Yearly Archives: 2015

Resolution – to be honest and fair

wethepoeple

What ever happened to honesty and fairness as bedrock principles in American politics?

Many citizens no longer expect either.

It’s always been a challenge to gauge what’s true and fair but we have been in a politically toxic environment perhaps ever since we declared “the war on terror.”

Our public leaders encourage us, in response to matters off shore and here at home, to focus on individual risk and fear, and to encourage reprisal and violence.

Our worst leaders do it by being entirely dishonest and unfair.

We have one blustering presidential candidate, so nativistic, he wants a very tall thick impregnable wall across the length of our southern border with Mexico. What’s scary is so many don’t think this is a joke. Nor does anyone think it’s incredible to believe this candidate will get a border nation-state, Mexico, to pay for his wall.

We have another saber rattling candidate who wants to carpet bomb a mid-east nation and apparently believes that won’t encourage “terrorists” to come here and do the same to us.

There are those who want every citizen to buy a gun. My neighbors were shooting their guns after dark while I wrote this – “practicing,” I suppose, to defend against a home invasion or the unlikely event that ISIS might attack at or near Lovettsville’s Town Council.

The worst aspect of this dystopic demagoguery, so misleading in concept and execution, is that these “leaders” are indifferent to the devastating effect on the nation’s character, on how we may continue to make the historical claim that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. Continue reading

A Magical Time!

German and British Troops together in “No Man’s Land”

German and British Troops together in “No Man’s Land”

The seasonal commercial onslaught notwithstanding, this is a magical time of the year, full of family, warmth, intimacy, compassion, togetherness, efforts to find one another, and abundant good will.

It has always been so, or so it seems, as the light of the sun is reborn, the rays shining longer day by day, a time when we renew ourselves from each other, resolving that for the next year, in the New Year, we will do things differently, reform ourselves but also perfect how we can deal better with each other.

While many of us watch film classics of the season about giving and risking for others, about the magic and miracle that is this holiday season, we don’t always appreciate the lesson.

About 100 years ago, somewhere in Flanders, in the Northern region of Belgium, there was singing in watery and flooded muddy pastures and trenches.

Some say guttural voices were first heard in German, singing, “O Tannenbaum,” and then other voices were heard in the King’s English, singing “The First Noel,” but the voices were conjoined when, in Latin, known to Germans and British alike, they could all sing together the familiar words, “Adeste Fidelis, laeti triumphantes.”

World War I had been underway for four months and it had wrongly been anticipated at the outset of the war that it would all be over in time for Christmas.  But it wasn’t.

Pope Benedict XV had suggested a truce for Christmas in early December, and the Germans had agreed but the British, French and Russians refused.

British and German troops were entrenched in parallel lines opposite each other, guns at the ready, under miserable conditions, with a patch of “No man’s land,” separating them north and south, each nation-state’s troops “carefully taught” as to the fierce enemy that they were sworn to shoot and kill.

On Christmas Eve, the Germans placed Christmas trees with lit candles along the front.

It is most often said that a German, who spoke English, was the first to say, after some banter, “Tommy, you come over and see us.”  But the British said, according to one report, “Fritz, you come here.”

Soon they were standing together, in the middle ground, not on either side, amidst the wiry entanglements that separated them, in “No Man’s Land,” talking like they’d known each other for years, lighting each other’s cigarettes, trading pictures and buttons, comparing places they’d been in each other’s country.  They even engaged in soccer games on Christmas Day in the “No Man’s Land” that had been their killing field.  No commanding officer approved this Christmas truce.  Indeed, they opposed it.  But it went on for days and 100,000 “fighting” men from the British and German front participated.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last.  The war resumed.

In 1930 in the British Parliament, a British participant from 1914, Murdoch M. Wood, said, “The fact is that we did it, and I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.”

We are in that special season now, and we should take the sentiments of compassion and charity that we now celebrate into the rest of the year and that, rather than a retreat or truce from the hard life that can so suffocate what’s best about us, extend this season into the rest of the year, into everything else that we do, and resolve that this New Year it won’t be just losing a few pounds but shedding distrust for the possibility that we can do better in so many ways, as Murdoch Wood said, if left to ourselves, if we foster what’s best about ourselves, how we are in the best time of the year, in this season when the light and illumination grow day by day.

