A Left Coast Conservative

"Gotta Serve Somebody"

2009-07-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

In the words of one-time evangelist, Bob Dylan, everyone has "Gotta serve somebody":

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we all have to choose whom
we are going to follow. In the Book of Luke there is a story about
the temptation of Jesus by the Devil:

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an
instant all the kingdoms of the world.
And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and
splendor, for it has been given to me,
and I can give it to anyone I want to.
So if you worship me, it will all be yours."
Luke 4:5-7 (New International Version)

The leaders of our country have this decision to make also.
Will they lead in a way that "worships" and glorifies the
Creator of this universe, or will they aspire to the "splendor"
of the current World Master, the Devil?

The Coming Fight Over Religious Liberty

2009-06-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Great article by Matt Lewis on what may be in store for the church in America if "gay rights" are fully embraced. If there is a "phobia" related to the "gay" debate, this may be it. Among others, Christ followers are rightfully fearful of the likely black-hole consequences of the casting-off this societal restraint:

Yesterday, President Obama spoke to gay leaders to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York. The riots took place after a police raid on a gay nightclub in Greenwich Village, and are considered the start of the gay-rights movement in the United States.

So far, the response to Obama's remarks seems a bit schizophrenic....

But while Obama is being politically sagacious (after all, he does have a car company to run and two wars to fight), it appears the gay rights movement is slowly gaining steam, as younger Americans show a more tolerant attitude toward homosexuality. And there is little doubt the intense political pressure from the left will ultimately force him to act on at least some of their agenda.

In my estimation, so long as the debate is presented as a group seeking civil rights vs. a group attempting to deny civil rights, Americans who favor traditional values will continue to lose the argument. Of course, the debate is much more complex than that. There are many unintended consequences to consider....

Consider, for example, the prospects of a church school that refuses to hire a transgendered teacher because doing so is counter to their theology. This could ultimately be viewed as discrimination, and, at the very least, open the school up to civil lawsuits -- some of them, perhaps, filed solely for political purposes. The school would either have to hire some transgendered teachers, or lie about it -- either way, it would be forced by the government to betray a tenet of its theology...

Read the full article at:

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/06/30/the-coming-fight-over-religious-liberty/ (accessed 6-30-2009)

Cap and Trade GOP "traitors"

2009-06-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

Here is the list of the 8 GOP Reps that voted FOR Cap and Trade HR 2454 on June 26, 2009. What were they thinking? Maybe a Dove Bar from Nancy Pelosi did the trick:

Mary Bono Mack R (CA)
Mike Castle R (DW)
Mark Steven Kirk R (IL)
Leonard Lance R (NJ)
Frank LoBiondo R (NJ)
John McHugh R (NY)
Dave Reichert R (WA)
Chris Smith R (NJ)

From Tea Party Patriots Website http://www.teapartypatriots.org/

Obama is a statist, not a socialist

2009-06-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

Written by Edward H. Crane

Thursday, 30 April 2009 13:29

Pres. Barack Obama is not a socialist. He is a thoroughgoing statist, perhaps the worst in American history. And with Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, he's got some serious competition. Republicans in Congress lack the leadership to challenge the president's audacious power grabs. More important, they lack any serious philosophical basis for doing so. The acronym RINO is an oxymoron, for the name "Republican" in fact designates someone with a commitment to nothing more than maintaining political power. The purpose of maintaining that power is to, well, maintain that power.

There is a reason sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are going through the roof. The book is nothing if not prescient. The "Troubled Assets Relief Program" is straight from its pages. Monday's New York Times front page suggests Atlas may be starting to shrug. "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals," laments the headline. Hmm. Wonder why there would be a doctor shortage in the face of nationalized health care? Perhaps bright young people considering a career don't want to work for the federal bureaucracy?

Time for those conservatives serious about limited government to re-read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Strategically, conservatives have made three major mistakes. The first was to follow the advice of supply-side guru (and big-government Democrat) Jude Wanniski and not talk about spending cuts, much less the proper role of government. Economic growth replaced individual liberty as the rallying cry of far too many GOPers. Second, the neocons — mostly statists themselves — should never have been accepted into the fold. All they give us is a war against a country that never attacked us and schemes for "national greatness" like going to Mars. Enough. Finally, conservatives should jettison the social agenda of gay marriage, flag burning, and school prayer, and focus instead on federalism. Politics is about man's relationship to the state. That relationship, to be healthy, should be minimal.

Edward H. Crane is the president of the Cato Institute.

http://www.thebusinessjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=350:obama-is-a-statist-not-a-socialist&catid=28:commentary&Itemid=319 (accessed 6-28-09)

Sincere Tyranny

2009-06-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny" on my iPod. Truly a great book expounding the basis for conservatism. The polar opposite of "statism".

At the end of Chapter 2 Mark talks about the statist who truly believes that what he is doing is for "the good" of the ruled. He quoted C.S. Lewis most appropriately:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

On the Fence for Cap & Trade?

2009-06-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

List of "On Fence" Members of Congress for "Cap & Trade":

Call them at 202-224-3121 (or 225-3121) and tell them NO to CAP & TRADE!

Email links and direct lines shown below (hope they all work):

Republicans:

Bartlett (MD) http://bartlett.house.gov/Email_Roscoe/ 202 225-2721

Bono Mack (CA) http://bono.house.gov/Contact_Mary/ContactForm.htm (202) 225-5330

Castle (DE) http://www.castle.house.gov/Contact/ContactForm.htm 202.225.4165 Twitter @repmikecastle

Dent (PA) http://dent.house.gov/htbin/formproc_za.pl?/dent/zip_qual_flags.txt&form=/dent/subscribe.shtml

202-225-6411

Ehlers (MI) https://writerep.house.gov/htbin/wrep_findrep?HIP865926342.23387.4114 (202) 225-3831

Frelinghuysen (NJ) http://frelinghuysen.house.gov/contactus/form.cfm (202) 225-5034

Gerlach (PA) https://writerep.house.gov/htbin/wrep_findrep?HIP865926342.26633.3031 202.225.4315

Inglis (SC) http://inglis.house.gov/contact.asp?content=sections/contact/write_inglis (202) 225-6030

Tim Johnson (IL) http://timjohnson.house.gov/?sectionid=56&sectiontree=3,56 202-225-2371

Kirk (IL) http://www.house.gov/htbin/formproc_za/kirk/ht_zip_parms.txt&form=/kirk/messageform.shtml 202-225-4835

Lance (NJ) http://lance.house.gov/?sectionid=48&sectiontree=3,48 (202) 225-5361

LoBiondo (NJ) http://www.house.gov/lobiondo/IMA/issue.htm (202) 225-6572

Petri (WI) https://forms.house.gov/htbin/formproc_za/petri/zip_authen.txt&form=/petri/contact_email.shtml&pass 202-225-2476

