My Thoughts as a Veteran

           My Thoughts as a Veteran, on Veteran's Day

                                                      Eric Paul Nolte



Today I saw a short video that was produced as a "thank you" to American veterans who were in the military to defend our country, all of whom were vulnerable to being put in harm's way, even if we were not actually at war during the years of our service.  As many National Guardsmen discovered at the start of the Gulf War, they could be activated at any time and sent overseas to fight.  The little film caused me to well up with emotion.  We've fought so many pointless wars!  In my opinion, almost all wars are insanely pointless.  But not all of them.

During the Vietnam War, I was on active duty in the Army.  I could have been deployed to Vietnam, but I had the good fortune to be sent to Germany instead where, in my spare time, I spent most of my pay on flying lessons, and thereby put myself on a good track to become an airline pilot while acquiring a taste for good German beer.

When the Vietnam War began for the US in the mid-1960s, I was a barely pubescent boy in junior high school.  I remember that everybody thought that surely the war would be over long before those of my age became eligible either to join or be drafted into the military.  

There were anti-war slogans in the air.  Make love, not war.  Hell no, we won't go!  Bring 'em home!    

My generation, or, more correctly, those in my circle of politically and religiously liberal youth were agreed on our opposition to the war, in general, and to the draft in particular because, we argued, it was the draft that made it possible for our government to engage in this hare-brained, hopeless, foreign military adventure that was being carried out with no plan actually to fight the war in a way that stood any chance of achieving anything like victory.  In my circles, we thought the war was a cynical pose on the part of our government to give the impression that we could actually stop the spread of communism while refusing to do what it would take to "win" the war.  Meanwhile, the war became a bloody meat grinder of the flesh of our young men (and more than a few women as well.)

This week, I came across some more of the facts of the matter.

Yes, we engaged in a long war that was often conducted with futile strategy and tactics.

But at the end of the day, as pointed out by Bruce Hershensohn, senior fellow at Pepperdine University, we get to the truth about the war we allegedly lost:

When the North Vietnamese left the Paris Peace talks in 1972, the US announced that in December 1972 we would begin serious bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the capital and major port cities of North Vietnam.  

We did bomb them, and within a month, the North Vietnamese, militarily devastated, came back to the negotiations in Paris and a peace accord was signed by the USA, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong.

As of January 1973, we had won a decisive victory in the Vietnam War. 

The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong agreed by their signatures that their defeat had been decisive.

Therefore, the US celebrated on January 27, 1973, our Victory in Vietnam Day.

South Vietnam was to be left protected from assault by the North and the Viet Cong.

This peace accord entailed an agreement in which the US pledged to replace any military hardware that South Vietnam might require in its defense against aggression from the North.

Let me restate this more simply: 

Our incontestable victory in Vietnam was dependent upon our promise to back up the South Vietnamese with replacement hardware, should this be required in the face of attack from their enemies. 

But then a year later Richard Nixon was disgraced by the Watergate fiasco and was forced out of office.  

In the elections that followed in 1974, the US Congress was decisively taken over by the Democrats.

Despite the impassioned pleas of Republican President Gerald Ford and others, the Democrats then voted to end all funding for our aid to South Vietnam.  

The North Vietnamese then immediately invaded the South.  When they advanced without opposition that could replenish the South's equipment, North Vietnamese forces shortly took over the whole country.  Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City and the whole country fell under the rule of the communist dictatorship from the north.

The whole affair of American involvement in Vietnam has proven to be a searing, intellectually and morally vertigo-inspiring episode, like no other in our history.

It might not have needed to be so terrible if the Democrats had not abandoned our former Vietnamese allies.  

Our abandonment of South Vietnam resulted in the "re-education" camps in which more than a million South Vietnamese were interned, and where a quarter-million of them died by summary execution, disease, and starvation.  

The Boat People were another two million people who fled the country for fear of their lives, and among them, another quarter million died from weather, accidents, and at the hands of pirates.

Reasonable people can argue over whether we should ever have been in Vietnam in the first place.  

But no one of goodwill can reasonably argue that our outright reneging on our promise of protection to the South Vietnamese people was a terrible betrayal that resulted in at least another half million deaths and the destruction of the lives and prospects of countless millions more.

Ironically, in a move not unlike the transformation of the communist dictatorship of China, Vietnam has since evolved into much more of a market economy than almost anyone might have imagined possible, and it is now engaged in lively trade with the United States and much of the rest of the world.

As an interesting footnote, I find it fascinating that Jane Fonda, the infamous "Hanoi Jane," has come forward with a heartfelt apology for her behavior during her two-week visit to North Vietnam at the height of the war.  Jane Fonda was accused of treasonously giving our enemies a propaganda bonanza because of her being exploited in such photographs as the one of her sitting, smiling, on an anti-aircraft gun used for shooting down American airplanes. 

The Democratic party, vastly more culpable here than Jane Fonda, given its murderous abandonment of our allies in South Vietnam, should long ago have come forward to apologize for their despicable, pragmatic action.  Hmm.  Actually, it would be fitting if some of them were in jail for this kind of horrible behavior.

The death toll here, obviously caused by the Democratic party's betrayal of South Vietnam, is five times larger than the deaths caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or by the fire-bombing that resulted in the destruction of the German city of Dresden.


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2018.1111, Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the First World War, the War to End All Wars,

and now renamed Veteran's Day.

I Voted. So What?--Who is Counting the Votes?

           I Voted. So what? Who is Counting the Votes?

                                                    Eric Paul Nolte




Something is rotten is Arizona (and Florida and elsewhere.)

Now, let's be clear about some of what's at stake here.  

We have, on the one hand, the Democratic candidate, Krysten Sinema, whom I heard in an extended interview, stammering, but adamantly refusing to condemn Americans who go fight for the Taliban. On the other hand, we have Martha McSally, a decorated female fighter pilot who flew in combat for her country, risking her life to defend us against the likes of that very same Taliban who want to kill her and the rest of us as well. There is much more to be said about their political differences, but let us focus here on what is happening in the counting of the ballots for and against them. The Associated Press reported on the day after the mid-term election that 99 percent of the vote had been counted in Arizona.  McSally was ahead of Sinema by one percentage point.

The numbers are confusing to me.  

About 1.7 million votes had been cast, with 49.4% for McSally, 48.4% for Sinema, and 2.2% for the Green Party candidate.

So think about this: 1% of 1.7 million = 17,000.  McSally was ahead by about one percentage point.

Am I confused here?  There were 99% of the votes counted. One percent remaining to be counted?  

Doesn't this make it sound like all the votes were in the hands of the counters and that only some of these remained to be processed?   

Do I have this right?--that the authorities reported that there were only 1% of the votes remaining to be counted?  So doesn't it make sense to conclude that there were only ~17,000 votes yet to count?

Now, days later, we are told that suddenly, in Maricopa County alone, there are at least another 345,000 additional votes that have suddenly appeared out of Zeus only knows from which Arizonan hamlets and now need to be counted. 

If there were only 17,000 votes to be counted on Wednesday, and now we have another 345,000 votes to count, this amounts to about 1,700% more votes than were previously said to be waiting for counting. 

Far more of these new votes have gone in favor of the Dems.  Hmm.

According to the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, we learn that Adrian Fontes, the Maricopa County Recorder (and a Bernie Sanders supporter) who is in charge of supervising the counting of those votes, was instructed by the statewide voting authorities to be sure to preserve and keep separate the votes of those whose votes were problematic (for whatever reason) and those whose votes were properly made.

It would seem that Fontes defiantly piled these two columns of ballots together and destroyed them.  Fontes destroyed the evidence of "voting irregularities" in the county where more than 60% of the state's population resides.

Huh?

Is this a banana republic?

Joseph Stalin famously declared that it matters not at all who votes for whom.  

