Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

The adage is, know your enemy.  No one disputes its veracity or utility.  Yet, frequently, problems, which are enemies, are misnamed because they are not really known . . . or, someone really does not want them really known.  And then effort to solve the problem is wasted because the problem was misnamed on account of being not really known, unwittingly or wittingly.

So I essay below to identify some really big problems that are really misnamed and to give them their proper names, really.  Maybe then these real problems really can be solved, really will be solved, like, really.

The Cartel Problem

We begin with drugs, specifically psychotropic drugs which are an enemy because they harm individuals and groups and are therefore illegal and meant to be tightly controlled with respect to their presence in the nation, the state, the county, the city, the business, etc.  Psychotropic drugs were named a problem and the solution to that problem was named The War On Drugs, by which was meant [feeble] law enforcement.

That solution is proven a non-solution, the war long since lost.  Reason: The problem was misnamed so the propounded solution for it aimed nowhere near it.  Problem continues, encouraged even, by the war against it.

The proper name for the problem of drugs is the problem of cartels.  They grow, process, transport, and sell the stuff.  Those cartels include the whole array of Salafi-Shiite Jihadis, an array of American (Hemisphere) financiers, industrialists, and merchants, an array of Chinese PLA fronts, and legacy organized criminal/political conspiracies, aka big business and big politics.

The morphology of the cartel problem presents a full-spectrum statecraft necessity, not a law enforcement one.  No legal system can solve the cartel problem.  Only full-spectrum assets of statecraft — diplomacy, finance, war-fighting — can solve the cartel problem.

The cartels are not nation states.  They are Globalists.  Their economies are organic to themselves but not organic to countries they inhabit to diminish.  They impose their economies on nations rather than grow their economies from nations.  Therefore, full-spectrum statecraft thrown at the cartel problem is state-to-cartel activity, not state-to-state activity.

National sovereignties are not infringed by commitment of full-spectrum statecraft to solving the problem of cartels.  Quite the opposite.  Solving the problem of cartels is an activity states can conduct jointly on each others’ lands and in each others’ networks, and should do.

Glenn Reynolds: When Iran was America’s problem, much of the world was less than supportive.  So Trump’s making Iran the world’s problem.

The Promiscuity Problem

Next, the complex of abortion, unwed mothers, deadbeat fathers, homosexuality, so-called government entitlement, and omnipresent, pan-life surveillance.

These are treated as problems because they are problems.  They are enemies of civil and happy society.  They are enemies of personal and national prestige and morale.

Most often these phenomena are treated as separate problems each having a unique source.  Actually, they are facets of the same problem having one source and that is properly named promiscuity, or, free association of the sexes.  So-called hook-up culture, a toxic gift from homosexuals, defines the problem most adequately.

Abortion, unwed mothers, deadbeat fathers, homosexuality, so-called government entitlement, and omnipresent, pan-life surveillance are spiritual problems, not moral problems, and certainly not legal problems.  Laws forbidding or channeling those behavior do not address them as the single problem they are and have no power to guide them this way or that towards a solution.  Abortion, etc., should not be legal or illegal.  They should be unthinkable.

How to do that, which is the real solution to the problem of promiscuity, which is the actual problem inside these several facets of it?  Build self-confidence, and from that self-satisfaction, and from that self-sacrifice.  That means, for the USA specifically, return to The Christian Liturgical Year and specifically daily if not hourly recitation of the Kyrie and the Miserere.  That return solves the problem of promiscuity because it cultivates the experience of grandeur, which is natural human nature.

The Oath Problem

The Anglican Reader Apolo Kivebulaya observed that Africans suffer from two self-diminishments: promiscuity and not keeping the word once given.  Since the 1960s, American common culture (pop-culture) espouses both of those self-diminishments as civil rights.  Not keeping the word once given is an enemy of everyone.

Elected and appointed officials take oaths of office they have no intention of fulfilling, or, later decide they need not fulfill.  Spouses recite marriage vows they have no intention of keeping, or, later decide they are not obliged to keep.  Children promise their parents and parents promise their children that they will do this or that while harboring the mental reservation that nothing they say obliges them to carry through on what they promise, to make the deed match the word.  Ditto teachers and students, employers and employees.

In this hot mess we are to have viable family, society, culture, and country?

There is a core diminishment in this mess that leads the parade of all the others.  It is step-parents.

Where children of a marriage exist, remarriage after losing a spouse to death creates a surrogate parent, not a step-parent.  Death terminates all obligations.

Where children of a marriage exist, remarriage, by a spouse who has initiated a prior divorce and has children, or to a person who has children, makes that divorce-initiating spouse and/or their new spouse a step-parent in the new marriage.

Step-parenthood is poison to the children of a marriage and therefore poison to a person who has initiated a former couple’s divorce or accepts one such in marriage.

A spouse who is divorced by their spouse is free to remarry without becoming a step-parent because their spouse was a non-believer, as evidenced by their initiating a divorce.  However, if a divorced spouse exercises their freedom to remarry, it must be to a person not married ever, or, to a person who has been divorced by a spouse and is thus free to remarry without becoming a step-parent.

