Good Feed

Time for the Monday edition of "Good Feed."  Had some time over the weekend to catch up on some reading.  If you are an avid Internet Miner like me, let me recommend the "Read It Later" app.  It comes as a button on Firefox, but if you are like me and use Chrome or Safari, you have to add it as a button.  Nice thing is it synchs to your smart phone, so if you have some downtime...or, like me you have to spend 8 hours in a car driving back and forth to Atlanta, it comes in handy!

In the late 1980's, Tom Clancy, fresh off his breakthrough success with "Hunt for the Red October," produced a book that became required reading at both the U.S. and Soviet War Colleges.  The book was titled Red Storm Rising, and the premise was that the Soviets would stir up insurrections in different corners of the earth in order to thin out, confuse and deplete U.S. military strength and will.  Then, the main attack would come screaming through the Fulda Gap.

I was thinking about the parallels between Red Storm Rising and the situation we find ourselves in now.  We (our military) are heavily deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are operational in Yemen, Libya, off the Somali coast and numerous other brush fires in North Africa and the Middle East.  And we continue with our regular stands in Europe and Korea along with a regular rotation at sea of our Navy.

All of this activity and we are shrinking our Navy and Marine Corps, cutting our Defense Spending and not replacing what is being used up in the course of combat and regular operations.  With the exception of Europe and Korea, ALL of these operations have one thing in common: Radical Islam.  There are enough variants and nut jobs to go around, that I seriously doubt it is a coordinated effort but if you stand back and look at it from a satellite's world view, it may be achieving the same objective as if it were a coordinated attack.  All the more reason we need to be extremely cautious, Constitutional and prudent about how we deploy our force - lest we end up like - well, err, this:

What is the economic impact of Freedom?  I am asking that rhetorically, but take a look at this recently released study from the Mercatus Institute at George Mason Institute, and you get some hints.  One piece of correlation - the states that are considered the "least free," New York, New Jersey and California are the ones closest to insolvency.  My great state of Tennessee comes in 16th - a lot of room for improvement!  Here's the video:



"Too many people in America think that other people need to be regulated..." - for those that continue to be in this mindset, I have two words for you:  Anthony Weiner.  THAT's the type of person that wants to regulate YOU.

Islamic Mob burning a Coptic Church in Aina, Egypt

Speaking of freedom, one of the most fundamental freedoms is the freedom of religion - to worship who, what, where, when and why we want to.  Unfortunately, that right is under assault across the globe - from the free reign Islamic mobs now have over Egypt's Coptic Christian community to the outright suppression of all other religions in Saudi Arabia - it ain't pretty.  Here's a good read on the matter: "Targeting the World's Worst Religious Persecutors."

Finally, continuing wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson who is apparently galavanting around Europe right now as I noticed this column is post-marked "Rome:" "We Have Seen Our Sad Future And It Is Europe."

That's it for now.

Rumble on!