What matters is who counts the votes.

Surely there is something I do not understand about this appearance of hundreds of thousands of Immaculate Votes miraculously popping out of the ether. 

E  P  N

2018.1110

Ponder Geo. McGovern, Accidental Libertarian Hero

                   

                         Ponder George McGovern,

                     Ironically Accidental Libertarian

                                                            Eric Paul Nolte

Here we are on the day of the 2018 elections, with the cultural atmosphere crackling with hate-charged electricity from the far sides of the political spectrum.

I long for more civilized discourse in the political arena. 

With the polls still open for many more hours, I've been thinking about a worthy man of honor who was a politician, George McGovern, the Democratic Party's nominee for President against Richard Nixon in the 1972 campaign.  He achieved notoriety among those on the right and was widely denounced for his promise to enact a universal basic income for all citizens.  But whether we agree with his politics in this respect, now think about how McGovern led his life, especially the intellectual honesty and willingness to engage with his experience that he wore as a well-deserved badge of pride.

I wrote a blog piece on McGovern shortly after he died in 2012.  I'm reposting it below:

George McGovern, Ironically Libertarian Hero, R.I.P.

The Associated Press and the CNN wire staff published articles on George McGovern, the day after the Senator’s death.  I was disappointed to find not one syllable in recognition of what I believe is the crowning insight of this man's life. 

 It is well known that McGovern lived by his own lights with principled and passionate devotion to doing the right thing always and everywhere in the world. 

 It is not well known that long after his political life ended, he briefly entered the business world and was rudely awakened to the actual nature of government intervention.  He wrote, in effect, that his life as a politician would have displayed far more wisdom, if he had been able to bring to the floor of Congress something of his experience of wrestling helplessly with the armies of regulators whose interventions contributed so much to bankrupting his little business.

In these mainstream articles on McGovern’s life, there was no mention of the outrage among liberals that McGovern caused by his 1992 letter to the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote an honest and unflattering account of his disastrous experience in trying to run his Connecticut hotel.  McGovern’s account of this experience reminded me of the old saw that says a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged (and, of course, in fairness, the flip side of this cranky old chestnut is that a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.)  So McGovern was the liberal who got mugged by government regulation. 

In McGovern's venture into the hotel business, he sank much of his savings and lost it all, largely due to the strangling web of government regulations--federal, state, and local--layer upon layer of sometimes conflicting regulations, written as arbitrary edicts, guided by the principle that one-size fits all, and imbued with the regulators' righteous attitude that we know better than you how to run your life, and, moreover, you will comply or else you're going to pay ruinous fines and maybe even go to jail.  (He stated the matter with less unflattering language, but the essence is the same as my description.) 

No matter what anyone may think of the uber-liberal politics McGovern brought to his doomed presidential bid in 1972, the man stuck up for what he believed and remained true to his own evolving thought and experience, no matter how it unfolded, and no matter what anybody else thought of him.

The way I frame my opinion of McGovern's legacy is to praise him for his plain spoken and searing honesty, and for the great courage it takes to maintain such public allegiance to his own sight, especially in the face of attacks, even by his allies.  He displayed the high virtues of courage, independence, and integrity. 

For me, there are at least three bright lights that McGovern aimed into the darkness of this world. 

Here is the Army Air Force First Lieutenant George McGovern, whose heroic actions as a B-24 bomber pilot won him the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and saved his crew and battle-damaged airplane more than once, during his 35 combat missions.  His horrifying experience in war led him on the Senate floor famously to snarl his exasperation with "old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight."  He was not a doctrinaire pacifist, but rather a principled citizen concerned that we not engage in war for the wrong reasons.

Here he is again, writing a deeply introspective book on the wrenching loss of his youngest child, who froze to death in a snow bank, in an alcoholic fog.  Later, thinking more widely, he wrote of the central importance to any civilized society of the personal freedom we need in order to put together lives by our own lights, no matter who is offended or what anybody else thinks.  He wrote again about these matters in a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed piece, "Whose Life Is It?"  Here he spoke out on the crucial matter of personal choice, responsibility, and against paternalistic intervention from both the political left and right, in their attempts to control the lifestyles of individuals through "the tyranny of the majority or the outspoken minority."