Spouses who agree a divorce were fornicating, never married, even if they conceived and bore children.  In this case, the children are orphans belonging to neither spouse and at the mercy of God alone through believers.

Marriage is an act committed by a couple, man and woman.  Divorce is an act committed by a spouse, man or woman and sometimes both.

A clergyman or court official does not marry a couple.  The couple marry themselves.  A court official presiding at a marriage officiates as public witness to the couple’s act of marriage.  An ecclesial authority presiding at a marriage officiates as public witness to the couple’s act of marriage and also bestows the blessing of Almighty God upon their act.  No ecclesial authority presides much less officiates at a divorce.

The solution to this problem: keep the word once given, even on pain of death.  That is the truth declared in The Bible and in The Ramayana.  The entire world rests on strict alignment of thought, word, and deed.  Absent that, chaos, until humanity, a family, a city, a county, a state, or a country comes to — or is brought to — their senses once again.

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update 1: Swami Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, Divine Discourse, 30 July 1967:

The rulers who frame and foster the educational system of the country are responsible for the discontent, disillusionment and consequent delinquencies and disturbances of the students.  They pay attention only to the physical and intellectual training of the youth; they forget that attention must also be paid to mental, moral and spiritual development, so that an integrated personality can emerge.  Now, a child is put to school so that years later he may get a cushy job!  Schooling is thought to be for gaining a living, not for gaining the ultimate in life.  Nowhere the youth are trained to earn shanti (equanimity, peace); everywhere, the aim is a comfortable life.  The search for comfort, riches, fame, power over others – these make one so egoistic that one is a danger to oneself and others.  The only safe path is to seek bliss within oneself, not in or through others.  There is great joy awaiting the person who radiates compassion, truth, patience, humility, reverence and piety.

Update 2: Old adage: when in doubt, do nothing.  I think John’s observation is close to center of mass in this matter.

This POTUS sees the ayatollahs supported by an economy of drug-and petrol-dollars which they impose on their countrymen and which is not, therefore, organic to their country and countrymen.

This is not, therefore, a state-to-state conflict as was, for example, that with Saddam in Iraq, who had an organic economy and was using it to kill Americans and others.

It is, rather, a conflict of state-to-Sunni-Shiite/Big-Crime cells and private armies of varying ability spread from Qom to Quito and Quezon and beyond.

Drug and other materials trafficking, including human, is now a military, not a law enforcement problem worldwide.  It comprises imposed economies that are organic to themselves but inorganic to countries they diminish.  That, I submit, is the strategic problem POTUS Trump faces and, I submit, sees.

Update 3: I think Wood is accurate in the main. No ground war, at least not extended, but provide the catalyst (to include fires) for an internal solution.  Wood describes a modified defense in depth: suck the aggressor forward by not taking his bait at his level, get him to make more outrages, swing wide opinion strongly against him, invite him to talk, which is humiliating, and when ready, on your own terms, knee him in his privates.

The refinery explosion this morning in Philadelphia may be related, another outrage from the ayatollahs.  And the stand down last evening may be to give Israel/Saud more time to prepare for the blow back from fires on ayatollah home assets.  Speculation.

This President is disinterested in another land war in MENA.  I am composing a post today on the theme of properly named problems, to include the observation that both Moslem (Sunni and Shiite) and Corporate/Big Crime aggression is paid for by drug-and petrol-dollars driving economies imposed upon nations rather than organic to them.  POTUS Trump, who understands economics instinctively and accurately, unlike any POTUS I can recall, who relied on economic advisors, understands that about Moslem and Corporate/Big Crime aggression.  Lacking organic economies supporting them, Moslem and Corporate/Big Crime aggressors are inherently weak and do not need to be treated as state-to-state (organic economy-to-organic economy) aggression must be.

That is a difference between Saddam and the ayatollahs, for example.  Saddam had an organic economy so required state-to-state response to his outrages, which were several and deadly to thousands of Americans before 2003.  The ayatollahs have no organic economy supporting them, just theft, intimidation, and corruption, paid for by drug-and petrol-dollar, imposed economies.  Ditto Iran’s allies, Hizballah, DPRK, Paks, Venezuela, etc.

POTUS Trump assesses a nation/group by the degree of organics of their supporting economy.  Ultimately this will more accurately measure and assess a nation/group’s prowess in all three assets of statecraft — diplomatics, finance, war-fighting — than will a count of their military formations, money in banks, or number and cost of goods moving across their networks.

Someone must have thought of that before, measuring an economy by the degree of its indigenous organic unity.  A prodigious economics mind such as POTUS Trump’s would make the assessment, accurately, with a coup d’œil.  But there must also be somewhere at least some metric, perhaps even quantitative, for accurately measuring a country’s economic indigenous organic-ness and from that obtaining an accurate predictor of its strategic moves, assuming an enemy or friend will do what it should do for their own self-interest (a large presumption, but usually warranted and at least the best-always starting point for such assessments).

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA