Is the Choice Between the “Deal” or War, Period?

 

The working agreement between the P5+1, and primarily President Obama, with the Iranians will in this discussion be referred to as the “Deal” for simplicity’s sake. This Deal has been panned by conservatives and anti-terror specialists as being dangerous and potentially deadly accords. It has been predicted that Iran will easily become a major economic power the equivalent of Saudi Arabia with the infusion of one-hundred-fifty-billion dollars and its resurgence into the oil market even at todays lowered prices, a situation caused by Saudi Arabia pumping oil at near peak levels intending to damage the economies of the Iranians and hurting Russia as well in the interim. The pain caused the Iranians will be offset by the cash infusion. The one thing we can be thankful for the warning but feel accursed by the aimed for results was the announcement after the signing of the Deal by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that his intentions are to utilize the cash infusion to resupply and rearm his terror proxies to levels believed impossible until a few days ago with the announcement of the Deal crafter by the Iranian demands and the quickness with which Secretary of State Kerry (to be referred to as ‘SKerry’ through the remainder of the article) revealed to be at the orders of President Obama, folded his hand and capitulated to every command and refusal to accept any limitations or requirements upon Iran thus in the final weeks of negotiations surrendering virtually every gain pressed forth through great efforts by the rest of the P5+1 from Iran. There was a glimmer of hope against hope that the Deal might crumble at the last minute due to the honor and integrity shown earlier in the negotiations when the initial framework was decided before the initial six-month pushback of the deadline for producing an agreement when the French Foreign Minister vetoed the framework only to be pressed by President Obama and his minions with a small cosmetic change in the phrasing of a minor item was made as the reason for the French veto though most believed the problems were more systemic than that one minor, insignificant item which was altered.

 

Back to the question at hand; is the Choice Between the “Deal” or War? One item which has to be brought into the consideration is some of the terms as far as items to be provided to Iran by the United States or other members of the P5+1 or any other entities. We have heard that the United States will be providing additional cyber protection with a mentioned direction of protecting the entirety of the Iranian nuclear research, development and particularly their enrichment program from interference, especially from Israeli cyber capabilities above and beyond other cyber assaults. There has been mention that President Obama through his lackey SKerry promised the Iranians that they could expect United States to provide air security both from the ground in Iraq as well as from the naval taskforce including, if necessary, from the aircraft deployed from the carrier in the Arabian Gulf. This guarantee appears to include, as some reports have stated, shooting down Israeli fighters should the situation demand such, and the expressed targeting of Israeli forces was exactly as heard. How much further to the other side the Administration will stray from the normative distance it has shown former allies making them into potentially targets of United States military assets is far beyond anything expected by any number of Americans who voted for President Obama, particularly my Jewish friends.

 

What does this paint for the future for Israel? Israel can feel a little less alone in her neighborhood as Egypt and Saudi Arabia along with their allies along the gulf coast are all in the same sinking boat right now. Unfortunately this situation will not aid Israel immensely. Where Saudi Arabia and Egypt might be cooperating, Israel should not expect any overt or announced cooperation from her new friends or even any thanks should Israel take actions which prevent Iranian production of nuclear weapons. Should the United States have actually sent orders to their military to intercept any attack on Iran, that could make any attack on Iran extremely problematic. By now Israel will hopefully have figured out that informing the United States of their intents is not tactically the brightest move available. This causes more problems than many might realize as there are numerous Israelis both within the IDF and within the government who believe it is their specific responsibility to announce every move to the corresponding department within the American government. This would require that care be taken on who might be trusted with any information and orders which were given to implement actions against the Iranian nuclear sites. Any such attempt to neutralize the Iranian nuclear sites had best be discussed with trustworthy advisors alone and should be tested as one of a number of potential interventions when being discussed with people having knowledge of the Iranian government and their expected and especially unexpected reactions and in plane plans made to address any resultant actions by Iran and her many allies and proxies. Further, Israeli intelligence should be on alert to find out the plans by any other actors as Iran has promised a reign of terror upon Israel should any attack be taken on their nuclear programs or any other resources within Iran.