Platts (PA) http://www.house.gov/platts/email.shtml (202) 225-5836

Ros-Lehtinen (FL) http://ros-lehtinen.house.gov/IMA/issue.htm 202-225-3931 Twitter @IRL

Democrats:

Altmire (PA) https://forms.house.gov/altmire/webforms/issue_subscribe.htm 202-225-2565

Bright (AL) https://forms.house.gov/bright/contact-form.shtml (202) 225-2901)

Dahlkemper (PA) https://forms.house.gov/dahlkemper/contact-form.shtml (202) 225-5406

Drieshaus (OH) https://forms.house.gov/driehaus/webforms/issue_subscribe.htm (202) 225-2216

Ellsworth (IN) http://www.ellsworth.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=325&Itemid= (202) 225-4636

Kissell (NC) https://forms.house.gov/kissell/contact-form.shtml (202) 225-3715

Kratovil (MD) https://forms.house.gov/kratovil/contact-form.shtml (202) 225-5311

Kanjorski (PA) http://kanjorski.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1479&Itemid= (202) 225-6511

Minnick(ID) https://forms.house.gov/minnick/contact-form.shtml (202) 225-6611

Teague (NM) http://forms.house.gov/teague/webforms/issue_subscribe.htm (202) 225-2365

Obamas Slow to Find a Church in Which to Serve

2009-06-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

At a White House Press Briefing on June 19, 2009 Robert Gibbs was asked about President Obama's search for a church home:

Q Okay. Last topic. The prayer breakfast today reminded me of something the President said during the campaign, that he would hope to or he probably would have a church selected for his and the girls' and Michelle's attendance in January. We're now in June -- can you update us on either the President's churchgoing habits or his process in selecting a church?

MR. GIBBS: I know they're continuing to look for a permanent place, mindful of many things.

Q Such as?

MR. GIBBS: What it does when a President decides to walk out of this building and walk into a different building and disrupt worshippers that are attending for their own personal reasons. I think that is certainly -- that's not an exhaustive list, but certainly one of the things that the President has on his mind about that.

Q Anything else that he has on his mind about it?

MR. GIBBS: Yes, I think there's wanting to ensure that he finds a church that he, Michelle, and the girls feel most comfortable in. (emphasis mine)

Q Robert, following on that --

Q Does he use the chapel in Camp David?

MR. GIBBS: He does.

Q Robert, a follow on church?

MR. GIBBS: Sure.

Q Is the President, since he has not found a church home here in Washington yet, is he -- is a minister being brought in to the White House on Sundays to have a service with the family? And is that also happening at Camp David?

MR. GIBBS: Well, as I've just said to Major, the President has been and very much enjoys the chapel and the chaplain up at Camp David. I don't know that anybody has been brought in here.
----------------------

My understanding of a mature Christian's search for a Church is that it is more about finding a place where one can serve rather than "feel comfortable". After all Michelle was just in San Francisco on Monday to kick off the "United We Serve" program. Perhaps if we could use Federal tax dollars to pay volunteers to serve in Church, the Obama's would be more anxious to find a Church home?

President throws US Support Behind People of Iran

2009-06-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

Many have voiced concerns about how the President has been reticent in his comments on the unrest in Iran. However, the President of the United States spoke very clearly to the people of Iran in 2008. But it was not Barack Obama, it was G.W. Bush:

To the people of Iran: You are rich in culture and talent. You have a right to live under a government that listens to your wishes, respects your talents, and allows you to build better lives for your families. Unfortunately, your government denies you these opportunities, and threatens the peace and stability of your neighbors. So we call on the regime in Tehran to heed your will, and to make itself accountable to you. The day will come when the people of Iran have a government that embraces liberty and justice, and Iran joins the community of free nations. And when that good day comes, you will have no better friend than the United States of America.

G.W. Bush , Emirates Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, January 13, 2008

http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/articles/2008/special-reports/080113-bush-speech.html (accessed 6-21-09

Fathers' Day

2009-06-21T08:45:00.001-07:00

This past Mothers' Day I wrote that we should all get down on our knees and praise our mothers for not aborting us. That may seem like an odd thing to say, even harsh. But the fact of the matter is, in our country each of us lived the first nine months or so of our existence in a very precarious position. According to our Supreme Court, and the apparent opinions of a large number of Americans, we had no inherent rights during that time. Particularly we lacked the right to life.

Irrespective of who our mother was, regardless of her skin-color or economic status, in the event that she was of the inclination to not have a baby, she would have been able to remove our growing body from her womb and be done with us. For about 50 million Americans who are unable to read this post today, that is exactly what decision their mother made.

So the fact that you have access to read this (i.e. you are alive) means that you were one of the lucky ones to have a mother who did not choose to end your life.

Although abortion was not as readily available previous to perhaps 100 years ago, each one of us reading this post today should recognize the "miracle" that we are even here. Each and every one of our ancestors, including our mother, had to go through the same nine month gestation period. Disease, famine, poisoning, accident; each of these and many others could have ended the family line at any point for any of our ancestors. In other words, an accident that killed your great-great-great-grandfather's mother during her pregnancy would have resulted in you not being alive right now. Call it what you want, but the fact that YOU are alive right now is at least "very lucky", if not a true "miracle".

Now on to fathers since this post is really meant for Fathers' Day. Much has been made of the differences between men and women and recently much also about the similarities. We are to the point in our country that some people are confused about their "gender identity" or "gender attraction" which has caused all sorts of problems. From the question of "gay-marriage" to the promotion of uni-sex bathrooms, we sometimes seem to not really know who we are.

One thing that I have noticed about males (and thus about fathers) is that they are not generally as concerned about the continuation of the human species as are mothers. That is not to say they are not concerned about children, its just that they tend to be more devoted to spreading their seed than nurturing it. For example, if two or three men are standing on the sidewalk and see a suitable and attractive female walk by, the tendency is to say, "I'd like to get some of that" rather than "Boy, I'd like to marry, have children with, and become a grandparent with her." The male psyche is just not as orientated to the idea of nine months of pregnancy, labor and child-birth, dirty diapers, sleepless nights, and seemingly endless nurturing. The male thinks more in three-minute cycles, or faster if he can manage.

So on this Fathers' Day I do not recommend the same praise for fathers as I suggested for Mothers' Day. Yes we should praise our mothers for allowing us to attain to life outside the womb. But fathers are different. They deserve no praise for the fact that they sustained their focus during three minutes of physical stimulation. But if we have (or had) a father who hung around afterwards, who did not force our mother to abort us, who did come home regularly at night, then we should consider ourselves "very lucky". In fact, maybe even the recipient of a "miracle".

Obama Was About a Week Late

2009-06-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

As soon as the Iran election turned to a quash-fest by the current regime, I began calling for a recognition of the right of the Iranians to free speech, free press and freedom to peaceably assemble (ala US Constitution, 1st Amendment). It appeared to me that, irrespective of who won the election, Iranians should have the freedom to protest the results. Following are several of my tweets from last week (PacificDT):

I am against abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. #iranelection11:54 PM Jun 14th from TweetDeck

Who do you support in #iranelection ? How about freedom of speech, press and freedom 4 ppl to peaceably assemble [ala US 1st Amend] #tcot7:14 AM Jun 15th from TweetDeck

Who do you support in #iranelection? How about freedom of speech, press and freedom 4 ppl to peaceably assemble [ala US 1st Amend] #tcot3:16 PM Jun 15th from TweetDeck

Tryrants flourish whn ppl sit at home on their hands. I support self-evident right 2 peaceably assemble in face of oppression #iranelection4:21 PM Jun 16th from TweetDeck

Question 2 BHO: Do U support quashing of opposition's voice in #iranelection ? Would U advocate same 4 America if U were questioned? #tcot4:38 PM Jun 16th from TweetDeck

While US debates shutting down free speech (fairness & local doctrine), Iran debates increased free speech. Tyrants hate free speech #tcot5:21 PM Jun 16th from TweetDeck

If U watched ur neighbor beat wife bloody w/ a baton for 4 days, would U B "worried"? Would you "meddle"? Would U BHO? #Iranelection #tcot6:24 PM Jun 16th from TweetDeck

In an apparent response to my tweets badgering the President this week, he finally came out and made the following statement today:

"The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights," Obama said in a written statement.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/20/republicans-pressure-obama-support-iranian-protesters/ (accessed 6-20-2009 19:44 PDT)

Whether the President actually read my tweets is unknowable. But my question to him tonight is: Mr. President, why did it take you so long to recognize a Truth that is so plain that it is printed right there in Washington DC, right in the National Archives, right in the United States Constitution. Could it be that you don't know that Constitution as well as you let on? Could it be that you are not really that committed to freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of the press; and freedom to peaceably assemble?

George W. Bush was criticized for an alleged slow response to Hurricane Katrina. Why should Preident Obama he held to any less of a standard when in the heat of the Iranian election protests, he could not bring himself to recognize the Truth of freedom, let alone speak the words, for almost 7 days.

Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society

2009-06-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

Although I don't usually spend much time at the Huffington Post, I want to share a post from Naomi Wolf from back in 2007. Ms. Wolf gives keen insight into what may be universal actions that could be included in a tool-kit for "shutting-up" dissent in a particular country (or world). What is interesting is that this was written in 2007 while George W. Bush was President. Read in 2009, it seems that these 10 steps are more applicable to the current regime headed by President, Barack Obama. After all, Bush willingly gave up power in January 2009.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2 Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3 Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4 Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5 Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7 Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8 Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9 Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10 Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

From "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Chelsea Green Publishing, Sept 2007

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-down-a_b_46695.html (accessed 6-19-09)

Spread Government Dependence (and Get Elected)

2009-06-19T00:13:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to see more evidence that Obama is not my "grandfathers" type of leader. Now there have been all kinds take up residence at the Pennsylvania Ave. House, but Obama appears to be a new breed. This is not about skin-color; it is more about thought color.

It appears to me that Obama (and his wife) have learned an important lesson about gaining power. Figure out a way to give people what they want (or need) and then take their vote. And if you can give them what they want by taking it from someone else, rather than producing it yourself, then you are indeed the smartest in the cookie jar.

So it seems to go like this. Get governement money to provide service and support to people, then educated them on how to do the same. When properly educated then they will be staunch supports of your effort to gain power. This is the opposite of showing people how to produce for themselves and letting them support whom they will. It is basically the differnce between capitalism and socialism/collectivism.

Following is a comment from a blog I read today that gets to the heart of what I am trying to say:

Your Majesty| 6.18.09 @ 12:47PM

ACORN-type corruption grabs the public's attention, but it's not the big-picture problem with AmeriCorps.

The real issue is that it changes the mindset of our 15-40 age group from entrepreneurism (set your own direction and go sell things to fund your org) to government dependence (let someone else decide what you will do, then beg for money via grant requests).

This was the conceit of having "volunteer scholarships" for college students. Existing college orgs (fraternities, service clubs, etc.) were always perfectly capable of providing both community service and entrepreneurial skill development. Nothing that couldn't be fixed by bribing students with scholarships!

From: http://spectator.org/blog/2009/06/17/americorps-and-acorn-go-way-ba (accessed 6-19-2009)

Jerusalem: The eternal front line

2009-06-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

[I enjoyed this article so much that I wanted to make sure it was saved. Left Coast Con.]

Jun. 2, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

The following is the full text of Caroline Glick's speech after accepting the 'Guardian of Zion' award.

For nearly as long as I can remember, the image of the watchman on the gates of Jerusalem has been the singular image of Jewish strength for me. It is has always been to the Jewish watchmen, ever vigilant, to whom we have owed our lives, and our survival as a people.

Today these watchmen preserve our freedom in our land. For 50 generations in exile, it was the memory of those Jewish Centurions, manning the barricades, that inspired us to keep faith with our traditions, our God, our law and our land.

It is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve the distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman - or watch-woman - on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight. THE WATCHMAN at the gates is a powerful image. But of course the defense of Jerusalem cannot begin at the gates. And guarding Jerusalem is not simply a matter of physical strength. It requires spiritual commitment and wisdom as well. Indeed, defenders of Zion require a greater mix of physical and spiritual strength than any defenders of any spot on earth.

Both our recent and ancient history as a people is one continuous testament to this truth.

And it is this aspect of Jerusalem - the eternal and temporal front line of the Jewish people - that I wish to discuss with you.

If you drove to Jerusalem this evening from Tel Aviv, as the coastal plain suddenly ended 25 kilometers from the city at Sha'ar Hagai or Bab el Wahd, you reached the starting point of the siege of Jerusalem from 1947. It was from this gauntlet that the British-commanded Jordan Legion sought - with the help of the Arabs of Jerusalem and surrounding villages - to cut the Jews of the city off from the rest of the country and so to conquer the nascent Jewish state.

As you began ascending through the hills to Jerusalem you could see the remnants of some of the most fearsome and bloody battles of the war. They came in the form of the reverentially preserved hulks of armored personnel carriers used by Haganah and Palmach units sent in front of the Jordanian snipers in a continuous attempt to bring reinforcements and food to the besieged Jews of Jerusalem.

As the hills - covered on both sides by JNF forests - rose to meet you, you passed the Latrun fortress on your right. It was the British decision to transfer control over Latrun - with its command over the road below - to the Jordan Legion, that all but guaranteed the fall of Jerusalem by preventing reinforcements from aiding its undermanned defenders.

