Springtime in these parts signals birth, and the wood sounded with the calls of birds and the occasional sighing of a youngster wobbling about on the ground, looking rather uncertain, as if rudely deposited onto a strange and alien world, as indeed he had been. In our courtyard, hidden under a leafy bush, a baby robin perched on the lowest supple branch, an inch from the ground, the tiny branch swaying dangerously with the one ounce weight of the tiny babe who clung to the branch with all his might. I watched him for some time, and wondered what he was thinking.

Well here I am, the youngster thought
But where is mom and dad?
I’m safe for now from that tom cat
But things are looking bad
This branch I’m on is swaying like
A hurricane passed through
Enough to make a fella sick
And scared of falling too
The ground it seems so far away
And what was that I heard?
Is it the cat? I’m getting scared
Thank goodness it’s a bird
Just sitting on the bird bath lip
And now he flies away
But pretty soon I’ll get my wings
And maybe it’s today
It looks like it is gonna rain
I’m stuck here on this leaf
It’s getting dark and now I’m wet
It’s all beyond belief
I’m cold and wet and in the dark
I’m scared, is that that tom?
THERE.S SOMETHING HERE! IT’S AFTER ME!
Oh phew! It’s only mom

The Rand Corporation published a preview of the war in the strategic waters of the western Pacific between the Chinese Navy and the US and Japanese navies. Interesting, in that it isn’t clear that the Americans will fight, but the Japanese will either fight or become a vassal of China, dependent on China for its imports of oil and rice and iron ore. America will not fight if Obama is still in office, but if China delays until after Obama leaves, then America will fight, and that makes it a different fight altogether. A mid-1980s book called Generations argued that US generations differed from each other in a cyclical way, moving clockwise from Aggressive to Aggressive-Passive to Passive to Passive-Aggressive and back to Aggressive, with Aggressive being defined as a generation willing to fight if necessary. The authors noted that every major American war was waged with an Aggressive generation culturally dominant, the theory being that that it takes two to tangle. Way back in the 1980s I counted ahead and calculated that an Aggressive generation would be culturally dominant in the US beginning in the year 2014, and that a major war would occur if our interests or security were seriously challenged. But I will stand on my conviction that the Chinese can build a blue water navy, but a navy is more than ships, it is tradition and leadership. The Chinese navy has zero tradition, and should it sail into blue water with hostile intent it would soon rest on the bottom of the South China Sea.

Nelson and Halsey and Cochrane, Pellew
Decatur and Stewart and Perry and Hood
Old Ironsides and Vincennes, the Vinny Maru
Iron men with steel ships and iron ships built of wood
They conquered the sea and defended their nations
They braved fierce run gales and the guns of the foe
At Savo they took it but stayed on their stations
As ships littered Ironbottom Sound far below
The Chinese may bravely sail into blue water
To find attack submarines lying in wait
The sound of the ships meeting old Neptune’s daughter
Will carry to China across Sunda Strait

For sixty years and more after World War 2, the United States was the world’s sheriff, keeping the peace, using force where necessary, all to prevent the world from collapsing into anarchy. Every aspiring writer is advised to shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph, in order to immediately engage the reader. It took a long time for the post WW2 narrative to unfold, but unfold it did, for in the final chapter the sheriff got shot. Shot in the back by Barack the Kid, shot in the back while playing cards in the Hegemon saloon, his winning hand fluttering to the floor, full house, aces up. Young Barack was elected sheriff, and all seemed well at first, until the Clanton gang rode into town.

I seen it all, the old man said
The Kid come down the street
He walked inside an’ shot him dead
His aces hard to beat
He walked through them there swingin’ doors
I follered just to see
I seen one had a pair of fours
The Kid’s gun hung real free
The barkeep follered with his eyes
But no one else took note
An’ then to everone’s surprise
The Kid pulled back his coat
His gun come out just sorta slack
Real slow as you might say
An’ shot the sheriff in the back
Then calmly walked away
Ain’t no one moved for quite some time
At least that’s how it seemed
The sheriff dead, a heenus crime
Just felt like we all dreamed
The Kid says he’s the Sheriff now
An’ all but me agrees
The Kid says we all have to bow
An’ he’ll do as he please
He made us give up all our guns
He says it’s hope and change
An’ says that ‘fore there’s many suns
That peace be on the range
Not long though till the church bells rang
An’ all come fallin’ down
‘Cause that’s the day the Clanton gang
Come ridin’ into town