 

The brilliance displayed by President Obama and his advisors which has been displayed through such exercises and actual events as Benghazi which was determined to be a response to a YouTube Video with about five thousand views before it was referenced by the Administration. There was the success of President Obama’s brilliant collapsing of al-Qaeda and how “stable governments” were taking form and President Obama gave as the prime example Yemen which burst into civil war overthrowing the “stable government” and forced to flee the Capital and head to the next largest city where two or three days later they were forced to flee again and have barely been heard from since. But we have heard from Iran and their arming of the Houthis and we have heard from Saudi Arabia which is supporting any entity which stands against the Iranian proxies, the Houthis. It is almost as if the Iranians are seeking anywhere and everywhere to make President Obama look the fool, but he and Secretary SKerry are too busy strutting their stuff purporting the great Deal they made and how it will prevent any need for a war to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. The Deal puts that the probability for setting the date for an Iranian nuclear weapon to be about a decade from now, give or take two, three or four years assuming that Iran gets caught in the web of intrigue and becomes entangled in all the minutia placed there to prevent an Iran desperate to please the West and the United States and Israel in particular but is absolutely useless against an Iran that intends to bull rush straight through any supposed restrictions in the Deal.

 

When asked what would happen if Iran simply took the one-hundred-fifty-billion dollars which are being released and used the improved centrifuge plans provided and open some undeclared enrichment laboratories in order to build nuclear weapons, warheads to be exact, with intent to make their warheads clandestinely and quickly; the administration replied with stunned disbelief stuttered slowly, but the Deal does not permit such actions and how dare you cast doubts about the Deal as it is a good deal fashioned for a good people to obey its restrictions and Iran had promised to abide by its restrictions. There appears to be a mental disconnect between President Obama and Secretary SKerry making them incapable of addressing any potential shortcomings of their deal and how it may prove completely impossible at restraining any government which practices subterfuge and dishonesty as stark principles reminiscent of the Germans after the Munich Agreement of 1938 which inevitably led to war within two years as Germany had since then annexed Austria, absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia, and proceeded to make the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreement with Russia by which the two powers invaded hapless Poland from opposite ends and met in the middle thus starting World War II.

 

Iran will not need to make any additional agreements as they have sufficient agreements in place to provide them with control of a large crescent starting at the Indian Ocean and cutting a swath of land passing through the Middle East passing through Iran, southern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and ending in the Mediterranean Sea. Currently Syria is in remission but the cash spigot is about to come wide open and as promised by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his friends will be rearmed and strengthened and will soon have all the necessary weapons and assistance to take the offensive. Add to this the promises from President Obama to provide a wall of protection both in the virtual domain and in the realm of the real where he promises have been made to prevent any and all assaults mounted, in particular, by Israel or any of her new-found allies. Of course by now the farthest reaching terms of the Deal have reached all those who have been waiting anxious to begin to understand what threats may be coming their way and if so, how long do they have to prepare. For Saudi Arabia, they know already that they have zero time as the fighting is on their southern and northern borders with the Yemeni Houthis fighting the Sunnis on their southern border and Iraqi Shia forces tangling with the Islamic State and Iranian backed and augmented Iraqi units facing off. Where most of the fighting has been between Shia and Sunni forces Iran has been known to finance Sunni groups as long as they did not bring any shame upon Iran, something amazingly enough accomplished by Hamas as Iran has cut their relations with Hamas, a blessing we would rather just accept and be thankful for small favors. Many of the groups and states supported by Iran is done simply to further the spread of the ideology and dogma of Shiite Islam and to bring as many misguided Islamic Sunni souls into the embracing arms of Shiite Islam and there is the we have the struggle of the ages. But in addition to this struggle there are the other tactical struggles. Iran desires to amass to themselves the rich oil fields of southern and central Iraq, the Saudi oil fields as well as the oil fields of the Gulf States including any offshore drilling. Additionally Iran believed that the time has arrived that the Shiite form of Islam becomes the dominant form supplanting Sunni through conversion by way of persuasion initially and by force if that becomes necessary. The Iranians also know the importance in geography and in particular of choke points. In that desire Iran definitely has desires to take control of both sides of the Straits of Hormuz, they seek ownership of Oman and the United Arab Emirates and for control of Bab el Mandeb Straits which is fueling much of their desire to have the Houthis control Yemen and be holding to Iran for their victories.

 

Meanwhile, the problem facing Israel as well as much of the Sunni Islamic world, though few would be capable of doing much about Iranian hegemony, is the prevention of permitting Iran to attain nuclear weapons and in particular what is referred to as weaponized delivery systems, a long way of saying miniaturized warheads. The reason for this is two-fold; the first being the obvious in that a rocket is limited in range by three factors, the first is the amount of fuel it can hold which is pretty much set by its initial design, second is the efficiency of the rocket motor, which consists of the combustion chamber, the valves, the atomizer, and some complex combinations in sizes and diameters which is called rocket science for a reason, and finally the weight of the warhead. This is where miniaturizing brings home the benefits as the weight of the warhead is by far the easiest part of a rocket or missile that the user can address. If we have a warhead that weights one-kilogram and a rocket which can hold one-kilogram then that is the limit you can arm said rocket with. But if you can miniaturize the warhead with a superior design which brings its weight down to three-hundred grams then you can place three warheads on that rocket and because that still allows for one-hundred additional grams that are not going to be used then the range of the rocket or missile just increased by almost ten percent, not that would be something as your miniaturization had tripled the capacity of the device’s damage capacity but also increased the range of the weapons package. This is where Iran will need to develop its technology as, just because you can produce a nuclear device does not necessarily mean one can deliver the weapon efficiently and here size and weight are the twin kings, especially if the intent is to place warheads atop missiles or within aircraft.

