Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Terrorism is not New to the World!

From Bill Neinast, a brilliant perspective on a tough issue facing the world!

IN PERSPECTIVE
On May 2, 1995, the late COL Jack Norton (originally Nussbaum) wrote this to his god-son, my son Bill Neinast, Jr.:

“I remember so well my experiences in my hometown, Bautzen near Dresden, on Krystallnackt, November 9, 1938.  After all sorts of indignities from mobs of ordinary burgers, my family, an aunt’s family and a third family were hiding out in a 5th floor apartment at the Post Platz.  Two of the fathers had escaped based on my warnings early in the morning.  The third father was already taken away by the Gestapo.

“When some of the more despicable German/Bautzner citizens learned of our location, hundreds streamed into the Post Platz.  They screamed death to the Jews and yelled for us to jump out of the window.  Finally, Nazis in uniform came storming up the stairs to do the job.  My mother threw the window open and showed at the window sill our group ready to jump.  Three women, one of whom had already become insane, and five children.  The people screaming for us to jump never stopped.  And yet, for some reason I still cannot phantom, the advance of the Nazis on the stairs stopped.  The rest of the story is too long.  We escaped during the night, hid in a cave, nearly starved, etc.”

Norton and one of his brothers managed to get out of Germany and to the U.S.  His mother, father, sister, and another brother died in Nazis concentration camps.

Near the end of WWII, Norton was in the U.S. Army unit that liberated the Nazis’ Hadamar Death Camp.  He captured one of the nurses in the camp who had administered many of the lethal injections to the mentally disabled and severely wounded or disabled German soldiers .  As an Infantry lieutenant Platoon Leader in Korea, he earned the Silver Star, which he would describe only as “Doing what I had to do to save my men.”

The Norton family comes to mind every time a rant against Muslims appears in the news.  The correlation is religion.

A safe assumption is that more than 90% of the mob gathered on the Post Platz in Bautzen and at many other localities throughout Germany on Krystallknact, the 9/11 for German Jews, were Christians.

Consider those Christian terrorists on the backdrop of the two centuries of the Crusades during the middle ages.  From 1095 to 1291 marauding bands of Christian knights murdered, pillaged, and burned through much of the Middle East that had become inhabited by Muslims.

Body counts of enemy casualties were not common in those days.  Records indicate, however, that several hundred thousand soldiers under the Papacy roamed Asia Minor all the way to Jerusalem. So it is not unreasonable to assume that at least an equal number of  innocent men, women, and children died at their  hands.

The Church, in fostering these Crusades, promised religious and secular benefits to those who took part in them. For example, a warrior of the Cross was to enjoy forgiveness of all his past sins.

Sound familiar?  Consider, in this regard, the six promises for Muslim jihadists who become “shahids” or martyrs. 

A shahid who dies fighting for the faith, is assured an immediate entrance to the joys of Paradise. He sees his place in Paradise where he will live in the highest Heaven and in the world of angels, eating, drinking, walking and enjoying himself. A crown of honor will be placed on his head and he will have 72 Dark-Eyed wives.

So here’s the perspective.

The only hope of a peaceful solution to the long, protracted war in which we are engaged requires a precise definition of the enemy. Contrary to the belief of some, Muslims are not the enemy.

This brief history of the Crusades, the Nazis genocide, and the Muslim Jihads must be remembered in defining the enemy.  By any measure of that history, there is as much blood on the hands of Christian terrorists as on the hands of Muslim jihadists or terrorists.

The key word is terrorist.

Today, 32% of the world population is Christian.  A minuscule portion of that population may be terrorists.  A similar portion of the 2.1 billion Muslims making up 23% of the population may be jihadists or terrorists.

Only a tiny fraction of Christians were the terrorists of the Crusades and Nazi genocide.  Similarly, only tiny cells of Muslims are jihadists interested in martyring themselves in order to enter Paradise.