Prosecutors who cheat justice

John P. Flannery asked Judge Kozinski about criminal justice reform

John P. Flannery asked Judge Kozinski about criminal justice reform

Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne, as Chair of a “Special Committee on Criminal Discovery Rules,” sought to put a stop to prosecutors ambushing the Accused at trial and, even worse, from withholding evidence of innocence or wrongdoing cabined away by the prosecutor or by his investigators or witnesses; Judge Horne sought to bring “clarity and transparency” to the process.

Anybody who has suffered our criminal justice system knows that you get more information, by law, in a $500 bad debt civil case than if your freedom and reputation are on the line in a criminal case.

Judge Horne’s committee recommended reforms to the “system” to cure these defects. But the Supreme Court of Virginia accepted not one of the long needed reforms.

The best prosecutors in the Commonwealth and across the nation have an open file policy – meaning the Accused gets to see what’s in the prosecutor’s files – because these prosecutors believe their primary directive is to do justice, not to win at all costs.

When I was a federal and a state prosecutor we opened our case file because we knew an adversary for the Accused might see something we overlooked and, even when a witness might be at risk, we’d find a way to make critical information available.

It is an open secret that this nation’s dockets are awash in unjust convictions and too severe sentences because full and fair discovery of what the prosecution knows is withheld on a daily basis.

The most egregious prosecutorial lapses occur with information characterized as Brady, that is, evidence that contradicts the government’s charges, impeaches their witnesses, and mitigates against the more severe punishment the prosecutor is demanding.

US Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, from the Ninth Circuit federal appellate court, wrote in United States v. Olsen, 737 F. 3d 625 (9th Cir. 2013) – “[T] here is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land.”

Judge Kozinski went further and said that there are too many “rogue investigators and forensic experts.” You’ve seen the reports of various federal and state labs impeached by bad practices and outright fraud including how the FBI estimated that over ten thousand cases going back to 1985 involved lab misconduct. Continue reading

We fiddle while the world warms

globalwarmgraphIt’s hard to believe there is any one on this planet not truly alarmed at our planet’s yearly warming, with huge glaciers melting, waters rising, islands submerging, weather systems changing, water supplies declining, droughts increasing, and, with the most advanced scientific observers saying, we may have passed the tipping point on our way to global disaster.

World leaders have converged on Paris and have a working outline how to address global warming while “leaders” in our Congress resist EPA efforts to restrain the outpouring of carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

“Climate change” is the term preferred by those who don’t get the science and believe somehow or other an unseen beneficent force will save the planet.

Comedian Robin Williams had a line in his stand-up act when the audience missed a joke. Williams would say, “Catch up!” We have some evidence that there are folk who never will.

The most sinister and deceitful participants in this crucial worldwide dialogue are the fossil fuel adherents, the oil and gas industry tools, and motor city defenders, resisting change to alternative energy sources, stifling the truth, busy buying politicians who put us all at risk, while recklessly flooding the air waves with false promises and assurances. They busy themselves publishing Disney fantasy claims, saying that coal can be clean, and that they are going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – someday – if it doesn’t cost too much.

The average High School student knows that carbon dioxide is a gas unlike oxygen or nitrogen; that it’s not transparent to sun light, and that it blocks and traps infrared light rays when reflected back from the earth. Continue reading

The National Geographic’s “MARY”

mary-natgeoWhen I was a boy in the South Bronx parish of St. Pius, taught by Dominican nuns, my favorite prayer was, “the Hail Mary.”

I was often chosen to lead the Rosary, and I suspect it was because I recited the prayer rapidly.

To this day, I’ll say the Hail Mary, in times of stress and distress, out of those early devotions, as I did repeatedly, while my Mom was undergoing a life or death operation, for a bypass, a prayerful meditation asking that she survive, or die without much pain. She lived another ten years.

