Sanctuary Cities

--They've co-opted their leader's invective

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head 
--Revolution,
The Beatles

 Sanctuary, it said:
but only the road has meaning there. It leads
into the world's cities like a long fuse laid
--Sanctuary,
Judith Wright 

You don't need a weather man
to know which way the wind blows
--Subterranean Homesick Blues,
Bob Dylan
_____________________

Subtitle: The Illegal illegal fight.

Mending Fences, Pt. II:

In Iraq the Coalition Forces (i.e., the United States) built walls around cities to keep insurgents out. This implied that walls would lead to victory versus violence.

Street battles, as in Fallujah, were fought to isolate cities from the insurgents (both domestic and foreign). In our current fight against ISIS, the same winning (ahem) formula applies: fight for the cities and when the vermin have been eradicated, everything will be just fine. 

Today, our 2017 Sanctuary City warriors are insurging against their President and federal authority. We (they) are insurgents when they burn images of their President in effigy, and wear shirts proclaiming, "Not My President.

Immigration has become a point of contention in the United States, and the United States' insurgents wish to keep criminal illegals inside the borders, rather than outside. It is a perverse inversion of the military fight abroad.

Alas, since gay marriage was signed into law, the last Civil Rights rampart has fallen, and Liberals are not Liberals unless they have some untermensch behind which to rally (provided they are not Jewish).

Do these sanctuary insurgents comprehend the nonsensical illegality what they are doing? If President Obama -- known as the "Deporter-in-Chief --had the authority to address immigration, then so does President Trump have that same authority. Legality transcends our personal convictions.

Mayors do not have the authority to override Constitutional imperatives. However, it is obvious they are not above sucking up to their constituents, forward-looking as they are to their next election and their meal plate.

Social workers may inhabit the "Every sperm is sacred" zone, fighting for the "rights" of illegals to remain in place. But why are the rest of us so hot to keep in people who are double criminals (i.e., illegals + run-of-the-mill criminals)?

Our country has problems enough ministering to our own citizens and blighted cities. What purpose can the whine du jour of the Democrats have other than being a convenient distraction from the problems of our indigenous?

Ah, but since the myriad of problems that beset our own citizens has proven to be intractable and obdurate, why not just look over there and drill down some illegal Muslims and Mexicans? The illegal fight to retain illegals is a clever bit of legerdemain. 

Since the U.S. has been fighting a 14 year war to protect foreign cities from external threats, what argument can be made to not do the same for our own cities?

In the counterinsurgency (COIN) environment the concept of personnel and resource control (PRC) is that every citizen or legitimate resident must have official identification issued by a legal authority. How else can a government control its territory?

If we will not control our borders then it is obvious that the PWOT © and the War on Drugs have been farcical enterprises conducted by farceurs (i.e., politicians).

Logical endpoint: a restive population maintains perpetual battle against their duly elected leader, who then must do something to restore order.

As the U.S. insurgents glumly and gleefully (a seeming oxymoron, but a Starbuck's espresso amongst the agonistas keeps it bearable and seemingly sensible) construct their insurgent safe zones against the order of law, they begin to feel more ostracized, more convinced that they are being persecuted and that they are on the side of right.

Ensconced in their "safety zones" pitted against the rule of law, they are transmuted into "The Deplorables" -- a term once reserved for the very people they are now opposing. They hunker down and draw to themselves their fellow travelers du jour (their token illegal pets).

What next for these illegals, and the people illegally harboring them?

Why does a nation have borders if they do not intend to enforce immigration law?

Muslim 2.0

 I'd like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves
--Coke commercial, The New Seekers 

Why can't we all just get a long neck,
And make a toast to peace and harmony? 
--Why Can't We All Just Get a Long Neck?
Hank Williams, Jr.

 Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be 
--Sonnet 138, Shakespeare
 _________________________

President Obama recently forcefully rebuked the rise of "inexplicable political rhetoric" against Muslims, decrying the fact that the entire Muslim community was being blamed for the violent acts of a very few. Strange days indeed, as this was spoken by a president who has killed Muslims worldwide, both observant and secular.

Besides being hypocritical it is disingenuous, for the violence perpetrated by Muslims who have recently invaded Europe makes the anti- Muslim rhetoric very explicable. Saying the reaction to Muslims is "inexplicable" does not make it so, even if it perpetuates the finely-honed image of inclusion and liberalism which we have embraced as an American self-definition.

One thing is certain: devout Muslims do not share Western Enlightenment values. Muslims are homophobic and misogynistic (which is not to say that die-hard Christians are not, but to a lesser degree and in a less public castigation), among many other beliefs they hold which do not jibe with Western protocol.

