Category Archives: USA–UK Relationship

Fathers Day, Poverty, Harsh Reality & Sports

Posted on June 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

Last night I watched LeBron James lead the determined Cavaliers against the super professional Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. The beloved King James who had seen his jersey burnt in Cleveland when he signed to play in Miami was not quite in the land of ordinary men. He was  crossing over a bit into legend on that moment.  It was Fathers Day and a lot of American Fathers (and other fathers too) are sports fans. It seems likely that for many families in Cleveland this was Fathers Day they are not likely to forget.  Of course for the Curry family and the fans of the Golden State Warriors it was a bitter disappointment. The moment one team and one man and one city flirted with legend was the moment that another story fell short the best regular season in NBA history ended with a hard fought  seven game finals but it did not end with the championship.

A moment of triumph for Cleveland

Competition is not the only value worth having and really is not the central value of my own life. But it is part of life for all of us and it is part of male identity. This Sunday Americans celebrated Fathers Day. I had an enjoyable time with my father.  I brought him gifts and we enjoyed drinks at the Riverfront restaurant in Abbeville and a beautiful meal that my mother had prepared. During this occasion most of the attention goes to the stories of fathers bringing up children in pretty good situations.  But fathering is done in many parts of the world that are far from ideal. The sense of struggle is almost endless for many people and many of them are fathers too. The Syrian refugees, the destitute in camps, homeless shelters,  and squatting in sites around the world — many of these are fathers as well.  This is one very compelling study about what is happening in the world.  It does not focus on the whole world but on one part of it very specifically, the world of a large group or class of Syrian refugees.  My Dad has spent a lot of time with those who were in trouble. We have lived and he has lived and visited regions where people were involved in the kinds of lingering and sporadic civil wars that were common in the twentieth century, places where mass migrations had strained local resources,  places recently devastated by hurricanes and places under various kinds of social change.

Being with him in some of those times  and places where the trouble and need which attracted us there were prevalent was not always easy. The path of a life in the missions was certainly not one without real challenges. The story of those challenges and the joys that go with them has been a story that has long been a part of my life itself — not just the events of the story but the telling and retelling of that story. Even the journalism I have made a little bit of a living doing from time to time and the fiction that has not yet paid any bills –even that is informed by the really extremely varied story of that life and those years especially spent together often dealing with crises.

News paper article about China
The novel I wrote online before many but never yet published receives paper form.

Crises shape the community, hardship shapes a community and depression shapes a community.  So does the fear of violence. Americans are subject to a considerable amount of fear of violence and there is not that much agreement about how to deal with it. The cultural hostility to a person achieving any kind of self reliance whatever can be very much manifest in groups of people that inhabit many people and intimidate the family oriented, hardworking and insightful people trying to prevent those neighborhoods from turning to living hells or remaining such. A country like ours that is so dotted with riots and violence and punctuates it life with so many bombings and mass shootings is not necessarily a place that will not be crippled by more emphasis on disarming the citizenry . The Obama administration has often been criticized  here and so have  those around him who want an unarmed lawful citizenry. They are criticized in large part because I believe that they do not know how profound the savagery, disorder and decay is in its effects in destroying the quality of life in this country.  Limiting the arms of besieged American beset with violence, chaos and resistance to public advancement on many sides will certainly increase this sense of a society where it is not safe to try to survive and thrive. Here is a story about these matter in terms of what American guns mean to maintaining a balance of terror. The bad guys will not be disarming much any time soon.

My Dad is a gun owner. He is not a big preacher of the value of an armed citizenry and in many rough places where we lived we could not keep weapons at home. In addition the radical nature of our involvement with those in need  required us to risk a level of vulnerability  — but my dad is, as I have always been, a man who knew and used guns and respected and enjoyed them.

My mother in front a Confederate monument in New Orleans reminds us of what complexity there is in violence and duty.
My father is a lifelong outdoorsman and that is a passion we have shared though for me like most good things it has just been in decline.
Our family has always hunted and fished though I do less now than I would wish

 

But the arts of shooting and killing like many other things have not been the only part of his life that we have shared. Family, ministry and other values and themes of life have really been much more important without undervaluing those things.  There have also been times visiting tourist sites, wealthy friends and relatives, living in neighborhoods near stable work and hanging out on the beach.

My 52 years celebrations…

 

But I think back on my life as life in which the moments victory in dark places and hard times mattered a lot. Compared to opening a new harbor facility, a new factory or a new large piece of permanent public infrastructure a lot of the victories our family shared were kind of fleeting and heard to define. Life the elated Cleveland fans who must go back to the problems that their city faces tomorrow. But Cleveland is building back in many ways over the last twenty years. Form the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to the improving Browns, to American Splendor and  the story of King James and his knights of the round ball — Cleveland is a gritty place in a gritty state looking for and finding some real meaning and hope.

I never forget the connection between the Saints winning the Super Bowl and the devastation of Katrina and Rita. Things are far from perfect now but the Super Bowl did help to keep people who stayed in the struggle in the struggle. In America a lot of fathers watch sports and find a little hope in their own struggles from the struggles of sports. That happened to us when the Saints won it all.

Owner Benson lifts Lombardi Trophy
Tight End Jeremy Shockey Celebrates the Game’s Highest Achievement
Saints Quarterback Celebrates with his Son After Winning The Super Bowl

Whatever come in the coming year that is difficult and challenging I am sure tha watching the game last nigh after getting back from Dad’s will not be my favorite memory. I am not a huge NBA fan really. But I am also sure that it is a Father’s day even that has some meaning. It is a moment in time that many will treasure  as dads and with their dads.

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Posted in 1, Acadians, Anglo-Acadians, Environment, family, Frank W. Summers, Jesus Christ, My Dad, Roman Catholicism, United Nations, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, Vermilion Parish, War, White House

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Presidential Politics and the Current American Mindset

Posted on June 9, 2016 | 2 comments

So will the US ban all Muslims from entering the country for a time? Will it seek to get along better with North Korea and not so well with the UK? Will it deport tens of millions of aliens to Mexico by relative force across the country? Do those visions fairly represent Donald Trump?

Will it lie, deny, distort and obfuscate as long and as much as can be imagined when challenged on any wrongdoing in the White House? Will it sing the official praises of those who who sell human body part of members of our species deliberately dismembered? Will it find ways to blame working class white men and unidentified big businesses for larger and larger parts of the country’s problems no matter what the evidence may be? Is that a fair vision of a potential Clinton presidency?