Remember, those promises of immediate entrance to Paradise and 72 virgins are for jihadist martyrs only.  They do not apply to the more than two billion other Muslims among us who are as peace loving as the Christians among them.

Obviously, terrorists come in many forms.  Currently, however, there is a tendency to think of terrorists only as “Muslim terrorists.”  That dangerously and unnecessarily limits the search for terrorists to individuals with Arab appearance.

Monday, April 22, 2013

One More Law


  ONE MORE LAW

There oughta be a law.  Soon there may be one.

The defeat in the Senate of the watered down gun control law and the solution of the Boston Marathon bombings have eliminated two back drops for free face time  for politicians on national TV.

Just in time, a third opportunity has arisen for the publicity hungry White House and Congress.  Two communities in Texas and one in Oklahoma have been devastated by man made catastrophes.

The tremendous explosions in Texas City and West resulted from human error, negligence, or both.  The destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City was due to human evil. 

Rules, regulations, and laws were and are in place to prevent such destruction, but human frailty or depravity ignored them and wreathed havoc on the localities.

The problem thus must be the very existence of the substance that permits such abuse. The cause and effect obviously is man made fertilizer.

There, then, is the new platform for politicians seeking attention.  As human behavior is not being controlled by rules, let’s abolish synthetic fertilizer. 

Arranging a group of the scarred and maimed survivors of the West tragedy behind the politicians demanding an end to deadly fertilizer, as the President has done with the survivors of the New Town massacre, would draw scores of sympathetic viewers.

Then those smart Senators and Congressmen with all the answers, so long as expanding the big federal government is concerned, can push legislation to prohibit the manufacture, storage, or use of chemical fertilizer on American soil.

The effective date of the law will have to be delayed several years to allow existing supplies to be shipped off to third world countries.  After all this dangerous substance is removed from American hands, there will be no more life threatening calamities.

An additional benefit will be protection of the nation’s water supply, as there will be no more pollution of water ways with dangerous fertilizer run off.  Our food in the future will come from agriculture produced on soil enriched with that natural fertilizer coming from animals.

This may make everyone happy except Al Gore.  To get all the manure needed to replace the efficiency of man made fertilizer, the nation’s cattle herds will have to be increased tremendously.

That means the methane released by the cows belching and passing gas will also rise at an exponential rate.  This will make Gore nervous, as the methane may aggravate global warming more than an occasional fertilizer explosion.

This spoof of the West tragedy is not intended to diminish the terrible loss of life and property in that small Texas town.  It is merely a vehicle to illustrate the foolishness and dangerousness of the politicians who think a big federal government is the answer to every problem.

This folly was aptly illustrated by President Obama’s failed attempt to enact even more restrictions on gun ownership after the Newtown disaster.  At least one Senator, in announcing his opposition to the President’s proposal, noted that the proposed new law would not have prevented the massacre.

Adam Lanza broke four laws in his shooting rampage.   

First, he stole his mother’s legally acquired weapons and car.   Next, he carried the guns into a weapons free zone.  Then he broke and entered the school building.  Finally, he broke the most serious law of all by murdering more than 20 students and teachers.

If four specific laws did not prevent this tragedy, how many other laws would have been required to avoid the rampage?  What words could have persuaded Lanza not to kill people?

This illustrates an important point.  Enact a multitude of laws to make it very difficult to acquire and own guns legally.  Law abiding systems will comply and dot every “i” and cross every “t” to have the weapons they want to protect themselves, hunt, shoot clays, or to engage in other legal activities. 

Those intent on evil, however, will, if necessary, follow the Lanza example and steal the weapons they want from legal gun owners.

So here’s the perspective.

The worst laws on the books are those that are knee jerk reactions to some tragedy.  Enacting another one of those laws was narrowly averted last week.

The Senate could not muster enough votes to pass the President’s emotionally charged gun control measure.  Some members of his own party even voted against the measure.

