Confessions of a Reformed NeoCon

I used to be a neocon, you know a “new conservative” , from the Ronald Reagan era. I was all-in with whatever my country was doing to protect others from the dastardly deeds of their own governments. And war? Don’t mess with Uncle Sam or we’ll kick your ass. As for those that would keep trying the patience of our greatest ally in the middle east, I said, Just turn the desert into glass. Yep. Nuke ‘em. And I was a grown man saying these things, one that had spent nearly 2 years in a combat zone, coming under fire on occasion, utterly uncaring as to what happened to other people, that we invaded for no reason (Iraq). I had no feeling for the locals while in country and even less, if that’s possible, for all Arabic peoples, and later Persians. Whether Palestinian, or Iraqi, or Egyptian, I clearly held a disdain for entire peoples that had never threatened me.

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Stop Listening to Idiots

I get a kick out of online drama. It’s nothing new of course, if it’s not a couple of people posting on X going after each other, then it’s podcasters (oops! “content creators”) or something else. There are always sides and a lot of the time I find both sides compelling. I’m not really a fence sitter, I just think that in order to make a reasoned determination on whatever the silly issue happens to be at the time, I need to hear both sides (or more) that’s being offered.

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And Now, For Your Entertainment Today…

As much as I try to, I can’t avoid politics here as uh as I’d like to. It’s become endemic in our lives, hasn’t it? The the advent of cable news over the past 40 years or so (CNN premiered June 1, 1980), it doesn’t seem we are able to avoid what passes for news today. In fact, what we regularly receive is not news in the classical sense, but infotainment, you know, something with just enough of what might be referred to as news, wrapped up t be fun and engaging. At the end of the day, are we any better informed than we were? I don’t think so.In fact, we can look at hundreds of examples, daily, and see how those that present as news attempt to manipulate their audience into believing something that is clearly, on second (maybe third) look, is blatant propaganda, pressing forward an ideology, whether it be political or cultural, instead of just informing.

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We Own the Truth

I want to be clear to everyone: questioning policies of our government is not being disloyal to that government. It is exercizing exactly what our founders desired but had to separate from England to establish: the right to free speech. We often interpret that to mean, well, everything, but the founders were considering the tyranny and oppresion of their government, so the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights to the constitution is the most important and those today questioning others patriotism based on questioning actions taken or not taken by our government is a discredit to those that wrote those famous words placed on paper in 1789.

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Saving Face

As I write this, the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran that was supposed to end tomorrow, has just been extended by our president, indefinitely because Pakistan, the host for the negotiations, asked for an extension. That’s right, there’s no time limit associated with it and the excuse is that Iran has not made any proposals of their own and the U.S.will give them time to(47 more years, I guess) come up with a response to the U.S. proposals over the kinetic action (not a war) with Iran. This is what’s called saving face.

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