 

The best example of the difference is that the initial bombs the United States dropped on Japan to end World War II were huge in size by today’s standards. Their names were Little Boy (a uranium gun-type atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945) and Fat Man (a plutonium implosion-type bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9) both of which took a Silverplate Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft. The Enola Gay, named after its Pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets’ mother carried Little Boy to its target of Hiroshima while, like William Dawes who was the other rider with Paul Revere and who actually made the warnings as Revere was captured by the British but Dawes proved too difficult to rhyme so it became “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and not William Dawes, while the B-29 named Bockscar piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney whose plane was not named after either of his parents, carried Fat Man over Nagasaki. Each of these atomic bombs had yields under twenty-thousand-kilograms of TNT (Trinitrotoluene C6H2(NO2)3CH3) which is considered quite low compared with modern thermonuclear devices which carry yields measured in Mega-tons of TNT yet are so much smaller than the original devices that if a B-29 were to carry modern weapons they could carry numerous bombs each with multiple warheads though the plane would likely not be capable of flying high enough and fast enough to clear the area before detonation though with a lighter load it might have a prayer’s chance.

 

Silverplate B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, named after its Pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets’ mother, carried Little Boy to its target of Hiroshima

 

Silverplate B-29 Superfortress Bockscar of the 509th Composite Group which dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney

 

Silverplate B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay with Pilot Col Paul Tibbets, named after its Pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets’ mother carried Little Boy to its target of Hiroshima historic picture og man and his aircraft

 

 

So, even should Iran detonate a trial nuclear bomb, depending on its yield, it could be determined what variety of device was detonated and what the intended use might be. A really low yield but leaving a high gamma radiation signature would signal they had developed an EMP bomb used to knock out electronic grids and sensitive electronics rendering entire weapons systems useless, especially those dependent on radar from ground based systems such as any aircraft batteries and other targeting systems as well as most command and control as they are dependent on computers and communications networks, both systems very vulnerable to an EMP attack. Such a device could spell a real disaster for most nations but mostly the United States or Europe as both societies are heavily dependent on communications for their economy, computers for their investment and banking systems, their electrical grids for refrigeration and for hospital equipment, and for supplying virtually everything as the majority of vehicles currently depend on computers to run and both Television and radio would be knocked out which in itself and without computers the United States would go completely bonkers within hours.

 

The real problem is that with the United States presumably defending the nuclear sites from military attacks and from cyber-attacks as well as providing advanced radar systems from aboard naval vessels matched to anti-missile interceptors of various types including jamming and interception, and have aircraft capable of taking out any aircraft identified as foreign and entering Iranian air-space with unclear intent or bombs hanging under the wings defiantly stating its mission, all of which means that for the foreseeable future the United States has joined the other side even against the people of the United States who knowingly continue to reside in the Great Satan and have yet to mend their ways and become good Dhimmis living the life in burka-land. The real question is how Iran can be derailed from attaining nuclear weapons, and not just any nuclear weapons, but miniaturized, weaponized, multiple-warhead, thermonuclear devices and the stealth cruise missiles capable of three-thousand-five-hundred mile routing at under fifty meters altitude and what would be the consequences to the nation which so took one for the team, and not necessarily an appreciative team? Because of the United States provided protection, should this continue to be the United States policy by the next President elected in November 2016 and taking office in mid-January 2017 no matter what their reasoning, such would mean that Iran might have such capabilities before they become easily targeted. This situation would present the parts of the world under threat, oddly enough including the United States, in so desperate a position that they might see tempting a shootout with the United States over Iran as giving them better hopes of survival than waiting for another President as by then protecting Iran would have become cemented policy that only the most assured and confident of Presidents would go against meaning there would be no end in sight. Boy, that sure is a SKerry Deal President Obama has there.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

 

When Our Traditions All Fall and Fail Us

 

