James M. Redwine

Peg

Not the Valkyries

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Armadillo with textured shell and long tail sniffing leaves on forest floor
A generated armadillo searches for food among leaves on the forest floor

Peg and I returned to our log cabin on our ranch and saw three large vultures just outside our front door vying over the carcass of a massive armadillo. They were so intent on rendering their share of the bounty they did not fly away until I got of our vehicle. My first impression was of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and some Ayatollah gnawing at the remains of Iran.

Armadillos are about as ugly a creature as nature has produced. They remind one of what a Congressional Committee might have produced had some generous pork producer asked their favorite House Member lackey to come up with a substitute for a hog to sell to the government for C-Rations. An armadillo is without any redeeming aesthetic value. They look the same from the front as the back; long, scaley and nasty grey from end to end with tuffs of hair dotted around for enhancement must be what other armadillos consider attractive.

Such attractiveness must work for them as the population of armadillos is growing exponentially as proven by all the dead ones on our roads. And for some reason, the Congressman who designed the armadillo provided that each pregnant female gutter-rat can produce four offspring at a time. It is as though the Armadillo Design Committee wanted to assure America has an alternate national symbol that is to the bald eagle as the U.S. Department of Transportation is to Roman highways. That is, roads that are built with planned obsolescence in mind versus two-thousand years of service.

Anyway, as I exited our pickup Peg screeched, “Jim, those vultures may attack you! That thing may still be alive.” We have plenty of experience with vultures, so I was fairly confident the already wafting putridness from the truly dead beast was what drew in the prairie vacuum sweepers.

I grabbed a pair of gloves and lifted the armadillo by its hairless, scaley tail. I was surprised at how heavy it was. It must have been a very pregnant female before somebody on the nearest state highway, two miles away, had run over it. I estimate it weighed twenty pounds based on my previous armadillo experience. I carried it out into the pasture and made sure it was visible from the sky. The vultures only waited about twenty minutes before hovering around the reeking mess. The pasture was armadillo-free by the next afternoon.

I wish to commend the vultures for somehow transporting the heavy helping of armadillo from what, I assume, was a two-mile flight. It looked like they had clung to their prize as long as they could before having to release it onto our lane. Mother Nature surely knows what She is doing even if our Congressional Committees do not. Vaya con dios mama armadillo, feel free to never return.

By the way, I do have a friend who swears the meat of an armadillo tastes like “sweet pork”. As I told him, he has my blessing to collect every dead armadillo he finds on the highway and serve them at Easter. He will have no competition from Peg and me, and that is even without the leprosy factor.

You can also “follow’ us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

A Re-Birth of Independence

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July 04, 1776 was the birth of the United States of America. Our Birth Certificate is the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure those rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Were the men who signed this document naïve? Did they not recognize that these words would ring hollow to slaves, indigenous peoples, women and minorities? Of course not! Our Founders are called founders not because they established the only government in world history that guaranteed these principles, but because they dreamed of building such a nation. And the first giant step was to separate America from the monarchy of Great Britain.

It has taken 250 years of blood, sweat and tears to free many whose rights were only words in 1776. But the Declaration was of an ideal towards which to struggle. Nothing was given; each element of the American Dream has been slowly, and by fits and starts, achieved through reliance on our Founders’ vision and great sacrifice. We have much left to accomplish, but we have steadily progressed toward our ideals of a nation based on true democratic government.

As President Abraham Lincoln declared at Gettysburg in 1863, the United States would have a new birth of freedom and that “…[G]overnment of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. The Civil War was the throes of our second birth of independence. It led our nation to those magnanimous ideals of “malice towards none and charity for all” that laid the foundation in the hearts of Americans that guided us to the Marshall Plan after WWII and leadership in humanitarian beneficence throughout the world from 1946 until we began to retreat from kindness into autocracy.

Immediately after WWII, thanks to trillions of dollars of U.S. aid and peaceful persuasion, America went from an isolationist self-centered nation to a beacon of hope across the earth. Then we began to lose our way so that now most of the planet sees us as simply a sycophant of the new country we helped establish in 1948, one we have supported without questioning its immoral hegemony and Zionism. The United States is now linked with Israel in aggressive wars of conquest and repeated genocides. How did we allow ourselves to go from a beacon of freedom to a symbol of oppression?

It began innocently enough with a desire to help Jewish minorities in Europe after WWI and especially WWII. Then Israel fell under the non-democratic Zionist government that took our foreign military and economic aid and repaid us by attacking our ship The Liberty in 1967 where Israel deliberately killed 34 of our sailors and wounded 171 more to hide their espionage upon America.

