Everyone is looking for good news about the economy, even to the point of cheering no-so-bad news.  Case in point is the latest unemployment report from the labor Department:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance fell last week to a nearly 15-month low, according to a government report released Wednesday.

There were 457,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Nov. 28, down 5,000 from a revised 462,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

That's the lowest level since the week ended Sept. 6, 2008. The week being reported included the Thanksgiving holiday.

Does anyone else really see this as good news?  It's like saying the fellow with a severed artery must be getting better because blood isn't spurting out as fast anymore.  No.  He is just running out of blood.  There are fewer NEW jobless claims because there isn't anybody left to layoff.

Obamanomics in full spin mode.

Dennis P. O'Neil

“And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights and tend for the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples.”

“Eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month”

The often quoted phrase denotes the time recognized as the end of World War I.  Although combat raged on for another month between Turkey and Austria-Hungary, the armistice signed between Germany and the Allies marked the cessation of most hostilities.  Based on President Woodrow Wilson's “Fourteen Points”, the armistice denoted was that it would take effect six hours after its signing.  That happened when German negotiators reluctantly signed the document at 5:00AM on November 11, 1918.  Thus began the ending of the Great War as it was then known.

Many of the Allied countries designated the anniversary of “Armistice Day” as day for annual reflection to remember the staggering human cost of those lost and honor those veterans who served.  After World War II and Korea added millions to the ranks of combat veterans, there was a popular push to honor their sacrifices also, and the November 11th holiday was expanded to recognize all veterans.  The United States renamed its national holiday to “Veterans Day”, while “Remembrance Day” became the official title in the United Kingdom and Canada.

The Veterans Day holiday fell into some disfavor in the U.S. during the 1970s, due in part to continued backlash from the war in Vietnam, and Congress moving the date to the fourth Monday in October as part of a uniform holiday legislation to have holidays become part of extended weekends.  After outraged citizens complained, Veterans Day was reinstated to its rightful spot on the calendar in 1978.

A movement growing in popularity during the 1990s was taking two minutes for quiet reflection starting at 11:00AM to coincide with those guns falling silent so many years before.  In 1999, singer-songwriter, Terry Kelly, was at a market when the store manager used the public address system to request that shoppers and employees take that two minutes of silent remembrance.  One shopper, with small daughter in tow, insisted on speaking with the clerks during that period.  The man's insensitivity enraged Kelly enough that he went home and penned his wonderful tribute, A Pittance of Time.

I bring this up a month early as a reminder, and call to action.  Every day, young men and women are willing to risk all in defense of our freedom, yet many of their fellow citizens are becoming more and more like that lout Kelly encountered.  Sadly, our nation seems to be slipping back into the apathy demonstrated 30 years ago.  We cannot let that happen again.  We have time to make a difference.

Tell your family.  Ask your friends.  Talk to your employer.  Have your pastor, rabbi or priest speak out to the congregation.  Implore everyone you encounter to take two minutes out of their busy schedules at 11:00AM this November 11th.  Let there be a rolling thunder of silence across this great nation as we pause to remember, and honor, all those who have willingly sacrificed much more than two simple minutes on our behalf.  Give that pittance of time.

I am at a loss for words.  You just have to see this for yourselves.

The thought struck as I became aware that I was humming a tune from my youth.  In light of today's headlines, Stephen Stills's forty-year-old lyrics take on a whole new meaning.

There's something happening here   Tea Party Express Message Rolls Across America
What it is ain't exactly clear   Gibbs: Blowups not 'representative'
There's a man with a gun over there   Man carries assault rifle at Obama protest
Telling me I got to beware   The Gun-Grabbers are on the Move Again

It's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn   White House to Democrats: 'Punch back twice as hard'
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong   The mob has to learn adulation
Young people speaking their minds   Town-hall meetings: facing voter wrath on healthcare
Getting so much resistance from behind   'Unmerican' attacks can't derail health care debate

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field day for the heat   Security Guards Remove Retired Cop from Town Hall Meeting
A thousand people in the street   Tea parties from sea to shining sea
Singing songs and carrying signs   8.28.09 Tea Party Patriots rally (video)
Mostly say, hooray for our side   Tea Party rally draws 3,000 - Congressman Issa surprises crowd

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep   Napolitano: Veterans are Targets of Right-Wing Extremist Recruiters
Into your life it will creep   Mass. Health Bill Would Allow Warrantless Arrests, Quarantines
It starts when you're always afraid   Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship
You step out of line, the man come and take you away   Officer threatened to arrest Obama protester for sign: 'It ain't [America] no more'

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Dennis P. O'Neil

Their history as human chattel in the New World is disturbing.