Shared traditions and agreement on common goals are the glue which holds societies together. Without these familiar items as the glue there is no need to fear threats from without as the society eventually will tear itself apart from the inside. You want a current example of such a society all one need do is look to the Middle East and pick a nation which is crumbling and intertwined in a destructive civil conflict and you have your example. Syria is all too obvious as Bashir al-Assad had a view of his Alawite minority should be defended by the Druze militias acting as his personal army and all the aid he needed from Iran in arms and even soldiers as things began to go wrong. Bashir al-Assad’s father held the nation together with the glue of fear of his wrath while the son is nowhere near the fearsome leader imbuing strength and competence like his father and before one knew it he was challenged and failed. When an iron fist and the fear of it visiting your little corner of the world is all your nation has holding it together, then you better be ready to use it and use it without mercy or else you are doomed. Such nations are destined to fail from the outset as sooner or later one falls victim to the el-Duce syndrome where the people revolt against your leadership as soon as your power comes into question even if it was your alliance with one megalomaniac that collapses and the next thing you know you are strung up in the town square for a week or so. When the Soviet Union began its surprisingly rapid crumbling from the inside, a friend asked if this was real and if it was, what would be the sign to look for that would signal it was irreversible. As for if it was real, let us say I was as in shock as the next person. As for the sign signaling this truly was the end, that was the easy part so that is what I tackled using that to hedge my answer on belief. I simply told him that I would believe this was the end when Nicolae Ceaușescu fell in Rumania, and sure enough he was the last of the leaders to fall and he fell almost as hard as the European Axis leaders at the end of World War II. The other modern day examples of such failures are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq where the three main societies within have each gone their own way whether by choice, the Kurds in the north, by default, the Shia who hold the power of the governance now, and those who lost outright, the Sunni who are now caught between two enslavers, the Shia government of Iraq and the murderous hordes that are ISIS and they have nowhere to turn as neither the Kurds nor the Shia have any love left for them as they were seen as the cruel oppressors who benefitted from Saddam Hussein’s rule and are now collecting the payment for his sins. Libya is the final example where without a strong leader or the perception of such the entire society reverted back to tribal divisions and will remain each tribe to themselves against the other tribes forming and breaking alliances as it fits them without any possibility of reinstituting a central government which has reach more than twelve blocks in any direction from central Tripoli. There are even those who blame the collapse of the Roman Empire on their failure to incorporate Roman culture, rules and societal structures on those they had conquered at the fringes of their empire which eventually led to the downfall which is a concept with a share of its validity.

 

If such failure of the Roman Empire came from the fraying at its edges of the application of a singular set of societal norms, then we are today witnessing the death throes of the United States as their common heritage and societal norms are currently under assault in the courts where laws are being fortified in defiance of the traditional culture ripping things apart in such a manner as to make the separate, even disparate, parts of the society unglued from each other which may lead to the collapse of that society. The latest and possibly second most destructive tear just was handed down by the Supreme Court with their universal acceptance of same-sex marriage as the law of the land. The real culprit which will eventually topple the United States and potentially all of Western society is multiculturalism which stands that one must honor all others and their customs and no universal set of shared standards can be allowed to stand unassailable by the many and varied lesser cultures within the society. There was a time not that long ago where gun ownership was near universal in the United States and now in most of the major cities gun ownership is not only shunned but illegal which has led to rampant crime as now the criminals do not need a firearm to make them equal to any victim they choose as all they need is two other fellow miscreants to forcibly take anybody’s money by force of numbers, though there are those who prefer not sharing who simply use a weapon, not even necessarily a gun. Then there are those cultures which are forced into remission and made to hide their identity or to regress into enclaves where their numbers provide protection. The day is coming and coming rapidly to the United States shores and is awash over Europe which is pushing the Jews out of society despite the Jews having mostly adopted what was sold to them as the societal norms. The Jews have been consistently seen to be on the leading edge of every trend which came along and was considered enlightened. They were among those marching for civil rights for blacks in the fifties and sixties and have remained supporters of equality of the races through to the current times. They have been at the forefront of the march for gay acceptance and even same-sex marriage. Now that the Jews are the ones being shunned from the college campuses, and trust that which enthralls the masses in the colleges today will be the mainstays of the society ten to twenty years hence; there are already signs that there is sufficient an undercurrent in American subcultures which already hold anti-Semitic feelings which are now slowly emerging from what many would claim were the same centers from which Jew hatreds grew in Europe in the rise of the Nazis. One of the things people seem to forget was the rise of the Nazis had two epicenters and the college campuses were just as important if not more so than the reemergence amongst the rest of the areas blamed for this resurgence of Jew hatred as the ideological leaders more often came from the ivory halls of academia which was also one of the first places that the Jews were banned, from either attending or teaching in the universities. How much longer before such purges strike Western nations’ colleges and universities. It already happens on many campuses for a period every year during the heights of Israel Apartheid Week or during pro-Palestinian celebrations which have started to resemble the pogroms of Russia and the Inquisitions and other cleansings in Europe where the Jews were singled out for exclusion from the society often simply by their being expelled with only the possessions they had packed in a suitcase or two readied ahead of the pitchforks and angry mobs wielding them and other times by simply removing them permanently often burning them at the stake and other methods the crown would demand during their frenzied assault on the other, the Jew.