This blog post does not attempt to answer any of those questions.  This post does assert that while I am doing other things I am still committed to the political commentary in this blog. It is a little different than the commentary any where else. It is very much my own.  Some of that commentary begins just now.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

It looks like there will be a race for the White House between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There may be surprises or a third significant candidate but it appears that those two will lead the charge for the major parties in this country. This post is a chance to simply link together a few thoughts and references for this blog which began during the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. I still have a few more posts in my series Emerging Views but this post is about the developing presidential election and what all of that will mean for this blog and other aspects of life, culture and politics. While this blog is obviously a particularly small voice in the world of news and information it is not clear that America has the kinds of voices today which Time and Newsweek represented in the 1980s and 1990s. Those were far from perfect times and those two famous weeklies were far from perfect media outlets.  Perceptions of bias and the wrong kinds of selectivity were often stated and were justified.  But these news and culture magazines did seem to capture a sense of where American political energy and interest were in a way which no handful of media outlets do today. Rush Limbaugh, the ABC, NBC,Fox, CBS, Yahoo and Google News programs taken together cover a lot waterfront. I am not sure they bring together a sense of the country as those two magazines and handful of their peers once did. I wonder where and how this great debate and discussion will play out.

To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

Before there were blogs forming a blogosphere there were letters to the editor in journals and magazines and I had quite a few published. That includes on published in Time. I recently wrote two long letters to Time although they really do not publish much in that way. Here they are reproduced nearly in entirety. The first discusses the state of political discussion in America from a particular point of view.

 

 Nancy Gibbs and Colleagues

Time Editorial Staff
225 Liberty Street
New York, New York 10281-1008
Ms. Gibbs (not to insult those who actually read this),
I am responding in part to the cover of the May 23 issue on Rana Forohaar’s careful rendering of her book into a lead article on capitalism. There is some alarming material in the article in the sense that it raises concerns that pose a threat to all of us. But the tone is perhaps other than alarmist. The cover was sort of evocative of covers that have appeared over times past with a contemporary take and for whatever mix of nostalgic and critical reasons I liked the cover and its kind of conversational approach to saving the U.S. economy. I also saw much of the same use of concepts of gate-keeping, source identification, making comparisons between varied crises and challenges for perspective and all these little traits reminded me of Time over the decades. But this time my reading was influenced by another experience that I will only mention and leave to any reader’s imagination as to how it influenced my reading of Time. The experience involved an interaction with an institution In some ways not at all like Time, yet both have played a role in the great and American intellectual commons which is distinct from a world or civilization based heritage or any regional or sectional intellectual ferment. That institution is one of the officials in the particular sport of television. I published a review in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in the early nineties and since I have no plethora of academic publications that is yet another reason for me to be more interested in the NIelsen process than most. Thus I found it stimulating.  
Just about the time your issue was hitting stands and libraries I had a chance to participate in the Nielsen ratings. It gave me the opportunity to think a bit more clearly about the ways in which all that we know as mass communication is changing and about how our society is changing. I deal a good bit with issues of social change and and communications and I do it in my blog, Facebook profiles and other places which are possessed of much longer comments on these events than you have time to read from an over the portal source. A look at my Twitter feed and profile would quickly tell you two things: I do have some influential followers although the number is small and I just added Time to those I am following as I started typing this email. It is not that I never viewed your tweets — I just don’t remember to add people and institutions to my list.  My Linked In profile which should be available herealso show some other connections. The relatively long and bizarre path through life depicted there is not a fiction, doubtless there are some errors and some of longstanding.But every thing in it is at least close to the truth or has simply evaded my limited attentions as an editor of the profile.
Time has bigger fish to fry than my little corner of the media world. Your recent issue of May 23 seeks to address Capitalism, feminism with Megan Kelly, mental health with Kristen Bell, Jodie Foster discussing the meaning of her movie and how Sadiq Khan hopes to combat extremism. You do this in a way which is fairly coherent, clever and informative and makes someone like me want to write you a letter even though no letters to the editor appeared in the issue about which I write. But it is clear is it not that there are forces almost of the type found in YA literature which challenge Time’s capacity to marshal an argument, stage a debate and aid in the creation and dissolution of any consensus in these United States. Much of this is blamed on Culture Wars by some who keep up with news from the eighties and nineties. However, this year it is notable that energies channeled into supporting Hillary Clinton, Donald trump and Bernie Sanders all find focus in places near your offices in New York City. They really do not seem to be cultures at war. More like a single culture not able to deal well with the people who make up the culture. I on the other hand am one of the real outsiders compared to New York and D.C., Jackson’s demise as a face on currency in favor of a Broadway promotion of Hamilton will hurt tourism associated with the Battle of New Orleans and I will feel it more than most  — although being too disadvantaged to feel it much.   I did live in New York for a year as a child and in a vague and general way I am part of the numerous constellations of enclaves the best of New York journalism used to seek to stay in touch with but I think finds it more difficult to do these days. I believe Time  is bringing to bear a great number of important questions and people are reading Time and yet I am not sure the influence on a national dialog is very great.  The recent past was not perfect but there was a conversation going on about its imperfections when your mentors were young. But the costs are not trivial, I care about fur trappers, cowboys, loggers, oilmen and stevedores. Most of all farmers and fishermen have made up large parts of my life and I consider myself an ardent environmentalist. Likely any relationship with New York journalism would experience plenty of frictions from that area of tension alone.   
The magazine you lead is really defined in part by a set of relationships with Newsweek, Life, Business Week, National Review, U.S. News and World Report and a handful of journals just as much as it is defined by its relationships with readers, advertisers, interviewed talent and newsmakers. It is easy to see that  Life andNewsweek are relatively defunct, National Review is less than it was under the leadership of the late William F. Buckley and the others are struggling at least as much as Time to find their way forward in the current era and into the future.  
I am fifty-one years old and had a letter to the editor appear in Time in the days when voice mail was means of communication that was in vogue. That was sometime around 1993 and I was more optimistic, less bitter and more hopeful of a positive future for myself and the people, communities and values I care about in an emerging American society. I think the tone was perhaps more strident and angry than the tone of this email but I was less alienated. This year is a special year for many observers of and participants in American culture, with its communication focused at actual vocal human beings in attendance at the excited and seemingly burgeoning rallies for Trump and Sanders and the coverage of those events. This makes this political season a year about a different kind of dialog. But this is not coming out of nowhere,Black Lives Matter, Occupy, pro and anti Confederate Flag rallies, Hispanic identity rallies, anti-immigration rallies, the rallies at the Papal visit and with the Pope near the border all form a compelling national dialog. In addition David Duke’s endorsement of Donald Trump reaffirmed that the pure blogosphere ( in which Duke is a player) can make a difference at least for a moment in the news cycle. My own blog is right here. Or you can drag and paste https://franksummers3ba.com/ into your browser. Isn’t it also time to admit that many of the mass shootings are acompanied by political statements which are fairly serious, reasoned attempts by Muslims, White Supremacists, East Asian Americans, military veterans, African Americans and the victims of bullying. They feel alienated and that there is no real recourse in our major social and political process. The  focus on guns and mental illness to the exclusion of everything else these people are expressing is perhaps a real sign of profound bankruptcy as regards our national conversation. I myself would like radical change and I outline it in my blog.  But how change is achieved matters almost as much as what changes one seeks.