“They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas.  They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

“Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways.  Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment.  They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.”

Harvard professor Henry Gates, central figure in the racially charged incident involving Cambridge police, is an ardent proponent of reparations to Black Americans for the atrocities of the African slave trade.  However, Gates's ethnocentric outrage conveniently ignores the full history of slavery in the Americas.  The above excerpt does not describe the plight of black slaves torn from their families in Africa.   It comes from White Slavery: The Slaves That Time Forgot by John Martin detailing the trade in Irish slaves.

The story of Irish slaves is one the politically correct manage to overlook while damning the United States for past transgressions against blacks.  It is not discussed in schools when teaching about slavery.  The history of Irish slaves is so completely buried that students gain a false impression that slave trade began when white Europeans raided Africa for cheap black labor.  In truth, the majority of early slaves in the New World were white, victims of that dehumanizing practice long before the establishment of an African slave trade.

“The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World.  His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.  By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat.  At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.”

Treatment of the Irish people under King James II and Charles I by the likes of Oliver Cromwell amounted to little more than state sponsored genocide on a scale not seen again for nearly three centuries.

“From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves.  Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.  Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic.  This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children.  Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

“During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England.  In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.  Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.  In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.”

Even a growing trade in African slaves did nothing to alleviate the hardships of Irish slaves.  If anything, it only made their lot worse as the lowest members in a perverse caste system.  African slaves were a prized commodity, often fetching prices 10 times that of the Irish.  To minimize expenses, slave owners forced Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) to breed with African men.  The “mulatto” offspring of these rapes were more valuable than their Irish parents, yet considerably cheaper than purchasing new Africans.

This trade in Irish slaves continued for well over a century as England sold thousands of Irish into slavery after the 1798 Irish Rebellion.  England finally renounced its official participation in slave trade in 1839, far too late for those hapless Irish dragged away in chains.  The Reconstruction Amendments after America's Civil War codified the rights of all men and women to live free of slavery's chains.

The horrors sustained by all people subjected to slavery are undeniable.  Many freed blacks returned to their ancestral homeland to restart their lives anew.  Many more Africans migrated to America on their own accord in search of the American dream.  Yet, as the Martin article concludes:

“None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal.  These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.”

For anyone such as Dr. Gates to proffer slavery as a uniquely Black experience requiring reparations to descendants of Black Africans is an insult to everyone of Irish ancestry.  It is a ludicrous proposition that all whites now living in America are responsible for sins against blacks going back over 200 years, and therefore should be held monetarily accountable.  It would be equally ludicrous for me to demand some type of payment from all blacks now living in America for their ancestors' participation in the forced rapes of Irish women so long ago.

However, if Gates and others insist on pushing the reparation issue, I will be equally insistent that the Irish be the first recipients, at least to the extent that blacks have benefited so far.  I demand the atrocities committed against the Irish be finally recognized and taught in our schools along with those of the Africans.

http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html

Note: Although enslavement of the Irish may have been the most egregious as far as numbers and percent of population, the treatment of other white European slaves from Spain, Portugal and Scotland was no less heinous, and equally deserving remembrance.

Dennis P. O'Neil

For extraordinary heroism, distinguished service, and devotion above and beyond the call of duty. During the first attack by Japanese airplanes on the Naval Air Station, Kanoehe Bay, on 7 December 1941, Lieutenant Finn promptly secured and manned a 50-caliber machine gun mounted on an instruction stand in a completely exposed section of the parking ramp, which was under heavy enemy machine-gun strafing fire. Although painfully wounded many times, he continued to man this gun and to return the enemy's fire vigorously and with telling effect throughout the enemy strafing and bombing attacks and with complete disregard for his own personal safety. It was only by specific orders that he was persuaded to leave his post to seek medical attention. Following first-aid treatment, although obviously suffering much pain and moving with great difficulty, he returned to the squadron area and actively supervised the rearming of returning planes. His extraordinary heroism and conduct in this action were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

Are you prepared to defend yourself from the local gang-bangers?  If you don't already own a gun, you should get one, learn how to use it, and be ready.  The police won't be doing it anymore.  They will be too busy giving criminals a stern talking to.

A story in today's Wall Street Journal reports on a new plan for combating crime to be unveiled Monday at the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

At least 30 cities are expected to announce Monday that they are joining an unorthodox crime-fighting program that relies on persuasion, rather than arrests, to cut down on criminal behavior.

The initiative, run by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, targets violent crime and open-air drug markets that are the scourge of some communities. The program is potentially controversial because it involves not prosecuting known offenders if they agree to quit their criminal activities.

Potentially controversial?  There's no “potentially” about it.  The plan calls for police to watch the criminals go about their criminal activities, document them, and then bring the bad guys in for a sit down where they will be told, “Stop being a mutant, or we're going to tell you to stop again.”