Wave after wave of Jewish soldiers threw themselves against the guns of the Jordan Legion in a desperate attempt to break its chokehold on Jerusalem.

If you came to this hotel from the center of town, you may have gone by Davidka Square. There you would have passed by one of the primitive mortars used by the Harel Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem.

The Davidka was grossly ineffective as a killing machine. But between its thunderous noise and the rumor mill, it proved an effective tool of psychological warfare against the enemy. Even more than in traditional conflicts, the psychological aspect of the War of Independence played a pivotal role in determining its outcome.

The Jews, who just three years before had been incinerated in European crematoria, were an object of wonder no less than hatred for our enemies. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, for many Arabs there was a sense that supernatural powers were at work as the new Jewish state rose from the ruins of Jerusalem.

If you came this way from the Old City, you most likely walked through the Jewish Quarter. It was to the 1,700 Jews who lived there in 1948 and their 150 defenders that the eyes of the citizens of nascent Jewish state were turned. The future security of the country was dependent on their ability to withstand the Arab siege. They had to be assisted and they had to hold their ground if the war was to end in a resounding victory for the Jews.

Tragically, the spiritual strength that sustained us 61 years ago was not matched by sufficient physical strength to hold the city.

As Jerusalem commander Dov Yosef instructed the starving and desperate Jews within the walls about the nutritional benefits of various leaves that they could eat in the absence of food, and as wave after wave of Jewish fighters fell to their deaths on the roads ringing the city - at Latrun, the Castel, Har Adar and Gush Etzion - in their bid to relieve the Jerusalemites - the British-commanded Jordanians delighted in our suffering. Arab snipers picked off any Jew within range.

In the end, the Jews of the Old City held out for six months. Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem on May 27, 1948. Of the Jewish Quarter's 150 defenders, only 43 survived until the Hurva synagogue was destroyed by the Jordan Legion. It was the destruction of the venerable old synagogue that finally forced the hands of the rabbis within the walls. After the Hurva was destroyed, the rabbis began negotiating the surrender of the Old City to the Arabs.

If you walked to the King David Hotel today from the Old City, and exited through the Jaffa Gate, you certainly took note of the gentrified neighborhood of Mamilla. Today, as you walk through the new upscale shopping plaza, it is hard to believe that from May 27, 1948 through June 7, 1967 Mamilla was Israel's frontline. It was the Sderot and Kiryat Shmona of its time.

The Jews of the neighborhood lived in constant fear of Jordanian snipers who took pot shots from the walls of the conquered city at the Jews down below. The buildings you passed were once surrounded by sandbags. The Jews who lived inside them would run, not walk across the street. Any hesitation could spell their death.

But then, on the third day of the Six Day War, their long nightmare ended. After 19 years, the IDF succeeded in liberating the capital city. Paratroopers from kibbutzim danced with yeshiva buchers as they stood in awe before the remnant of the Second Temple. In June 1967, the proper balance between our spiritual and physical defenses had finally been struck.

After 2000 years, we were again a free people. EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, on May 27, 1991, the 43rd anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, and the 24th anniversary of its liberation, tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia were airlifted to the Jewish state. As then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said, the Ethiopian aliyah marked the first time in history where Africans were liberated from slavery by being taken out of Africa.

The entire country celebrated the arrival of these Jews, who had maintained their allegiance to Zion for thousands of years often in complete isolation from the rest of the people of Israel.

The next day, May 28, 1991, I stepped off an El Al plane at Ben Gurion Airport, and before reaching the passport check, I walked up the stairs of the old terminal building to the Ministry of Absorption's offices and officially made aliyah. A friend picked me and my massive immigrant suitcases up and a few hours later, I began my new life in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem that greeted me 18 years ago was almost entirely free from fear. It was hard for me to imagine that the city had ever been endangered as I rode the buses, walked along the streets, sat in cafes, hiked in the forests, shopped in supermarkets and clothing stores.

As I moved without fear through Arab neighborhoods, and traversed the old and new city, it rarely occurred to me that I was walking on contested ground. The Palestinian uprising, which had begun in 1988 and had instigated a period of self-segregation and renewed hostility towards Israel among the city's Arab residents, had been defeated in the wake of the Gulf War.

But unbeknownst to me and to my fellow Jerusalemites, all of this was set to change just two years later. When, as part of the implementation of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the government of Israel allowed for an Arab armed force to be deployed on the outskirts of the city, fear returned to Jerusalem.

Within just a few weeks of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Jerusalem again became the front line of the country as terrorists from Ramallah, Hebron, Beit Lehem and beyond converged on Jerusalem to terrorize its people in shooting attacks and suicide bombings. What the people of Sderot experience today was first suffered by residents of Gilo.

I moved away from Jerusalem at the end of 1991, after I joined the army. I returned to the city in 2002. By that time, the sense of safety I had felt here during my first months in the country had been obliterated. Every day brought a new atrocity or attempted atrocity. My own street became the scene of carnage as a bus was bombed just a half a block from my front door. My neighbors' mangled bodies were strewn before me as I ran out of my home with some vague notion that I could help someone.

It was only after the government finally unleashed the Israel Defense Force in Judea and Samaria that a semblance of normality returned again to the city. It was only after Operation Defensive Shield returned our soldiers to the streets of Ramallah, Beit Lehem, Shehem, Jenin, Kalkilya and Hebron, and vastly curtailed the powers of the Palestinian armed forces, that we could feel safe going out to dinner and riding the bus again. DURING THE YEARS that Jerusalem came under physical threat, it also became politically threatened. Israel's acquiescence to the PLO's military presence on the outskirts of the city began a process of unraveling Israel's own claim to the city. As Yasser Arafat ordered his forces to march on Jerusalem, and denied that the Jewish people have any rights to the city, successive Israeli governments found themselves on the diplomatic defensive.

Just as our leaders allowed Jerusalem's physical wellbeing to be threatened, so they enabled its political unity to come under assault. Rather than insist that the world recognize our sovereign rights to our capital, at best, our leaders spoke of the strategic importance of Jerusalem to our physical security.

The element of metaphysical power embodied by the tactically worthless Davidka was absent from discussions of how Israel needed Tzur Bahar and Jabel Mukaber to defend Armon HaNatziv or how our control over Shuafat and Beit Hanina is necessary to defend Ramot, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev.

Happily today Prime Minister ISRAEL TRANSFORMED. In 1967, the convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable. Binyamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat have abandoned this defensive posture and are waging strident campaigns against all who demand that we again surrender our eternal capital.

But for much of the past 15 years, the full expanse of Jewish history and identity was narrowed to a discussion of isolated neighborhoods, as if they were what this is all about.

Jerusalem's importance is far greater than the sum total of its neighborhoods. In ignoring this basic truth, our leaders did more to imperil the city's neighborhoods than legions of our enemies could hope to accomplish.