 One of the mysterious casualties of Hurricane Katrina and a host of other troubles was the loss of a daily New Orleans newspaper in the Times Picayune. The Advocate from Baton Rouge seeks to make up the slack, but I do not think this will be without some dire consequences down the road.The decline of newspapers has been discussed all my life. I worked for or with and have been published in a variety of papers that there is only  a small chance anyone in the initial review of this letter will know. Among these newspapers are the Abbeville Meridional (principal voice of Vermilion Parish, Louisiana since the 1850s), Gannett’s Daily Advertiser, The Vermilion ( student paper for UL now then USL)and Bonnes Nouvelles ( the Vermilion Parish edition of a  chain owned by connected members of the Dardeau family). 

My Facebook friends list has the publishers and journalist of many Catholic and also of many regional outlets. The  list also includes the principal editor of the Queer Times and a number of space related blogs. Yet I cannot help but wonder if I am more alienated from the center you represent than ever before. Would it be to risky for Time to interact with me given perhaps some position or other in my blog?  The question is not purely rhetorical. I admit I would still love to have a byline in Time. I do not pretend that I am the only and best qualified person wanting to publish in your pages. I think your recent issue did a credible job. I enjoyed it although less perfectly than in the past and did not read every word. But I do wonder is Time very committed to a sort of national conversation? Committed in the way so many others are to so many other things? If not, then who is?   

— 

Frank W. Summers, III
Frank “Beau” Summers

The next letter I wrote to Time was related to an article I had read in their pages related to the  South China Sea and the brewing tensions there.  It is less to the point of this post than the first but it is not irrelevant:

 

Timelords (is that the correct form of address?),

 
Fiery Cross Reef is vital to Chinese military interests. There artificial island should be expanded with a more naturalistic artificial coastline. We need a very civilized rival somewhere in the world to justify maintaining our investment in traditional military assets. We need traditional military assets to have a long term future. The Philippines and the United States have a vital interest and real claims in the region are indeed held by several powers as described in the article.
 
The total story is a complex one. But where are the calls for the kinds of dispute resolution which the vast and costly international legal system and the United Nations could possibly actually resolve?
 
There are not yet any real bad guys in this story. It may turn out in the long run that a real belligerence must arise in this region. I wish that were less likely than it is… However, if the United Nations, the various systems of mediation and other institutions are worth anything then many people should be calling for them to be fully used here.
 
I also believe artificial islands must become major priorities for many of the world’s great powers. Learning to address the issues related to such projects ought to be both an American and a global priority.
 
Sincerely,
 
Frank Summers
Foreign Expert
People’s Republic of China
2004 to 2005
Students & in English Corner meeting on Campus SDIBT Yantai.

Students & in English Corner meeting on Campus SDIBT Yantai.

America has a lot on its plate right now. It is not mostly China which challenges us in the world. Our policies from Syria, to Iraq, to Israel, to Afghanistan and on to Europe are at least subject to serious question. This blog has been questioning policies throughout the Obama presidency. It has also been the place to put forward some policy proposals — many of them radical which may be up for discussion or may be ignored but are not being deleted from this site.  It has also made many correct predictions and some dire predictions about the possibilities of the Obama Presidency that may not turn out to be the case. While that was always hoped for by me and others around it nonetheless does undermine the credibility of the blog if things do not get significantly worse than they are before January.  My own life in these years has arguably been more and more ineffective with a few bright spots and counter trends not disproving that general direction. But while I  have problems and many others do as well I am not sure mine are the problems that resonate with the electorate per se. At least they are not likely be determinative of the outcome of the election. Yes I need better opportunity and more money but not in the same way as some other people whose needs better represent more voters.

America has many challenges to face and this blog is full of my thoughts bout meeting those challenges. but so far there is little evidence that this blog will be a major factor in shaping the key discussions of these matters at the heart of our political discussion.  I myself am more than a little weary and the worse for wear.  But I began this blog to express a point of view and influence the American mindset and I will continue to try to do that.

The earliest post on this blog was provided by Word Press but I could have deleted it. I am not sure if I edited it at all it appears here. 

It is reproduced here:

Hello world!

Posted on August 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

My next blog post was a kind of manifesto lifted from a series of Facebook notes just a few months earlier in its release on Facebook. You can read it here if so inclined. The idea of a very personal blog with a political view is quite manifest but not so much presidential politics. In fact specific politics as the term is often  are not much in evidence in that post.

The next post, which appears here, lays out some geopolitical ideas, visions and policies. It takes tongue in cheek a limitless ambition and scope as part of the nature of this blog.  I had nothing much to say about presidential politics in the manifesto.

The first post dealing with presidential politics in this blog links here. It was a reposting from a now long neglected or abandoned user blog I had on Politco.

I reproduce the long introductory segment of it here below. I cannot say that none of my views have changed or evolved but many have not:

I feel a certain amount of sympathy for Barack Obama. I choose to start with that line because I consider myself to be one of the people most opposed to Barack Obama within the spectrum of legitimate politics. However, I don’t think that there is any doubt that we have reached the point where Conservatism can be looked at as something which has merited the term “crisis”. America is in a crisis and I believe that it will prove to be a very grave crisis. However, conservatism is in a far greater crisis. For argument’s sake let us say that the terms right and left, Democrat and Republican describe a real political dynamic which matters in this country. I would argue that on the right in this country we have lots of politicians who use the label“conservative” but actually we have a collection of Libertarians, Tax Avoiders,  Moderate Neo-Fascists , Ultra-Reformed  Protestant Theocrats, and Anglophile Antiquarians who collectively squeeze a weak and demoralized conservative group of Americans who hardly matter at all.  Some of these five never discussed groups would be Conservatives if there really was a Conservative Movement for them to be part of , on the other hand many fundamentally despise Conservatism.I voted for George Bush the first time and almost certainly would have voted for him the second time if I could have made it to Beijing’s American Embassy in time to vote. However, I missed that election. I voted for McCain-Palin in the most recent election. I also voted for Mary Landrieu a Democrat this year. Through my life I have voted for a collection of Democrats, Republicans and Independents.  My sympathy for Barack Obama comes into play in this regard. Like Obama (and a lot of other people)  I have had to make the best choices I could at any given time. By the time I was old enough to vote I had forged a lot of bonds and relationships which included fundamentalists, communists in other countries, resentful Moslems, white supremacists, black radicals and lots of other people who don’t fall into the neat safe categories that President mills like mid century Yale Law normally produce in quantity.  If I were to have made a run at the US Presidency there would be people some folks would like as little as I like Rev. Wright and David Ayres. Despite all that colorful background I have lots of self-respect and more oddly yet, I think of myself as an authentic American Conservative. Arguably, I am one of the only American conservatives who could be optimistic about the Obama example. Because if such an oddly positioned person of such a background as Barack Obama can be President of the United States then maybe I could at least get elected parish assessor, city dog-catcher, county councilman, water-district representative or something else somewhere in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Somehow I don’t think Obama’s election signifies anything nearly that hopeful for someone like me.  I am able to accept that there is not likely to be a government paycheck in my future. That is unless you include the kinds of fellowships and part-time job checks form school boards and universities which I have gotten in the past. I don’t hate liberalism but I know that Liberals are more likely to take a political interest in those with odd and quirky backgrounds than conservatives are. I am able to say that I have won a few elections. I won a seat on Dorm Council in College, I was elected as Outstanding Graduate in my department , college and university for that particular commencement exercise at a different school. Then In China  a few years ago I organized elections among my student for various class and subgroup offices. Then there are a couple of elections where I was elected to post that I can’t discuss here by groups that like their privacy.  None of those races seem very much related to the Presidency or even a governorship however. In most of these races my political philosophy was not a central aspect of what people were electing me for or voting against. Many people hold office for other reasons than political philosophy. People vote for friends, members of their race or class, to keep seniority in a legislature or because they are personally opposed to the candidates opposition. But in  the big leagues there are always some questions of political philosophy that become important. I would argue that Conservatism is usually not on the menu.I think that a coherent expression of American Conservative political philosophy would require at least one very long book. If someone hasn’t read any of the books which have helped to from my opinions then an article or two would not make the great sweep of ideas stand clear. Here I am going to do something very different. I am going to propose ten unthinkable planks in a platform in an aggressive conservative movement. I don’t think that conservative means passive. Some of these would even require constitutional amendments. I believe that these planks would probably unpopular and are largely undemanded but that is because Conservatism is largely dead. I think that passing something along these lines would be essential to setting our country on a good conservative path. I believe struggling for something like this would be essential for rebuilding a conservative movement.

What is the mindset or set of mindsets which will shape American destiny in the coming election cycle?  Where are we headed as country?  This blog will still be involved in tracking these questions and any answers that it can find.

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Posted in 1, blogs, Geopolitics, Israel, media, Palestine, Peace Plan in Israel, Personal Philosophy and Moral Economics, Sarah and Todd Palin Family, time, United States Armed Forces, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, White House

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Crimea and the Moment

Posted on March 4, 2014 | 6 comments

I certainly think many people are doing the right thing to act early in trying to define the limits of Russian authority over Ukraine as being something that cannot be total. Little is ever gained by mere capitulation or hoping problems will go away.  Many commentators  make some good points about the Syrian crisis and by analogy and inference about other places in the world where Russia can play a role different than almost any other country. I commented on a post by prominent Labor party figure Clive Lord Soley as regards some of those comments he shaped and passed on in The Lords of the Blog. Russia is a striking alternative to the West both because of its view of itself as an alternative to Europe and the USA and also as a society which nonetheless has a history of Christianity, a large white population, huge shared literary and artistic conventions  with the West. There are also not only ties to nearby regimes but the recent memory of leading world Communism with only China coming anywhere close to being a competitor.

I am inclined to want very much to help Western Ukraine to a secure future and see their sense of the need to act. But I would not try to dislodge Russia from the Crimea. I am perhaps more of this view than many in Europe given the relatively recent past Britain joined the Turks in fighting the Crimean War against Russia as I recall. That surely shapes one’s point of view. The Germans followed a man committed to building a new order on a destroyed Russian state more recently still. Hitler mapped that out in Mein Kampf. Whether Napoleon, Hitler or the Turks Crimea is a key to beating down Russia. The time may come when I will wish we had beaten down Russia starting with the Crimea but that is not how I feel just now. Russia plays a key role in geopolitics. No ready substitutes are available and Russia is one of several great super societies.

If the US enter armed conflict with Russia I will mostly try to support my country and remember Russia’s many iniquities while behind the scenes perhaps expressing some other points of view. However, I do not think seizing the Crimea is the right reason to be drawn into conflict with Russia I do not even think it seems all that assertive to everyone. Most people feel the need to defend Ukrainian self determination, in some way — I do as well, and perhaps more than most. Many informed people feel the need to try to support the cultural rights and decent aspirations of Western Ukrainians in the next generation– I do probably pass the average person in desire to do that as well. But if Russia really and truly has no right to hold the Crimea in a friendly position then the world is unrecognizably bizarre.

I am aware that much of human history and current geopolitics seems different from different points of view. But to say Russia must commit suicide is to declare the end of this era in a very real way. In my personal life I have not hidden in the shadows but I do believe there is so much that needs resolving and doing besides war. This blog of mine is full of other priorities which I support and uphold. My life is full of distractions. I suffer from threats to life in my own health and have a friend in the hospital with a cerebral hemorrhage and the grandfather of two of my nieces and one nephew has just died of heart disease today.  My own schedule and the tourist economy of the region are  disrupted by unseasonable ice storms.

Bleak in Acadiana

Bleak in Acadiana

 

trees wrapped in ice in the afternoon in March near Acadiana's coast

trees wrapped in ice in the afternoon in March near Acadiana’s coast

I want to support those who would broker a better deal for Western Ukraine above all. However I also have a full set of distractions to keep me from Russia’s periphery. That is the nature of spheres of influence.

Our ritual foods of Mardi Gras are on my mind more than Borscht

Our ritual foods of Mardi Gras are on my mind more than Borscht

The world has many problems and Crimea is more important to Russia than it is to anyone else except possibly Ukraine. Really losing Crimea mean Russia must fight a major war sooner than later. We may squeeze them out peacefully and humiliate them and in the end it may lead to a post Russian civilization but somewhere before they check out they will fight a big war. A Russian dominated Crimea is essential to peace. I do not believe in peace at any cost. I do not think Russia and the US are pals. I do not believe I am a coward. But Russia has to control or be the largest and accepted foreign influence in Crimea for their to be peace, of that there is no doubt in my mind. So as I sit here trying to manage many other concerns and even to survive myself in the less than perfect health I enjoy I hope for peace in the Crimea.

Of course I live in intolerable situations and perhaps Russia can as well. But it would be intolerable for them to lose Crimea. What will they do if they concede this loss?

It is Mardi Gras. Tomorrow Lent begins and today is the day to celebrate the end of Carnival season

We have no way of knowing whether or not when asked about Russian troops in Ukraine Putin told Western diplomats “Crimea river”, Cry me a river” or none of the above. The Germans took the Crimea from Russia, so did the joint forces of the British, Turkish and French. Could the US do so? Certainly it is possible. with the support of the European Union and others but there is no doubt that those campaigns were fought over a very long time and at a high level of intensity. It is also arguable whether other powers had really achieved a peaceful status in which Russia was not in the end the dominant world power in the Crimea. I hope there will be a good resolution here.

