Great Expectations

It is now 9:45 PM, and my eighth grader has just gone to bed, having finally finished his homework. He started at 3:30, took an hour for dinner and a bit of relaxing, and finished fifteen minutes ago. Which is to say that he had five hours of  homework tonight, including practicing his musical instrument (music is one of his classes). This is a fairly typical night's work for him. If there are tests or assignments due, it may be more; rarely is it less.

The reason I mention this is that last week I watched a discussion on a cable news show about public school parents who complain of the amount of homework their children are given. How much homework? Thirty to forty-five minutes a night.

...

(Those who have followed my blog will know that the ellipsis represents my reaction of stunned silence.)

Forty-five minutes of homework a night?! My son has forty-five minutes in each subject. How do these indignant parents expect their children to compete in the real world on such a minimal diet of self-improvement? Forty-five minutes a night?!

Are the public schools' expectations of the children so low, and the demands made on them so scant, are the parents so utterly clueless, that they think these children can compete for places at the best universities -- or at any universities -- on forty-five minutes of homework a night? Do they expect that they will go out into the wide world armed with the knowledge necessary to secure good jobs and fashion fulfilling careers?

What planet are these people living on? Certainly not the one on which bright, well educated, ambitious students live, and on which Japanese and Chinese students live, who will gobble up the few places at the best schools, while your little underachiever struggles to get into the local community college.

On the rare night when my child has a mere three and a half or four hours of homework, we fairly celebrate. We make cookies and watch an old movie or classic TV show, or he enjoys the luxury of getting an extra hour's sleep. Unless you feel that your child is stupid and condemned to a life of underemployment, or to the pickings of academia after the choice spots have been taken, you should not be complaining about less than an hour's homework; you should be demanding more.

And you should be helping the child with that extra work, both to improve your own mind, and to keep abreast of what he or she is learning, and how well he or she is doing. That is part of the responsibility of being the parent of a school-aged child. And it is, surprisingly, fun.

Those extra hours you spend helping your child with homework are not only a bonding experience for you, they will pay big dividends later in life. And meanwhile, they will ensure that your young student has a good grounding in the fundamentals of education, and learns mental discipline, time management skills, and the self-esteem that comes from not only knowing, but knowing that you know.

Put in the time now, those extra hours in the evenings, and you will open doors for your child's future which otherwise will be closed. As Shakespeare said: Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross. And if your child doesn't know who Shakespeare is, I rest my case.

The Browning of SoCal

All of my liquid amber trees are dying. Beset by drought and beetles, they are literally falling apart from the tops down. Just yesterday, another shed its upper branches all over the cactus in my driveway, the few desultory pinpoints of green I have left. An ambitious tree surgeon, a sort of arbor ambulance chaser, appeared at my door to ask if I needed any work done. When I pointed out the carcass of the grey-trunked maple in front of my garage, he nodded sagely and said "$200." For what? To take it down, to rub it out as if it had never been.  It was as if he were making a bid on a funeral service. But when I showed him the trees in my back yard, his eyes glowed darkly. Thousands of dollars in removal fees glimmered in them, as if this drought were a personal boon to his otherwise seasonal service.

The fact is that we in Southern California are in the throes of one of the worst droughts in our history. I have already suffered the governor, that octogenarian hipster, instructing me on how many times I can flush my toilet and how long a shower I can take. The fact is that, having lived in this metropolitan brush-land for thirty-some years, I already knew all that, and I was saving water as assiduously as anybody. Anybody, that is, except for the "civil rights activist" who lives up the street from me in a gated mansion, by far the most valuable real estate in the neighborhood, and who consumes water as if nothing has happened. His lawns, unlike everyone else's, are liberally sprinkled night and day, in keeping with steadfast and time-honored left-wing hypocrisy. "The rules are for the rest of you; not for righteous folks like me."

But all of that pales in the face of the growing crisis of dehydration in which we find ourselves. For the first few years it was a warning, which became requests, and then regulations, which are becoming strictures. Though I run only full loads of laundry in my washing machine, and that only after dark, and though I am down to watering my lawns and plants twice a week (as per), take five-minute showers, flush in a timely fashion (as my son says: If it's yellow let it mellow; if it's brown flush it down), not letting the tap run while brushing teeth, and waiting till the dishwasher is brimming before I use it, I expect that any day there will be a knock at my door. Then a uniformed representative of the DWP (if not the police) will put me on formal notice that, if I do not curb my usage, I will incur a $500 fine, or worse.

Meanwhile, I could not help but notice that, earlier this year, the City of Pasadena, in its bureaucratic wisdom, decided to re-sod the medians on Sierra Madre Boulevard, near my house, and then allowed the new grass, so carefully and expensively installed, to die when they shut off the municipal sprinkler system. If you wonder why I distrust, even despise, government bureaucracy, the answer is in those dung brown medians. Apparently no one in the city government asked: Is it a good idea to re-sod the medians in the middle of a historic drought? No, they just went ahead as planned and spent other people's money, and the result is a stretch of wasteland that would have made Okie Dustbowlers feel at home.

The other day, my son asked me how much longer this drought would last. I reminded him that the drought which destroyed the Anasazi (ancient Navajo) civilization is thought to have lasted over 100 years. Then, the dearth of rainfall virtually wiped out one of the most advanced and ingenious societies that ever existed on the North American continent; a culture that invented the flying buttress 300 years before the French, devised a far-flung and almost instantaneous communication system, and had a water conservation scheme which, it was thought, could defeat the scourge of drought. It did not, and all that remains of that sophisticated culture is the breathtaking ruins of the Four Corners.

How long we can survive this episode remains to be seen. For my own part, I feel guilty every time I wash clothes or do the dishes, and I find myself more often scanning the sky for rain clouds, which never seem to appear over the parchment shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains above my house. Mark Twain said that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. That has never been truer than of we who live in this artificial urban sprawl which was destined to be a desert. All we can do, I am afraid, is ask the rest of you to pray for rain for us who, as T. S. Eliot said, are dry brains in a dry season.

The Business of America is...