Even more devastating than what we said to the world is what we said to ourselves. For much of the past 15 years, our national leaders scornfully and contemptuously worked to limit our expectations and accused us of being greedy for assuming we had a right to our capital.

When did King David live in Abu Dis?, they sneered. Why were we needlessly upsetting the Arabs by moving back to Ir David?, they hissed. The underlying message was clear. We were provoking our enemies by asserting our rights, which we were told, were unimportant.

In general, since 1994, to greater and lesser degrees, our leaders abandoned Jerusalem as our metaphysical frontline and reduced the rationale of our control over our eternal capital to a security argument.

This argument is fine for as far is it goes. We explained - correctly - that without Israeli control over Jerusalem, the entire country would be under threat. And this is true. Indeed it has always been true.

Among other reasons, King David chose Jerusalem as his capital city because of its strategic importance. Were foreign forces to take control over Jerusalem and surrounding areas today, everything from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv to Beersheva to Tiberias would be placed under threat.

As Shaar Hagai in 1948 and Beit Jalla in 2000 showed, with foreign forces on the outskirts of the city, Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the country. To secure the city is to secure the country. And to abandon the city - whether by surrendering control of the road to Tel Aviv or by relinquishing Judea and Samaria - is to imperil the country.

Specifically, placing foreign forces in Jerusalem or on its doorstep would mean importing Gaza into the heart of the country.

Jerusalemites would find ourselves living in bomb shelters like our brothers and sisters in Sderot. Tel Aviv would find itself, like Ofakim, within range of enemy rockets. Terrorists with simple portable weapons could sit on the hills of Jerusalem and shoot down civilian jetliners landing at Ben Gurion airport. In wartime, terrorists with primitive artillery could shut down the country's vital traffic arteries, preventing reservists from reaching the fronts to defend the state.

Although inarguably accurate, Israel's security arguments for its sovereignty over Jerusalem have fallen on deaf ears. Neither the Americans - who demand that we cease asserting our sovereignty over eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria - nor the Arabs consider Jerusalem primarily a military issue.

The Americans prefer to ignore the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the city's frontline status as they push for an Israeli retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. For them, the issue of Jerusalem is no more than a petty real estate squabble.

But our enemies know better. For them the question of who controls Jerusalem is rightly recognized as the core issue - as the issue upon which Israel rises or falls as a state and as a people. Earlier this month, this point was made clearly by one of Israelís sworn enemies.

In a television interview on May 7, the PLO's Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki explained that from the PLO to the Iranian mullahs, Jerusalem is seen as the metaphysical key to Israel's wellbeing. As he put it, "With the [implementation of the] two-state solution, [involving an Israeli relinquishment of Jerusalem], in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."

As a wayward Jew once said, "The truth will set you free."

We owe the likes of Zaki - and the Iranians who call their most prestigious terrorist unit the Jerusalem Brigade - a big thank you for reminding us of who we are and what we need to survive. For even as our leaders tried to forget what we as a people have always known, our history - both ancient and modern - is testament to the truth of Zaki's statement. WE MARK the end of Jewish control over the Land of Israel as having occurred not with the Roman invasion in 63 BCE, nor from the defeat of Bar Kochba's rebellion 182 years later in 135. We mark the hurban, the destruction of our sovereignty, as having occurred with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

And why is this the case? It is because people do not fight for strategically significant hilltops. They fight for ideas like freedom. They fight for symbols, for abstractions like flags. They fight for their beliefs. They fight for their way of life.

They do not fight for strategic advantage.

We Jews know this better than any other people. We were the first people to self-consciously define ourselves at Mt. Sinai as a nation committed to an abstract principle of an invisible God, an abstract code of law, and an abstract, yet-to-be-seen promised land.

Josef Trumpeldor is not remembered as a great hero for having said, "It is good to die for strategically significant hilltops" - although that is what he died defending. Trumpeldor is remembered as a great hero for declaring, "It is good to die for our country."

Just as Zaki, Arafat, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad remind us every day, from the outset of our nationhood here in Israel 4,000 years ago, throughout the centuries of our dispersion and to this day, our fate as a nation - both physically and spiritually - has always been tied directly to our control, or lack of control over Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been our front line both physically and spiritually.

Rabbi Akiva knew, as he gazed at the destroyed Temple from Mt. Scopus, that one day our control over the city would be restored and so our national wellbeing would be renewed. This is why he laughed as he watched foxes entering and exiting the Holiest of Holies.

Perhaps if he had known then that it would take nearly 2,000 years for that to happen, he would have joined his colleagues in their tears instead of shocking them with his laughter and gaiety. But still, today we know that Rabbi Akiva was right. Our return to Jerusalem did presage our national rebirth with the renewal of our sovereignty in 1948 and 1967.

The modern Zionist movement, which officially began with Hovevei Tzion in 1882, came after the Jewish repopulation of Jerusalem. By 1850, Jews again comprised the majority of the city's population. And it was our strong presence here that emboldened the early Zionists to believe that a mass return to Zion was finally possible. It was because we had returned again to Jerusalem that our hope and so our strength were finally renewed after 2000 years of stateless wandering and persecution. LET US RETURN for a moment to 1967.

In June 1967, Israel was transformed from a threatened, vulnerable Jewish statelet into a mighty state to be reckoned with. But who celebrated - then or since - the conquest of Gaza and Kalkilya? Who remembers the great battles in the Sinai or even the Golan Heights?

The images of that war that have entered our collective consciousness - never to leave - are the images of our paratroopers on the Temple Mount, of Mota Gur crying "Har Habayit b'Yadeinu!" "the Temple Mount is in our hands!," of our young soldiers praying at the Western Wall.

The convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable in those days.

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim this month, a documentary was aired on Israel Television about the signals battalion in the Paratroopers Brigade. The battalion played a major role in the fighting - first taking over the Rockefeller Museum, then the Temple Mount, then the Kotel, then the walls of the city.

In the documentary, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem were brought together 40 years later to celebrate its renewal and to recall their fight. They told a stunning story.

After the city was liberated, they situated themselves in the abandoned Jordanian police station just inside the Jaffa Gate. The same station now houses the Israel police. In one of the rooms, they found a large quantity of musical instruments. Apparently, the Jordanian police band was stationed at the site and stored its instruments there.

The men took one of the drums and climbed up the walls of the Old City overlooking Mamilla. There the Jews had been huddled beneath the streets in their bomb shelters for several weeks.

As they ascended the walls, the paratroopers began pounding the drum. It must have been a terrifically strange noise since they all claimed to have had no idea how to play the drums.

As the men told it, and as a woman who had been hiding in the shelters with her family recalled, the civilians became perplexed at the new sound that replaced the familiar staccato pop of gun bursts and cannon fire. Slowly, they began emerging from the shelters to find out what was happening.