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Posted in Lords of the Blog, Russia, Russia's East, Ukraine, Ukraine, USA--UK Relationship

Guns, Violence and Policy in the USA and Abroad: A recopied Facebook Note

Posted on January 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

by Frank Wynerth Summers III on Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 11:19am ·
President Barack Hussein Obama has come out with his gun policy intiatives. There is no doubt that former US Representative Gabby Giffords, Vice President Joe Biden, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will find many opportunites to say, write aand support a wide variety of people who will discuss the future of the country and the role guns will play in that future. There will be many experts discussing the current situation. This has been a time with many high profile shootings since President Obama came into office and there were already many high profile shootings.

I have written of gun policy before. I would support a regime that allowed federal licensing of transport of guns acorss State and other jurisdictional lines except by licensed wholesalers. Any retail or personal transit would require a not too expepensive federal license and be recorded. Jurisdictions could then also make rules for themselves. Beyond that I have proposed a whole new constitution. Howver, I will leave aside my own radical vision for now and eal with what we have. Some states may fortify schools, some have extensive gun control. The feds could tax all guns and ammo with a single 10% value added addition to all other taxes and prices. Half of this woulod go to the records and policing of the new law by the ATF. The rest would go to the general treasury. I think the national registry of not nice people is a really horrible idea. It is both eveil and idiotic. those are its good points.

This is a time when many Americans are concerned about the killing of Americans with handguns. I feel that I must weigh in on the issues related to handguns, AR-15 rifles and the numbers involved in killings in this country. I also feel that I must weigh in on policy concerns. America is certainly a nation with many firearms. Their is little more to it than that which almost all Americans will agree about. We do not agree about how many guns there ought to be or anything else along those lines.

The truth is that the President of the United States has ties to people in the Weather Underground, has supported the Occupy Wall Street and the larger Occupy Movement and has been silent about the role of the Black Block Anarachists and others in this whole world of people who make trouble for a living when there is such work to be had. I respect more people in that world than perhaps many people in my readership do. It has been years since I had any real prospertity or a mortgage, I know lots of people who have been bankrupt, in jail or otherwise in trouble. I kinow some really wretched people who live in nice homes and have many financial assets and in many cases they know I despise them. But it is this vast mob which has so much increasing influnce under President Obama who are most deterred by guns. They will be free to remake the country into their own image when the guns are more limited and be much more bold in undertaking that national transformation.

Popular questions in the media and the public today are focused on how to stop people shooting up schools. There are few wondering how to stop the destruction of a society in which schools are possibly worth attending. I think things are pretty horrible already but they certainly can and likely will get worse.

“Why Do Riots Occur?” may be a hard question. But there is no doubt that a heavily armed populace is a deterrent to the pursuit of mob rule across a society.

Remember what happened after the Rodney King beating? That did not spread far beyond the neighborhoods in South Central Los Angels in large part because large numbers of people in the frenzied mobs were aware that other people with different points of view were well armed at home. The plague of angry idiocy which has been the downfall of many civilizations was contained then and has often been contained thus. Britain has countless more cultural resources to deter riots than we have relative to the threat. However since disarming the populace the role of riots has greatly increased. That violent riots are part of the discourse in Britain is evident when one discusses the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests which connected with the sometimes violent student protests of November and December 2010, and was prompted by cuts and changes to the welfare like and unsustainable realtively new system funding various forms of higher and further education in England. Significant in the UK was that a student protest included a violent protest when students attacked the automobile in which Charles, Prince of Wales and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall were riding. This is a symbolic attack equal to only a handful of possible symbolic acts in the United States.

But overall these anti-austerity protests were nothing compared to the 2011 England Riots proper. Are any Americans remembering images of England’s firefighters blasting water hoses on a shop and flats destroyed by arson during the initial rioting in Tottenham?

Across large parts of London from the 6th to 10th of August 2011 as well as in Birmingham, the West Midlands, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Bristol and elsewhere there was a wave and network of rioting, looting, arson, mugging, assault, and murder. The numbers killed were fewer than in one mass shooting but the effect on life and culture and the message to those in society was very strong. After such events it hard to trust other reports because people do not report violence. Code fo this problem in the UK is that anti-social events occurred under Blair but crime went down. That simply means that the honest live in perpetuial terror. Low-grade and limited terror but terror nonethless.

Those who want only the Police to be armed would do well to remember that the British disturbances I am discussing here began on August 6, 2011 after a protest in Tottenham, following the death of Mark Duggan, a local man who was shot and killed by police on 4 August 2011. The protestors became angry after police attacked a sixteen-year old who provoked them. Several violent clashes with police, along with the destruction of police vehicles, magistrates’ court and a double-decker bus. The complete loss of many and severe damage to more civilian homes and businesses occupied by the disarmed British citizen-subjects of this era was likely nothing compared to what will happen here. This is completely forgotten now though it did get some attention from the media then . Before the wave of unrest ended a very conservative estimate of £200 million worth of property damage was incurred, and local economic activity was significantly compromised. The riots have occasioned debate among Brits of varied political, social and academic backgrounds regarding the causes and context in which they happened but have not brought back the hidden and polite British guns society which prevented total social upheaval of this kind. Well spoken people discuss the rioters’ behavior in terms of structural factors such as racism, classism, and economic decline, as well as cultural factors like criminality, hooliganism, breakdown of social morality, and gang culture. The absences of a gun-toting law abiding element is not discussed. The struggle is over and the future is determined. President Obama cannot get the country he wants with guns allowed to those depressed and not always able to keep the rules in a society sunk under rules. Most of those rules are badly thought out, badly written and ill-advised. The nannie-staters, the thugs and the cowards will have their unholy alliance to run our country. The honest tough, the mildy misanthropic and the law-abiding who deals openly with imperfection will become a legal underclass. None of us will survive this as a culture but we will be individually dead (most of us of old age or other such causes) before the final transformation occurs.

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What about BP? More thoughts on the midterm election…

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 2 comments

I would like to think that the election results last night had to do with Sarah Palin and the ruralists reasserting their fair share of a national consensus…

1. BUT, was a lot of it about money supporting an injured oil and gas former governor who  was simply pushed forward by  a BP  orchestrated cartel?

I would like to believe that Main Street and Wall Street interests here in America formed part of the coalition which fought for our national growth…

2.BUT, was part of it the fact that British creditors hold so much paper that they could exercise subtle pressures to make people stop the administration that chewed out the centerpiece of their economic all-stars — BP? 

I would like to see that Rand Paul and Rubio and Haley and Cantor show a real ripening of American diversity into the political process…

3. But, how much of their limited government philosophy is a desire to abdicate cultural maturity to the Brits again because of BP’s threatened status in the public eye recently?

