What Ronald Reagan Means to me

Originally published on BigPeace

February 2011

Ronald Reagan—Inspiration for Personal Development

The first Presidential election I was old enough to vote was 1980, Ronald Reagan’s first successful run. My journey during his two terms was a miracle—from a lost anti-American liberal to a proud American veteran and conservative. Was that a coincidence? Or was it leadership?

I was a 20 year old, maggot-infested, long-haired, skull-full-of-mush product of liberal brain-washing. I read Time magazine every week, and watched Walter Cronkite on the 6 o’clock news. I’d spent twelve years in National Education Association controlled public schools. I knew that Joseph McCarthy was bad, that Richard Nixon had done something really bad and was “Tricky.”

I knew that it was cool to “party.” That drinking and marijuana were ways to open your mind and show how counter-culture you were. I knew that Ronald “Raygun-zzzz,” like they pronounced it on the Woodstock album, was a whacky old kook.

As I looked for my voter registration card, I couldn’t have cared less about the vote. I had no appreciation of my country, my freedom, or the grave responsibility that our country entrusted me with—the right to vote.

Drinking a six-pack every night, everything was pretty much a fog to me. I’d screwed up, big time, flunked out of college. Now I waited for the date to report to Air Force basic training. Riding my ten-speed over the Roanoke River, up the hill to Gaston for a four hour shift the in mini-mart a couple times a week kept me busy.

Faced with the momentous decision, Jimmy Carter, or Ronald Reagan, I threw away my vote. Thank God I didn’t vote for Carter, but I didn’t vote for Reagan either. Something I’d read in National Lampoon stuck with me when I went to the fire station that day, and I wrote in “Nobody.” What a waste.

Basic training in San Antonio started a week after President Reagan’s inauguration, the end of January 1981. Sobered up, I started a slow progression to reality. Basic whipped a little discipline into me. Vietnamese language training and technical training showed me that I could learn, and had a talent for languages, and a passionate interest in Asia.

Three years in the Philippines kept my interest in Asia alive, and opened my eyes to the beauty of America.

Discharged and back in college, it was President Reagan’s second term. Of course, I’d voted for the Gipper the second time around, fully aware and sober.

Being a veteran in a university, during the long peaceful Cold War interregnum, was eye-opening. I saw the liberal bias and vile anti-Americanism on campus, directed at President Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was my hero now. He stood up to the communists, who I now understood, after studying the Vietnam war, and communism, were exactly what President Reagan called them—evil. And he stood up to the American friends of the communists, the Progressives, liberals—Carter, the Kennedys, McGovern, Jesse Jackson, and the press.

Every day, I realized more and more how right President Reagan was, in foreign policy and in domestic policy. By 1989, when President Reagan left office, I was teaching at a university in Saudi Arabia, after working in a refugee camp in Southeast Asia.

Every day, I thanked God I was an American, and that my country was a shining beacon of hope, freedom, and prosperity for the world. I was proud to be a Reagan American.

Ronald Reagan, reviled by the Progressive haters, and denigrated by the liberal press, was the ideal of American humility, humor, dignity, honor, and quiet determination to do the right thing.

Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration coincided with my own coming of age, and emergence from a liberal haze of ignorance and weak-minded following.

Ronald Reagan was a real American hero. An original and a role model. With his philosophical and moral guidance, we all had a chance to glimpse his shining city on a hill. Did you?

Was it a coincidence that I made the journey from a lost liberal to American conservative during President Reagan’s time in office? What do you think?

Maghreb Mutinies: Karl Marx Meet Sayid Qutb; Lenin Meet Osama bin Laden

Maghreb Mutinies: Karl Marx Meet Sayid Qutb; Lenin Meet Osama bin Laden

Originally appeared in BigPeace,; January 28, 2011

The Wikileaks revolutions sweeping the Arab world seem democratically promising. Tweeting twenty-somethings challenge iron-fisted dictators. Populist mutineers trash the ruling clique’s Mediterranean villas. Royal families (and wannabe royal families) pack up their gold and flee to Europe or a nearby sympathetic kingdom.

Popular sentiment in the North African countries (“the Maghreb,” the lands beyond the sunset) appears to support reform. But it is a broad-based support—with a wide range of flavors. All the reformers, in all the Maghreb, share a commonality—they are Muslim.