Next Israel used its Jewish American spy, Jonathon Pollard, to steal our nuclear secrets while we continued to supply Israel with diplomatic cover and aid. Ironically, Pollard is now a citizen of Israel who is running for a seat in the Knesset on a platform of Palestinian elimination from Gaza.

Just as our Declaration of Independence set forth King George III’s transgressions that justified our Revolution, we should acknowledge that Israel has repeatedly led America to engage in foreign wars in Iraq and elsewhere using false allegations that Saddam Hussein and others had weapons of mass destruction. Currently, Zionist Israel has falsely led us into repeatedly attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities while Israel controls the nuclear weapons that it stole from us.

However, the real damage that Israel has wreaked upon America is not just misapplication of the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. aid, but the damage to our democratic ideals and our hard-won place among nations as a beacon to equal rights for all. The United States was a light to the world, but now is seen as a threat to attack whatever countries Israel wants to conquer. The world now links us to the actions of Israel, which is seen by most of the United Nations as a pariah country.

It is time to remember our Founder’s guidance and return to that great wisdom of President George Washington who warned us in his Farewell Address not to become passionately attached to any other country for, as President Washington said in 1796:

“…[N]othing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

It is long past time for the United States to “dissolve the political bands which have connected” America and Israel. We need not treat Israel as an enemy, but we can have a relationship with Israel just as we treat equally all the nations of the world. We need to have a new birth of our ideals and re-take our place as the world’s preeminent democracy. To do so we must cease enabling Zionist Israel to represent to the world we condone or, worse, promote unequal treatment of all humanity.

Should one have questions as to the seriousness of the harm to America from our government’s unqualified loyalty to Israel over loyalty to our ideals, our nation’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, just resigned in protest of the danger posed by Israel’s power over America’s war making policies. The Trump-appointed former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center wrote in his letter of resignation of March 17, 2026:

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Over 60% of Americans oppose President Trump’s policy on Iran. However, according to President Trump, “Right now I’m at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister (of Israel)”. In the United States the President’s overall approval rating is 39% according to a new poll from FOX NEWS. And, President Trump publicly stated he might move to Israel and run for prime minister once his current term ends.

Our passionate attachment to Israel has cost us our hard-earned status as that “Shining City on the Hill” in world opinion. We have allowed ourselves to be misled from our ideals; it is past time for us to reclaim our rightful place among the true democracies of the earth and Declare our Independence from Israel. For although we are 250 years old, we are still too young to die, especially because we abdicated our core values.

For Reference Please See:

            The Passionate Attachment, America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (1992) by George Ball, former Under Secretary of State and formally America’s Ambassador to the United Nations; and,

            Assault on the Liberty (1979) by James M. Ennes, Jr.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavel gamut”

Living Law of a Democratic Society

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Jim’s desk at JPeg Osage Ranch. Photo by Peg Redwine

President Trump promises to annihilate a nation of 92 million people if his unconditional terms of capitulation are not met by the autocratic leaders of Iran. Pope Leo XIV calls for world-wide peace. President Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have twice ordered surprise bombings of Iran during peace negotiations to end a war started and maintained by Israel and the United States. President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu criticize the Pope for not joining with them in their demands. The Pope continues to call for peace.

President Trump is weaponizing his self-appointed and individually controlled Department of Justice to punish and eliminate from government many persons involved in his election loss of 2020. The president has established a 1.6-billion-dollar fund of taxpayer money to pay some of the insurrectionists who tried to violently overturn the 2020 election. Trump claims the 2020 election was an illegal takeover of our federal government.

President Trump has proudly killed the leaders of Iran’s government using about 100-billion-dollars of America’s funds and virtually uncontested military force. The president sees no inconsistency in his belief that America’s government was illegally prevented from power while he and Netanyahu removed Iran’s government by force. What is the paradox between calling out an alleged overthrow of a democratic election while “bombing Iran back to the Stone Age” to remove its leaders?

All societies have legal systems. Autocratic societies have legal systems in name only as the rulers have the power to disregard or misapply the written laws. If they do not like established laws, say that only Congress has the power to involve America in war, then the dictatorial ruler can simply ignore all restrictions. However, in a democracy, a country is not to be run by vacillating fiats of one or a few people, but according to due process established by the majority. That is the absolute bedrock of the “Living Law of a Democratic Society”.

