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At RAND, in their media "Hot Topics", not so much as a mention of, not even a 'related issue' reference to, illegal immigration and/or border security. To read RAND's list of "Hot Topics," it's as if the border and border-related threats and illegal immigration just do not exist in the public discourse.

Like many Americans, I read the daily news with rapt attention and curiosity, eager to learn more about the Middle Eastern "situation" and about Hezbollah and Israel and Iran, particuarly. I don't perceive nor define any of this -- from my safer United States location -- on racial or ethnic terms, but politically and, in the subtext, religiously, given my Christian faith and beliefs.

But I intuitively reject any group of people who mutilate others, blow themselves up and otherwise encourage anyone to do so for any reason, and I also intuitively understand Israel's nationality and their need to protect and defend their territory, their citizens, their futures. I continue to read the news, I continue to formulate opinions based upon what I read but I also fundamentally reject and feel intolerant about terrorism by anyone, and in that I include Hezbollah and many among Muslims, who declare their intent to eradicate Israel and the Jewish people.

I continue to read the news, a bystander to a great degree, responding in human terms about excesses and outrages but simply continuing to read...and among what I'm reading is about this outrageous nuttiness from right here in the United States:

From THE AMERICAN THINKER

Paranoia on the left

Sheldon Drobny is a wealthy Jewish financier of the Democrats, and founder of Air America, the liberal-left "answer" to conservative talk radio. See this Chicago Jewish News interview for a sense of the man.

Remarkably, Drobny actually believes the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment on the left is in reality a conspiracy orchestrated by the right. As Drobny's last sentence states: "I see Karl Rove's fingerprints all over this". Below are excerpts from his blog:

"I came to the conclusion that the hostile comments about Israel on these liberal blogs are not coming from true liberals. Most of the anti-Semitism comes from racism and most of the racism I have experienced has come from the far right, not the left.

"So my conclusion is that the bloggers who violently hate Israel and see it in black and white terms are not really liberals. They may even be anti-Semites, but they are not representative of the liberal community that was so active in achieving racial and ethnic equality. It is a contradiction for a true liberal to be an anti-Semite.

"Furthermore, I would not put it past the right wing to flood the liberal blogs with hateful criticisms of Israel to advance a perception that liberals are anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. And I see Karl Rove's fingerprints all over this."

Michael Menis 7 23 06

It can be off-putting to be required to "love" the Jewish people or be deemed, instead, an "anti-Semite" if one does not declare love and affection for them, but few reasonable people would ever make such a declaration sincerely, non-frivolously, about any type of people -- there are Israelites, there are Jews, there are Jewish atheists, there are Jewish Bolsheviks, there are good people, there are bad people, there are Jewish Reformists even among all those affiliations, just as there are many other human beliefs and behaviors and character among other religious and ethnic groups. To love or hate "all" of "them" on some basic principle is not only irrational but it's not well thought out.

But that article there reveals inherent imbalance, palpable lack of sanity. To follow along with that irrational viewpoint by Sheldon Drobny, however, Conservatives and Republicans ("the Right") represent "anti-Semites" and as such have managed some sort of guerilla informational network that has made it appear that it is "the Left" who is anti-Semite -- which would mean that Palestine was the equivalent of "the Right" in position and perspective compared to Israel (as "the Left").

While, to the contrary, in reality it is most among Christians worldwide who are friend to Israel however slightly or even intently. And it is Christians, in reality, who are majority included among "the Right" politically just because most of us are conservative in our approach toward government and as to social issues and "the Left" represents non-conservative opinion about both.

Point is that Islam instructs against and/or postulates in contradiction to our shared, Judeo-Christian ideology and there are just some very absolute, definite beliefs and behaviors included in that and along those lines, those very absolute, large lines, the separations occur. Among the subtypecasting afterward occurs the individual variation.

