Hello Fellow Patriots:
Confusion and Division. That’s where we are today as a country. There is so much on our plate, you need to be a rocket scientist to keep up with what’s going on and to weigh its significance to your everyday life. Has it always been this way? I don’t think so. I think we’ve gradually seen an increase in the quantity and velocity of information and issues grow over the last 20 years or so. Is this by design or happenstance? And, has technology played a role in the current quagmire we find ourselves in? Finally, why is this even important to you and me? Let’s start with a partial list of what’s on our plate:
- Covid
- Political leadership issues
- World events including nuclear war
- Economic events like inflation
- What the future looks like for our children and our elderly
Quite a bit in the above sampler that is by no means a complete list. Let’s run down the list, one by one, and put in perspective why these things should matter to all of us.
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Covid
Covid, for all the press its gotten and all the personal and economic hardship it has caused is just the first step in a longer process that is unfortunately just getting started. The United States got a slow start to an epidemic that you would have thought we would have been better prepared for. I am not enamored with much that we and the rest of the world did to try and contain Covid. We failed spectacularly, but not for trying. Should we have just let it run its course or just have tried to protect the elderly? I certainly don’t know why, but between bungled messaging, bad science and nearly destroying our economy and our children’s future; it was not our finest moment.
Yet, at the same time, America understood and acted on the reality that this is/was a world problem and to a greater extent than other nations, we led the world in research, donation of shots, (for better or worse) economic and other aid, not just for our own country but also for altruistic reasons. Kudos to us for trying to do the right thing. No one bats a thousand. I wish we had made better scientific, political, and other decisions, but we are where we are. Lessons (hopefully) learned.
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Political Leadership Issues
We don’t have fistfights in our high chambers like some other nations do and we don’t vote, in lockstep with whoever is leading our nation like say Russia and their Duma or China and their National People’s Congress. That’s a good thing! The secret sauce that our Founding Fathers wrote into our Constitution was tension. We call it debate and the process often looks like gridlock. That’s by design to ensure a certain continuity of thought and stability. Have we ever been as fragmented as we are now? You betcha! In the runup to WWII, our nation’s leaders were very divided on how to react to the gathering war clouds in Europe. In the aftermath of the crash of the stock market in 1929, our leadership was divided on what to do. With people starving in the streets and the wealth of our citizens critically in peril, political divisions raged. In the runup to the Civil War, we were again divided and slow to react until Fort Sumter seemed to decide the issue for both sides. All these instances demonstrated a divided nation until certain events transpired, and in an instant, we coalesced on the right course.
Eventually, America always rallies to whatever challenges we face. Not necessarily so with other nations, as I have witnessed. The system our Founding Fathers put in place all those so many years ago works. However, there have been more recent changes that threaten our legacy of finding solutions and making the frequently hard decisions needed to continue to be exceptional.
Our leadership has begun to stray from our core principles and beliefs as we adopt a multiculturalist view of the world that seeks to change who we are as a nation and as a people. Our core strengths stand in juxtaposition with terrible concepts being espoused and promulgated today. It’s as if someone or something is trying to drain our blood, our essence to make us no better, no worse than the rest of the world. We must resist this idea and fight those that attempt to bring us down using the tools and actions of division, implicit racism, rampant uncontrolled immigration, destruction of the nuclear family, and other insidious actions. Foreign nations and non-state actors hammer us constantly as they seek to control our communications and abet too many of our insincere political leaders.
Clausewitz: War as Politics by Other Means. If you want to understand how we have gotten to where we are, read about Carl Von Clausewitz and his famous quote. https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/clausewitz-war-as-politics-by-other-means In this case the opposite is just as true. We don’t have physical war; we have politics instead of war. People still die, there are winners and losers both economically and physically, but the stillborn fruit of our womb today are these new tools of societal destruction I’ve been talking about. They are just as deadly and dangerous as actual bullets and bombs but without the obvious destruction, which makes them all the more insidious. America is being maneuvered into a position which we will find difficult to extricate ourselves. Yet, like a pendulum swinging in the opposite direction, we will find our footing eventually and overcome our current predicaments and prevail once again. You must have faith in the good, the right, and in God. You must also accept that evil exists and must be confronted. You can’t hide from evil!
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World Events and Nuclear War
There have been no world conflagrations for 77 years. The world has not seen the kind of carnage that existed in two major world wars for a long time. Was it because of MAD, an acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction that our nuclear doctrine is based upon? Or, was it something else? We don’t seem to focus anymore on how relatively peaceful our American world has been for so long. I have not forgotten about Korea, Viet Nam or even the Gulf Wars and assorted other conflicts. They just don’t rise to the level of death that we have realized only three other times in our history.
Our government does a lot of things poorly. One thing they got right is the balance that was struck with world stability. Crazy as it might sound and to the horror of many, nuclear weapons have kept an uneasy peace in the world and have restrained would-be tyrants from starting up new World Wars. That balance is not absolute, however. I am reading a book right now…How the World Ends by Ron Rosenbaum, a tie-dyed pacifist, which I am not. He unveils a starkly scary history of close calls and near misses that wind up with the conclusion that someday there will be a miscalculation that starts a chain of events leading to an unprecedented world nuclear war, whereas, he states, “the survivors will envy the dead.” Really dark stuff. His book was written in 2011. I do agree that we need better control of our strategic deterrence than we do today. It can’t be one-sided though.
One of a series of possible flashpoints he mentions in his book is a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and even Sunnis against Shia. He even mentions Putin and his calculation that limited nuclear war is not only possible, it is also likely and winnable. The key takeaway and this is the scary one, is that inevitably, even limited nuclear exchanges will suck in the rest of the world in an all-out nuclear exchange. The corollary to this is that the other side believes their threats of nuclear war will enable them to do their worst without a response in kind. No easy answers here.
