of America's most respected constitutional historians closed his Constitutional History of the United States with these words:

The United States of America was born in a revolution against big, meddlesome, arbitrary, and capricious government; and the Constitution's central purpose—whatever its other purpose—was to enshrine the ideals of that revolution in a fundamental law. As the Constitution's two-hundredth anniversary approached, the nation had witnessed the emergence of a government bigger and more meddlesome, arbitrary, and capricious than any ever dreamed of by George III.

McDonald adds, "If that development were not reversed, the United States would have forfeited the legitimate reason for its existence." As Ben Franklin said, we got, "A Republic, if you can keep it!" That was 1788. Now, it's 2008.

Can anyone doubt that America is not treading down the same path of the Romans?

Rome itself fell prey to the very lawlessness that it had exploited in conquering so many other nations. In the latter days of the Roman Empire, the law had little effect. Even the imposition of tyranny in the last years could not stop the collapse of law and order. When the Roman peace was no longer possible, the nation fell. The Dark ages, which spread over Europe for the next thousand years, was the result of the loss of order and balance in the world. No single nation and no empire could offer any transcendent system of authority. Only the Christian church was positioned to give meaning and purpose to the lives of the people.
—Jim Nelson Black, When Nations Die, p. 38

When nations die, and that they do, we see certain recurring patterns:

Among the social symptoms we should recognize are a general increase in lawlessness throughout the culture; the loss of economic discipline and self-restraint; rising bureaucracy, government regulation, and taxes; and a decline in the quality and relevance of education. Among cultural factors, we see a weakening of the foundational principles that contributed to the greatness of the nation, a loss of respect for established religions, and an increase in materialism. Important spiritual indicators include a rise in immorality, the lure of alien gods, and a decline in the value of human life. These two symptoms of cultural dysfunction are unmistakable signs of decay that may be discovered in great societies from antiquity to the present—symptoms that, in sufficient combination, indicate the impending demise of any culture.
—Jim Nelson Black, When Nations Die, p. xviii

"Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."
—George Satayana

1/09 Okay, I updated the blogpage, because all kinds of words were missing and it messed up the coherence and readibility of the article. For some reason, the Internet content filter messes up my blogger's WYSIWYG editor, and filters out innocuous keywords because it's too hyperactive. It filters Bible verses too. I think I fixed it.

Commensurate with original intent, the federal authority knew nothing of an open-ended federal ‘law and order’ power because no such power had been delegated to it. Congress has authority to enact statutes criminalizing only a handful of crimes specifically outlined in the Constitution – in particular counterfeiting, piracy, offenses committed on the high seas, violations of international law, and treason (See Art. I, §8 of the Constitution). Originally, the federal judiciary encountered the common law only incidental to the exercise of its diversity jurisdiction, and essentially there was no federal law of crimes, but rather a general common law of commercial relations. Hamilton reminds us in Federalist #17, that