It has been revealed that the top leadership of FIFA, the governing body of the world soccer association, has been selling the World Cup soccer games, with countries paying tens of millions of dollars to the members of FIFA for the privilege of hosting the games. Russia bought the 2018 games and Qatar bought the 2022 games, with resulting world-wide indignation. But does anyone really care if Qatar bought the games? I think not. So long as the games are honest who cares where they are played or how much it cost the host country to get them there. Everyone knows, and has known for many years, that the UN is a criminal organization, that Bill and Hillary are Bonnie and Clyde, lacking only the 1934 Ford V8, that Brussels is the Sodom and Gomorrah of political corruption, so why should anyone believe FIFA walks with the angels? Forbes recently had a list of the 20 top money earners in sports and almost half were soccer players, so it is no wonder the guys in the suits at FIFA feel they deserve a slice of the pie.

The guys at FIFA all ask why
Ronaldo should get all the pie
Beckham should get all the girls
Why Messi should have all those curls
It’s jealous fury all around
And FIFA guys say they are bound
Determined, yes, to own the stage
While football worldwide is the rage
And get it while the getting’s good
And live the kind of life that could
Appeal to blokes who never score
All through a game that tends to bore

Barack Obama is trying to get an international trade agreement that will give him more power than he already has, and the institutional Congressional Republicans seem to want to give it to him. Why? Trade does not need secret agreements, trade does not need bureaucrats shuffling paper, trade needs only two partners who agree on price and product. Ross Perot might have been nuts but he was right about NAFTA sucking jobs out of the United States never to return. Keeping your jobs and factories at home is not protectionism, it is common sense, but neither party has much common sense these days. I have been waiting for a Tea Party revolt since 2010 but have yet to see the establishment Republicans give up anything or learn anything. I am sane and have the best interests of my country at heart and so do not qualify for public office, but if elected I will get all those jobs back from China and Mexico. So stuff will cost more at WalMart, but at least the stuff will be made in America by Americans.

The textile mills across the track
Are shuttered and forlorn
The jobs there they ain’t coming back
Whole towns were left to mourn
Our shipyards closed and on the block
The steel mills now are dark
Where once were three shifts on the clock
Men now sit in the park
And watch their children run and play
While mom’s still waiting for
That waitress job to keep away
The wolf from their front door
NAFTA benefits the few
And China but not us
Our leaders smiled and then they threw
Us all under the bus

It has been said that democracy is like a train, and we’ll get out when we arrive at the station we want. The station the Democrats want is a minority white country in which they have permanent power. When I look back on it I wonder how we let it happen. How did we allow the Democratic Party to surrender the country to two third world cultures, Mexicans and American Blacks? We are in serious danger of becoming a third world country, in danger of becoming a minority in our own land, the land white people built out of a howling wilderness. The recent history of third world countries is one of tyranny, corruption and presidents for life. We are very close to being there. Politicians lie, the media lies, and we even lie to ourselves, but demographics tells the truth.

I was eight years old and in my hometown
I wandered all alone
In the summertime from the dawn to dusk
I had no need to phone
I was out of touch but my parents knew
That I would be okay
For the neighborhood took good care of us
When we went out to play
But the times they changed and the neighborhood
Turned color overnight
And I went to school where I tried to keep
Out of the daily fight
When the country changed into us and them
And they said we kept them down
I was now a man and a stranger in
What once was my hometown
As the years went by and the Mexicans
Came across the Rio Grande
And the jobs were gone and the mills were closed
We who built it lost our land
As the votes went to all the lefties who
Promised stars and apple pie
And the blacks and browns left us all to ask
What had happened, how and why
I’m an old man now and I tell my kids
My granddaughter and grandsons
That worse will come and it won’t be long
You had better get some guns
But I still can see what it is we’ve lost
As we’ve torn the country down
In my mind’s eye the streets still shine
In what once was my hometown

Robots are now capable of doing things that humans can do, and do them better. In China, plans are afoot to replace millions of human workers in labor intensive factories with robots. China is determined to march into the mercantile future, but what happens to the displaced millions of workers? Way back in the early 70s an Architectural firm I was associated with designed a County Health complex that included a hospital, a geriatric high rise, an array of smaller buildings and a brand new food preparation facility. The centerpiece of the food facility was a burger making machine that not only cooked the burgers without human aid, it flash froze them, ready for placement in the electric food carts that would be wheeled into the corridors of every patient building in the complex. When the project went out for bids there were screams of rage and anguish from the unions, the local Democrat politicians could not stand the pressure, and the burger maker was cancelled. The new food facility was redesigned to have long stretches of stainless steel counters, ranges, sinks and so forth, making work for the local tin-knocker union and work for many dozens of burger flippers. The moral of this story is, many plan the glorious future, but the unions and the politicians have the horses, and the horses always win.

