Love your blog, by the way!

This one is interesting. If a tree falls and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound? What _are_ natural resources? You can have all the ingredients for a magnificent dessert in your refrigerator, but if you don’t take them out and _do_ something with them, you have garbage in your refrigerator. Likewise “natural resources”…if you don’t _do_ something with them, they’re not really resources…they’re just chemicals – or _stuff_ – or something. The fact that someone calls them “natural resources” indicates that they are the raw material that can be used to produce something. But only humans can produce things – and in order to do so, yes, they _will_ deplete the source. So…either it’s a substance which can be _used_ or it’s just a substance. Without human endeavor, it’s just a substance. It’s just _stuff_. The old story of King Midas comes to mind. All the gold in the world and not a drop to drink.

>>Yet it is also true that our nation is a good nation, a great nation. That elected Obama.>>

You know…I think I disagree with this. We _were_ a good and great nation. And that goodness/greatness was based on the fact that the majority – the moral majority – were imbued with the Judeo-Christian ethic. 50 years ago, I don’t believe Obama could have been elected, and that’s without any regard to his color. His ideals simply wouldn’t have been adequate. So I think Obama was able to be elected because we have too many people who no longer can defend the J-C ethic as being the only acceptable one. I’ve said it before – you need both religion and law to maintain an orderly society. Only one or only the other and you will have a tyranny. Control of behavior is either internal or external. The goal of J-C ethic is the internal control of behavior. Without it, you have only external control which is the force of law.

I don’t know if we can take a step back, but if we don’t, the only way forward is not one I’m happy with.

All that 11B has described here is true.

Yet it is also true that our nation is a good nation, a great nation. That elected Obama.

The military will be able to save many people from the ravages of nihilism and anti-Colonial European ideologies and religions.

But will it be enough to save the nation from its own people? My analysis of the future says not.

However, there are several sayings in the military lexicon. “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. “The enemy has a vote too”.

In this circumstance, who is the enemy? The enemy is the Left and their Democrat shills, dupes, and useful idiots. Think of them just as you think of AQ when planning strategies to obliterate AQ.

So is AQ going to stand by while we create prosperity, security, and democracy in the Middle East? Will our plans simply grind to ultimate victory there with AQ just sitting on their thumbs? No. And so the same is true for the Left.

11B has a strategy or at least a proposal concerning key aspects of political indoctrination and patriotic or cultural allegiances. But the Left is not going to be passive while this plan is carried out. No, they will interfere .They will infiltrate. They will betray, backstab, lie, deceive, sabotage, and destroy.

And they will be the masters. Because they will be the leaders, the politicians, the economic billionaires. The ones that decide where defense contracts will go, with preferences given to Boxer’s husband, for example. They will be the ones that tell the Generals “Call me Senator or you will lose your stars”.

The military won’t be able to do a damn thing if their Boot Camp detoxification program is dismantled. The military won’t be able to do a damn thing when political favoritisms are given out to certain draftees over other draftees. Why? Cause the military is beholden to civilian command, and in that war, the military ain’t going to win.

No, you first have to get the draftees OUT of the military for them to do a damn bit of good in this fauked up nation we call the Obamanation full of OBamafaukingcans and not Americans.

The Left should be destroyed. I want to destroy the Left. I want it so bad I can taste it. But that’s why I have to see it from the Left’s perspective. To predict their actions, in order to annihilate them. To defeat an enemy, one must learn to think like the enemy. And the more you hate the enemy, the more you have to think like them.

Civilians *were* different prior to the 60s. They’ve been well indoctrinated into anti-military, even anti-human thought since then. My generation, born early 60s, was effectively indoctrinated in this manner. By high school the “creative writing” I was doing was science fiction of a sort, and generally about evil humans and how wonderful nature was, especially without humans. (Take a look at Andre Norton’s execrable ‘Breed To Come’. I *loved* that story back then; it thoroughly disgusts me now.) I did not develop anti-human ideas on my own from a vacuum; I was indoctrinated. In the schools. It can only have gotten much worse since then, especially due to the nature of the anti-global-warming crusade, in which the evil humans that are systemically destroying Dear Mother Earth, depleting all natural resources, and for which the only acceptable solution, really, is massive human depopulation. Yes, that is all sarcasm on my part, I hope you all hear it.