Senator Harry Ried, the Senate Majority Leader, however, vowed to bring the proposed legislation back for another vote.  The chances of it passing the second time around are slim, but no one can predict with certainty what politicians will do.

If more restrictions are enacted on purchasing and owning guns and if the use of fertilizer were prohibited, what would be the effect?  The answer is nothing.  There would just be another law or two to break.

Monday, April 1, 2013

How is your blood pressure?

By Bill Neinast

Slacker is not heard so often today as it was 75 years ago.  During WWII, the word was frequently used as an epithet for a man who was avoiding military service.

That pejorative term came to mind recently while reading Dr. Stuart Yoffe’s comments on the prisoners in the Washington County jail who are drawing monthly SSI checks from the U.S. Treasury. 

Dr. Yoffe believes that many of the SSI prisoners he treated in jail were fully capable of productive work but had managed somehow to get on the federal disability dole.  While the county was providing them free room and board, they were getting monthly checks of federal money that average $600.

He calculates that, if there is only one such prisoner in each of the 254 county jails in Texas, “we are spending at minimum $64 million on non-disabled individuals just in Texas.”

As my blood pressure was returning to normal after reading those statistics, another Banner Press hit my doorstep.  “Taxpayers shell out nearly $3.7M for ex-presidents” was headlined on page 2 of that issue.

Those millions did not include the amounts spent to provide the very necessary security for our former leaders.  This was money for offices, secretarial help, postage, travel, etc.

Thinking about shelling out $64 million a year for dead beats in jail and another $3.7 million for individuals at the other end of the economic spectrum shot those blood pressure readings back into the stratosphere.

The largess for those poor presidents who have been sent back home is provided under the Former Presidents Act of 1958. Under that act, ex-presidents get a lifetime pension equal to the annual rate of basic pay for the heads of executive branch departments. 

This pension is “earned” after just four or eight years of service.  In 2011, that meant the federal treasury piled $199,700 on top of their personal income.

Congress, however, was looking out for the poor taxpayers.  The act provides that the pension is taxable.

Except for Truman, and possibly Ford, every president during the last 100 years has been a millionaire or in the highest echelon of the upper class. So providing rich people with such benevolence is as bad or worse than sending SSI checks to prisoners.

Another blood pressure enhancer was on page 3 of the same paper.  It reads, “USDA expanding program to fight poverty in rural areas.”  The gist of the article is that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was in South Carolina to kick start new initiatives in the war on poverty.

Interestingly, the only activity in this program that is discussed in the article is the assistance being given to Larry Harris.

Harris has been operating a “small” farm for 15 years.  The USDA is now going to help him dig a new well so that he can expand his farm and grow vegetables.

That’s fighting poverty? 

In the 40 years that my father owned and operated a small retail business in Somerville, he expanded or improved the physical plant four times.  He got the money for each expansion or improvement from his own operating budget.

So why is government assistance needed for Harris to expand his business?

The budget foolishness discussed here is so minuscule in the overall scheme of the massive federal budget that it probably will not be noticed by sincere  reformers.  Thus the vexatious question is how, when, and why did these items get in the budget to begin with?

So here’s the perspective.

SSI payments for prisoners, pensions for well heeled presidents, and wells for farmers are the proverbial tips of the iceberg.  If the entire ice berg of foolish federal programs were melted, however, the problem would not be solved.

The problem is the mind set of most of our elected representatives in D.C.  As a group, they seem to lack any understanding of why budgets must be balanced, with income equalling or exceeding outgo.

If the long list of wasteful spending identified by Representative Paul Ryan were eliminated during this session of Congress and if the safety net entitlement programs were controlled, the fix would be only temporary. 

Until common sense individuals like Dr. Ben Carson, Senators Marcus Rubio and Ted Cruz, Governors Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindall, and others like them get into positions of decision making prominence the country may patch a few pot holes but will continue down the same old road.

Eliminating some of the pot holes, however, may be good for blood pressure.