Under the project, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors in the cities identify individuals operating in violent-crime areas who haven't yet committed serious violent crimes, and build cases against them, including undercover operations and surveillance. The culmination is a "call in" when the case is presented to the would-be suspect in front of law enforcement, community leaders, ex-offenders and friends and family.

"The prosecutor talks to them and lets them know: 'we could arrest you now but we won't because the drug dealing stops today, the violence stops today,'" said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay. "If you continue, you now know the consequences and you've seen the case against you but we don't want to send you to prison."

Well, that should do it.

We have all had friends when growing up who maybe had a nine o'clock curfew.  At nine o'clock they headed into their homes – and we knew why.  They faced real, immediate consequences for not following the rules.  They had strong parents.  We also had other friends who did as they pleased, and when called on it, would mouth off to their parents.  We would step back so there was a place for their teeth to land – but the parents did nothing except ask them to be more respectful in the future.   The stern words carried no weight.  Our friends knew it, and the same thing would happen over, and over, and over again.  They had weak parents.

This “National Network for Safe Communities” program is just a form of weak parenting on the grand scale, and the criminals know it.  They are surely laughing at what may be the dumbest idea on how to deal with society's bottom feeders since – I don't know – maybe the decision to close Guantanamo with no plan on what to do with the illegal combatants being held there.

Then there's Kim Jong Il laughing at Obama's stern words about nuclear weapons.

Dennis P. O'Neil

It's not that I am abandoning my nom de plume.  In fact I am quite fond of the Saltwater handle.   I am proud of the essays I have written under that name.  So much so, that I will continue to use it.  The main difference is that I will be appending my given name to the end of each article.

This change was inspired by a discussion at Bob's My Uncle's Backyard Grill Blog under the comments section for his What Do You Think? post.   During that discussion, I repeated the final phrase from our Declaration of Independence – our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.  The more I thought about those words, the more I realized it was time for a change I have been mulling over for some time.

Townhall gave me the option of changing the name on all the posts at once, but that seemed the easy way out.  To reconfirm my commitment to the cause, I chose to edit all my posts – one at a time – to add my name to each.   If Janet Napolitano and her minions want to come after me for being one of those right wing extremists, I will not stand accused of hiding behind an assumed name.

Dennis P. O'Neil

Now, some graduating classes have marched into this stadium in easy times – times of peace and stability when we call on our graduates simply to keep things going, and don’t screw it up. Other classes have received their diplomas in times of trial and upheaval, when the very foundations of our lives, the old order has been shaken, the old ideas and institutions have crumbled, and a new generation is called upon to remake the world.

It should be clear to you by now the category into which all of you fall. For we gather here tonight in times of extraordinary difficulty, for the nation and for the world. The economy remains in the midst of a historic recession, the worst we’ve seen since the Great Depression;

The economy remains in the midst of a historic recession, the worst we’ve seen since the Great Depression; the result, in part, of greed and irresponsibility that rippled out from Wall Street and Washington, as we spent beyond our means and failed to make hard choices. We’re engaged in two wars and a struggle against terrorism. The threats of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemic defy national boundaries and easy solutions.

Now, in the face of these challenges, it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have been pedaled so frequently in recent years. It goes something like this: You’re taught to chase after all the usual brass rings; you try to be on this “who’s who” list or that top 100 list; you chase after the big money and you figure out how big your corner office is; you worry about whether you have a fancy enough title or a fancy enough car. That’s the message that’s sent each and every day, or has been in our culture for far too long – that through material possessions, through a ruthless competition pursued only on your own behalf – that’s how you will measure success.

Now, you can take that road, and it may work for some. But at this critical juncture in our nation’s history, at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; it displays a poverty of ambition. That in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, of celebrity over character, of short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

So, graduates, it’s now abundantly clear that we need to start doing things a little bit different.... And as a nation, we’ll need a fundamental change of perspective and attitude.... I’m talking about an approach to life, a quality of mind and quality of heart; a willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame; a willingness to question conventional wisdom and rethink old dogmas; a lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige, and a commitment instead to doing what’s meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.

That’s a great motto for all of us, find somebody to be successful for. Raise their hopes. Rise to their needs.... You may look in the mirror tonight and you may see somebody who’s not really sure what to do with their lives. That’s what you may see, but a troubled child might look at you and see a mentor. A homebound senior citizen might see a lifeline. The folks at your local homeless shelter might see a friend. None of them care how much money is in your bank account, or whether you’re important at work, or whether you’re famous around town. They just know that you’re somebody who cares, somebody who makes a difference in their lives.

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it.... Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.