With a draft, you’ll get them for two to four years. Our military is much more technological and complex than it was through the 50s. From my limited understanding of Vietnam, even then the new draftees were remarkably ineffective and too often died quickly due to wet-behind-the-ears syndrome. The drug culture appeared to in fact be rampant. Heck, I knew an Airborne Ranger in the early 90s who, after the downsizing of the military hit him, loved nothing more than to get high on pot many times each week, and as far as I can tell loved it while in the military, too. I’m not sure the military could effectively handle millions of useless, whining brats coming in via a peacetime draft; I fear the endlessly whining brats would end up transforming the military instead. But perhaps I’m just defeatist and pessimistic. I *like* what I see in our volunteer military; the cameraderie and professionalism; the fact that they reenlist out of duty, honor, loyalty to their fellow professional soldiers… and because they find fulfillment in the soldiering life. Being surrounded by millions of whining brats who lack even the desire to develop a professional soldiering attitude would probably have a negative effect.

And after two or four years, the vast majority of the whining brats would still be whining brats and would thankfully be gone back into the civilian world. I think today’s military benefits from the skill level of the reenlistees, from all the skills and professional attitudes that they maintain. During that two or four years, what would we do with them? It would be most useful to train into skilled positions those who appear likely to remain; it would be a waste on those who just want to get back home. So in the event of conflicts, our whiny brats would end up on the front lines, precisely where they’d do the most harm.

Too pessimistic, probably, I know.

In terms of the cultural adjustment, I don’t think this would be significantly different. My understanding is that the military has somewhat toned down its act in terms of training. Even with the “volunteer” military, there are still rejects and wash-outs. The military has a couple of hundred years experience in turning citizens into soldiers and the numbers needed these days would probably allow for a good deal of post-draft/early training selectivity. The son of a guy I know went in the Army and was back out in about 6 weeks, so they’re not batting a thousand in the “volunteer” system. I’d be okay with them getting some kind of appropriate discharge. As a fallback, there’s always the stockade or the brig for the serious knuckleheads.

As for the women who really want to serve, well, every soldier wants his own special nurse. And I’m sure there are administrative jobs that could be so filled. But my difficulty with the concept stems from what we used to call “strap” jobs. These were rear (or relatively rear) jobs that we would try to fill with combat troops who had done more than was expected of them or, alternatively, than they could handle. A lot of “clerks and jerks” positions were filled this way so some guy could finish out his tour for a couple of weeks or months. If these positions are filled by women, this administrative asset dries up as they would be in the position for their full tour. In the case of a more “asymmetrical” situation, you’re providing a higher value target for your opponents to focus on. Think Jennifer Lynch, et al. For myself, I would have a much harder time dealing with the loss of a female soldier than a male.

(P.S.) I don’t have a clue where to start with “Ymarsakar”. I think that I’m going
to have to sleep on that one.

If you can find a Total War or partial war for men to be drafted into, you could emulate such results. But the current military climate does not require total war and even if it did, it would be way too short to produce any real requirement for a warm body draft.

There is also the question of deferments. You cannot, literally, draft 90% of the male aged population between the ages of 19 and 40. That would destroy the economic sector, and even if the women will fill the gap, they cannot do so in such vital industries as engineering. For there aren’t a lot of women in engineering. Same for mathematics.

So with that being the case, who decides who is going to go and who is going to stay? Ted Kennedy is going to decide. Barbara Boxer is going to decide. And giving such people more power over other people’s lives is never a good thing.

To the extent that the Left wants to ban ROTC and military recruitment, it is, indeed, to get rid of the competition. However, this competition, in the current form that they despise, is focused on volunteers, thus the Left cannot subvert and infiltrate the military, because they would need volunteers to do so. Now if the government simply had the power to draft people in, and the Fifth Column of traitors continue to pull the levers of American power, then the Left will easily find malcontents, saboteurs, and traitors in the current US military.

They have already created plants and moles in key vital sectors of the US natonal security, espionage, and diplomatic services. Those sectors leak like sieves whenever the Democrats need a political advantage. The Democrats will eventually do so with the military, because so long as they have the power, they might as well use it, from their perspective.