Ukraine is exactly the kind of flashpoint that can get out of control. Wargaming by our government and various think tanks have demonstrated the danger of people like Putin miscalculating and attempting a bridge too far where anything can happen. The danger of Ukraine is that it emboldens an all too sane individual like Putin who thinks he is some kind of modern-day Napoleon, except he isn’t. What happens when he goes too far and his territorial, economic and political aspirations are met with someone who vigorously disagrees? The world has seen before what happens when you don’t confront evil early. Putin is a rational egomaniac that believes Russia will lead a new world order. Where have we heard that before? What is different today is that Putin can destroy the world and his form of dictatorship is absolute. Nothing constrains him. That is the essential reason that we can’t let him have his way. He wants it all. Want some inside poker on Mr. Putin? Listen to this quote:
“…At a reception in 2015, I had a chance to ask Putin about his planning for the occupation of Crimea. “I was even surprised at how well it went!” he told me with a smile. The West must make sure he does not find it so easy this time…” As reported by Daniel Treisman in a CNN article on the 24th of February 2020.
Where this goes, I can’t quite predict. But I know that we will inevitably have to confront Putin and we will. The strategy we develop needs exceptional leadership that we don’t have today. For now, we will have to play for time. I’ll stay close on this issue. The stakes are simply just too high.
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Economic Events like Inflation
Depending on who you speak to on the causes of inflation, you’ll likely receive different answers. There is only one real truth though. Inflation is caused when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. A juiced economy was created by efforts to fight the effects of Covid. The majority of those stimulus dollars were appropriated and are now being distributed by the Biden administration. There are plenty of conversations about inflation being a direct consequence of this kind of spending. To make a fine point, it was expected, at least temporarily by statements made by the Biden administration. They were wrong then and are even more wrong somehow believing that Build Back Better would somehow stem inflation. Look for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates about 2% this year as a starting point. Inflation will hit the middle class more than any other sector of our people. Inflation is never good; it is punitive and disruptive and likened to a thief of your wealth. Inflation is always a choice rooted in poor economic planning.
What can we do, besides trying to cool off an economy that is not really as “hot” as claimed except by hiking interest rates and risking a recession? The most important thing we can and should do is to return to the energy independence we willingly gave away just 13 short months ago. Decisions made by the Biden administration have led to hundreds of wells and hundreds of drilling rigs have been idled by government fiat. This has directly led to both higher prices at the pump and for home heating, oil and ironically is forcing us to buy foreign oil including Russian crude right now. This is insane and is a nod to the power of the climate change lobby that would rather buy foreign oil from our enemies instead of producing it ourselves.
On the first day of the next revolution, these crazies will be tracked down and taken out, and shot for the harm they did to the American people. Russia gets 40% of its national income from oil. Europe gets more than 35% of its energy from Russia. There is a noose around the neck of a significant percentage of free people in our hemisphere. We have to realize that what is happening in Ukraine today is to a significant degree the result of decisions poorly thought out by our leadership. Mistakes, in my opinion, have certainly risen to the level of incompetence.
Inflation and energy are two sides of the same coin. Our current inability to understand that protecting the American dollar is the key to our continuing power and wealth. Spasmodic actions and loud rhetoric will not fix our energy or inflation problems. I do not know how events will work out under the current administration. Americans must wake up that their economic and ultimately their personal freedom is being bargained away in a quest to be something of dubious value. Our survival today depends on reasonably priced energy and spending within our means. Our internal discipline will be watched by the world more closely than any platitudes we espouse. Step one for all of us personally is to understand the economic issues and push for sane and accountable leadership. Elect people who understand the very basic issues at play here and don’t complicate it with feel-good issues that are specious at their core. Spend less and control our sources of energy. It’s that simple. We’ll whip ourselves back into economic shape pretty fast if we take off the restraints and full-speed forward on these priorities.
But What if We Don’t Change the Current Arc?
After you view this video, just for a moment, please pause and reflect. Put yourself in this video. Imagine if this was your city, your hometown, your very street. What would your personal resistance be? would you be like this man, standing against rapidly moving tanks with nothing but his bare hands, or would you just go hide, conditioned by a generation of passivity into believing nothing more than happy thoughts while your basic freedoms and worldview occupy only the smallest part of your consciousness? Would you through up your hands and trust that the cavalry is coming to the rescue to restore your perfect world?
The reality is that this is a dangerous world and America has been on the decline for a long time. How we got here is now only tangentially important at this moment. What we do about it now, how we wake up and become engaged is everything.
Start today, by becoming what my good friend calls an “Engaged Citizen.” That’s a term used derisively by government officials for a citizen who won’t accept what he/she is told at face value, and who asks questions with an expectation of truthful answers from those that ostensibly work for us.
The world is neither benevolent nor evil. The world is much more akin to the weather. All weather happens as a result of localized heating of the earth by the Sun. This creates pressure differentials which in turn creates wind moving from areas of higher pressure to lower pressure. This is how the political world works as well. Putin sitting in for a metrological high pressure depending on other nations to be low pressure, or a better word, compliant and in fear of him. The United States has become feeble to a degree I could have never imagined. We do things against our self-interest like putting things like climate change, our economy, and feel-good social experiments above the reality that is our world. Putin and Xi Jinping laugh at us.
Friends, there is no safety through believing in unsupported and child-like happy thoughts. That’s where too many Americans are today. There is no Shangri-La for a reason…it just doesn’t exist. The threats we face today are very consequential. They can neither be wished away nor will go away by closing our eyes to what’s going on. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us.
I’d love to hear from you on your thoughts and particularly what, if anything, we can do personally to keep our great nation relevant and safe in a world that lurks with real Monsters.
God Bless America.
Allan J. Feifer
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