Mao smiled and all the flowers bloomed
A billion folks all cheered
And now those billion folks are doomed
The future now is feared
A robot stands now in the place
Of what was once a man
Who suffers unemployed disgrace
With this new Five Year Plan
But here at home we’re safe of course
The robots will not win
For on our side we have the horse
Whose votes will save our skin
No politician worth his salt
Denies the horse his vote
For robots to be the default
Means that his pleasure boat
Is gone forever with the wind
His pals, his gals, his perks
Against the horse no pol has sinned
They keep what always works

I sometimes think the world would be a better place if thoughtful men replaced the ambitious, the driven. It will never happen, but it would be nice if our leaders took the time occasionally to consider that thought should precede action.

He softly walks the forest of his mind
Each bole the storehouse of his threaded thought
The leaves and branches supple, intertwined
His life full laid upon what he’d been taught
He rests beside the freely flowing brook
Each pebble washed to brilliant diamond shine
The dancing light to him an open book
The air upon his tongue like new made wine
The evening light grows dim and day’s events
Are catalogued and filed as bird calls cease
He lights a lamp and knows without pretense
That at the end of day he is at peace

The Greeks referred to anyone who spoke a language other than Greek as a barbarian, whether Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian or whoever. The word comes from the Greek word barbaros, meaning babbler, someone who cannot be understood, and was, and was meant to be, derogatory. We still have barbarians among us, and likely always will. Today’s barbarians are our old friends the Muslim Barbary, of the Barbary Coast pirates, though they have graduated from capturing innocent sailing vessels to capturing and beheading Christians and capturing and selling Christian girls into slavery, as well as sending out suicide bombers to kill people at weddings and so forth. It used to be we called barbarians Huns; today we call them Muslims. And just as the word barbarian comes from an ancient Greek word, the word Hun comes from an ancient Chinese word. Archaeology and genetics has come together to trace early migrations of Europeans through DNA, and what was found was that at one point some ten or twelve thousand years ago, tribes of proto-Europeans, under the pressure of expanding population, left their homes in Anatolia and moved out into the wider world in all directions. Those who moved East met tribes from the East who pushed them back West. The Gauls, for instance, were driven all the way from Central Asia to the western coast of Spain by successive waves of tribes moving westward. The Romans were run into by a tribe of barbarians the Romans called the Huns, who were, it turns out, a tribe known to the Chinese as the Hsuing-nu, a name the Romans found difficult and so called them Huns. One thing is for certain: when Western civilization collapses there will be far more Huns than Swiss or Swedes.

Barbarians are with us still
The Tribe will never die
The Other we must quickly kill
And not to reason why
The human brain is wired hard
To stay with those like us
To kill who come into our yard
To take what’s theirs a plus
We think we live in nation states
We don’t, we live as tribes
Our neighborhoods control our fates
Our futures it describes
We’re born to tribes and tribal life
Though some we civilize
Who preach that war and tribal strife
Are gone, but they are lies

Massed armies deciding the fates of nation states may be a thing of the past, but a man killed in a small war is just as dead as a man killed on Omaha Beach seventy-one years ago. In both cases a wife, a mother, a girlfriend, had to go on living, and as year follows year most get through the day, but not the nights.

She lies abed these sleepless nights
And thinks of many things
Of all the many wondrous sights
That each tomorrow brings
The windows turn from dark to gray
The birds are now awake
To celebrate the newborn day
As sunlight paints the lake
Now fully light, the woods ablaze
With autumn’s brilliant hues
She rises and she turns her gaze
To other wondrous views
A pair of deer walk by the fence
Unhurried, unafraid
A squirrel’s tail switches, quite intense
Annoyed by the parade
Meridian comes much too soon
And life slows to a walk
All sleeping now that it is noon
Except the red-tailed hawk
Who circles lazily at height
For the unwary prey
And soon the afternoon is night
As dusk replaces day
The starlit wood stands crystal clear
The moon begins her climb
A hidden owl says he’s quite near
It’s midnight says the chime
She sighs and wanders off to bed
Insomnia to fight
She doesn’t mind the daytime dread
But oh the lonely night