There above them, they saw the flag of Israel flying. They saw Jewish watchmen on the walls, beating the drums of victory in a half-mad boom, boom, boom.

And at the site of the Guardians of Jerusalem above them, the Jews of Mamilla began to dance as in times of old. They danced and danced, and walked to the walls, first tentatively, and then with a massive convulsion of joy and relief, of hope and ecstasy as for the first time in 2,000 years the city was secured. The Jews were free of fear as we returned to the Temple Mount, to Mt. Zion, to Jerusalem from whence our strength was renewed. OUR ENEMIES are right in choosing their targets. They are right because they know who we are. We are the children of Jerusalem, of Zion. Our physical and spiritual survival is dependent on our willingness to dedicate our lives in every generation to guarding both the physical and spiritual walls of this city. It is only by guarding Zion, that we guard its people.

I am humbled and honored beyond words to have been chosen from among so many of my fellow Jews for this singular honor of being named a "Guardian of Zion." For me, more than anything, what this means, is that people I respect for their defense of our people accept me as a loyal daughter of this eternal city. It is all I have ever wished to be. It is all I wish for my children to become.

And with God's help, it is something I will be blessed to remain all the days of my life.

Thank you. God bless the people of Israel and our eternal capital city.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1243872311299&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

Torture?

2009-04-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

“What defines torture, and is it ever morally acceptable?” This is a much debated topic these days in light of interrogation of detainees in the “war on terror” (another much debated topic).

Some have argued that “war on terror” detainee interrogation is just that; Interrogation, albeit sometimes harsh. Others argue that anything that makes a detainee uncomfortable is “torture”. For the sake of sanity I am using the less charged term “harsh interrogation”.

Some have posited that ”the ends justifies the means”. In other words, if lives were saved as a result of information obtained during harsh interrogation, then it is justified.

Others argue that using ”the ends justifies the means” idea puts the interrogator in a moral quandary.

I believe that how one answers the “torture” question is directly influenced on his particular world-view. I also believe that the “the ends justifies the means” argument can be valid.

If one’s world-view allows for “evil”, then it follows that harsh interrogation could be morally defensible. However if a person’s world-view does not allow for evil (or downplays evil) then it will be far more difficult for him to accept harsh interrogation.

Thus if evil threatens human life then one might consider harsh measures. For example, to combat cancer one might follow a chemo-therapy regimen. To get information about the whereabouts of a child from a kidnaper, an interrogator might take harsh measures.

But if evil is not recognized, then a harsh response will be lacking.

So harsh treatment to elicit a confession of faith (such as the Inquisition) would not be moral, but harsh interrogation (I'm not talking "the rack" here) in an attempt to get the de-activation code for a ticking nuclear bomb in a major city could be moral.

So the “ends CAN justify the means”. It just depends on what the “ends” actually are. And whether one believes that there is such a thing as “evil”.

Swine Flu

2009-04-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

At church this morning I had to with-hold my hand during the normal "meet and greet" time where everyone expects a hand-pump. Got quite a few odd looks and my wife was exasperated with me. But hey that guy sitting next to me might have just gotten of the plane after a week in Mexico. I just hope he did not think I saw him as a pig...

I heard they are passing out hand-sanitizer at the PDX airport. That should help control the pandemic!

A Deep Dark Cave (Easter 2006)

2009-04-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you were lost in a deep dark cave.

It started as a late summer afternoon hike in a local forest. Wandering off the beaten path, you find an opening in the thick overgrown woods and suddenly you catch a glimpse of a fissure in the rocks. A closer look confirms your suspicion; you have found an undocumented cave entrance. As you carefully crawl through the tight opening you can feel the contrast between the warm summer breeze outside and the cool musty air of the cave.

"Lucky that I brought that roll of string with me," you say to yourself under your excited breath. Attaching the end of the string to a large rock near the entrance you start crawling into the darkness. Your small key chain light barely illuminates the narrow walls of the low cavern. You glance back at the sunlit entrance now growing dim in the distance.

"Perhaps this isn't such a good idea," you think as you feel the thin thread that is coming off the roll in your hand. Against your better judgment, you continue a few more yards and soon find yourself in a larger space. Your small light barely reflects off of a damp and glistening wall about 50 feet ahead. You stand and walk upright and soon you find three smaller openings. A random choice sends you into the middle mouth and you continue crawling. You inch ahead for what seems like hours and realize that your knees and hands are scraped and bleeding. Then you feel for the string and find that you have come to the end of the roll.

"I should be able to go a little further," you calculate based on the fact that there is only one way to go. Again you come to a larger area where you can stand. As you examine the new room you discover it is much larger that the previous one. You carefully walk to what seems to be the far end of the enormous room, but now a terrible revelation comes. The new battery that you had put in your key light several months ago was losing its power. Soon the light would be gone.

"I have to get back to that opening and find the string," you shout to yourself.

"It should be right over here! How can it be so hard to find?" you think. After several minutes of searching the final rays of light disappear into the darkness. Now all is black. Hours of stumbling and falling down leave your shins and hands raw. You cannot find the hole that you came out of.

"What now?," you desperately ask, as if there were someone there to hear you.

So there you are, lost in a deep dark cave. How do you feel? Will the several power bars you have in your coat pocket sustain you? Does desperation begin to set in? Or do you begin to think of all types of possible solutions?

"Maybe if I just keep looking?" Well that end of the room suddenly collapses and the exit is buried with tons of jagged rock.

"Maybe there is another way out," you presume. Well unfortunately you step in a hole and seriously break your leg, now you can't walk.

So you think, "I'll crawl out that new exit!". Well now a large bolder rolls onto your arm wedging it tightly into a crack in the floor.

"I'll just use my pocketknife and amputate my arm. Then I'll crawl out!"

What solutions can you come up with ? What if there was no solution? What if there was nothing you could do, no power you could exert, that could get you out of that cave and back to the warm summer day outside?

Have you ever felt this type of darkness? A dark hole in life that seemed to have no exit?

Perhaps this is how the followers of Jesus felt as they holed up behind closed doors after His death. There they realized that the string that had connected them to their supposed leader had been broken and lost as He hung on the cross.

Now imagine that as you lay in your own deep dark cave, lost and bleeding, facing certain death, a brilliant light breaks through the wall of jagged rocks. A rescuer enters the room and immediately carries you out of the cave to freedom. Would you be overwhelmed with joy? Would you be amazed that someone was able to find and save you? Would you be grateful?

The disciples were changed when they discovered that Jesus, whose dead body had just been laid to rest in a tomb behind an enormous stone, was alive again. They burst out of their dark rooms and proceeded to tell the world about their Rescuer and the world has never been the same. The fact that Jesus rose from the dead is amazing, but the fact that the disciples left their cowardice and then boldly told His story is equally amazing.