I personally have set out many reasons why BP and the oil industry have got to be protected from the ravening and nationalizing interest I myself opposed in this process….

4. But has BP orchestrated a bought and paid for coalition of GOP oil-friendly officials and legislators who will let them continue to really fail in every honest measure and tell themself how successful they are?

I would like to think that the organization that pulled this off was homegrown and shows that America’s business lobby has not decayed as much as so many measures suggest about our management….

5. BUT, how much of this machine was made in the UNited Kingdom and not the USA?

For me every day is more or less a bad day. I will try to see the good and hope for the best.  But I still think we are in a self-destructive cycle. I am hopeful that the many good things, ideas and people in this country will find a way forward in this society.  However, I am not pleased that Obama’s administration handled the details the way they did with BP and left such a clear occasion for them to retaliate and find sympathy. I am sure nobody in the White House was ever more peeved with BP than I was. But I fancy that my own enraged and wounded approach was always more tempered with reason and civility. Those are qualities the British establishment sees in itself but rarely can be honestly said to have possessed. Keep your eyes out and find some descendant of Paul Revere because the British are always coming, have always been coming and always will be coming.

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Posted in BP - British Petroleum, BP Chairman Svanberg, Election Day, Louisiana, midterm elections, Oil & Gas Industry, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, White House

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Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Papal Visit

Posted on September 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Well, it is done. John Henry Cardinal Newman is Beatified. Across America at universities there are many Newman Clubs where some of the  Catholic student members likely feel more connected to a canonization than they ever expected to and yet they are likely to have known only a very little about his life and record. He is a man who lived for 89 year in a single century. That is much more unusual than living for 89 years and so historians who are drawn to the study of centuries (despite their best efforts not to be) will always be likely to note him as a source in studying the nineteenth century of the Christian era.   He was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and there are not very many of those. He was the author of a very long memoir called Apologia Pro Vita Sua: The History of My Religious Opinions.  That gives the rest of his writing, speaking and organizing a different shape and flavor for history than the lives of great men who do not write memoirs. He belonged to the Birmingham Oratory and therefore he is likely to be remembered by his community that has preserved his documents and artifacts and remembered the anecdotes of his life. Then, as of a few days ago, a Pope had made a historic journey to his homeland to celebrate his legacy. We now have added to all of this his official elevation to the “honor of the altars” not the “glory of the altars” which is the step of canonization which has not yet been taken.  His chapel will now become an official Catholic Shrine.  I expect the process to canonization will proceed in good order. Attention will show a man who like other saints was faithful to his sense of the life and inspiration of Jesus Christ.

I may or may not do another post on this visit by Pope Benedict XVI and this man who was so compelling a human being in so many ways.  Let us just consider the enormous effect which this visit has had on the Catholic community in Britain. I lived there as a child and found the air of anti-Catholicism thick enough. But for these days there has been a chance for the Roman Catholics there to see a fellow Teuton leading their worship on good terms with the Anglicans and beatifying a great Catholic son of their island.

In my own life it has also been a significant occasion. As an Anglo-Acadian, a former English major and a correspondent with Peers and others at the Westminster Parliament where Benedict XVI just spoke. For me there has not been much of an emotional response to these events but there has been an intellectual recognition that these things do matter.

The only possible victims in this happy event or the devotees of the American saint John Newman who was a multilingual pastor and builder and bishop.  Perhaps his ethnic name of Johannes Naumann or something close to it can be used. However, he was not very well-known anyway. However, he is worth knowing.

The saints meant more to me perhaps when I tried a bit harder to imitate them. However, I still admire what I am less able to imitate.  I do sort of hope this Beatification will move several efforts for peace and reconciliation forward.

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Posted in Christianity, Frank W. Summers, Jesus Christ, Lords of the Blog, Roman Catholicism, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, Western civilization

The Danger of Being a Complete Idiot

Posted on September 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

I have decided that I am personally opposed to be the world being run by complete idiots.  I think that in time there will be a need to decide that merely being a complete idiot is not a sign of a divine right to govern. Being a complete idiot may be  a fine ideal for people at many levels and may feel really wonderful but it is not sufficient to outweigh all other possible human qualities.

We have a society that moves fast and moving fast has become essential to a lot of what we do and who we are. However,  we often move in a lot of ignorance and foolishness. The adjustment to a somewhat more deliberate pace will not be an easy one.

I think that it is somehow important to be able to step out of the ordinary and mundane flow and norm of human life and society.  It is important to be able to see the bigger picture and the connections between the separate pictures which are the worldviews of each society, nation and culture. I think it is good to be able to see the several goods that conflict with the several evils that may accompany a policy decision  and also to see  how those evils conflict with each other and how those goods conflict with each other. I trust the analysis that follows such a  moral parsing  more than one which starts always looking for just the good and the bad of a choice. I trust even less that analysis rooted in the opinion that there is no good or evil.

I like the idea that a school should be a place of learning first for all the students. I do not believe we can eliminate all the rest but I believe that rape, bullying, brutalization, farting, stupidity being propounded pompously and theft should be less important than well-organized lessons, sporting events, school dances, plays, bands, moderate punishments and friendly conversation at the lunch table. I am willing to see the world that I live in clearly but I am not willing to see it as all perfectly good and right.

I think that the main purpose of the world we live in from my point of view is to suck as much as possible. However, I sometimes choose to resist this trend. One thing I hate is that whole trend which has amended the election of any US Senators by the State Legislatures away, made absolute robots of the College of Electors to the point of completely ignoring them except as mathematical factors, diminished the role of the Vice President as President of the Senate, started the rule of saying the United States is a country instead of the United States are a country (to which like others of these rules I adhere), racial policy that says either no colored people can share a conference center with white people anywhere or else blacks have the obligation to overrun every white school and rearrange its curriculum and life. These are just some of the many ways in which the country which is my home has made being a complete idiot the national ideal. I wish it could be changed.

It takes great intelligence and knowledge and some discipline to really follow the beauty pageants system, baseball at each level, the NCAA basketball tournament or a good game of football. It takes great knowledge and intelligence to stay current on what is happening in Country, Cajun, Zydeco, Bluegrass, various regional forms of the Blues, Contemporary Christian, Southern Swing, Motown, Jazz, Broadway Showtunes and movie Soundtracks. It takes great knowledge and skill  to follow and understand the Mercantile Exchange, The New York Stock Exchange, the history of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, the Urner-Barry Seafood Price Current, the NASDAQ and the Morningstar summary of  mutual funds. Nobody apologizes for any of this difficulty. But I am convinced that in the essence of our polity and commonwealth and in the social mechanics that hold us all together  we face the ideal of the complete idiot gaining ground year by year and generation by generation.  I do not mean democracy.  I really mean the ideal of the complete political idiot. I am not joking. We have not achieved our ideal yet, but that is the ideal to which we are being drawn and towards which we are drawing the world.

