What does it take to get a hamburger handed to you through the window in the drive-through lane?

Someone has to decide to be a rancher. The rancher buys or inherits property. If he's lucky his father taught him how to ranch, but he may have gone off to Texas A&M to get a degree anyway. He raises cattle. That involves feeding, protecting, nurturing and culling a lot of big obnoxious animals. He must hire ranch hands, veterinarians, and reproductive management services (and you thought cows just "did it"). He negotiates with packing houses, the USDA, and his neighbors who complain about the smell. Finally a certain select group of cattle go off to a processing facility to emerge as steaks and other miscellaneous parts. The rancher decides which and how many cattle go to whom based on his experience, with input from his accountant and admonishments from his banker.

A meat wholesaler processes those miscellaneous parts into ground beef. Based on contracts negotiated by his lawyer with the fast-food chain he delivers it by truck to the person running the grill. The USDA gets involved again.

But wait. What did those cattle eat before they were ready to be eaten? They ate grain and or hay which had to come from a farmer. The farmer decides what to grow and how much, going through many of the same agra-business challenges as the rancher. Ultimately he delivers hay and grain on a truck at the proper time and location in the proper amounts to keep the cows all chubbed up. (We're going to skip the part where the rancher sells the cattle manure back to the farmer — just hum "Circle of Life" to yourself in the background.)

But the farmer wasn't done. Before that pimply-faced high school kid can shove your lunch into that re-cycled paper bag, he needs lettuce and plastic encased doses of relish, ketchup and mustard. The farmer grows cucumbers, tomatoes and brassica juncea plants. A condiments manufacturer takes those veggies and mixes them with spices and vinegar.

Vinegar? Where does that come from? This time a vintner dedicates part of his grape production not to fine tasting wines but to creating a sour, acidic food preservative. Just as complicated, if not more, than the work of the rancher and the farmer.

And that's the high-level, simplistic version of how a hamburger gets to you. Shall we now consider how an electroencephalogram gets to you so the doctor can tell if you have brain cancer?

Let's not.

The hamburger gets to you because free people, taking risks, making choices and making profits along the way. do things that benefit their fellow man. And they didn't need the government to tell them to do it. In fact, the more the government interferes, beyond enforcing contracts, the harder it becomes to get that hamburger.

I wouldn't trust the government to be in charge of producing hamburgers. Do you really want to trust them with health care?

Last Friday, I was probably the only person in the country mowing their lawn and thinking about the Roman Emperor Justinian and the German historian Oswald Spengler. (OK, I was probably the only person in the world, mowing their lawn and thinking thusly.)

For those of you with the good sense not to have been history majors in college, here's a brief. Most people think that when the Roman Empire fell (insert sound effect of big crashing noise) in 476, it was all Germanic barbarians, all the time. In fact, a large chunk of the empire, ruled from Constantinople, continued to survive till it fell to jihadists in 1453. And, for a period in the 500's, Justinian, the Emperor at Constantinople, beat back the barbarians, reestablishing imperial rule over North Africa, Italy and parts of Spain. Justinian also revived the arts, public works, reformed public administration and laid the ground work for keeping the empire going for the next thousand years. He was called "The Emperor who Never Slept".

So where does the German professor come in? Oswald Spengler, best known for his work "Decline of the West", posited that civilization was not, as you may have learned in high school, one long progression from Sumeria to Egypt to Greece to Rome to Liberalism. Rather, civilizations are a life form, born and evolving through phases - spring, summer, fall and winter - blooming and dying like flowers in a field. The key to understanding what is possible politically and socially, according to Spengler, is to grasp into what phase of a civilization you are born.

Modern Spenglerians, such as Henry Kissinger, suggest that we are in the fall or winter of Western Civilization. We cannot recreate, through a sheer act of will, the England of the 1850's nor the America of the 1950's. We can, however, find a leader who can grab us by the scruff of the neck, and like Justinian, kick us - and especially the bureaucracy - in the behind so we will get up and do what is right, and rebuild an America which can lead the world in a quest for freedom for another century or two at least.

Here's the want ad:

Desperately Seeking Justinian. Need leader for Western Civilization. Must believe in freedom, human potential, and the dignity of the individual. Willing to abolish the welfare state, to build a military to crush tyranny and to remove the obstacles to American creativity and productivity. Apply with the American people. No experience required. We'll know you when we see you.

Any ideas for additional qualifications to put in the ad? Let me know.

Well, the grass is getting long again and I've got some thinking to do.

When I was active in the military, people would ask me, "Aren't you afraid of getting killed?".  The answer was simple.  We all die.  Your death can be in defense of your country, or you can die in a hospital stuck full of needles and tubes.  The choice was easy.

Leo of Mars recieved only one call yesterday congratulating him on his military service.  It was from another veteran. 

Of course, during his time on Earth, Leo of Mars has served in every war since the Revolutionary War, but, most receently, he spent 30 years in the Army Reserve, mostly in Psychologicial Operations (PSYOP) units. 

The other veteran, his brother-in-law Patrick Guidacan, serverd in the Airborne during the Korean War.  That really took guts.