How about you? Have you been rescued? If so, how do you feel about your Rescuer? Have you told anyone?

"Praise God, Jesus is risen!"

An Example of Wine Drinking Capitalism

2009-04-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

I was about 10 years old when my parents were building a new house. They needed a hole dug on the back side of the house in order to put in an oil tank. Now my brother, who is about 7 years older than me, had lots of experience digging ditches and trenches over his teenage years. I was just entering my free hard labor period. But my father must have realized that if my brother and I were enlisted to dig the oil tank hole, it just might mean that the house would never be heated.

One day a stranger showed up with a shovel and by that afternoon there was a large gaping hole in the back yard. I was amazed by the herculean feat that man performed. The hole was at least 7 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 10 feet long. And it was hewn from hard-pan clay. The last time I saw that stranger he was walking down the driveway, a fifty dollar bill stuffed in his shirt, and headed to the wine aisle of the local grocery store.

This story is an excellent example of capitalism vs. socialism (or collectivism). That stranger was motivated by the capitalist system. He knew that if he got in and worked his tail off, that he could, at the end of the day, enjoy the “fruits” of his labor. Now he could have lounged around and taken a week to dig the hole, but that $50.00 was too tempting a reward to ignore. He was a man who understood the capitalist theory.

On the other hand, my brother and I had all we needed. We had 3 full meals every day, new clothes when we needed them, and we didn't drink wine. Trying to motivate us was a job that my father realized was a lost cause. If we had been sent out to the back yard to dig that hole, it would never be finished. My brother and I truly understood the socialist system. No matter how little effort we put into life, we were always taken care of. Of course this put a lot more burden upon our parents, but hey, after all, we were still kids.

Tea Party Misunderstanding?

2009-04-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

"The thing that bewilders me is that this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere because he certainly understands the burden that people face." -- Senior White House adviser David Axelrod 4-19-2009

Perhaps DA did not visit any of these Tea Parties and thus does not realize that a primary driver of many of the participants was out of control government SPENDING.

Who will be paying for the TRILLIONS of dollars of SPENDING that has been going on unabated for the last several years? Will it be only the 5% of high income saps on Obama's black list? Or will some of the TRILLIONS eventually have to be repaid by some or all of the 95% of Obama's favored?

If my family leaves all the windows and doors open in the winter I have 2 choices: either turn the furnace on high and hope to keep the house somewhat warm; or close the windows and doors.

Obama seems to think that in addition to leaving all the windows and doors open he might as well blow a few walls out altogether. After all, he has the 5% on whom he can turn up the heat in an effort to keep the house from freezing.

Better grab some blankets!

Building a House on the Sand

2009-04-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

Concerning BO’s interesting use of Scripture (April 14, 2009). I do not want to nit-pick, but I will anyway. First of all, BO has the story out of order. The first illustration in the story (found in Luke 6 and and Matthew 7) was the man who built his house on a rock, not a pile of sand. Is that lack of order significant? Maybe not. But I have always been taught to look at the context of any story. The context of this story is false prophets. People who claim to follow God but actually do not. JC said “No good tree bears bad fruit… Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice.” Then JC tells the rock vs. sand story. Thus we can see that it has nothing to do with economy or spending or saving. It has to do with listening and obeying God. And thus a nation that is built on disobedience to God will display fruit following that disobedience (e.g. killing not yet or inconveniently born children) and will not stand when the storm hits. Will BO lead us to listen to and obey God, or in the other direction?

Silvi's Camera

2009-04-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

What is it about a jig-saw puzzle that makes people sit for hours poring over hundreds of oddly shaped pieces? Sometimes one sees half solved puzzles being worked on by an assortment of retirement home residents. Or a group of children working on a new puzzle on Christmas morning. Young and old, people are often subtly drawn into the grip of a jig-saw puzzle. For some people perhaps its a lack of anything else to do that gets them involved, but for others it might be the mystery. This is especially true when the puzzle box has been lost. The pieces are scattered and the question of what picture they would form if put together is daunting. This is how I got trapped: a puzzle with lots of photos but no reference picture.

The mystery began on a romantic and remote Mediterranean island. A lovely young dark-haired woman was traveling with an older couple. Who was she, and where was the mystery island located?

Our son Bob works the Rose Garden in Washington Park. Portland, Oregon is famous for roses and people come from around the world to see this beautiful garden. On a clear day the vistas from the park are astounding and one can see almost forever. Well at least one can see to Mt. Hood which is about 75 miles in the distance.

One morning, as Bob was making his rounds of the garden and the surrounding park, he noticed something in the grass gleaming in the rising sunlight. Upon closer inspection he found a camera obviously left behind by someone the night before. Perhaps they had been to the outdoor concert and had dropped it on their way home, he thought. He noticed that it was precisely the same model of camera that his mother Nancy owned. Bound partly by honor and partly by sympathy for someone who would own camera like his mother's, Bob turned the camera in to the Lost and Found department at the park office.

"If nobody claims this camera within 30 days you can return and the camera will be yours," the lady at the office explained to Bob.

About a month later Bob stopped by the office and asked about the camera. After rummaging around in the back room for a few minutes the lady came back to the counter with a piece of paper. She adjusted her glasses and peered intently at the paper.

"It says here that someone called about the camera. Let's see... yes they identified the camera. Wait. No they identified another camera. Humm, looks like they were on a fishing trip trying to get a free camera. I think the camera is still here," the lady said and then returned to the back room. She emerged about 30 seconds later, "Here it is, nobody claimed it!"

As Bob walked out into the gently shaded Portland sunlight, he tried to turn on the camera. "Darn, the battery is dead," he muttered. Upon opening the battery compartment he saw that the camera had an oddly shaped battery which would require a special charger. A replacement charger would probably cost as much as a new camera he thought. Realizing that the camera was useless without the charger he was ready to toss it in the garbage. Then he remembered that his mom's camera had a charger.

"Maybe the battery will fit in her charger," he shouted excitedly!

When I got home that afternoon Nancy was waiting for me at the door. "Bob found a camera at the park!" she exclaimed. Not recognizing the importance of her statement, I went straight to my laptop to check my email. Following me she said, "Really, he found a camera just like mine! It had a dead battery so he put it on my charger and now it works!"

"Okay, so now he has a nice camera", I said. "Let me finish my email."

Nancy persisted, "But you should see the pictures! The camera has some really neat pictures. Bob thinks they might be from Italy and even the Middle East!"

"Middle East?" I thought. I have been to the Middle East. Perhaps I could recognize where they were taken. Then I realized that Bob had been looking at the pictures on the small LCD display on the camera. Hardly great for identifying the location of strategic photographic evidence.

"Hey, let me download those pictures to my laptop and let's see if we can figure out where they were taken," I said to Bob as he walked in the room cradling his new camera. He carefully opened the camera and gently pulled out the SD card.