Especially dissonant at the President's talk was the presence of women in hijabs and burkas gazing agog at this president, Lewinsky-like, while he argued for the inclusivity of Muslims into Western society.  Meanwhile their bodies were hidden beneath bag-like 13th century garb. How can these women pursue happiness and the American dream when their very exclusion violates the separate-but-equal clause of the U.S. Constitution?

Is importing such reactionary foreign behaviors into America really wise? Is not the United State's the great "melting pot", into which all newcomers throw themselves in order that they might emerge from that cauldron tempered and defined as a new entity, that of the "U.S.citizen"? The modern U.S. ideal is rational thought which promotes individualism, freedom of religion, and all associated freedoms, rights and responsibilities.

While no American can deny the use of controlled immigration as a national tool, should we allow immigration of peoples en masse whom opposes the very values of our national life. Creating Enlightenment values was a hard road to hoe, but it is precious and should be defended against those who would revel in its dissolution.

Islam is not the problem, because they are very clear. No, the problem is that we Judeo-Christian types extend charitable thoughts and actions to those who neither deserve nor want this largess. U.S. charity and immigration policy should address the welfare of our nation and apply only to those willing to integrate into our value system.

The U.S. government is clamping down on social benefits across the board for our own citizens, yet we espouse bringing people in to the country who can't say with a straight face that they want be Americans.

 And we say with a straight face that they will enrich our nation. 

"You lie with me, and I with you ..."

You're All In or You're Not

 --Ceci n'est pas une pomme 
  (This is not an apple), 
Rene Magritte   

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, 
the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term 
 --One Hour Photo (2002)

Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom
got a running bet 
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley 

--It’s strange that we’ve never
 read of this in the newspapers

--Well… that’s newspapers for you, ma’am.
You could fill volumes with
what you don’t read in them 
--The Green Berets (1968)
 ___________________

Subtitle: This is not a Muslim. 

"The Islamic State is not really Islamic" -- perhaps one of President Obama's most disingenuous recent statements. Perhaps they remind him more of Urantians?

Now that's like saying a Dodge Ram pickup is really a Toyota, or a cherry cheesecake is actually a rhubarb pie. Is it blasphemy, a lie, or a massive denial? Perhaps cognitive dissonance of the highest level, or just the canniness of a politician seeking to curry favor with the less animated members of that one-billion strong religion?

Of course it is Islamic, as Islamic as Islamic can get. It's just that most Muslims practice a form of Muslim Lite, like cafeteria Catholics who haven't the stomach for transubstantiation, a doctrine which explains the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Jesus.

Religions in general serve as primers on how to live a good life, and they are founded by crusaders with an agenda, some more benign and ecumenical than others, their words often warped by their inheritors. They basically tend to man's basic needs and they all have their quirks, but if you're a believer you cleave to The Word, regardless of those seeming hiccups.

For the Catholic, The Word is that you are eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the rite of the Eucharist. It is cannibalism, but by invitation (sort of like the Germans in the recent press who had placed classified adverts requesting to be eaten, like a nice sushi.) Christopher Hitchens deconstructed the idea of belief completely. The dogma is clear and if you reject any of it, you are a hypocrite at best. But hey, religion (and the world) is full of them.

Likewise, if one is a true believer in the prophet Mohammed, one believes that infidels (= those of other religions) should be killed. It is all there, in their Good Book, the Koran. It's not a very happy (for non-Muslims) or modern concept, but for those feeling nostalgic or who have never entered modernity, it is spot-on and clear as day.

Just as the Christian crusaders fought both for belief and booty, so too the thoroughly modern Muslim crusader. To have a caliphate of your own is a pretty fine thing, after all.

Our misbegotten wars have served to animate vast swaths of often unemployed usually young people disenfranchised in their own countries, subjected to the brutalities and insults of an invading and occupying Army. Some people come to God when their back is against the wall -- it is the last comfort of and the last depot for the desperate.

These desperadoes are finding common ground with the True Believers (always a much smaller minority.) They yearn to live in their own "ownership society" (as President George W. Bush encouraged us to do) and regain a state of grace and dignity (regardless of how undignified their methods might appear to us.)

And being salacious Westerners in bondage to easy and gory visuals we give them incessant free press, providing them with the most valuable asset they possess: the ability to spread fear beyond the discrete beheading or other vulgar murder. We are aiding and abetting the criminal/terrorist, wittingly or not. Do we acknowledge our role in the crimes we behold?

We are like Yuri Bezmenov's demoralized useful idiots. But to what end?

Waging jihad is every bit as faithful to doctrine as the flesh and blood consumption of the believing Catholic. What right have we to dismiss or deny the validity of these doctrinal beliefs to the adherent? But to deny these realities is not to do justice to the facts.

If indeed the slashers and hackers and beheaders are the rare breed, why are we proliferating their self-aggrandizing videos? Shouldn't the goal be to minimize that message while elevating anything opposed to it?

Have I missed anything?