Malaysian Flight 370, a Boeing 777, arguably the safest plane in the world,has disappeared along with over 230 souls. That was last week. Where is it? Did it crash en route from Malaysia to China? No debris has been found. Did it veer west, the pings from the plane to the satellite says yes. But no plane has been found. Has it been hijacked? No ransom demands have been made. Has it been diverted to an ageless High Lama in the Himalayas, for one of its passengers, like  CONWAY( Ronald Colman) in LOST HORIZON? Flight 370 has turned into the S.S. MINNOW from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, off on a routine flight, and lost. One of the grating leitmotifs of President Obama is his raving praise for the 21 st  Century; the 21 st  Century with its NSA and its trademark  omniscience phone and email taps,  with its  CIA, FBI, GPS, satellites,and omnipresent cameras. The 21st Century with its  constant surveillance, its constant memorializing o...

“…..  Obama was struggling to understand Donald Trump's victory.  "What if we were wrong?," the outgoing US President asked aides riding with him in the armoured presidential limousine. He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. "Maybe we pushed too far," Obama said. "Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe." His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Trump. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. "Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early," he said. In the weeks after Trump's election, Obama went through multiple emotional stages, according to a new book by his longtime adviser Benjamin Rhodes. At times, the departin...

The Roman Republic fought a war over Citizenship, the Social War. The war ended in a Roman victory and the genocide of Samnites, an Italian tribe, which wanted full Roman citizenship. The Citizenship War was debilitating to the Republic, causing the rise of military strongmen like Sulla, Marius and eventually Julius Caesar.The vaunted Roman Republic, which had survived hundreds of years, began to die, over a war about who should be a citizen of Rome. Citizenship is very important to Republics. A Monarch can claim subjects by birth, decree or conquest. To be a citizen of a Republic, this American Republic, one has to be either born lucky or meet the criteria of the citizens who came before you. Because American Citizenship is so valuable, such a cohesive force in the existence of the Republic, it cannot and should not be enterprised upon. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is the executive order by President Obama which allowed some individuals who were b...

In the archives of the oral history of World War II, there is a very seminal interview   pertinent to the current 2018 border conditions. In the interview, an aging G.I. not a RAMBO nor an Audie Murphy, just a grunt, pulled from his factory job, his bowling league, his softball team to go fight the Germans, tells this story.  He is on guard duty, at a river crossing. He is a private, a combat soldier. His Captain tells him not to allow any German,soldier or civilian to cross the river. All is quiet, then a group of German refugees appear, civilians , men, women and children, young and old appear and start swimming across the river. He fires into the air, half of the refugees turn back. The others keep coming; he puts a round in the water ahead of them. All turn back, save an audacious woman. She swims on. He fires again into the air; she still swims on.   The other refugees are on the opposite riverbank watching. He fires a round into the w...