"Wow! A 1 gig Kingston SD card," I chirped. "Exactly like the one I bought for Nancy's camera last month!"

I eagerly shoved the card into the slot on the side of my laptop. A window popped open, "Download photos to this computer?" it asked. I quickly pressed the "Y" key.

Bob and I started with the first photo. A gentleman perhaps in his 70's stood with his left arm around a shorter woman with glasses who might be his wife. He wore a red windbreaker and a blue cap. She wore a white blouse and had a large purse in her right hand. Behind them was a small harbor with a smattering of small fishing boats. On the other side of the harbor rose a row of brightly colored buildings, some with small balconies and awnings. A small church spire stood to the left of the buildings. High rounded hills capped off the picture in the distance.

"Do you really think we can figure out where this was taken?" Bob asked.

Now I was getting excited.

"Not only are we going to figure out where this was taken, we are going to figure out whom these people are and who owns this camera!" I said.

Bob looked at me and said, "If we can figure out whose camera it is, then we can return it to them!"

So the challenge was set. We moved on to more pictures. There were various shots of the man and lady in an obviously Mediterranean seaside town.

“You were right, Bob." I said. "This is definitely an Italian scene. But it looks like it is on an island."

One photo showed the lady holding some fruit that she had just purchased. In the background was a man at a makeshift table with some rocks displayed, apparently for sale. "Look, you can see his watch," I told Bob. We zoomed in on the watch and it showed 1:00 PM exactly. Then we looked at the timestamp on the photo and it said it was taken at 3:06 AM on 5-16-08.

Comparing the two times we realized that they were about 10 hours apart. Then Bob remember that he had checked the time-zone on the camera and it was set for Pacific Time but not adjusted for daylight savings. So we concluded that the camera must belong to someone who lives on the West Coast of the US rather than Europe.

A following photo showed the man sitting in a taxi on a bluff overlooking the sea. Then there was a panorama of a beach with long piers jutting into the ocean. It appeared that the couple was circumnavigating a large island.

Clicking through the pictures we discovered a photo of the couple posing on the bluff with a smaller island in the distance. And there she was, the dark-haired young lady standing next to the couple. Could she be the owner of the camera? Did the taxi driver finally capture the three of them with the camera? We decide to call the young lady "Silvi".

Still we were no closer to figuring out where they were or what island they were traveling on. But then we found our first real clue: a picture of a hand-written sign in Italian. I went to Babel Fish and tried to translate it. It roughly said, "300 meters to the crossroads to the beach at di Valle Muria: equipped beach." A quick Google search showed me that there was a small beach called "Spiaggia di Valle Muria" on the west coast of the Island of Lipari. I used Google Earth to find Lipari Island and soon Bob and I were locating many the locations that were shown in the photos. We found the town of Acquacalda where the piers jut into the sea. And the rugged southwestern coast where the Valle Muria beach is located. And finally the town of Lipari where the traveling trio ended their trip around the Island.

We observed as they walked down the ferry terminal dock in Lipari and then cruised away on a ship as the sun set. Again using Google Earth, Bob and I figured that they were headed to the port of Milazzo in Sicily. A few photos of a beautiful sunset and their first day was over.

We followed the travelers the next day to a beach next to the Portorosa Hilton Hotel on the north shore of Sicily. A few shots of the boat harbor and a walk over a bridge finished up this day.

The following day the nature of the photos took a decidedly different flavor. The travelers reached a small mountain town. Several photos seemed to show the home of the couple. By all appearances the town was also in Sicily, but according to a Wikipedia search of the license plate on their car it should have been in the province of Caltanissetta. This is in the southern central part of Sicily.

"Hey we have an acquaintance that lives in that area! Maybe he would be able to help us locate the town?" I said to Bob.

It was getting late and Bob had to go to work early the next morning so he left for bed. In the meantime I started a search of the Internet looking for this small town. Luckily the camera had caught many scenes from the town including a castle and a central town square. I examined the photos carefully, zooming in on any signs I saw. But nothing was clear and they were all just too fuzzy to make out. A photo of a statue in the town square seemed to offer a clue, but I could not make it out. It seemed to say Mont------ Elo ----- plus some other words. I looked at it for about an hour with all types of filters and zoom levels, but I could not make it out. Since I thought the town was in Caltanissetta, I started to search every town in that province. I figured I would be able to recognize the castle from photos on the Internet. After about 4 hours I gave up and went to bed. I just could not find the town.

The next morning I started to write an email to my brother-in-law in Germany. He is a good friend of our acquaintance who lives in Caltanissetta. I was going to have him send our friend a photo of the castle and town square to see if he could recognize it. Then I had an epiphany. The photos from the town seemed to indicate that it was located on the north slope of Sicily. I had noticed that the sun was always behind the camera as it took shots of vistas. Although I could not see it, it appeared that the sea was to the north. So I looked at Google Earth again and followed the slope up from the Hilton Hotel beach location into the mountains. Then I saw the town! It was named Montalbano Elicona. This fit perfectly with the words on the statue! I zoomed in on the town and there was the castle off to the west and a closer look showed me the town square. A Google search for the town brought me to photos of the statue. It’s writing did start with "Montalbano Elicona"!

By drawing lines in Google Earth from reference points found in the camera's photos, I was able to pinpoint the location of the house where I figured the couple lived. I also tracked down the location of another house where apparent extended family lived. There were several group photos of these people and "Silvi" together.

We finally concluded that "Silvi" was perhaps from the West Coast of America and visiting her grandparents in Sicily. The trip with them to Lipari Island and Portorosa preceded the trip with "Silvi" to Montalbano to visit with the extended family.

Later photos showed "Silvi" meeting up and traveling with friends in Palermo. Then a train trip to London to catch a plane back to the US. Further photos show a group of young people picking raspberries in an obvious Northwest setting.

At this point I know we had to find "Silvi" and return her camera. But how? In my best Babel Fish Italian, I composed a letter and faxed it to a restaurant next to the Montalbano town square. It read:

Greetings from Oregon in America.

We have found a camera in the USA. We want to find the owner. The images are of a man who lives in Montalbano. Close to Via Indipendenza. Here it is a photo. Can you help us find him in order to give back the camera?

I do not speak Italian. Can you answer in English? Otherwise Italian is OK.

I gave my phone number, fax number and email address.

I also faxed the letter to the Montalbano town hall.

That was on Monday August 25th. Yesterday, August 28th I answered my phone and a young woman, somewhat confused, said that she was calling about a lost camera. She said that her grandfather from Sicily had just called her and given her my phone number. Her name is Jodi and she is in Portland. We hope to meet up with her tomorrow and return her camera.

Our mystery puzzle is solved! Oh, and by the way, I agreed to buy Bob a new camera as a reward for offering to return "Silvi"'s camera.