 

When that befalls western culture once again it will have started in the exact same place but with a slightly different target, the unfitness of the unborn. The undertaking has traditionally been referred to as Eugenics Movement. The idea of eugenics reaches back at least as far as Plato who called for the formation of a guardian race of selective breeding of those who were of superior mind and body, the mating of the cream of humanity to produce a master race. Sound familiar? Francis Galton, the half-cousin Charles Darwin, had taken his relative’s work on evolution and the survival of the fittest and applied it to be used within the human populations to breed the perfect human being and for the removal of those who were inferior. He coined the word Eugenics and eventually it became a course of study in the universities leading to a movement started around a core of its most ardent and adamant proponents and the rest is history. What is less well known is that the forefront of the Eugenics movement formed in the United States and its acceptance was so universal that it was from the United States that the most strident proponents of eugenics emerged. Such names at the front in founding the eugenics movement in their day and up to today are the poet Carl Sandburg, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the mother of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, the Perfect Human Society and an interesting proponent in current times, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel who was instrumental in the drafting of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Obamacare. People might be shocked to be informed that Planned Parenthood has not always been the equal provider of alternatives for those who either desire preventive methods to avoid pregnancies or alternatives to carrying, their terms to birth of the child, a fetal mass to its conclusive child bearing as it would cause the mother undue mental stresses and interfere directly with their pursuits in life, it originally was used to sterilize those seen as unfit to have children thus forcing a eugenics program which was, as it is today, centered in minority neighborhoods. Providing you desire to seek the reality that is Planned Parenthood all one need to do is to research Margaret Sanger and her relationship with what we would today refer to as black genocide, it is not a pretty picture. There comes now another eugenics styled movement and this time the target will be traditions, the very traditions which were the glue of Western culture and society for the last two millennia.

 

The scissors that cut the pages into confetti will be forged by multiculturalism where no culture is to be preferred because we are blinding ourselves to such observations and the axe which will sever the binding making the job of the scissors even easier will be the axe taken to the Judeo-Christian culture and in particular to cut the binding of that book which professes that there are such things as good and evil, there is such a concept as right and wrong, that a life lived with proper restraints is life to be pursued, the book that once graced nearly every house and every hotel room across the United States and now a book scorned as old, out of fashion and obsolete, but the Bible is that book which we could learn where our new follies will lead, they will lead to the same place they have always led, ruination and the destruction of all that made the Western World strong. Choosing to lose ourselves in a culture of any culture of the moment is the culture we desire to raise up, but we cannot raise up debauchery and the damnation of human life as equal to the pursuit of a good life spent rejoicing in the gift that life provides and not seeking some manner of faith which demands of us surrender or die, such is a choice without a choice. We need return to our former ideals which permit those whose cultures differ to continue such practice in their private times and spaces such as their homes and houses of worship, but also we demanded they accept our cultural rules when in public. The Western culture allowed for certain irregularities such as special religious clothing being worn in public and even providing areas for prayer permitting such did not interfere with the performance of one’s job and was committed off the clock and on the individual’s own time as the whole cannot be forced to pay them for their private time spent praying and not producing things of mutual gain as that is what working at a job is, producing things for mutual gains, a cooperative effort and a central pillar of our traditional society.

 