Jerome Hall (1901-1992) was an internationally renowned professor of jurisprudence at Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana from 1939-1970. I was fortunate to attend his last Indiana class in jurisprudence, The Study of Legal Philosophy, in the summer of 1970 before he retired and moved his teaching to the University of California, Hastings College of Law until 1986. I found Professor Hall’s class to be my greatest challenge and greatest learning experience.

In his marvelous book, Living Law of Democratic Society, published in 1949, Professor Hall examines how societies form legal systems and, especially in democratic societies, how they live by them. A society such as the United States maintains a legal system in constant flux, but is guided by its lodestone of keeping its democracy by not allowing the constantly shifting legal framework to slide into autocracy. In America, our guiding principles are firmly established within our Constitution which may bend or sway but never break.

Americans know what is right: offensive wars are wrong morally and must always be guarded against if our republic is to survive and not fall into the abyss of Nazi Germany or Zionist Israel or the destruction of countless once democratic societies which lost their freedoms. It is not insignificant that Professor Hall lived through the evil of Japan, Italy and Germany in WWII and thereafter in 1949 wrote his scholarly treatise of democratic legal systems that had lost their way. Today, in my opinion, he would strongly caution America not to allow Zionist Israel to mislead us into evil as so many countries allowed Nazi Germany to do.

What should we do? What can we do? Professor Hall might guide us toward the original democratic society and point out as did Plato:

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”

Plato meant that the general Greek population allowed people of lower morality who sought office not to serve but to slowly accumulate absolute power. In the 1930’s and 40’s the Japanese citizenry was not generally evil, but through lethargy and desire for ease it allowed Emperor Hirohito and General Tojo and their cadre of power brokers to slowly move Japan towards autocracy without limits. The Italian populace was not prone to squelch rights in general, but it lazily watched as Benito Mussolini seized more and more power until Italy was lost within Germany’s military scheme. The Germans had had over a thousand years of a great culture that included many Jewish, Romanian and other minorities, but the average German allowed Hitler and his ilk to blame immigrants and Jews for Germany’s loss in WWI which led to the loss of all of Germany.

In 1948 Jewish people immigrated to what was then Palestine and began to almost imperceptibly force out Arabs, Christians and Palestinians until now the autocratic Zionist government has committed the same holocaust on Palestinians, Syrians, West Bankers, Yemenis and Lebanese as the Nazis did the Jews in Germany. In each case it has been a minority of power-hungry politicians such as President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu who have demonized minorities such as immigrants or Muslims and have sought to supplant the democratically arrived at law with their own despotic rule.

This was all done as the well-meaning but uninvolved general populace did nothing but cheer on the coming Nakba so that land and resources could be stolen. We Americans are a happy nation and prefer ease to strife. I know from many within my own family and friends religion is often at the root of the worship of Donald Trump and support for his policies. That is why it is enheartening that Pope Leo has taken a firm and public stand for peace. I am not Catholic, but if I were I would be proud to pay attention as the sirens entice us onto the rocks.

In the United States today, our Living Law has ebbed into being ruled not by our democratic system, but by power-mad autocrats and their sycophants who are convinced they know what they want and what the rest of us should receive. We are not too late to pull down the temple walls and return to the righteous path of our Constitution. However, time waits for no one.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

A Way Forward

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Israel and Iran have been at odds since 1967. The United States and Iran have been at odds since 1979. Israel and Iran used to be allies and trading partners as did Iran and America. There are countless reasons for the current state of belligerence between Israel and Iran and Iran and the U.S.A. These grievances could be delineated, explained and sometimes justified. Such an analysis, if done objectively, might help lead to a return to equanimity and better lives for the citizens of all three nations and, perhaps, other countries that are now receiving collateral damage from the aggression of America, Israel and Iran.

On the other hand, such an analysis requires virtually global input and greater wisdom than is likely to arise from one newspaper column. However, what might be of value are ideas addressed to the quagmire status of the current conflict. There are innumerable players in this Greek tragedy and an attempt to list each and their roles most likely would not advance a resolution. It might be of more utility to concentrate on the process and procedure rather than personalities and protestations.

One useful model could be general negotiation or mediation. The first issue is to find knowledgeable and unbiased moderator(s) or mediator(s) acceptable to all three combatants. This person or entity should not be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, American, Israeli or Persian. He/she or they should not have any personal stake, other than as a citizen of the world, in the on-going war. The moderator might be an experienced diplomat affiliated with the United Nations or the Hague. The expenses for the negotiations should be born equally by America, Israel and Iran, each of whom should sign an agreement to participate voluntarily in a series of conferences at a particular location, say, the Hague in the Netherlands. The mediation agreement should contain stipulations of confidentiality, respectful exchanges of positions and assurances to abide by any freely arrived at resolutions.