And, that article also describes a setup, aimed at substantiating that negative that Drobny alleges: if he's Jewish (or anyone is) and he/they write from a paranoid and irrational perspective about "anti-Semitism," then for anyone to reject what is written/said through whatever skewered perspectives would be, well, to be opposed to the author...who is...Jewish...which is to be...opposed to...Jews? So goes the beginning of nonsense but in these current terms of war, war and more war, that nonsense is quickly blown way out of proportion and people's lives can be and are ruined over that degree of irrationality. Because few check the specifics and respond only to the irrational flaming of and about others. Not to mention do not question the source of the ignition.

So much for what's wrong with Air America, not to mention many among the Left. Among the Right, by comparison, we have our differences ("No, this is not 'our war'" by Patrick J. Buchanan) but they seem slight by comparison with the outrageous distortions I read from many liberals and Democrats, Sheldon Droby specifically as good example of that outrageousness. I've met quite debased people who were Jewish, I've been hurt by people who are Jewish but I've also loved people who are Jewish and been helped by people who are Jewish and so goes our human environment where it's the individual, primarily, who sets a precedent among other individuals. I cannot see rejecting "all" types of people because "some" types of people were offensive or problematic, is my point, no more than I would embrace or not embrace for the same reasons. EXCEPT in times of mass responses, as now, in many areas of our planet, the Middle East particularly and the opposing philosophies being authored by opposing peoples in that area, affecting our global population outwardly.

But it's tough when people are rejected or embraced in passing by how or what one feels or reasons about "Jews" because it's an impossible thing to state clearly or objectively for most of us. I can say that if I had to chose between Israel or Hezbollah and/or Iran, I'd opt to choose Israel but then I'd start asking questions about my choice. Most Christians feel that way, given our shared religious beliefs in the Judeo-Christian community.

I've read racist and ethnically prejudiced comments and articles among the news lately (and previously) but about nearly all types and groups of humans, not just as to Jews and Muslims, or for that matter, between Jews and Christians or Christians and atheists, or even Christians and Muslims. I can't say I dislike human beings except upon their beliefs and behaviors after a point, so my sentiments about anyone are always available but only after I know something about those people, specifically: people who promote suicides and other mutilations or group beliefs that promote those things, the wanton destruction of others, those human beings tend to get a negative review by me, which should not be a surprise to anyone, nor indicate excess in reaction.

The last Presidential election was embittered between U.S. "types" or associations -- the "Conservative vs. Liberal" debate, refined down to "Republican vs. Democrat" respectively -- but I do not believe that occured as a one-time thing but, rather, indicates our degrading society. We are losing barriers and customs and advancing toward a more brutal level of interaction with one another, as an American society, but also, obviously, as a world-wide human population. Thus, the wars in the Middle East from my United States location and American perspective frighten me to a great degree because I see the end result there (and elsewhere, as in the Phillipines and Central America) as a progressively destructed, and destructive, world behavior.

That is, I realize the potential for the exploding, rock-throwing, car burning swarms of hostility in the Middle East to appear anywhere else, anywhere else on the globe where that type of Infinite Doom might occur and I resent and resist attempts by some to get that degree of exploding doom started. I resent so much as reading that our nation, our country, is somehow an offshoot or suburban community to an urban Middle Eastern war.

However, with an urban flight, of sorts, of the sentiments and embittered, irreconcilable differences from those engaged to the bitter end in the Middle East also propping up in the United States between the two, general types -- Jews and Muslims -- or should I write SOME Jews and SOME Muslims, given that there are people among both groups who reject and value the opposite of what is of issue between Israel and Palestine -- here I am as an American of neither Jewish nor Muslim affiliation who feels a great deal of caution about them both. And it's because of the extremes among the Middle East that I do, not because of any personal animosity or dislike inherently for either "type" but because there are just so many negative assumptions being cast around by everyone as to who is alright and who needs to explode, or be made to.