And again, here is George McGovern, speaking out with the voice of hapless personal experience, writing in the Wall Street Journal of the unintended but nevertheless terrible consequences of the good intentions that created those multiple layers of paternalistic legislation that are largely to blame for bankrupting his hotel business.

I do not agree with much of McGovern's politics, but I must say that, in the end, George McGovern was a special kind of American hero.  I see a man whose honest introspection and allegiance to his own mind and experience led him eventually to praise freedom and individual rights, and to caution against overweening government intervention, however ironic this may have been, coming from a man whose whole life had been devoted to making overweening statist government ever more powerful and intrusive.

This is not a view one would predict from a man whose life was otherwise devoted to hyper-liberal welfare statist and bossy bureaucratic government central planning of everything.  But it is a view one would predict of a man who evinced the awe-inspiring courage, integrity, and strength of character to be so intellectually independent. 

There is another crucial aspect of George McGovern's life which I have never heard anybody else mention:  I believe that McGovern must have had a most unusual ability to stare down his own confimation bias, that godawful tendency all of us embody, that psychological and intellectual mechanism that turns us into our own intellectual echo chambers and thereby renders us nearly deaf and blind to anything we don't already believe to be true and right. 

George McGovern, life-long Big Government Liberal statist, was a man of principle.  When he became sort of an accidental tourist in the business neighborhood of the Land of Liberty, he actually changed his mind on this foundational belief on the purpose government.  Because he had the integrity to look at his experience of life with unblinking honesty, and to tell the truth he saw, even when these truths were not always flattering to himself or others, he declared in public that he had come to oppose unfettered government intervention into the free market.  

How ironic.  But what a mensch!

                                           E   P   N

 2018.1106

·         CNN wire staff article on McGovern:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html …

·         Here is the link to McGovern’s article, with introductory comments, as it was entered into the 102nd Congressional Record:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r102:S04JN2-163:

·         Here is a link to McGovern’s piece in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/14/opinion/whose-life-is-it.html

     *    Here's a link to a very good piece on this part (and other important aspects) of McGovern's career, by Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason Magazine. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21/george-mcgovern-s-legacy-as-a-libertarian-hero.html

Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint!

Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint! Eric Paul Nolte It is 0720 hours in Arizona as I write this on Election Day morning.  Nobody can know now what the outcome of this election will be. But I suspect that the Republicans will keep both houses of Congress, given the behavior of pollsters and voters in recent years. 

To the outrage of my liberal friends, I hope the Republicans win everything. 

Notwithstanding that the Pubs tend to be clueless on many matters, I believe that a vote for any Democrat looks like a vote to outlaw free speech, to ban guns, to continue the relentless march towards government control of damn near everything, and to promote the outright thuggery of fascist Anitifa (yes, how ironic, but it's true!) and Black Lives Matter. 

Among the defining characteristics of a Progressive is the belief that it is right for government to solve every problem.  Moreover, to be a progressive one must also believe that the state actually has the power and the knowledge to solve our problems.  In fact, the bloated state, meddling in every aspect of our lives, is at the heart of so many of our problems! 

Progressives do not see that freedom works.  At the very least, freedom works a damn sight better than coercion. 

Voluntary exchange gives us the best we can hope for.  It ain't perfect, but it's the best anybody can hope for at any given moment in time.

The absence of government regulation does not mean the absence of regulation.  Government regulation imposes the judgment of a small pool of unelected bureaucrats on the hundreds of millions of us--by force! 

Absent government regulation, we the people, in our hundreds of millions, by our every choice of what to buy or not, regulate the behavior of every business. 

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out long ago, in a free market, the consumers are the kings and queens who control the fate of every enterprise.  It is we who determine the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that stand the best chance of satisfying what real people really want in this world.