Of course, nothing may be resolved by this suggested format, but, as most judges know, almost every case gets settled (more than 95%) without a trial (armed conflict). Most humans appreciate the advantages of peace over war: life, health, economic benefits and long-term friendly relations with one’s neighbors. But even if the U.S., Iran and Israel are not better off after reasonable and good faith interchanges, they almost certainly will not be worse off.

The current war will eventually end. It would be to the earth’s advantage for it to end sooner, rather than later and with less bloodshed rather than an Armageddon.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Of Snakes And Crows

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In the Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-3, God, perhaps in a mood to overcome His boredom once He had created earth and its creatures, set Eve and all future women to be at odds with snakes. First, God created Adam then, when Adam had nothing to do but enjoy life, God created Eve to tempt him; I suppose for God’s own amusement. To tempt Eve, God created the serpent whose main purpose appears to have been to set up Eve’s biblical day-time talk show episode of learning about good versus evil by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Of course, Eve brought Adam along.

Even though both Eve and the serpent knew to eat of the Tree of Knowledge had been forbidden by God, as Eve explained her great sin, the serpent beguiled her and led her to partake of the Tree of Knowledge and share the dreadful bounty with Adam. God cursed Adam to labor and women to bear children and hate snakes. The Bible makes it clear that the “curse” included the creation of sexual relations so Adam was probably not too upset with Eve’s frailty.

These interactions of women and serpents came to mind yesterday when Peg and I looked out our cabin window and saw a large black crow in a battle of wits with a two-foot long black and gold banded, although I’m no herpetologist, I think, Mandarin serpent. I am guessing the snake was seen by the crow as a potential threat to the crow’s nearby nest. Usually, crows build their homes high up a tree, but as most of our trees are stubby blackjacks, I bet this crow’s nest may have been not too far away. I really do not know how or why the confrontation took place nor which adversary initiated it. I did conclude both snake and crow saw the battle as an existential threat.

The crow would make a sprightly hop over the snake which would try a thrust with its head as the bird jumped over. According to the Internet, the Mandarin is not very venomous, but has enough poison to defend itself if it can get a bite in.

This back and forth and over and across series of moves and countermoves went on for about five minutes until either one or both of the creatures got bored or tired and the crow hopped up on the fence and the serpent slithered off into the high grass of our pasture. I do know how I happened to see this entertaining contest. Peg shouted, “Jim!” I recognize Peg’s alarm for mice, not too loud, squirrels, somewhat concerned and snakes: an all-out Eve protestation. I went for my shotgun but, frankly, did not know at which of God’s creatures to shoot; they both looked like good and evil or just confused and while Peg hates all snakes, she’s not too fond of crows either.

I did note that by the time I was ready to fire, Mother Nature had taken matters back to the situation ante without any damage being done. Apparently, the knowledge of good (live and let live) and evil (senseless death) had not been eaten of by either creature. Maybe there’s a lesson there; I wish I could ask my old Sunday School teacher.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Drone On

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Photo by Peg Redwine

All organized militaries play war games to practice for real war. No blood from the losers or booty to the winners. No buildings destroyed or state treasuries depleted. In essence, war games are the best wars. Mankind has sought such a resolution of conflicts since we progressed from living in caves to coveting the caves of our neighbors. However, a major problem has often been we had to destroy our neighbor’s cave to take it over and often we had to kill our neighbors first. But, voila; along has come our ability to wage war without incurring any of its messier elements. We can now just dispatch unmanned drones instead.

Just this past week Ukraine captured several Russian soldiers using inexpensive, unmanned drones. No blood, no returned fire, no mess, i.e., no fighting. That’s the kind of war we can all live with. It is a little like battles used to be settled by having one soldier from one side, say David, fight one soldier from the other side, say Goliath. Who says we humans cannot learn from thousands of years of slaughter? Instead of killing to prevent Iran from somehow, someday, maybe developing a nuclear weapon, we can now just have warring factions display their drones while everyone watches the show. It could be better than an ♫ op-er-a ♫ (as they say in the musical Les Misérables) and cost about the same.

Oh, I know what you are thinking, Gentle Reader; there are a few more things to work out with Iran now. Anyway, I have already spent more time thinking this war through than President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu did before June 2025 and February 2026 when they started bombing Iran.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”