To take "sides" -- I wonder -- as with other wars, not all individuals have the option of deciding for themselves what their loyalties are -- or they cannot decide given the many shared conditions among all people -- but are forced or assumed to associate with one polar opposite over another. And it can be savagery at work that forces others to so declare under penalty or threat, so care is required to affiliate in severe times such as this. Accusations can be threats, and certainly can be threatening, particularly when the accusations are not rational. And so there is a lot of nuttiness beng imposed upon others, a lot of unhealing of memories like deconstructing wounds, refusals to be healed, rejection of reason.

Perhaps that's what the word, "enemies" means in practice and why the poison from enemies affects everyone around them.

"...I was 11 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. I remember believing that I would not grow up to be a man. I remember crouching under my desk at school and being told to face away from the window when the blast hit. I remember too the jet-black newspaper headlines that each day suggested we were moving closer to the precipice, the grainy photos with arrows pointing to long objects on the decks of Soviet ships. I wondered why I'd been born into the first generation that had to grow up in the shadow of the Bomb." -- Ted Gup, The Washington Post, "The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway" -- May 31, 1992

And here we are again, the bomb, the recurring crises, the recurring need to confront or to avoid the confrontation, depending.

Like Mr. Gup in that article of his from 1992, the very same article that exposed the once-top-secret shelter for Congress constructed beneath The Greenbrier Inn in White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia, I have childhood memories of those classroom "duck and cover" rehearsals, although I was more candid later in life than I'd been when very young during the Crises itself, more candid with age in admitting that where I was during those exercises, that Crises, would have resigned me and the whole region to obliteration had any nuclear attack taken place -- no amount of ducking and covering would have made any difference, given my proximity during the Cuban Missile Crises by only a few miles to Cape Canaveral, FL and I was acutely aware of that during my youth, but at least adults attempted to keep reality at bay for me and my childhood peers as much as possible, despite my knowing at that very young age (very early gradeschool) that what I was being told to duck and cover from was immediate and ultimate doom. In retrospect, I knew at the outset despite my young years that the circumstances were final and only practiced along with my classmates to indulge the teacher -- because otherwise I would cry all the way home from school on several days and imagine the world hostile and deadly and reduced to ashes as I stumbled along amidst the image of my gasping self being roasted by the unseeable but hideously awful radioactivity, a little child walking home amidst fears about the end of the world, wondering what the point was to be going anywhere.

And so began the reality of life that ultimate warfare was ever present and it seems that it has not changed since then: we as a population have lived since the Sixties -- and always will live since that time forward -- with the reality that nuclear war was and is possible and that it was and is also a terribly final act, at least for much of individual life.

The notion that some people are prepared to survive a global catastrophe such as this -- particularly those individuals who might represent the continuation of our civilization (which would be nearly anyone, under the circumstances) -- is encouraging but in a cryptic sense: some human survival and civil continuation is the best hope, however grim, is my point, because the alternative of species annihilation is certainly not one I like to consider.

And, to refer to our United States Constitution (I paraphrase), "those who have the ability to defend (democracy, our nation as a democracy, the Constitution) have the responsibility to protect/defend it (all)."

I've always worried about the survival of other species, too, other life, given the idea that such a terrible thing as global, nuclear war might ever occur. Plant and animal life gone for, perhaps, many thousands of years -- it would take that for plant life and a modest degree of animal life to reappear and proliferate following such an event -- does not describe a very probable environment in which human life would be able to maintain itself, even desperately, so the notion is, indeed, just as fatal that a group of human hangers-on in some bunker somewhere would survive to return to a world devoid of other life. A horrible set of options, no less.

But as to the point of this: it is the rogue maniacs who refocus our world upon the dreadful reality that global nuclear war is on our horizon of possibilities, as it was the maniacs who nearly made nuclear war occur in the Sixties (Kruschev and Castro, specifically, although we all must wait additional decades before we can know more as to certain realities affecting the Cuban Missile Crises associated with John Kennedy, known only so far to a very few but pending release by document to the public in, I believe it will be, 2050). It is the maniacs among our human populations who seek the flame and flare and disregard the day after. What's worse today, however, than at crises times past, is that the population of maniacs among us is growing.