I wish we would adopt a different ideal. I fee l that there are real dangers in us all becoming complete idiots in this area of our lives. We will face challenges in the environment, politics, war and diplomacy which a complete idiot is not the best person to address. Sometimes we will need people who are not complete idiots.

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Posted in Amy Grant, Asia, College Football, Contemprary Christian Music, Country Music, Geopolitics, Music, Peace Plan in Israel, Population policy, United States Armed Forces, USA--UK Relationship, Vince Gill, White House

Peace, War and the Future in Israel & Elsewhere

Posted on September 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

I am writing this blog post about the peace process in Israel and the larger issues related to it in so many ways. That topic will be challenging and my little blog post is not likely to be so very influential either. We face many challenges  in the world and I am weary and sometimes weak in the face of the many challenges we face considering the  time that has passed since I have known. I am going to lay out a  plan for Peace in Israel that I do not believe can be implemented right now. All I can really do is say that I will not call something else acceptable right now my self.

I first want to quote from an earlier blog post which in turn reproduced a Facebook Note from my Facebook profile. To see the blog post itself see this link:  https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/novus-ordo-seclorum/  The most pertinent passage appears below.

” I. I suggest that reparations be paid for the Holocaust by many parties which benefitted or inherited from beneficiaries. I suggest that a large part of these funds be paid to purchase the Sinai from Egypt and then a separate portion be set up as a development fund. This fund would also include a fund for concessions to be paid for in which those paying in to the fund would be preferred. This Sinai would be a State of a greater Federal Great Israel. The other States would be the Principal State of the Republic of Israel, the Capital Sate of Jerusalem, and the State of Palestine. The Republic would receive slightly more land than it yielded to form the Capital State of Jerusalem in the from of five state military reservations in the Sinai. Palestine would receive a concession the size of Gaza which would be one of three districts in that federal state. The remainder of Sinai would be composed of several federalized districts and it would form the fourth and last state.”

In time I will return to pursuing this argument  a bit further and explaining and clarifying it a bit. Life is indeed a constant source of interruptions to our hobbies, hopes and avocations. I am going to write a bit about my life and how my life gets in the way of reshaping the world. This will be one of my more rambling and indirect posts I think.

I think Israel is too small even with the occupied territories. My plan does not call for enslaving, deporting or exterminating the Palestinians. However, it is clear to me that I must support the expansion of the State of Israel above all considerations that can be used to distract from it. Further, I must demand reparations for the Holocaust. I do not demand a truly adequate compensation but a very significant gesture. I was thinking in the neighborhood of forty-five billion dollars.

The Holocaust Reparation Fund

I. Amount Collected and Release of Claims

 I would propose collecting a total of forty-five billion dollars for this fund. So that it is a cohesive fund from all sources and that Israel would sign a release saying that all claims of the Hebrew Nation which can be discharges with money related to the Holocaust would be discharged with this payment.

  II. Structure Of Expenditures and Disbursement of Funds

1. Thirteen Billion Dollars would be paid to Egypt  for full and total cession of all lands on the Sinai Peninsula to which it has any claim which are more that fifteen kilometers from the banks of the Suez Canal and are not an effective part of the existing city of Al Qantarah. This would be a permanent and complete cession to the new Federal Great Israel brokered by  a treaty bound current State and Republic of Israel.

2. The Zone along the Canal in Sinai would become a permanent Canal Condominium Territory governed by the Suez Corporate Territorial Government. Egypt would retain twenty of a hundred seats in the upper house of the legislature which would also be  the corporate board and would receive one billion dollars from the Holocaust Reparation Fund for which the new Israeli State of Sinai would receive fifteen of these same hundred states. Egypt would also receive one billion and formal release of all claims resulting from seizure of its rights from GDF Suez which in return would receive twenty seats of these same hundred and the Royal Pretender to throne of Egypt would pay nothing except formal release of all other family claims to the canal but would receive five seats of these same one hundred seats.  Israel would pay one billion dollars to Egypt and would receive for  the New First State of the Republic of Israel  twenty seats and for the Federal Great Israel’s national government twenty seats. Thus 20+ 15+20+5+20+20 = 100. Egypt would retain a share of these assets and gain three billion dollars in cash and release of all competing claims. The lower house of the legislature of the Canal Condominium Territory would be democratic and represent inhabitants of the zone.  The Holocaust Reparation Fund will only be reduced by a billion dollars.

3. One billion would be paid to a fund for Egyptians living in the Sinai to either resettle in Egypt or else accommodate to the new situation taking an oath and signing papers of loyalty to Israel.

5. Five Billion Dollars would be paid to an endowed trust to use only in resettling descendants of the Holocaust within the boundaries of the new Israeli State of Sinai.     

6. Three Billion Dollars would be paid to the Israel general Treasury to develop the basic infrastructure of its new  five military bases in Sinai.

7. Three Billion dollars would be set up as the initial treasury of the new Israeli Capital State of Jerusalem.

8. Three billion would be given to a jointly administered fund for the Palestinian Authority and Israel to develop the third of the three federal districts in the Israeli State of Palestine which will be located in the new lands in the Sinai.

9. One Billion Dollars would be paid to the Palestinian Authority to  develope the initial treasury of the Israeli Federated State of Palestine. Its state legislature will have an upper house with seats by the three great district and a lower house with seats elected in electoral district by population.

10. These initial  thirty  billions will be the unrecoverable portion of the payment. 13+1+1+5+3+3+3+1= 30 billion.

11. The remaining fifteen billion dollars will be kept in an internationally administered trust until exhausted. Its sole use will be to buy goods and services for the development of the Israeli State of Sinai from the donors to the Holocaust Reparation Fund. Only Austrian and German companies and any other not of those countries that contributed to the fund will be eligible vendors.  However, the international board will assure that market prices are charged and that orders are relatively widely distributed among the pool of donors.