But I can’t say my Mother’s recovery from her almost immovable stone hard heart muscle was because I prayed. Nor did my Mom think that was the reason. But she did say afterwards she would never eat pork again, a respectful offering, out of respect for the pig valve that made her heart healthy again and for years afterwards.

In recent days, National Geographic chose as its cover story, Mary, and described her as “the most powerful woman in the world.”

In the past, Geographic has discussed religion and culture as an influence on nation states and tribes.

But has not given such a misleading title to a subject as this issue — for the article is in truth and fact about the cult of Mary and not about the Mary of the Church or of scripture.

So what happened?

After 127 years under the ownership of the not-for-profit National Geographic Society, the magazine and the Society’s assets have been taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

Murdoch’s purple prose publishing is already evident in this current cover, ascribing to a religious icon the appellation that she is the “most powerful.”

The Aryan image of this strawberry blonde Mary looking more like Cate Blanchett, rather than the more likely image of an historic Mary, perhaps olive skinned and dark haired, is unworthy of Geographic’s past amazing journalism, printed and photographic. Continue reading

THANKS – also means giving

tgturkeyWhen we asked a local Lovettsville resident what he was doing for Thanksgiving, he said he was going to be with his mother-in-law, and family.

Not everyone, however, is with his or her family or loved one.

The service men and women we so recently celebrated may be abroad in theaters of war and at risk. They won’t be sitting down with their family at home.

Even here on the home front, it is true we have those separated from family and friends by obligations at work, the expense of travel, perhaps illness, maybe they are in a hospital recovering, or told they shouldn’t travel, and an array of circumstances too varied to imagine or recount.

This separation doesn’t mean that they have nothing to be thankful for.

Despite time and distance and obligation and whatever has caused separation this season, they still have each other to cherish, know they are loved, draw strength and meaning from their connection, what they were for each other in the recent and distant past, and the knowledge that they will be together again.

There is another group of people we cannot overlook on Thanksgiving, who have little to be thankful for, the homeless and the hungry.

We cannot celebrate ourselves without giving these poor souls hope.

Nor can we ignore the fact that the plight of the homeless and hungry is not limited to a single day.

We should especially be aware, as the days grow cold and the morning sun burns off the frost, what the homeless and hungry shall suffer.

In the good book, in Ezekiel, we are encouraged to be “given [of our] bread to the hungry.”

We should not be prideful that we are better if we have food or a home. We should make it part of our thanks to be giving to others.

We are soon upon the season when we celebrate in an annual rite of passage a young couple that could not find a home to give birth to a small child. In this timeless story, there was no room at the inn. Matthew wrote how -“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Nor do many of our sick and poor have a place to lay their heads. If you truly believe we are made in “his image,” then how can anyone not care to help the homeless? Continue reading

The abyss revisited – Vietnam

The Vietnam Memorial

The Vietnam Memorial

On Veterans’ Day, we rightly celebrate the sacrifice of our young service men and women but don’t ever speak enough about how we decided to engage in the wars that risked their lives.

This was especially the case in the Vietnam War when young men were drafted to become cannon fodder in a war that defied the wisdom of Indochina history and based on the lie that it was a war of defense.

We “60s kids” were a generation that believed the government would tell us what was true and right for the nation; Vietnam was our awakening that the government could not be trusted.

It’s instructive to re-visit how we went wrong in Vietnam because we have since repeated this questionable toxic war scenario in the Middle East.

In the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh told the French, then occupying Vietnam, “You can kill ten of my men for everyone I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

Ho Chi Minh spoke of the resolve of a nation to be let alone, and his challenge was not meant for the French alone.

Ho Chi Minh succeeded. He beat the French.

An arrogant United States, however, thought to defy philosopher George Santayana’s caveat that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We never held the high ground in the Vietnam War.

Our government lied that we needed to war in defense of American interests,

President Lyndon Johnson’s war powers relied on a manufactured pretext to go to war. Our government claimed the USS Maddox was targeted in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin by communist forces. This was untrue. The USS Maddox was never at risk, there was no provocation, and former Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, admitted as much – albeit, long after the fact.

Nevertheless, our Congress empowered the President to war against “communist aggression,” a fatal deceit that killed our young men in combat actions having nothing to do with our national defense.