Recent history provides a parallel to guide our understanding, and response, to the Maghreb Mutiny—the Russian Revolution.

A broad-based coalition reflecting popular discontent, made up of a spectrum of loosely linked groups that shared a common philosophical base. In Russia, the common base was socialism. In the Maghreb the common base is Islam.

The majority of people in 1905 Russia supported government reform to relieve the oppression of the tsar’s royal dictates. A socialist coalition, ranging from the radical Marxists, to the more moderate Social Revolutionists, took control of the Russian government after the tsar fell to riots, strikes, and protests.

The majority of people in the Maghreb support government reforms to relieve the oppression of their leaders’ secular dictates. While details are sketchy in the Maghreb, it is very likely that the opposition is gathering a coalition, which will be formed around their common belief system—Islam. It is also sure that the Muslim coalition will represent a range of flavors—from modernist Islam, to Islamic extremists. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood, followers of the teachings of Sayid Qutb, and bin Laden followers are surely in the coalition.

If, as has happened in Tunisia, and as it seems increasingly likely elsewhere, the Maghreb Mutinies succeed in overthrowing dictators, the aftermath could continue the parallels to the Russian revolution. This will not be a good development, for America, or for the people involved.

After the broad-based Russian socialist revolution, a committed extremist minority, the communist Bolsheviks, out-maneuvered the majority. The communists were tireless in using political, military, and terror tactics to wear down their coalition partners. Finally, the Bolsheviks seized power from their coalition partners, in October 1917.

The immediate aftermath was a bloodbath—the Red Terror. The Red Terror was followed by several years of ruthless civil war. The communists wiped out their coalition partners and anyone else who resisted their rule. The next 70 years were miserable, bloody, soul-deadening proof of the bankruptcy of communism.

While we may cheer a seemingly democratic uprising in the Maghreb, to paraphrase the prophet Hosea, the sowers of the wind shall reap the whirlwind. The fall of secular oppressors could very likely lead to the rise of religious oppressors, even against the will of the majority. A Green Terror could very easily mimic the Red Terror.

Marxist extremists did it in Russia; Qutubist extremists could repeat the strategy and tactics in the Maghreb.

If ever America needed a self-interested, strong, clear voice in the realm of foreign affairs, now is the time. Unfortunately, we are saddled with the reed- thin, apologetic Obama foreign affairs crowd. Following Obama’s Cairo apology to the Muslim world, he withdrew to the golf course on Ft. Myers.

His Middle East representatives, czar George Mitchell, and foreign affairs neophyte (which part of first lady of Arkansas prepared her for international affairs?) Hillary Clinton, are doomed to disrespect in a region where face and power are requirements for effectiveness.

Will we sit back and watch the second coming of an extremist coup following a popular revolution, dooming to slavery the masses struggling for freedom? Or will we aid and abet the wrong side? The President’s shaky foundation--apologizing for America, and uncertain bows to kings—does not bode well for America’s interests. Prepare for the whirlwinds.

BigPeace.com article: Qutb Meet Lenin; El-Baradei Meet Kerensky

SOTUS 2011--WTF?

BigPeace article: Obama 2012--WTF?

Assange the Anarchist

Wik-An-Ar-Ki in the Cloud

By: Kent Clizbe

Originally appeared in BigPeace; Dec. 19, 2010

Anarchists in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries plotted violence against governments around the globe. Their anti-organization philosophy was attractive to a strange fringe of social misfits. Some recognized the reality of might versus right. Some advocated illegal acts to satisfy personal desires, instead of ideology. Others advocated a vague belief in free love and multiple sexual partners. Their anti-establishment beliefs seemed to parallel the objectives of socialists and communists. Anarchists joined the Russian revolutionaries to fight the Czar.

Zo d’Axa, French anarchist, a predecessor of Assange

By definition, anarchists are unorganized. But loosely linked groups of anarchists helped the communist revolution. Less than five years after the Bolsheviks seized power, anarchists were destroyed by the communist dictator’s intelligence service. Arrested, convicted, exiled to the gulag, or executed, the anarchists felt the sting of the dictator’s lash as did the capitalists they despised.

Emma Goldman, Russian Anarchist

Fast forward to the 1990s, anarchists were like a global mobile party. Dressed in black, faces fashionably cloaked in Palestinian head scarves, they partied at global economic meetings around the globe. Trashing McDonalds was the anarchist statement of 2000.