Schools were a place where we learned about our mutual culture and were able to master those basic tenets which supported the society, and where we learned how to think and not so much exactly what to think though guidelines were imposed and what was out of bounds was ingrained. We even learned to cooperate through sports where we also learned the easy joys of winning and even more importantly how to cope with losing and thus with failure. The best amongst us learned that failure was not the end but rather a stop where we reassessed our priorities and assumptions making changes where we found things in error or lacking altogether and then proceeded on towards our ultimate goal. Further we learned, were we that fortunate, lucky even, that failures come in the thousands and that success comes only to those willing to fail and fail repeatedly and learning from each failure where we diverted from our goals and how to get back on track. Are there ideas whose failure is guaranteed and where one can never fully achieve the goal? Yes. We can never make a machine which is 100% efficient as in all things there is that degree of wasted effort, effort which does not contribute to the completion and realization of the goal. In a machine that goal is the product such as a generator making electricity; we use water, steam, explosive fuels all to drive the generator to make electricity but there are losses to friction and pushing the generator against the resistive magnetic forces induced in the coils which does not directly produce the electricity but which must be overcome. The same is true in life. Sleep is something our bodies must submit to or we will eventually collapse and possibly die. Still, it is sometimes in our dreams that the spark bursts forth solving some vexing problem which assists the project to completion. Such is an exception and even that spark was not the only dream we enjoyed or endured, and there were the periods of sleep which were used as a dedicated means of repairing and preparing the body for the next day. Another item which obviously diverts us from achieving goals but may be necessary in order to reach our goals are the failures along the way. Lessor peoples will allow failures to prevent them from trying and just surrender to their failures. That is not an intricate part of our society until recently when we found ways of rewarding those who become mired in failure.

 

Another casualty in our modern society is the loosening of the moral structure. In the lives of the vast majority of the population, and to a limited extent to all of the population not restricted to an asylum (do we even have asylums any longer to care for the elderly and the comatose?) as we all wear clothing though some wear far less than others; we all eat and sleep as nature insists on these; and we all live and let live because if large segments of the society, and it need not be more than ten to twenty percent of a society, take to being belligerent and resorting to murdering those who they fear or refuse to submit; then the society will fracture and it will soon become a free-for-all with every faction against the rest; see Libya, Syria or Iraq for current examples. What many do not realize is this is rapidly becoming the definition of Western culture. The society of the Western World has become unmoored and without an anchor with which to tie off and provide immovability, permanence and the Western World has rapidly been cranking the centerboard retrieving it from below the boat allowing the winds to blow us as they may while our ability to steer the boat has failed without the centerboard. That centerboard was western Judeo-Christian ethics and the anchor was the ideal of hard work will produce and provide for one and one’s family and charity would take care of the few who for reasons often beyond their control are unable to find a place within our society. We did not used to change our society such that everybody’s quirks or the beliefs of those coming to our shores being used as a cudgel with which to beat and force us to alter our religious and social structures which we have held dear fashioning our societal norms around and have worked just fine for us and is tried and true. Therein lies the current problem, we in the West have doubted our own culture while allowing another culture whose adherents have little doubt that it is superior to all the Western World has ever known and that the Western World must be cowed and beaten into submission, and that is termed our surrendering to Allah. Do not mistake Allah for the same as G0d in our Judeo-Christian society as Hashem does not demand surrender but instead reason, trust and faith. The easiest manner to present a difference is to look at the lineage of belief. In Judeo-Christian ethics the line of faith flows through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while Islam and Allah follow the lineage of belief through Abraham, Ishmael and Mohammad. Perhaps this is as good a place to stop before I get into deeper troubles and this is way more sufficient amount to chew of for one day. With any luck I’ll get into this stranger side of my reasoning after a decent period of rest. Thank you all for reading this far and may your life be blessed only with those failings which aid you in your journeys and make you a stronger and better you, even if others spend some time confused at what you are trying to say, and boy have I spent time on that bus.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Future and Hope for the Western World

 

The future is determined just as much by the nurturing and education provided for the next generation during their youth, formative years and on through their years of education and initial introduction into the workforce as it is by their genetic makeup which is still provided by the natural selection that leads to determining who their parents are. Where we may be on the cusp of great breakthroughs in genetic engineering and closing in on providing parents with choices for genetically altering their future child’s DNA makeup and thus provide for what are called designer children, we have yet to get beyond the cusp and make such opportunities acceptable to the general public. I am sure that should the time come and we are able to literally design a child, leaving only the most minor possibilities of any unseen crisis, and produce a next generation of geniuses, but thus far we are not quite beyond the cusp and stepping into what may be a very strange new world. Once we arrive at the point where the first designer child is produced successfully and a healthy, intelligent, beautiful and handsome wonder-child is born, I suspect rather than being met with cheers and adulation of being the first child in a new era of humanity, we will instead face mobs of protesters demanding this kind of monstrous building of abomination of nature be immediately outlawed and only naturally conceived children be permitted. Of course these demonstrators will eventually tire of their objections, or at least making a public display of those objections, and designer children will be as common as are naturally selected children of today. The problem would be when only designer children or minimally selected pairing of best case DNA from the natural parents for children will be required in a means of aiding natural selection and optimizing the next generations.