III. Skewing the Collection of Reparations

West German Lander should pay a somewhat discounted portion of the totality of the reparations because they have paid early and in a structure as part of the West German government. However they would still pay but Swiss banks, Austrian and Czech governments, the Eastern Lander governments, major corporations and estates of rich individuals would pay. In return for their contributions and disclosure to a Truth and Reconciliation Committee they would also be entitled to a  UN authorized agreement releasing them from criminal and civil claims for genocide and crimes against humanity. Individuals could still complain for murder and other ordinary crimes but all ethnic, racial and war crimes would be settled. Confessions made along with payments would be sealed for a period of twenty years except for a vague sort of eummary which would be published as a book. Payments made by others would vary by degree of guilt off-set by other factors.   It would also be true that individuals claiming benefits under the fund would agree that in the future thay would allow those who paid in to be held free of punitve damages for  holding stolen property and would allow some portion less than a third of recovered property value to go to a structure to compensate partially even parties with guilty title but not direct thieves who have collected stolen assets. In a ddition it would be clear that those clearly not part of the paying pool who paid nothing and were later found implicated directly in harm whether coroporations or governments would never receive any of these benefits. On the other hand even criminal cartels should they come into the structure should still qualify for these specific protections even if they do not receive recognition by the law in any other good way. Despite saying Germany and Austria if by some miracle some Norse governments were to admit principal and activist guilt they could pay into the structure and make the deal as well. If organized crime in Western China were to come forward and admit its active role in the policy then it too would qualify. Forty-Five billion is a minimal amount. In my view Germany ought to be made to feel that they are the guarantor help collect or pay it all despite previous agreements. However, somehow pressure must be exerted to make them work to deliver other guilty parties to pay instead of shielding them. Clearly however Italy, Poland, Vichy France, Spain, Turkey and many other countries cannot be held responsible the moral lines are too unclear in dealing with the Nazi monstrosity. I would be a better broker and proponent of this deal if I was a big bad guy all these scary people feared. However, I am a fairly weak player not likely to live to be an old man whether they do anything or not. But if rage and contempt count for anything then I am a factor to be reckoned with anyway. I can fight a little but I am no anti-Hitler to throw my weight around.

II. Constitution of  the Israeli Federated State of Sinai

1. The Federated State of Sinai should have one of the most complex constitutions of any new polity in the world’s history. People have grown unused to civilization but civilized solutions are often complicated. The Upper House of the State Legislature should itself be federal by Seven Districts and the lower house elected by population.  The Districts themselves will have relatively strong  local near state governments and some of them will also be federal. 

 2. There will be a reservation of five percent of the lands as an Egyptian Ethnarchy of which the Royal Pretender to the Throne of Egypt will be the Head of State and appoint several members of the District Upper House and will have his own Ward of which he is Head of State and populated by Egyptian royalists who wish to live there including up to one-third of the population coming in new from Egypt and the others from  the current population of Sinai and Palestine. The second ward will be the Constitutional Patriarchate of Alexandria and will recognize the Christian Coptic Patriarch of Alexander as Ward Head of State under a Sinai and Israel Constitution . Up to two-thirds of the population can be Christian refugees from Muslim countries so long as one half of them  are from Egypt and the other third must be currently residents from within Israel, Palestine and Sinai. The last ward will be the Sinai Republican Ward made up of old residents of the peninsula and Palestinian and Israeli Arabs wishing to start such a polity.

3.The Second District will consist of ten percent of all lands and be an North  American Jewish Ethnarchy for Hebrews practicing  some form of Judaism and seeking to maintain dual citizenship culture for families who participate in the USA, Mexico and Canada as well as Israel.

4. The Third District will the District of Federated Israeli Military Hinterland Communities and consist of five civilian settlement belts for residents of the Republic of Israel which measure four kilometer wide bands around the five military bases that will be part of the Israeli First State of the Republic of Israel.

5. The Fourth District will be a one hundred Kilometer State Capital District.

6. The Fifth District will be made up of fifty percent of all the lands in the Israeli Federal State of Sinai and will be made be  dedicated to the Right of Return and permanent priority will be given to the resettlement of direct descendants of Holocaust victims currently in Israel and returning from other places.

7. The Sixth and Seventh districts will be equal in size. Together they will occupy all remaining lands which will be substantially less than thirty-five percent but I will not work out the exact numbers.  The Sixth District will be the Federated Christian District  of which the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem will be head of State, appoint members to the District Upper House and be head of State of a Ward under an Israeli and Sinai Constitution.  This District will have another ward of equal size under the Ward Head of State who will be the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.  Each of these district should receive as part of Sinai state territory and as part of their respective ward’s rule a land concession of one square mile each divided between Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.  The Third Ward will be a Ward for Sinai and Israeli Christians.  The Fourth  Ward will be a Ward for ethnic Palestinian Christians who want to resettle there. The Seventh District should be the Hebrew Royalist District  of the State of Sinai. Here there will be a Ward which is the Barony of Rothschild and two other Baronies. Since I am fantasizing anyway I may as well say that I think the largest ward should be a Duchy and I would name my nominee for founding Duke or Duchess if this ever came close to reality and it was necessary to do so.              

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Posted in Egypt, Frank W. Summers, Geopolitics, Israel, Jesus Christ, Judaism, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Mexico, Palestine, Peace Plan in Israel, Roman Catholicism, Royalty and Empire, Sinai, Suez Canal, United Nations, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, Western civilization

An Acadian Moment

Posted on September 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

The following timeline is from memory and tapped out quickly. It leaves out far more than it includes.  Nonetheless, in this blog I often argue that we may have reached an Acadian moment in American history. Therefore, I want to give some idea of where that moment would fall in our history.

1600ish Project of founding Acadie begins in Western France.

1755 Le Grand Derangement peaks with exiles from Grand Pre area as the Brits drive out the “French Neutrals”  and burn, confiscate  or destroy almost all their possessions.

1785 Joseph Broussard Dit Beausoleil  and his company receive near state statue from the Spanish Empire on the Atakapas Prairie. Connections well established with Olivier Theriot’s Acadian Colony in East Louisiana.

 Very Early 1800s Acadians deal with numerous transitions including the Louisiana Purchase, some fight at Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana becomes a State of the United States.

1850s Tensions build toward the Civil War. Acadian Governor Mouton prominent in crisis. Comite de Vigilance des Atakapas founded.  

1860s French Prince Camille de Polignac fights in Acadiana as a Confederate general. Acadian Confederate General Mouton dies  of wounds received at Shiloh. The COnfederacy loses the war.

1881 5000 or so Acadians gather for the first National Convention intended to represent the whole people publicly since the exile. August 15, Feast of the Assumption is named national Acadian holiday.

1938 the Pope recognizes Feast of Assumption as Acadian holiday.

1940s through 1950s Dudley Leblanc leads a high  profile movement of activism, study and international committees.

1960s Acadian music, festivals and crafts better organized in Louisiana. Sometimes call the start of an Acadian Renaissance.

1980s Congres  Mondial makes strong steps to restore national union of family associations.

2003 Her Britannic Majesty Elizabeth Queen of Scotland and of England Second of the Name issues a proclamation regarding the Acadians and Le Grand Derangement.

To see a bit more go to my glossary:     https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/acadian-forum-archive/glossary-of-terms-casually-defined/

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Posted in Acadians, Arts, Christianity, Louisiana, Louisiana Musicians and Music, Music, Personal Philosophy and Moral Economics, Religious Holidays, Roman Catholicism, United States of America, USA--UK Relationship, Vermilion Parish