Freedom is the difference between the iPhone and the government-made $900 toilet plunger. 

Freedom is the difference between the Wright brothers' astonishing success and Samuel Pierpont Langley's government-subsidized airplane that crashed into the Potomac River every time it flew off the top of its houseboat launching pad. 

Freedom is the difference between your life, your choice of how you want to live, versus some far-flung government bureaucrat bossing your around against your will. 

It's North Korea's grinding poverty versus South Korea's prosperity and flourishing--which was the same situation in Soviet East Germany versus the much freer West Germany.

If you fail to vote, you have no grounds for complaining about how awful things are in our country. 

If you vote for Republicans, you are indeed part of the problem.

If you vote for Democrats, you are a vastly bigger part of the problem.

If you vote for Libertarians, at least your vote will show up on the political radar as a vote for the bedrock, indispensable virtue of freedom for all.  Moreover, since Libertarian voters are more likely to take votes away from Republicans, a vote for the Libertarian is usually like a vote for the Democrats. 

If you vote for the Greens, you demonstrate that you have likely been seduced by the ubiquitous, jaw-dropping swindle which is the kind of Environmentalist religion we see among the supporters of such data-altering frauds, liers, and ideologues as James Hansen, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, Paul Jones (of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) and the summary writers of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The ambition of all these people is essentially to take over industrial production in the name of social justice (former French President Jacques Chirac actually said precisely this in his address to the last Kyoto Protocol conference at the Hague.)

If you vote for the Socialist Party of America or the Communist Party of America, I suggest that pack up all your stuff a move to Venezuela, where the citizens are enjoying the fruits of actual socialism.  Don't tell me that true socialism has yet to be tried.  Don't tell me that democratic socialism works in Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have much greater economic freedom than we have in the US. Their system combines massive welfare statism on the productive back of capitalism.  But among these countries, only Norway, thanks to its huge oil inventories, is not now in a descending economic spiral as a consequence of the welfare statism.  Maggie Thatcher rightly said that socialism can work only until it runs out of other people's money.  Sweden and Denmark are  now running out of their productive citizens' money. E P N 2018.1106

What Counts is the Set of Your Sails, 
Not the Gales

Among art's most important purposes, it should exult, it should inspire, and should aim for the exalted and the beautiful.  Among the poets taken most seriously by the Twentieth century's literati, there was less of this exultation than in the century before them--a sad and disheartening fact.

Here is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an ebullient cheerleader from that earlier century, who offers some guidance for unfolding your life, a voice that confidently sang out long before the debilitating fog of postmodern nihilism rolled in from the sea of bad philosophy.

                      Winds of Fate

                      Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

E   P   N

2018.1021

"Dawn Patrol," a silly little poem with commentary

"Dawn Patrol"

Eric Paul Nolte

A little poem below, a tiny burst of sweet silliness I wrote, along with some commentary on why I came to write it.

Terri is campaigning, slowly but slyly, to get a dog. I resist because dogs are so much work. But I do love dogs anyway! I especially remember how much I loved Star, starting when the girls were little. Star was a big old black standard poodle. Well, actually he was more gray than black, and he was half a size smaller than a standard poodle, but what a winning smile and eager mien! We all adored him.

Now, I just stumbled across a lovely article in The Science Dog, by Linda P. Case, called "I Yawn for Your Love," which describes studies done on the nature of canine yawning. She opens her article by describing how her dog, a Brittany named Vinny, begins every day by yawning hugely in her face.

On her Facebook page, Cynthia Gillis posted Ms. Case's article and there challenged our mutual friend, John Joseph Enright, to write some verse, which John subsequently did with his usual, inimitable wit.

A line or two came to my mind, so I too tried my hand at writing a little, um, doggerel (as it were) on the subject, and amused myself for a few minutes with this silliness.