The United States was complicit in the political assassination of a corrupt Vietnam head of state we had championed, ignored the sanctity of other nation states when we bombed Laos and Cambodia, and lied to the American people about kill ratios and accumulated Viet Cong deaths, and the progress of the war generally.

On January 30, 1968, on the Tet holiday, the Vietnam New Year, a combined force of 80,000 Vietcong and the People’s Army of Vietnam launched a country wide offensive against 100 towns and cities; it was an assault few observers thought was possible; support for the war evaporated; the bold attack proved the communist forces were hardly on the run in Vietnam.

By the time the last American troops left Vietnam on August 15, 1973, Presidents Johnson and Nixon dropped 4.6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

We lost almost 60,000 service men and women and millions of Vietnamese were killed.

I do believe that we should honor those who served in Vietnam and every other war.

But we would honor them and this nation more if we only waged righteous wars of defense that were based on what was true, rather than the bald lies, the false propaganda, that the public is urged to believe instead

Post modem post election

electionSigns2015Every election has its themes and forces that shape its outcome – that is – who will govern and implement what policies?

While there were a series of familiar campaign issues in this last election, there was an underlying concern about the character of our Loudoun County government.

We had a crowded field of experienced and inexperienced candidates offering themselves for public service.

Experienced hands enjoyed some special advantages, name recognition of course, but also incumbency, and those solidly gerrymandered election districts strewn across the Commonwealth’s electoral maps.

The greatest and most telling changes to the County’s character came, however, in several key contests for the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

Eugene Delgaudio, the orange-hatted incumbent Sterling Supervisor, has been attacked for years for his allegedly questionable ethical and discriminatory antics on and off the Board of Supervisors. To its credit, the Board itself recoiled from Mr. Delgaudio’s misconduct, citing a scathing special grand jury report to do so. The Republican Party members took the Republican Board to task for its modest sanctions against Mr. Delgaudio, signaling a split in the party that proved deeper than may have been first understood.

Mr. Delgaudio’s conduct prompted a bitter and abiding distaste more generally for the Board’s ethical ambiguities.

There was legitimate unease with the Board’s cronies in construction and development who contributed heavily to Board members. Continue reading

Taking its toll

i66trafficWe have high occupancy lanes on the highway, I-66, that reward those drivers inside the beltway who plan ahead and take one or more extra riders and car pool; this sensible traffic policy cuts down on highway congestion, moves cars along otherwise frozen in space and time, and contains pollution.

What’s interesting, as a matter of social engineering, is that there remain so relatively few car poolers and yet the high occupancy lanes still move faster than the congested traffic lanes.

Some might rightly think that, if requiring two riders for a high occupancy lane eases traffic flow, then why not increase the requirement to three riders? But, the plans for this innovation won’t occur until at least 2020.

Instead, we have a short-sighted controversial proposal on the table, scheduled for 2017, allowing well-heeled solo drivers to buy a faster ride, to use one high occupancy lane during peak periods of traffic — if they pay for the privilege.

The policy is a shame and a disgrace.

It’s one thing to modify personal behavior with a salutary public policy such as carpooling; it’s quite another, however, to “license” the violation of that sound policy for a fee. Continue reading

Hard knocks

braininjuryThe brain is not meant to be jarred, hit hard, nor to hit something itself.

A concussion, a brain injury, is not something to ignore – not on a pro football team, nor in student athletics, nor any other activity including car accidents, domestic violence, or a “simple” fall.

About 20 to 30% of all Americans have experienced one or more head injuries. If there are repeated head injuries, deficits in cognitive functioning may remain.

Little wonder, some parents are pulling their children from high impact sports; my parents did; President Barack Obama said, if he had a son, he wouldn’t let him play football; NBA all-star LeBron James said the same thing.

Local parents who wanted to have their sons try out special helmet sensors were rebuffed by our County’s schools; it was a light weight micro-electromechanical, tri-axial acceleromoter capable of measuring acceleration from any direction, attached to the helmet, interfering not at all in the field of play. Good enough for the pros, but not for our kids. A no-brainer you might say. Continue reading