As a strategy against Leftist cultural indoctrination, it is plain to see that the reactive 2 or 4 or 8 years of military service is not going to eradicate Leftist anti-Americanism. They will have 20 or 18 years with which to indoctrinate the current or future generations. This war cannot be won on the defensive by slow reactions which don’t even invest the same amount of time to de-program people that the Left has spent in programming them. The strategy lacks OODA attributes. Instead of getting inside the Left’s OODA, a military draft would allow them to set policies and thus get inside the military’s OODA loop. I don’t see this as all that likely of producing victory against the Left and their goals.

We agree more than we disagree. On this one, though, I disagree:

>>The draft was successful in WWI, WWII and Korea and in between.>>

Not with your statement, but in the assumption that it worked then so it will work now. I see a much greater difference between the cultures of the military and the civilian population than I think existed in the period before the Vietnam War. I agree that the civilian youth today needs it (even more than they did then), but the culture is so different that I can see it developing into some real problems.

I also agree with you about women in the service – though there are certainly areas where they can serve, but then you get into discrimination of a different sort. And I agree that if there are minors involved, _one_ member of the couple should _not_ be military, and if you have a single parent home, that parent should _not_ be in the military. While it isn’t the military’s problem in one sense (”if the army thought you needed a wife, you’d have been issued one”), it is. Morale is always an issue.

>>I think that the originator, David Mamet (a born-again conservative), stepped away from the show and turned it over to his wife around the time of the emergence of “The Junior Varsity Unit”.>>

_That_ must be an interesting marriage…!

Your husband and I appear to be contemporaries military-service-wise and I would not argue that there were no morale problems during that period. I was “fortunate” enough to spend most of my time in the bush, so I was able to avoid most of it. But, it did get to the point where the racial and anti-war attitudes effected my desire to come out of the bush. And I would not come out without a “private” and/or an issued weapon.

That said, I think that there’s a bit of going from the specific to the general in your husband’s assessment. The draft was successful in WWI, WWII and Korea and in between. Besides detaching the young sirs from their mothers’ apron strings, the draft provides a reservoir of trained and experienced men that can be called upon in future emergencies, military or otherwise, local or national. Basic skills liking shooting and not getting shot; moving over, under, around, and through terrains of varying degrees of urbanization; and, basic first aid are lifelong socially beneficial skills. But, the bottom line for me, is teaching young men that, as my mother used to say, “Life is real, and life is earnest, and the grave is not the goal.” Our world is not always or necessarily a friendly place. There will always be more than enough despots interested in eating our lunch and maybe more. Of less importance to me, but nonetheless valuable, is the bonding effect of military service, both intra-generationally and inter-generationally. My own father never talked much with me about his military service until I returned from mine.

As to Mommy’s letters to her Congressperson, I think that rotating her letter through the company might well put a damper on her future efforts. Effectively administered, this type of intrusion can as often be a status deflater as an enhancer. That asserted, I have some major concerns about the effect of our modern age of telecommunications on our combat troops. How much calling/e-mailing home is a good thing is beyond my own experience. My instinct tell me that in this case, less is probably better. It’s a tough job, but tell them about it when you get home.

As to women being drafted, I don’t think that this is a good idea. Besides its contribution to keeping the “volunteer” army illusion going, my understanding is that most of the push for women in the military comes from the feminist left in order to establish their false premise of male-female equality. If you look at organized sports at any level, you see the obvious, that women cannot compete against men effectively. This holds for military service also. (Again, I don’t mean to denigrate any individual’s service or commitment; I’m writing here about the policy only.) The basis of my calculus is that introducing women into the military equation is introducing another variable when everyone already has more than enough about which to be concerned. That the military is now devoting its time to “protecting” female soldiers from their male counterparts, is certainly one indication of how off the track we have gotten. Besides the wonder of military pregnancies, we now have two military member families as if no one could figure out that the only thing worse than a child having one parent go off to war was having both parents go off to war. Lastly, there’s that wonderful management problem when some are getting some and some are getting none. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that action, if you know what I mean.

On a lighter note, to which is where I need to get back, I agree totally with your assessment of the “The Unit” TV program. I think that the originator, David Mamet (a born-again conservative), stepped away from the show and turned it over to his wife around the time of the emergence of “The Junior Varsity Unit”.
It was a disappointment to me, but I have had to let it go. There wasn’t enough action or interesting “toys” once the program went 50-50. As to the “History Detectives”, I saw it enough times to rename it the “Diversity Detectives”.