Then the internet changed everything. Suddenly thin techno-geeks who couldn’t get dates were empowered. They could express their individuality by hacking. They hacked into government systems, commercial systems, stole credit card numbers, and generally wreaked havoc.

Cloaking their hacking antics in some sort of ideology must have seemed like a good idea. Some of them cloak themselves in anti-establishment anarchist robes. Much like the anarchists of a hundred years ago, these cyberpunks seem to be mostly unable to fit in to society.

Ironically, the tools the anti-establishment, anarchist hackers use—the internet, personal computers, wireless communications, and other technology—are the peak achievements of capitalism’s technological and industrial efforts. Without the combination of advanced social and government organizations providing the framework for capitalist endeavor, none of the technology so ably used by the anarchist hackers would even exist.

From the point of view of government and industry security specialists, the Julian Assange Wikileaks story is a nightmare. One of the first rules for any security is control. You need control of the input into the system. You need control of the network itself, the physical wiring or wireless connections. And you need to control access to your system. But the internet has thrived on anarchic freedom.

This relative freedom has worked pretty well up to now. Some countries block the free flow of information. Chinese government wraps any opinions it doesn’t like in a security blanket, behind the Chinese internet firewall. Other authoritarian governments control the flow of electrons through their networks, and control the bits delivered to consumers under their control.

Now, the anarchist Assange has revealed the ultimate vulnerability of the “Cloud.” The current Cloud dreams will dissolve with the inevitable response to the anarchist exposure of massive amounts of classified information.

During the dot.com frenzy of the late 1990’s I was the premier computational linguist recruiter. No one had the knowledge of the specialty, combined with a network of professionals that I did. My business was pure knowledge and relationships. Communicating only on the internet and telephone, I established relationships with businesses that needed computational linguists. They paid me to find professionals who were ready, willing and able to work for them.

Without the internet, I could never have created the business, nor been successful. But at the same time, I had to protect my business from the internet. I kept notes on each candidate and client, candid assessments of their personalities, and personal and professional needs and requirements. If those private business files were exposed on the internet, the result would have been disastrous, to my business, to my clients, and to the candidates.

An early Cloud company offered to put all my recruiting records and communication on their servers, removing the need for me to maintain my own databases in house. It didn’t make sense to me—give up control of the keys to my business, in return for what? I didn’t play, and still don’t. Losing control of the keys to the business, putting confidential details in the Cloud seemed insane.

In the same way, governments and companies’ internal communications and deliberations must be kept secret. These communications are the internal thought processes of organizations. These are confidential for good reason. Public exposure would destroy their ability to operate. Protection of this information is a fundamental right. The U.S. Constitution protects us in the Bill of Rights—the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Assange and his anarchist buddies illegally obtain personal and confidential information from free governments, like the U.S., and from businesses. Like the Russian anarchists after 1917, they may very well soon find the truth in the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.”

Although the anti-American forces now sing his praises, it’s unlikely Assange would prosper in a totalitarian society. Imagine how he or his fellow anarchists would fare in a Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, or Burmese prison cell. Assange may soon be begging to spend time in an American prison.

BigPeace.com article: Wik-Anarki

Obama's Extra-judicial Killings

Selective Progressive Outrage? Extra-judicial Killings or Water-boarding, Take Your Pick

By Kent Clizbe

Originally appeared in BigPeace; Dec. 9, 2010

Newsweek first revealed that the Bush administration used harsh interrogation tactics to obtain intelligence from terrorist masterminds in 2004. American Progressives leapt at the chance to attack the evil, war-mongering, Halliburton-loving, Cheney-controlled Bush. Their pious, humanitarian tinged caterwauling was heard non-stop, coast to coast, on every Progressive media outlet, from every college campus, and from Hollywood.

Progressive hand-wringing over the horror of water-boarding grew to epic proportions. They called for war crimes tribunals for the unrepentant fascist scum working to keep them safe from Al Qaeda. Hazing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib—in which helpless prisoners were stripped naked and forced to wear demeaning clothing—became, in the fevered Progressive imagination, tantamount to Auschwitz.