 

No matter how close to what is deemed perfect human children biological research may permit society to produce, all of that is worthless if the education system they are given is not up to the optimum level that might be possible. This is apparently a subject of great debate amongst two different generations, the parents of young children through college age young adults and their grandparents whose educational rigors did not grant the wide array of course selection nor did it have the advantages of computers, the internet, social media, and all the other advantages, difficulties, challenges and new educational theories such as the currently very seriously debated and in many cases rejected system known mostly as Common Core. All of that debate aside, the objection appears to be most prevalent amongst the grandparents who look at some of the signs they have observed and the sometimes unbelievable ignorance revealed by numerous interviews and test results given to children in elementary education through to college and university students even those studying for advanced degrees such as Masters and Doctoral programs.

 

One of the glaring recent examples was the interviews of random students at Harvard about current politics and historical questions mostly pertaining to American history. Only a minority could identify Vice President being currently Joe Biden. An even smaller percentage identified John Roberts as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Where I would forgive the average High School student not knowing who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, these were students at Harvard and whom will be the leaders and shapers of the future of the nation and many of whom will become the lawyers and judges, possible even Supreme Court Judges even to the high position of Chief Justice. These were presumably the crème de la crème of American education; these were students at Harvard. As disturbing as those results may have been, there have been numerous tests performed on students from middle school, there cannot be anything named junior as in junior high school as junior gives of a connotation of inferior and might damage sensitive psyches, high school and through all levels of college which have produced similar indications that the education system is not up to par or students are simply not retaining anything about civics, government or history. The levels displayed often appear like they could use these youths as the stars for a sequel to the movie, and I am reluctant to even let it be known to the world I even have viewed this movie, Idiocracy.

 

Perhaps some examples of questions which stymied so many students, and granted that some of these interviews were handpicked to make the point that there is something amiss in the American, and very likely across the Western World, education systems are in order. When students cannot identify who was the President of the United States during the Civil War as President Lincoln, and I would have even taken President Jefferson Davis assuming the student was from Alabama, Georgia or any of the other southern states which made up the Confederacy, or they cannot name which country from which the United States fought to gain their independence and name Britain or England there is a problem with the education system. Students were unable to name the three branches of the United Stated Federal Government as the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. These are not trick questions setup to fool or mislead the students; they were straight forward and elementary questions. I almost understand when people attending an anti-nuke rally or other ecological rally against pollution or some other similarly themed action are willing to sign a petition to restrict one of the worst greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere named dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) as they are likely to simply take for granted the petition seekers are representing an actual cause celeb and are not pranking them so they do not fully ingest the question and are just signing to support a similarly themed petition, or so they think. In reality, water vapor in the atmosphere is the greatest of the greenhouse gasses but is also so vital to our existence and the existence of virtually every land animal and plant that we accept its presence as vitally necessary so the petition is not false, simply misleading as no such cause has arisen. Asking who the allied powers were in World War II and against whom they were fighting is not a question which should be as great a challenge for the student population in high school or college. Naming the date that we celebrate the United States gaining its independence as the fourth of July is not that difficult. Probably the worst display was on a late night show where they were giving examples of the dumbest of the dumbest set of answers found from archives to history and civics questions from random universities (and I know these were extremely handpicked but with this question that should have been impossible for anybody to miss the answer) and they could not name what nation the United States fought in the Spanish American War. I am at a loss for words to explain how utterly unbelievable it is that there actually were students who guessed at the answer. Some of the examples were, France, the southern states (they did not even call it the Confederacy), Europe (at least they got the right continent even if they missed the actual nation), the Soviet Union, and of course now we get Britain and England. Most of us have heard these questions and answer combinations which would usually be considered outtakes except they were the exact kind of answers they were seeking. I am aware that it probably took quite a number of interviews of students rushing between classes, but still some of these questions are way to basic to have been missed by anyone.

 

Then there is the final point which recently hit the news and was not so much of a surprise as it was the depth and near universality of the criminal deceits that a university would go to simply to have a stronger and more talented football or basketball teams. One of, if not the, best commentaries on the scandal that broke from the University of North Carolina (UNC) was Phantom courses disservice to black students by Walter Williams. In my ‘innocent youth’ I remember the jokes that at some universities there were student athletes taking courses such as Advanced Basket Weaving and other inane and ridiculous courses but never did we imagine phantom courses where students were given grades sufficient to have them retain player status and not be prevented from taking the field due to academic deficiencies. What makes these crimes even worse is that professors received payment for teaching a class that did not exist in reality. These courses were placed within the school for specific social science curriculum and the student’s grade was determined by what was required for their academic qualifications to play their sport as was the number of these courses each student athlete was assigned to raise their averages. These courses and the inflated grades also gave the university the required diversity representation within the student body to qualify for certain Federal Government grant programs which means that these courses were a part of intentionally defrauding the Federal Government and the tax payers of the United States. These frauds, which can be expected, or something similar, to exist in many a university which fields competitive football and basketball teams, are likely to be revealed elsewhere should this investigation be broadened, as it deserves to be, to other universities where such courses may exist. I am sure that other sports programs are likely to be scrutinized and such scrutiny will produce even more and similar problems and frauds.