I have seen many things in my lifetime that have caused me to worry and to wonder about the state of our society, and its future. I am old enough to remember little black children being refused schooling at gunpoint, and protesters being pummeled along the pavement by high pressure hoses. I lived through the JFK assassination and the elaborate cover-up that followed, and through Watergate, and the elaborate cover-up that followed. The Vietnam War was a horrid carbuncle on the national flesh, perhaps our greatest crime in the Twentieth Century, and I recall clearly the climate of lies, chaos, and corruption, political, fiscal and moral which it engendered. All of these events touched, and helped shape, my consciousness, and provoked in me mixed feelings of anger, sorrow, and protest.

But nothing has so shaken me -- shaken me to my core -- and caused me to question, calmly and profoundly, the spiritual condition of American society as the recent Planned Parenthood videos. These undercover interviews have made it clear that that organization, which claims to be the spearhead of women's health care, is actively involved, at the highest levels, in the sale of fetal body parts.

Let me repeat that: A taxpayer-funded organization is harvesting and selling the body parts of unborn babies. And now, it appears, is selling entire baby corpses themselves.

Let us put aside for the moment the near-hysterical debate which these revelations have generated, and focus on the simple, cold fact that in America the harvesting and sale of babies' bodies is not only being carried on, it is being defended. I watch in wonder and dismay as intelligent and informed spokespersons for Planned Parenthood and its political supporters, go before the TV cameras and try to rationalize and even to justify this practice. It is a practice worthy of the worst Nazi nightmares; indeed, such experiments were carried out on the bodies of mothers and babies in the extermination camps during World War II.

I am sorry, but there is no finessing the matter: Harvesting and selling babies' body parts is a crime of monstrous proportions. Yet we see the Planned Parenthood executives and doctors discussing the matter casually over cocktails at lunch. Laughing, making jokes, and haggling over prices. In America. At taxpayer expense.

Organs and tissue and brains and entire little corpses, for sale in the United States of America. And those whose political affiliations demand that they defend it, go before the public and try to explain the necessity of it, even the benefits of it, and to excuse it in the name of science and women's reproductive freedom. I have noted before that, in order to rationalize their position, the advocates of abortion on demand must argue that unborn babies are not human beings, but merely "viable tissue masses." And now we see where that leads. If the babies are not babies but merely tissue then we can do anything we want with them: discard them, or, given that they have monetary value in the marketplace, harvest them, dissect them, and sell their organs.

Now, if, for any reason, you find yourself inclined to support this practice, you ought to do what Catholics call an examination of conscience. You need to counsel with yourself and take a dispassionate look at the position you are embracing. And if you feel instinctively that it is wrong (and in the case of selling baby body parts, you cannot help but feel this way), then you must ask yourself why you are taking this position, and what you ought to do to bring your behavior in line with the voice of your conscience. That much, at least, you owe it to yourself to do if you are to consider yourself a moral person.

If nothing else makes us think about God, sin does. And the greater and more hideous the sin, the more focused our minds become on the possibility, even the inevitability, of divine retribution. Well, there is scarcely a more hideous sin imaginable than removing living human babies from their mothers' wombs, cutting them up into pieces, and selling the parts to those willing to pay for them. Unless, of course, it is chatting about it over white wine and cheese.

I have written here before that I reject the conventional concept of God, though I do believe fervently in the spiritual nature and destiny of humankind. I also reject the idea of eternal punishment and reward as being a primitive fancy founded on an intuitive need for some final form of justice. But this business -- and make no mistake, it is a business -- stirs up in me precisely an instinctual sensation that in some way, at some time in this life or another, the people who do this must be repaid, and the innocents who suffer it must be consoled.

As for America... How much farther from truth and justice, from compassion and humanity, can our society get? Especially when there are so many who will clamor forward, not to condemn, but to justify the rape and murder of pure souls who ought to represent the best in us, and our hope for the future.

Bad Deal

I wrote about a year ago that I was withholding judgment on the Iran nuclear deal since we did not know at that time what it consisted of. I also wrote that I opposed the letter sent by members of Congress informing the mullahs in Tehran that no such deal need be respected by the next president. I said at that time that I thought the president was entitled to pursue negotiations without interference from members of Congress. Now that process is nearly finished, the details (most of them) have become public, and it is time to take a position.

On balance, I am convinced that the Iran nuclear deal is a bad one, and should be rejected. That it has already been rejected by a large majority of the American people is clear from the polls. Without wishing to go into details of my position, let me make two or three larger points to illuminate it.

First, it is now clear that the inspection regime outlined in the treaty is inadequate, to say the least. The concept of anywhere/anytime on-site inspections has become requests for inspections, giving the Iranians at least three weeks to respond, though this period would only begin after a lengthy discussion in which the Iranians have a leading role. But beyond that comes last week's revelation that a secret side deal between Iran and the UN's nuclear enforcement agency, the IAEA, requires no on-site inspections at all. Rather, and incredibly, the Iranians are tasked with taking and turning over their own soil samples to the IAEA for analysis. More stupid a plan than this cannot be conceived. Obama maintained throughout the negotiating process that we could not trust the Iranians; now we learn that we are giving them the exclusive right to choose their own soil samples for testing! Someone pointed out that this would be like asking a professional athlete to provide his own urine samples for drug testing analysis. If we can't trust the Iranian regime -- and we can't -- how can we possibly allow them to decide which soil samples to turn over for testing? (To my mind, this is rather like trusting Hillary Clinton to decide which emails to turn over and which to destroy.)

But beyond this, it is true, as the Israeli prime minister stated, that the deal guarantees Iran a nuclear weapon, even if it adheres strictly to its terms. In ten or fifteen years (depending on who you believe), Iran will get a nuclear weapon. In the meantime, it will get sanctions relief and some 150 billion dollars to spend as nefariously as it will. Obama, with typical vacuousness, argued that the regime would not spend that money on terror, because the Iranian people, exhausted by years of sanctions, would demand that it be spent to better their lives. Since when, in history, has an oppressed people demanded anything from their dictators? And these dictators are medieval-minded clerics who believe that God has commanded them to destroy Israel and Western Civilization, as the Great Mufti Ayatollah said in his very recent book.

But consider this for a moment, if you will: Donald Trump has declared that he will build a wall on our southern border, and that the Mexican government will pay for it. For this outlandish statement he was roundly mocked. However, the Iran nuclear deal means that the mullahs will get an atomic weapon, and the West will pay for it. So Trump's claim no longer seems so outlandish, does it.

Finally, in a last-minute capitation to the Iranians, John Kerry and his feckless posse of negotiators agreed to lift the ban on Iran acquiring conventional weapons and ballistic missiles. So, Iran gets 150 billion dollars, nuclear weapons in ten or fifteen years, and ballistic missiles in the meantime. And they continue to insist that their God-imposed intent is to destroy Israel and the West. Now we must ask ourselves: What do we think they will do with those nuclear weapons when they get them? They will, of course, do exactly what they have always said they would: use them to destroy the enemies of God. And we are they, that is us.

My final point is this: Everyone agrees that we cannot trust the Iranians; even Obama, who never had any intention of walking away from the table, has said so. I don't trust them either. But neither do I trust Obama. And that, for me, is the final straw. And so, I have concluded that this is a bad deal, and ought to be rejected.

The Redux

A good deal has happened since I last felt moved to write here, and I will try to comment on at least some of it.

The most important event, of course, was my younger son's debut at Carnegie Hall. He is the bassoonist in the Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestra, which was invited to participate in an international music festival in New York. For me, as a parent, it was a thrilling and unforgettable experience, to see my 12 year old on stage at the nation's most celebrated concert hall, performing works by Dvorak, Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Few things bring tears to my eyes these days, but that certainly did.

I had never been inside Carnegie Hall, and so, before the concert, I took a tour of the place. When I first walked into the hall itself, I was overwhelmed; I had not imagined how beautiful it is. And to think that it was to have been torn down in 1960 to be replaced by yet another glass and cement skyscraper! Thank god that Isaac Stern and his confreres conspired to preserve it. Removing such jewels of the nation's past is always a mistake, and I am grateful that we have largely outgrown our tendency towards such cultural lobotomy.

The City of New York, on the other hand, was a rather shocking revelation to me. I had not been there in many years, and what I found on my return was dismaying. The place seems worn down, aged, overused, and hopelessly outdated. The condition of the streets is a disgrace, and the entire city bears a panoply of odors which I found disgusting. Gore Vidal once remarked that every piece of metal in Manhattan is bent. That is true, and every street surface is cracked and pot-holed, every bit of concrete is broken, and the place is littered with trash which no one, including the city fathers, seems willing to remove.

And the people... I could not help but notice how pale they looked, how insular and disconnected from one another. I am no great partisan of Los Angeles, but I must say that more strangers in the street said hello to me in the days after my return than... well, no one even looked at me in New York. Everyone there seems so distracted, harried, preoccupied; which is so, I suppose, as a defense against the sheer oppressive congestion of the place, and in order not to notice how dirty and dreary are the surroundings. It seems to me that the city government would do much better to spend its money to improve the physical infrastructure of the place than on the social justice nonsense on which it prefers to lavish it.That, at least, might lift people's spirits.

Nationally, it is election season, and, as usual, the nation's collective IQ is dropping weekly. We have scarcely begun the endless, pointless process, and yet the partisan flags are in full flight. No one seems interested in listening to what any of the candidates have to say; most minds, it seems, are already made up, at least among those who can be bothered to pay attention. This is more pointed now than ever before because the partisan divide in this country has never been so pronounced. I suppose I will have more to say about the 2016 election as the months churn by, but for now let me make only a few remarks.

There is very little to say about the Democrat side except to register my disbelief that Hillary Clinton continues to be taken seriously as a potential president. Her history of mendacity is generously documented, her spectrum of lies stretching back to her days as a Watergate impeachment staffer, whose supervisor called her "a corrupt lawyer deserving of neither public nor private trust," all the way, unbroken, to this past week, when Her Majesty finally granted a press interview. In the course of it she said that her emails had never been subpoenaed (not true), that she used only one personal electronic device (not true), that she complied with all federal regulations (not true), and that we can trust that she was being honest with us when she said that none of the 30,000-plus emails which she deleted contained sensitive material (not true). Please bear in mind that Richard Nixon erased 18 minutes of tape and was forced to resign the presidency. Hillary erased tens of thousands of emails and wiped her server clean, and she appears to be getting away with it. Nixon must be salivating in his grave.

There is another point which has been made recently, and which I think bears careful consideration by anyone contemplating voting for this shameless scoundrel. Foreign governments have repeatedly hacked into the most carefully secured servers in American corporate and public life. Within the past month, tens of millions of public employees' personal information was stolen by the Chinese intelligence services. And Sony Corporation saw its private correspondence published on the Net to the embarrassment, and the forced resignation, of its top leadership. Now let me ask you: What do you think are the chances that the governments of China, Russia and North Korea never managed to confiscate the contents of Hillary's private email server?

When asked about this, she replied that there was a Secret Service man guarding her computer! No one was suggesting that her computer was at risk of being stolen. But its contents, the private and public emails of the Secretary of State, were certainly at risk. I think it is inconceivable that foreign governments, both hostile and friendly, do not possess the deleted emails -- the ones Hillary did not want us to see -- and will use them to blackmail her if she is elected. To me, the logic is inescapable. What would the government of China or of Russia do, not to mention that of North Korea, if it found itself in possession of information that could force the resignation of the President of the United States? You may imagine the answer as well as I.

On the other side... well, I was in New York when Donald Trump made his announcement speech and watched it on TV. All I could think was: I am looking for Lincoln, and they give me Barnum and Bailey. The media, which, by and large, has devoted itself to Hillary's coronation, is delighted to parade Trump front and center, since that draws the life out of any other candidacy. Reasonable people like Ben Carson and Chris Christie, and Scott Walker cannot be heard over the cacophony around Trump. Yes, he has hoisted the question of illegal immigration into the forefront of discussion, and yes, it is true that the southern border is in chaos and that criminals are being protected by politically-correct activists in many cities, for which some Americans have paid with their lives, most recently a lovely young woman out for a stroll in San Francisco with her father. But Trump's candidacy is nonetheless a sideshow, a travelling circus of self-promotion for the gratification of an ego maniac.

But as I said, in every election cycle, the national IQ shrinks, and the same tired faces (and some new tired ones) ask the same pointless questions with the same lack of informed follow-up. That is, when Hillary does not have the press roped off so that they cannot get to her. And let that image, of a press corps being literally corralled by a candidate be the image of this feckless political process we have fashioned for ourselves. None of the so-called journalists protested, none yanked the rope aside and said, "I am an American journalist and I will not stand for this kind of treatment!" None got in Hillary's face and demanded to know how she dared treat a free press in this fashion. Instead, like the sheep they are, the reporters meekly followed along behind the rope while the phony Hillary campaign cruised ahead. This was as disgraceful a spectacle as I have ever witnessed on the part of the media. Yet it is precisely this kind of compliant cowardice on which she is counting for her ascendancy.

As for the president, well, I have ceased to be interested or surprised. When asked yesterday about the capitulation inherent in the idea that Iran will get three weeks' notice before any inspection of a suspected nuclear site, he referred us to his "high school physics" knowledge of fissile material, stating that the half-life of uranium would ensure that the "earth samples" would reveal its presence. As if the Iranians are going to bury their atomic weapons in the back yard. This is the same kind of insipid and insulting illogic as in Hillary's claim that a secret service man in her home protected her emails from being stolen. I used to wonder how stupid they think we are; now to that I add the question, How stupid can they actually be?

Well, an answer to that may lie in the recent fervid controversy over the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Charleston, South Carolina. This crucial cultural debate was ignited by the murder of nine churchgoers by a demented young man whose father, of all people, had given him a gun. Leaving aside this stunning act of parental idiocy, the young man was, as in all of these cases, clearly a mentally ill person, and ought to have been identified and treated as such. But no sooner were the victims of the shooting in their graves than the nation's attention was turned by the media onto the question of... the Confederate battle flag. This peripheral issue was immediately thrust to center stage, and the victims, and the motivation for their murder, nearly ignored.

Now let me be clear on two points: The Stars and Bars, as it is called, was not the flag of the Confederacy, which was, in fact, the "bonny blue flag that bears a single star," as the song goes; it was the battle flag of the rebel army. And second, I think the damn thing ought to have been relegated to museums a century ago, preserved only as an artifact of the critical turning point in American history. If I were the governor of South Carolina I would have gone out and taken it down with my own hands. But that is not the point. With typical shallow, knee-jerk reaction, the media and the left instinctively focused on what they perceived to be a symbol of racism, and made the issue about that. Not the substance, mind, but a symbol, since symbols are much easier to identify and deal with. Meanwhile, the very weekend when this urgent question was being debated non-stop in the press, some three dozen black people were shot in Chicago by other black people, one of them, a 7 year old boy, who was killed.

Now, once again, the question is not a simple one. This poor little creature's father was a gang member with 45 convictions on his record. That's whose victim he truly was. He was murdered because other black gang members were trying to murder his father. Black criminality and the ongoing slaughter of young black men by other black men is rising rapidly in cities across the nation, yet the press chooses to fixate on a few cases where white police have shot black men in the performance of their duty, and, of course, on the Confederate flag.

Thus the national debate swirls on, stupefied, shaped and fueled by politicians and media who have neither the desire nor the ability to engage the real issues: mental illness, black-on-black crime, the bloated growth of government which crushes individual initiative and personal responsibility, the breakdown of the black family, and a lack of responsible parenting. But facing such challenges would require strong leadership, courage, vision, honesty, and innovative solutions, and it is so much easier to point to a flag and, when it has been lowered, declare victory. In the meantime, the carnage in our cities goes on and grows worse, and nothing really changes. And we pretend that more candidates manufactured by the political machines and monied interests actually represent the possibility of meaningful reform.

However, we move on, time being ineluctable in its movement and we being flotsam on that ever-outflowing tide. The election will come and go, the Iranian deal will creep through, the slaughter in our inner cities will continue, and nothing will really change, because nothing can really change in our nation now, given the undeniable truth that our leadership remains inept and ineffectual, our society is polarized, our political system has broken down, and our world grows more dangerous and deadly because of it.

Signs of the Times

I rarely read the Los Angeles Times anymore. This is so for two reasons: first, the articles, by and large, are poorly written; and, second, the left-wing bias of the newspaper is so pervasive that I simply do not believe what is written there. However, I often have breakfast at a local cafe, and since I am incapable of sitting idly under any circumstances, I sometimes read whatever sections of the Times are left behind on the table. This morning, as I looked over the front page, I was struck by two things: that, as I said in a previous posting, there was no mention either of the Hillary Clinton email scandal or the Bergdahl desertion charges; and a massive front-page article on a recent Orange County election.

In this article, entitled "When mail-in votes go absentee," the reporters discuss in detail the race for Orange County supervisor. The favorite in this contest was a Hispanic career Democrat politician, Lou Correa, who, the writers tells us, should "easily have carried the race." But to their shock (though apparently not to that of the voters), a "little-known Vietnamese Republican" won. Now, what I want to point out about this article is the following: Though the Democrat candidate's name appears in both the sub-head and in the first sentence, the name of the winner does not appear on the front page at all. We have to go to the eighth paragraph, on page A-14, to learn that the newly elected OC supervisor is Andrew Do. 

The Times is, apparently, stunned that a well-known Democrat did not win in a heavily Democrat district, and they point out rather breathlessly that this "political earthquake" shows that "Republicans can still win," if enough people turn out to vote. Why this should be an earth-shaking revelation to the Times' political staff is mysterious. Asians voted in significantly larger numbers than Hispanics, they report, and so Mr. Do won. Nothing is said of any other kind of voter; only those in these two ethnic groups, though neither block was large enough to elect either candidate. And, as I said, the winning candidate's name is buried deep in the article; yet, surely, it is the fact that Mr. Do won and not that Mr. Correa lost, that is important. Except to the Times. 

There are several very disturbing implications to this article, and to this kind of biased reporting, for anyone who cares about the integrity of the press and of the electoral system.

The first, of course, is the implied lament that an Asian voting block was instrumental in defeating a Latino one. If this sort of thing becomes epidemic, the Times seems to be saying, what will happen to the state's Democrat majority, which is heavily supported by Hispanics? Who are these Asian upstarts who are threatening to overturn the Dems' carefully crafted coalition of white liberals, Latinos, blacks and unions? 

Now, if you want to argue that it is not the fact that a Republican won because more people turned out to vote for him, but that only one ethnic group of voters put him over the top, then you will be guilty of the same kind of bigotry of which liberals always accuse those who disagree with them. You say Obama’s policies have failed? You are a racist. You say Hillary Clinton lacks the integrity to be president? You are a sexist. You question gay marriage? You are a bigot. You have moral reservations about abortion? You are waging war on women.

Yet here we have the Times decrying the fact that Asian voters defeated a Latino candidate. Why is the Times even focusing on the race of the candidates? Because, being liberals, they always see race in everything. They are practicing the opposite of what Dr. King urged us to do: Judge a person by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. Is it just possible that Mr. Do, his ethnic origin aside, was a better candidate than Mr. Correa? The Times does not know or care to know. The only thing that concerns them is the ethnicity of the two candidates, and they conclude that only an upheaval of seismic proportions could have elected a Republican Asian over a Democrat Hispanic. This, surely, is racist.

Now, let us consider the fact that the winning candidate’s name is buried deep in the article. Clearly, the Times is not interested in who he is or even the fact that he won. Only that a prominent Latino Democrat lost concerns them. In this way, the winner and the loser are reversed. Mr. Correa gets front-page coverage, and we have to search for Mr. Do’s name thirteen pages on. This, I think, pretty clearly indicates the liberal bias of the Times, not in its editorial writing, but in its reporting. Mr. Do pulls off a significant victory for Asians in Orange County, and we have to go to page 14 to learn who he is. You would think that the Times might celebrate this fact, but all that matters to their reporters is that a Democrat darling has been defeated. The implication here is that if these activist Asians, who tend to be conservative, were ever truly to get together, they might just change the face of California politics. For my own part, I hope they do.

Now, this article was only one of two in the Times I read recently which gave me pause. The other, titled "Afghan mob sets woman on fire for alleged Koran burning," concerned the horrific murder of a young Afghan woman who was slaughtered by a mob, aided by police, after she was accused of having burned a Koran in public. She was first beaten and kicked almost to death, and then her body was set on fire. The spectacle is too terrible to be imagined, and I read the story only reluctantly. As I have written in another post: This is the twenty-first century, not the twelfth.

Apparently the townspeople knew this young woman, and some at least knew that she had a history of mental illness. Though anyone might know that you would have to be crazy to burn a Koran in public in any Muslim country. Yet that did not stop them from flying into a collective fit of religious hysteria, and murdering the poor creature in public, which, apparently, they thought a lesser crime than hers. They are wrong, of course: Korans can be replaced; people cannot.

Then, two thirds of the way through the article, the reporters make this extraordinary observation: “…Afghan and foreign health professionals believe that a large proportion of the Afghan population suffers from some sort of psychological trauma after three decades of conflict.” Apart from the fact that the writers do not name any of these professionals, the question is: Why did they even raise this point? Was it an attempt to explain, rationalize, or even justify the horrible killing? I cannot help but feel that this is so; otherwise, why bring it up, gratuitously, at all?

Which leads me to wonder, would any writer be taken seriously if he reminded us that the German people were suffering from decades of deprivation and humiliation after World War I as a way of excusing the horrors of Nazism? Would a reporter have been permitted to publish the idea that centuries of oppression by Russian autocrats somehow rationalize the tens of millions of deaths in the Gulag? Would any American journalist even think of writing that the crushing loss of the Confederacy and the North’s Reconstruction excesses justified lynching?

And yet here we have the Los Angeles Times publishing on the first page of its "The World" section the suggestion that this pathetic woman’s brutal murder ought to be understood in terms of some vague concept of the Afghan population’s post-traumatic stress disorder. For my own part, I do not want to think about the Times’ ideological reasons for making this shameful suggestion, any more than I want to contemplate that poor woman’s horrible death at the hands of her countrymen, who claimed to be defending a faith that ought to have cherished and protected her.

She Burned the Tapes

I have compared Hillary Clinton's penchant for lying, obfuscation, and evasion to that of Richard Nixon, but that comparison ends today. We now know that Hillary did what even Nixon could not bring himself to do: She burned the tapes. At the height of Watergate, some Nixon advisers and confidantes urged him to do just that -- burn the secret White House tape recordings that incriminated him and exposed him as a liar. But for whatever reason, whether because as a lawyer he understood that to do so would be a crime, the crime of destruction of evidence, or because in some perverse way he wanted the tapes to become public, even Nixon refrained from doing so.

Yesterday we learned that the Hills did what Nixon could have done but did not -- she has destroyed evidence that was being sought by both the State Department and by the Congress. We discover this fact very late in the game. She apparently "wiped clean" the private server on which she conducted official business as Secretary of State, in October, after the State Department asked for all of her correspondence. Now, unless some technological wizardry can retrieve those deleted documents, we may never know what it was that she, and she alone, chose to withhold from the American people and from history.

Failing that, we are forced to take her word for the assertion that she turned over every email relating to her official duties, an act of faith which her previous record makes impossible. There are, as the chairman of the congressional investigating committee has pointed out, large gaps in the flow of her government emails -- far larger than Nixon's eighteen-minute gap -- and gaps that occur at the very time she was dealing with the crisis in Benghazi. It is simply not possible to believe that she was fully candid in her response to the State Department's request for all of her official correspondence. And now, unless someone from her inner circle comes forward to enlighten us, we, the public, whose records they were, will be exactly where the Clintons have always wanted us to be -- in the dark.

Will any of this matter to the Hills' presidential plans? Probably not. This morning, over breakfast, I searched the LA Times for information on this latest twist in the email scandal, and what did I find? Nothing. There was not a mention of it in the front section of the newspaper. There was a front page story of Harry Reid's decision not to run for the senate again (which was welcome news), but no word on the two stories which I thought would have dominated: Hillary's clean sweep, and the Bergdahl desertion charges. Neither story did the Times feel it necessary to report, yet both are important news. The Hills' emails because she is running for president, and Bergdahl because the president saw fit to afford his parents a Rose Garden celebration after he had been exchanged for five leading Taliban killers.

The explanation for these oversights need not be detailed: the Times, and other left-leaning news outlets, are doing everything they can to protect Hillary's campaign and Obama's legacy. Truth be damned; the mainstream media wants Hillary as president and Obama as legend, and will sacrifice anything, including professional integrity, to achieve those ends. Yet the fact remains that Hillary continues to practice the same sort of scheming, scurrilous political and personal behavior for which she has established a lengthy track record. And Obama, and his staff, have been made to look like fools -- dangerous fools -- now that the Army has decided that Bergdahl was what every member of his platoon always insisted he was, a deserter, who gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

Remember, of course, that when those fellow soldiers of Bergdahl's came forward and told the truth about what he did, they were summarily pilloried by the mainstream press; called liars, losers, poor soldiers, unreliable witnesses. Their integrity, not Bergdahl's, was called into question, and for what reason? To protect a president who was either so ill-informed or so arrogant, that he reversed the truth of history for his own political purposes. Now Bergdahl will, probably, be court-martialed, and what does the Obama Administration do? Admit they made a mistake? Never! They insist that the prisoner exchange was a worthy deed, fully justified in retrospect. Despite the facts that six soldiers were killed trying to find Bergdahl, and three of the Taliban killers are already planning to rejoin the jihad.

This is nonsense. And if you won't take my word for that, just consider what the White House press secretary said when asked about the Administration's declaration that Bergdahl had served "with honor and distinction." With a perfectly straight face and waxen hair, the presidential press secretary replied that to serve the country is an honor, and wearing the uniform makes one distinct. This is the kind of self-serving pablum that gives sophistry a bad name. Why this silly man was not laughed out of the press room is a mystery to me. Even the Soviet press corps, after the KGB coup against Gorbachev, laughed in derision when the coup's spokesman declared that Gorby had not been overthrown, but was being held in protective custody at his own request. Those lifelong toadies in the Russian press managed to do what the White House press corps did not: laugh in the face of patent nonsense.

So, we have a presidential candidate who does what even poor, disgraced Dick Nixon could not do, and a press corps that will sit in silence as idiotic lies are told to them. And what does this mean for the nation? President Hillary Clinton.

Crossing the Line

I was startled to learn the other day that forty-seven Republican senators wrote a letter to the dictators of Iran instructing them on the details of the Constitution, and warning them that any deal with the Obama Administration would be subject to reversal in the near future. I do not believe I have ever heard of such a thing in my lifetime: members of one party of the Senate corresponding with the opposite side in an international negotiation while it was ongoing and, in effect, saying that the Administration has no real authority to make a deal.

To say that I have been critical of the Obama Administration is to put it mildly indeed. But here I find myself having to take the president's side. Such politically motivated intrusion into a high-level negotiation is not only unprecedented (as far as I know), it is downright dangerous. Not to mention breathtakingly stupid. That forty-six senators would have followed a freshman with less than six months in the Senate and no foreign policy experience into this political stunt baffles me. It not only signals that the new Republican majority has no more talent for leadership than the president; it also demonstrates the Republicans' determination to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, as they have done on immigration and the budget.

I have not commented on the Iran nuclear deal to this point for the simple reason that we do not know its details. The broad outline of the deal, as I understand it, does trouble me, as did Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech before Congress. Iran is the world's chief sponsor of terror, and it is making stunning gains in its effort to dominate the Middle East. There can be no doubt that it is determined to establish its hegemony in the region, and that it remains committed to the destruction of Israel. Armed with nuclear weapons, the Mullahs are just crazy enough to use them -- they are fanatics if nothing else, and, thus, impervious to reason. Their ultimate desire is to bring about the End Times, and how better to do that than to unleash a world war.

Now, you could argue as some are doing, that in face of this, no deal with such people is possible. But you could also argue, as the Administration is doing, that some sort of deal is essential for exactly the same reasons. I am inclined to accept the latter proposition, with the important caveat, as Netanyahu urged, that it represent a barrier to an Iranian nuke, and not a pathway to it. If the latter is to be the case, then the deal must be forestalled. But if a deal emerges from the current negotiations which ensures, in a verifiable manner, that Iran will not get the bomb, then it must be taken with utmost seriousness. The whole process is as delicate as it is crucial.

For the forty-seven senators to inject themselves unilaterally into this process before we have had a chance to learn the details of the pending agreement is an egregious breach of protocol and common sense. It crosses a line which, I think, no members of the government should ever cross: undercutting a high-level negotiation while it is in progress by communicating directly with the adversary.

That said, my fear remains that Obama is so desperate for a foreign policy victory that he and Secretary of State John Kerry (who has so far been out-maneuvered in every negotiation) will agree to a deal that achieves the reverse of its intent. It is not enough to wrangle a Munich-style agreement from Tehran, buying a few years of peace at the long-term expense of the security of the U.S. and Israel. This is the what the Prime Minister came to warn us about, in a powerful and cogent speech which, typically, our president could not find time to watch.

The Hills for Pres

I am going to make a prediction. Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.

Why do I say this? Because the political atmosphere in America has become so thick and toxic with lies, she is the right candidate at the right time. She has much more experience at lying than any other potential candidate, and so she is much better at it, as proved by the fact that she has gotten away it with so often. Certainly she is better than Obama, who is routinely exposed for lying, though the media pretends not to have noticed.

Why, just yesterday the president was asked when he learned that the Hills was using her personal email account while Secretary of State. Mr Obama looked the interviewer more or less in the eye and said what he always says when a scandal erupts: I learned of it when you did, through the press reports. Why, if it wasn't for reporters, the president wouldn't know anything! How many times has he said this? I can't even count. But I thought I did detect a bit of weariness in his response this time, as if even he were getting tried of admitting that he is clueless. But realistically, my friends, how is it possible that in the years the Hills was Secretary, and in daily communication with the White House, neither the president nor anyone on his staff noticed that her emails were coming from a private server, and not from a government account? And this even after Mr. Obama had ordered everyone in his cabinet to use a government server.

Of course, the interviewer did not follow up when the president denied he knew. He did not exclaim: How is that possible? Didn't you notice?! Didn't anybody in the White House notice?! What is wrong with your staff?! No, as usual, the president was given a pass, allowed to slide. Allowed to lie.

Still, no one can rival the Hills for the sheer longevity, frequency, and boldness of her deceit. Not even Richard Nixon, who, because he was male and a Republican, was far less likely to escape unexposed than Hills, who is female and a Democrat. No, Hills is the distaff Nixon, and much more likely to succeed at deception than Tricky Dick.

Take some of her more memorable lies, for example. She lied about her cattle futures profits, she lied about Travelgate, she lied about the Rose Law Firm records, she lied when she wrote that she was shocked to learn of Bill's infidelity, she lied about being under fire in Bosnia, she lied about Benghazi, and she is lying now about her State Department emails. But, you say, she has directed State to turn them all over. Yes... the ones she gave to State. But how many more are there? And how many of those have been destroyed? They are not her property; they are the government's property. She does not have the right to retain them, and she certainly does not have the right to decide which ones will be made public and which will not.

This passing flap over the tens of millions of dollars donated to the Clinton Foundation by oppressive governments that deny women even the most basic human rights is merely eyewash. Hills is a champion of women's rights and a heroine in the war against women. As Bill said just the other day, they only took the money from those regimes in order to do good. The end does, after all, justify the means. And of course, Hills said she took no such money while she was Secretary of State... Wait, it turns out she did. But she assures us that no influence was bought with it. That, too, I suspect, is a lie.

One of the first public figures to comment on Hillary's integrity (or lack of it) was her supervisor on the Senate Watergate Committee, investigating that legendary liar, Richard Nixon. Hillary Clinton, he wrote in his memoir of Watergate, is "a corrupt lawyer deserving of neither public nor private trust." Why, she even lied about how she got her name! As for the other lies, well, don't take my word for it; read the now-famous column by William Safire, which I reproduce here:

Blizzard of Lies 

By WILLIAM SAFIRE 

Published: January 8, 1996

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

1. Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that as the Governor's wife she profited corruptly, her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests through a disreputable broker.

She lied for good reason: To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.

2. The abuse of Presidential power known as Travelgate elicited another series of lies. She induced a White House lawyer to assert flatly to investigators that Mrs. Clinton did not order the firing of White House travel aides, who were then harassed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department to justify patronage replacement by Mrs. Clinton's cronies.

Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators, that there would be "hell to pay" if the furious First Lady's desires were scorned. The career of the lawyer who transmitted Hillary's lie to authorities is now in jeopardy. Again, she lied with good reason: to avoid being identified as a vindictive political power player who used the F.B.I. to ruin the lives of people standing in the way of juicy patronage.

3. In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of her former partner and closest confidant, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, she ordered the overturn of an agreement to allow the Justice Department to examine the files in the dead man's office. Her closest friends and aides, under oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay for supporting Hillary's lie with jail terms.

Again, the lying was not irrational. Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster's White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years -- in Hillary's closet, in Web Hubbell's basement before his felony conviction, in the President's secretary's personal files -- before some were forced out last week.

Why the White House concealment? For good reason: The records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell's father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million.

Why the belated release of some of the incriminating evidence? Not because it mysteriously turned up in offices previously searched. Certainly not because Hillary Clinton and her new hang-tough White House counsel want to respond fully to lawful subpoenas.

One reason for the Friday-night dribble of evidence from the White House is the discovery by the F.B.I. of copies of some of those records elsewhere. When Clinton witnesses are asked about specific items in "lost" records -- which investigators have -- the White House "finds" its copy and releases it. By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators.

Another reason for recent revelations is the imminent turning of former aides and partners of Hillary against her; they were willing to cover her lying when it advanced their careers, but are inclined to listen to their own lawyers when faced with perjury indictments.

Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.

So you see, it's not just me. I'm not making this up, nor am I a member of a vast right-wing conspiracy. The emails story was broken by the New York Times, and it is being pursued by every major media outlet. Why, even MSNBC has questioned whether, if Dick Cheney had done what Hillary did and continues to do, the press would not be in a Jaws-like feeding frenzy. And Democrats, realizing they have no alternative to the Hills, are slowly coming forward either to distance themselves from her, as the president has done, or urge her to come clean. (Now, that is the one area in which she does lack credentials, and so it is not likely to happen any time soon.)

Even so eminent a commentator as William Safire noticed the Hills' pattern of deception. Add to that the paranoia which she has exhibited by, for example, using her personal email account to conduct her State Department business, so that she alone could control the records of her actions, as well as the reports of her "enemies lists," a la Nixon. Add also the hypocrisy inherent in her accepting from governments that oppress women tens of millions of dollars, while claiming to be a crusader for women's rights. And the hypocrisy in the fact that she required her subordinates to use government email accounts, and fired one of her ambassadors for disobeying. Do as I say, not as I do. The rules don't apply to me! So add hubris, as well. 

So what do we have? A long pattern of deceit, paranoia, vengefulness, hypocrisy, and hubris.

Yes, I predict that Hillary will be our next president. Given the state of political discourse in this nation after eight years of Obama, how can she miss?

Worth God's While

This morning, as every morning, I read from my favorite poet, G. M. Hopkins. Today, I opened my complete Hopkins at random, and my eye fell on the following passage, which I would like to share with you, for its beauty, and its spiritual uplift:

But what we have not done yet we can do now, what we have done badly hitherto we can do well henceforward, we can repent our sins and begin to give God glory. The moment we do this we reach the end of our being, we do and are what we were made for, we make it worth God's while to have created us. This is a comforting thought: we need not wait in fear till death; any day, any minute we bless God for our being or for anything, for food, for sunlight, we do and are what we were meant for, made for -- things that give and mean to give God glory. This is a thing to live for. Then make haste so to live.

The Man in the Mirror

Well, no sooner had I written that denying that the Islamic terrorists are Muslims (as the president does), would be like denying that the Crusaders were Christians, than Mr. Obama uses the Crusades as a means of chastening us, declaring that we should not "get up on our high horse," because terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity.

In making this sophistic moral equivocation, the president does not realize that he has undercut his own position. If horrors were committed by the Crusaders in the name of Christ, then the Islamists' horrors are being committed in the name of Allah. And if the Crusaders were Christians, which he affirms, then the terrorists are Muslims, which he denies. He cannot have it both ways; of course, unless the media permits him to do so, which they have.