Here it is:

                             Dawn Patrol

Rising just above the distant mountain ridge,

The sun's slender crescent swells at dawn

While Vinny, Linda's Brittany, creeps and peeks

Above his sleeping master's sheets. Then with a gaping yawn

Of dog breath wafting up her nose--oh, how she freaks! 

And then he crawls across her legs as if upon a bridge

And pulls abeam her face to softly nuzzle Linda's cheeks! 

                                          E P N

2018.1017

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Eric Paul Nolte

A young friend, Felix Mueller, just posted on Facebook an engaging little meditation on how he and his wife, Kate, made their way to America from Germany not long ago. He feels that he is now facing some difficult choices in life. 

I too am facing some tough choices, but where Felix is a young man, I am down at the other end of the road.

I am feeling compelled to reinvent myself in the wake of my retirement, which was mandated by an Act of Congress. 

I wrote Felix:

Your path has been very impressive so far! I have been delighted to follow the story of your and Kate's unfolding.

I greatly identify with the matters you are now wrestling with.

However, I think it may miss the point to say, as you do, that this kind of struggle may just be a part of being young. It's not youth, per se, of course, because it greatly depends on the individual!

There are people young and old who remain deaf to the very idea that they have much of a choice in steering their lives on any personal course across the sea of life.

Others of any age can know that life is essentially a matter of making choices.

I believe that most of us acquire our values and, more broadly, our sense of life by an uncritical process of breathing-in whatever ideas happened to be in the air when we dropped off the branches of the tree into which life delivered us.

Nothing so passive for you or others like us who made our way to Ayn Rand's challenging ideas!

Now I find myself at the other end of life, teetering on the brink of Old Geezerhood, with my career as an airline pilot ended by an Act of Congress--that bossy, meddlesome gang that always thinks it knows better than we how to run our lives-- that got me frog-marched out to pasture just because I turned 65 years old.

In short, I am having to reinvent myself in the same way that so many feel compelled to do right after college.

For me, I never had to struggle to find things I loved. Rather, my problem has always been how to limit my pursuits to a path that is practicable.

I loved airplanes, music, writing, philosophy, history, literature, science, economics--all things that were artistically and soulfully expressive, or that offered explanatory power for why people do the weird and wonderful things they do!

I remain fascinated by physics and especially by those philosophical aspects of the field that made such a confusing account of things.1

So, my advice, for what it's worth, as I formulate it for myself:

I want to create for myself a life of joy, meaning, purpose.

I need to identify and unfold the gifts I am lucky enough to have.

Which gifts? Most of us have more gifts than a single life can allow us to develop very fully. So which ones should I pursue?

I should strive to identify something that lies at the intersection of:

1. Something I love, something I feel I can learn to do unusually well (if not uniquely well) in the world;

2. A pursuit that stands perhaps the best chance of letting me feel that I have shown up in the world in a way that can make a difference like only I can make.

3. At the end of the day, I need to feel that I have loved doing what I do and that I have nurtured a circle of loving friends and family.

All these are the very stuff of life.

A final point: think about how Alex Epstein as a philosopher is taking the wonderful project he created, the Center for Industrial Progress, into what may become a fount of goodness, sanity, and truly world-shaking gravity! Alex has created for himself and his like-minded associates a place of meaning, purpose, and joy that attracts customers to pay him enough money for him to thrive and flourish!

Felix, I will follow your and Kate's continued unfolding with interest!

Viel Glück!

E P N

________________________________________________________

1. There were epistemological rabbit holes that snagged Einstein [like the analytic-synthetic dichotomy], and then there was the Kantian skepticism that seduced Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, et al, who brought their already committed and contradictory assumptions about the essential Unreality of Reality to bear on their formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the nature of light--i.e. that light is not just a puzzling matter that needs to be further investigated because it displays characteristics of both particles and waves, but rather to say that light is a "wavicle." Right, it’s a wavicle. Now we know! Hallelujah! No need to look into this matter any further! Which is like saying that now we understand something because, "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it. QED."

2018.1013

word count, c. 810