 

This fraud and any others existing in the American university systems also uncover another even more serious problem, the lack of quality educational opportunity within the public school system as a whole and with particular problems within the schools which serve those troubled neighborhoods which allows certain students to disrupt the education of the entirety of the classes offered. When students are given a passing grade for the reasoning of social promotion both the student and society are being cheated. A major component of this problem is the Federal Government and its various programs and minimal requirements for schools to receive full funding and not be classified as a troubled, problematic or whatever title might be used to classify a school as substandard which places the teachers and administrators of such schools under focus and scrutiny. Needless to point out that such scrutiny due such a rating is anything but friendly and their demands go beyond the schoolroom and into the main office and often will force changed at the top thus great pressure is placed on teachers to assure that every student passes the testing. This produces what is often referred to as teaching to the test where the class becomes practiced in answering the actual questions on the test potentially without having ever studied or been exposed to anything outside of the test regimens. Additionally, over the past couple of decades there has been a litany of schools where cheating on the qualifying tests have been revealed. These deceptions range from teachers prompting the students while they are testing to changing students’ answers to allow for them receiving a higher rating and preventing the school from losing its standing academically.

 

These practices of altering test answers, teaching solely to the test, social progressions through the school system without failing, giving the students answers for the test while they are taking the test and so many other defrauding of students and society has other ramifications such as graduates from high schools not having the ability to read, write and perform elementary mathematical skills. Some of these student athletes learn very early on that they will be exempted from academic requirements and will receive special attention and reprieves which allow them to pass and continue their academic ratings such that they remain eligible for playing their sport. One has to wonder what future many of these athletes will have when they graduate from college still unable to read, write or do elementary arithmetic, not even mathematics, not even the very basics. Providing the student athlete who was granted grades which were not a true accounting of their abilities or actual learning manages to be accepted to a college because of their false grade point average (GPA) and are unable to make the team in their sport or even other less money generating sport, how can they ever pass an actual course when the first time they are being pressed to actually display learned knowledge and retention. In some cases such students may not even be able to write their name beyond block capital letters? They have a high school diploma which they are incapable of reading and will likely have failed and been academically dismissed from college and now need to find work and they realize they have no skill or capabilities that qualify them for employment except menial labors or, if they are fortunate, some trade, operating equipment or performing a specialized skill such as welding or were taken on to apprentice for such a skill such as carpentry or plumbing. The problems arise when there are nowhere near sufficient jobs which require largely physical strength and stamina and then many of such educationally-challenged students who are incapable of filling out an application to receive their paycheck or the required W-2 tax form are unable even to get those jobs. Even more distressing is that the level of knowledge which students taking the required classes to receive a teaching license will also have received an education which potentially will leave them with inadequate levels of knowledge to be fully capable of teaching most courses. This in turn hurts any student who was assigned to have the under-qualified teacher and the cycle begins anew. The areas which have the highest numbers of unqualified or under-qualified teachers are the sciences and mathematics. These particular courses to be qualified as a teacher of mathematics or the sciences are far more rigorous and require numerous hours in higher level mathematics and whatever science one would choose such as biology, physics, chemistry and the numerous others. Since there is a dearth of teachers who become qualified to teach mathematics or the many sciences, the result is that teachers with a general teaching degree end up covering teaching mathematics or some science class despite potentially never having seen that level or even having taken related courses and still be put in a place where they must show proficiency. This begs the question of what would be the advantage of designing students with astronomical IQs if the education system is so broken that it can only provide one with a sub-prime level of education and knowledge. Perhaps the near future we will have a society of brilliantly ignorant young adults holding graduation certificates that hopefully they can actually read. If there exists one school which does not prepare their students with a decent and complete education then as a society we have failed a good number of children which is something which should be eliminated. Our greatest legacies for the most of us are our children and grandchildren and the generation beyond, we must not fail them from the very start with a failing school system; we must not simply trust the education system and should teach them as best we are able. As for any disruptive students who make an education near to impossible we must have a school which deals solely with such students with provisions to take them to those classes thus allowing the rest of the students who are seeking knowledge to receive their lessons without disruption and even intimidations which make learning impossible and murders their future in the process.

 

Beyond the Cusp