And as to that BUNKER beneath The Greenbrier Inn in West Virginia -- I am sure that our government has replacements available for this now multi-million-dollar-tourist-attraction (and I am glad that they do, assuming they do) -- I hope someone else has an Arc (of sorts) prepared (or is working on the preparation of one) to host the survival of other species, either below ground or in outer space (ideally possible, certainly impractical). Even with plant seeds available, there'd be the need for non-radiated soil in which to grow them at some point, along with a suitable environment, and a supply of non-contaminated water inorder to sustain their growth, along with our own. All of that would require a lot of time following a global, nuclear war, and circumstances would likely not be hospitable nor survivable for a long time following, so there's the liklihood of survival-inorder-to-survive but only for a threatened period of time afterward. The BUNKER idea is at least a start, however grim the options, but to be effective it would need to provide a sustainable habitat -- for human life and also for plant and animal life.

(View: The BUNKER slideshow.)

The area surrounding The Greenbriar Inn and BUNKER today offers new homes and homesites for sale, and the Inn remains in service as elegantly as ever from what I am told, while the BUNKER is available for public, paid tours (after initially offering tours in 1995, the tours were suspended while The Inn underwent modifications and have resumed this July 2006); and, The Inn has begun making BUNKER group meeting rooms available -- a peculiar format, certainly.

However, as with the BUNKER (or any bunker), what is the point of new homes and building sites being available if you can't reach them -- this property is out of economic reach to many U.S. citizens, and certainly the BUNKER at The Greenbrier is/was beyond the practical reach of most anyone anywhere (including Congress at that time or even today given the distance of the BUNKER from D.C.) other than those already in the bunker(s) at the outset of nuclear war. Which equals: a mere few survive (or would have) and survive to questionable survival conditions afterward if ever our country -- and along with it, our Constitution and Constitutional principles -- met with destruction, just as they were threatened with during the Cuban Missile Crises and others. Some things are worth fighting for and fighting to survive inorder to protect. Question is, to what extent, and how.

Over the 30 years that it was an active facility, communications and other equipment were updated, keeping the bunker at full-operation status. The location of the facility, critical to its effectiveness, remained a secret for more than three decades.

...Until its closure, The Bunker was kept in a state of constant readiness, with foodstuffs and a pharmacy with the active prescriptions for every member of Congress.

...On May 31, 1992, The Washington Post published an article, "The Last Resort" which exposed the facility. In 1995, the US government ended the lease agreement with The Greenbrier...

About that:

...Details of the design and construction of the facility, of course, are scarce. But Randy Wickline, who hauled concrete to the site, remembers seeing the name "Mosler" on the enormous doors that were installed at the entrances.

"Mosler" was Mosler Safe Co., an Ohio-based manufacturer famed for its vaults and safes. In the '50s and early '60s it also had a flourishing "nuclear products group" that used the company's expertise to build massive doors for government relocation centers and bunkers. The company believed it's doors could survive the impact of an atomic bomb blast, or at least a near miss. A Mosler vault door withstood a nuclear blast some two-fifths of a mile away at the government's Nevada Test Site in 1957. "

"...Two of the four doors ordered were gigantic, built to shield vehicular entrances. One was designated "GH 1," the other, "GH 3." With it's frame and assembly, GH 1 weighed more than 28 tons and measured 12 feet 3 inches wide and 15 feet high. The other vehicular door, GH 3, weighed more than 20 tons. The doors were 19 1/2 inches thick. Each was hung with two hinges. Those hinges alone weighed 1 1/2 tons, according to Mosler's records. Yet the doors were so delicately balanced that they could be opened and closed with the application of a mere 50 pounds of force against their bulk. Two other doors were also built: a hatch-like door measuring 3 feet by 3 1/2 feet, and a "personnel door" 7 feet wide by 8 feet high.

It will need to be a very secure Arc, whatever and wherever it is. Or, better yet, maybe we should just keep and maintain well the one we already have: our island Earth. And build better weapons, ones that target the maniacs and not the global population of life.