When I attended the International Ethics in Intelligence conference in 2006, the Progressive academics in attendance were mainly interested in discussing one topic—torture. Of the hundreds in attendance, I only ran across two other members who had ever been intelligence officers in the field. Few of the presenters on Torture, or the myriad related “ethical” issues had ever been at the pointy end of the spear. They lectured on “Just War Theory” and Hegelian ethics as applied to an Aristotelian world view, or other pseudo-intellectual rot. To a person, they condemned the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation tactics. The Guantanamo Bay prison camp was another popular target of revulsion.

Fast forward just four years later. Torture is out of the news. Gitmo remains open. The media quietly reports that CIA “drone strikes” (missile attacks from an unmanned aerial vehicles) and associated “targeted killings” have sky-rocketed since Obama gained control of the covert action elements of the U.S. Government. 

Our new President, the Progressive hero, rules the Executive Branch. The Executive controls the CIA, and all law enforcement and intelligence, including covert action. Covert killings, including UAV targeted killings, require a “finding” to be signed by the President.

In 2006 there were a reported total of two drone attacks in Pakistan, which killed a reported 23 people. In the first 11 months of 2010 the Obama administration is reportedly carried out 106 attacks in Pakistan, with a death toll of up to 857. Evidently, Obama’s left hand has been quite busy signing findings between rounds of golf and elbow-banging sessions on the hardwood court.

The faux outrage over water-boarding was over the top. Progressives vowed revenge on the Bush administration members who had reviewed and approved the harsh methods. The Progressive reaction to low-level, untrained jailers playing pranks on defenseless prisoners at Abu Ghraib created world-wide ill-will against the U.S. and our interests. In response, Americans were taken hostage and brutally tortured. Terrorists sawed and hacked the heads off of American and other allied hostages. They shared their gory work online.

The Progressive outrage machine seems to have run out of steam. Where is the outrage over the extra-judicial killings of 857 people, in Pakistan alone? We are not at war with Pakistan. The Obama administration waffles on whether we are still at war or not, and if so, with whom. People, including American and allied citizens, are alleged to be members of terrorist organizations. They are alleged to be planning terrorist attacks.

The Obama administration made a public vow to use legal and defensible approaches to combating “man-caused contingencies,” or whatever their political commissars have decided to call terrorism. They vowed to close Gitmo. They vowed to bring clarity to dealing with the poor innocents the bad Bushies had snatched from their cradles and sent to the prison on Cuba.

Their vain, self-congratulatory certainty of moral superiority was, and is, a sham. Now that Obama and his minions control the covert action apparatus, it has shifted into high gear. They operate in ways that were not even conceivable during the Bush administration. American, international, and local laws be damned.

While we surely need to have counter-terrorist operations, we also need to consider American and international law when we take those actions. A German legislator, a member of the Left party (leftovers from East Germany), pointed out that “Obama is not God,” after a German was killed. Maybe the understatement of the century, but I believe that unrepentant communist is quite prescient. It is possible that Obama’s extra-judicial killings could be his Watergate. Who knew what and when?

Anwar al-Awlaki is certainly affiliated with terrorism. He clearly inspires al Qaeda wannabes, including the Ft Hood terrorist, Nidal Hassan, and the hapless Christmas 2009 Panties Bomber.

It appears that Obama’s policy is to target for extra-judicial killing by a UAV missile American citizens who inspire terrorists to plan attacks. Considering the actual, armed attack on the Discovery Channel by eco-terrorist (“humans are filth”) James Lee, Al Gore should probably check in with the White House regularly.

BigPeace.com article--Selective Progressive Outrage? Water-boarding or Extra-judicial Killings? Take your pick.

Tilting at Lavendar Windmills

War-time Priorities—Tilting at Lavender Windmills

By Kent Clizbe

Originally appeared in BigPeace; Dec. 8, 2010

We are a nation at war. We are engaged in combat in two countries. We have combat and support troops in scores of countries around the globe. Hostile groups plan and operate 24 hours a day against us. They would love to get their hands on an American to take hostage. They would love to pull off a Mumbai attack in downtown San Francisco.

Our enemies plot ways to weaken our economy and our society. Chinese espionage agents actively steal our economic secrets. Russian espionage officers run networks under commercial cover, aer arrested, and then whisked out of the country in a 10 for 2 swap. The Russians muscle us into a new nuclear arms treaty.

A rogue Aussie cyber-punk operating a global intelligence collection network, with funding from who knows where, recruits penetrations of our military and diplomatic services. His recruits provide him with hundreds of thousands of classified government communications. He brazenly flaunts American security, and publishes his espionage haul on the internet, and shares the raw take with a variety of hostile news outlets, including the New York Times.

An insane punk Communist dictatorship in Korea teases and taunts American good will. After taking millions in assistance funds in exchange for quitting its nuclear weapons development programs, North Korea missiles an allied ship. Then, rubbing our nose in its mess, the little commie-state shells an allied island into oblivion.

Tinpot Latin American communist dictatorships flaunt their disdain for American leadership.

And what is the Progressive Obama administration’s national security focus? Ensuring that homosexuals have equal rights to join and serve in America’s all-volunteer military. Obama’s campaign to end “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is pay-back to his rabid homosexual and Progressive base.

We have had more killed in action in Afghanistan in 2010 than during the eight years previously. We are still battling terrorist and insurgent forces in Iraq. We have combat troops across the globe. We are assisting multiple countries around the world in counter-terrorism operations.

Our military resources are thin in many areas. We need many more linguists—Dari, Pashto, Arabic, and Farsi. We need technical skills—computers and communications. We need people who can operate in foreign cultures.

But in all of the far-flung places we are operating, against various enemies, and with various allies, there has not been one public report of our military not having enough homosexuals to get the job done. I have not heard of an unmet demand for open homosexuals in our forward operating bases in Afghanistan.

Our military should be doing exactly what we need to do to win our wars. Our military should be doing exactly what we need to do to support American and allied interests abroad. Our military is not the place for Politically Correct attacks on our culture.

Those who, during our prosecution of a global war, waste one second of one military member’s time on a social issue, come very close to being a friend of our enemies. One general, one private, one sailor, one airman, any single military member who wastes one minute dealing with the Obama administration’s, and their Pelosite friends’ corrosive drive to allow open homosexuals to serve in the military, is wasting American military resources. Those resource could be used to eliminate the Taliban. Instead, our military is forced to waste massive amounts of time and energy tilting at social engineering windmills.

Stop the cultural combat. Leave the military alone. Let them fight. Let them win. Anything less is near treason.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Tilting at Lavender Windmills

North Korea: Time to Lead, Barack

North Korea: President Obama, Time To Be A Leader

Originally appeared in BigPeace; Nov. 24, 2010

The two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, have made clear their lack of respect for our callow and shallow President, as he traipsed around the world with his gold-plated posse in tow.

Tehran continues its march towards production of nuclear weapons just as fast as Russia, North Korea, and rogue suppliers of technology can feed them resources.

Meanwhile, North Korea manipulated American scientists to reveal the advanced stages of their nuclear weapons production facilities. And just in case Obama was on the golf course, or flying to a ceremony in Europe, and didn’t hear that message, the communist Koreans on Tuesday carpet-shelled a free Korean island.

Can you hear them now, Mr. Obama? Do you realize that it wasn’t President Bush that they hate? Do you realize how ridiculous they consider you? Do you realize how much you have humiliated the country that you chose to call home? Do you realize that America is the vanguard of good in the world?

The Axis of Evil are not humane. They are not humanitarian. They are not caring. They are not fair. They are not free. They are not open. They are not dedicated to human decency, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

They are dedicated to control. Control of their own people. Control of you. Control of me. For what purpose? For evil, Mr. Obama. They are evil. Their goals are evil. Their intent is evil. They mask their goals in ideology—religious (Iran’s theocracy) or quasi-religious (North Korea’s worship of its leader and his spawn). But their ultimate goal is to control.

You kow-tow to kings, despots, and tyrants. Bullies sense weakness. Bullies sense cowardice. The Axis of Evil are bullies. Your actions since inauguration signal weakness and cowardice. Allies, foes, and potential foes all around the world hear and see your message of weakness. They smell blood in the water.



It is clear that you have neither the experience nor aptitude to undertake the job which you won in 2008. But you could show your character. Fire your team. Then resign. Allow leaders with experience and wisdom to make the hard decisions required to keep our country and its allies safe and free.

The whole world is watching. China is intrigued. Russia awaits. Do the right thing, for America.

BigPeace.com article on North Korea's artillery attack.