And now comes the latest embarrassment: the Man in the Mirror, stick-selfie episode. I could not at first understand what I was seeing -- I thought it was some kind of parody or joke. I did not realize that it had actually been done by the president; but when that was clear, though it came as little surprise, it was nonetheless shocking to me. Who advises this man? Who tells him that such stunts are acceptable, even cool? And what the hell was the president thinking? What does he think his job is? This is a man who does not have time to mourn the public murder of American journalists and aid workers, but has plenty of time for golf; a man who could not manage to attend the massive free speech rally in Paris, but permitted himself to be interviewed by a woman in fluorescent green lipstick who bathes in breakfast cereal; a man who has no time to meet with the Prime Minister of Israel, coming to warn us of the Iranian nuclear threat, but who does find time to play the fool in front of a mirror, before the entire world.

This is shameful, it is a disgrace. Leaving aside the impression that this spectacle must make on the minds of our enemies -- real people who really want to kills us -- it demeans the presidency in a way that should have been unthinkable. Not long ago, Bill O'Reilly was taken to task for his aggressive questioning of the president in an interview, on the grounds that he was disrespecting "the majesty of the office." Well, so much for the majesty of the office.

The only effort to defend Mr. Obama's buffoonery was the lame argument that he was trying to appeal to Millenials to sign up for his health care scheme. Which makes one wonder: Just how stupid and shallow does he think the current generation is? Does he, or do his advisers, really think that this kind of clownish behavior on the part of the President of the United States, will appeal to the younger generation? Any intelligent, informed young person would find it scandalous.

It is true that Franklin Roosevelt appeared jovial in many of his public appearances, and that Abraham Lincoln liked to tell jokes. But neither descended to this level of foolishness; neither demeaned the dignity of the office. That this president has done so at a time when the world is in such a dangerous state, when Islamo-fascists are burning, beheading, and crucifying innocents, and old-fashioned Russian imperialism has resurrected itself, when there are very serious people very seriously threatening our civilization, makes me question more than Mr. Obama's judgment; it makes me question his sanity.

Whatevers

--This is 2015 AD, not 1015 AD. Yet much of our national conversation is taken up with such matters as torture, beheading, crucifixion, and burning at the stake, or in a cage as the case may be. I admit that I am puzzled, and dismayed. Does progress count for nothing? Does civilization count for nothing? Does evolution count for nothing? How have we, at this late date in human history, returned to the Dark Ages? In one corner of the Earth we have marvelous tools of science and technology, and in another, human beings crucified and burned in public. On the same stage we have Beauty and the Beast. How can the race generate and tolerate such contradictions? It is enough to make one believe in the religious concept of the End Times. The poet said, Surely some revelation is at hand. Yet I begin to feel that, Surely some annihilation is at hand. No species can long endure such dislocations in its behavior. Beauty or bestiality; progress or regress, hope or despair. As Lincoln said, We will become entirely one thing or the other.

--I could not bring myself to watch the video of the public immolation of the Jordanian pilot by ISIS. There are just some images you should not allow into your consciousness. But I listened to discussions of it at some length, saw the images of the young man and of his family, and lay awake last night wondering what it all meant for us as humans. I will tell you one sad spectacle I did watch: that of our President's milquetoast and mumbling comment on it, in which he said that "whatever ideology" was behind it is bankrupt. No ringing condemnation, no decisive course of action, not even a willingness to identify who the villains are and what they stand for. 

Who they are is Islamo-fascists, fanatical corrupters of one of the world's leading religions. And what they stand for is the annihilation of civilization in the name of a new Caliphate. Why the President cannot or will not admit this remains a puzzle, not just to me, but to nearly everyone who has commented on the fact. It would be as if we tried to deny that the Crusaders were Christians. Of course they were; a manifestation of a militant and vile view of Christianity which had nothing to do with the essential spirit of the religion. But nothing would be gained by denying that they were motivated by, and acted in the name of, Christianity. History would be distorted, its interpretation would be impossible. The President is a jihad-denier. And that is as dangerous as any form of historical denial. 

--I know something about the Crusades, or the first one, at least. I researched and wrote a book about it, read the contemporaneous accounts, as well as dozens of subsequent studies of it. The Crusaders, most of them, were religious zealots, though their leaders were as motivated by wealth, greed, and power as by religion. They armed themselves and spread across the known world, bringing bloodshed, rape, torture, massacre, beheading, burning, and even cannibalism into every land they conquered. And they did it all in the name of religion. Does that not sound horribly familiar? Yet that was 1000 years ago. I had thought the human race had progressed far beyond that point. Evidently, it has not. Somebody ought to tell the President.

--I have written before that I regard J. S. Bach as the greatest artist of our civilization, and I have commented that I think some of his keyboard work, such as the Italian Concerto and the French and English Suites are as close to perfection as one will ever get in this world. I could not help but think of them in these past few terrible weeks, and listen to them, and cling to them as to a lifeline. And that gave me some comfort, and some hope that perhaps we as a race may yet endure, in spite of everything.

--I have recently begun re-reading Somerset Maugham. I was hoping that my twelve-year-old, who has been reading through and enjoying Kurt Vonnegut, would take a liking to Maugham. He has not, and I can see why. I read Maugham in college, and loved his work; I have often said that every young man should read The Razor's Edge while he is still young. I think it a beautiful and thought-provoking novel. But in reading Maugham again, I realize that his prose is far too elegant, far too meticulous, and far too embedded in an extinct culture of manners and insouciance to catch the attention of even a very bright pre-teen. But I am enjoying him again. Gore Vidal said that no one writing in the Twentieth Century could avoid Maugham "because he is so there." It is charming to discover that, in my consciousness at least, he is still here.

--These have been ambling thoughts; the reason for which I began this blog several years ago. I wanted a forum in which I could record my thinking about... well, about just anything that crossed my mind. I have tried to do so as clearly and frankly as I could. My thinking has changed over those years, as one's thinking always must in time, and part of that change has been due to writing these posts, and going back and reading through them. This blog has been a sort of intellectual diary, and I have tried to do my best to keep it going, and keep it honest.

At the outset, I was faced with the question of whether or not I would allow comments to be published on my posts. I decided that I would, both out of curiosity, and in the expectation that my readers' comments would help me to clarify my thinking. I follow Lincoln's dictum: I will adopt new views as quickly as they shall be proved to be true views. Of my readers I asked only that their comments be to the point, that is, that they refer to the content of my posts, and that they be brief, and civil in tone.

Initially they were, and I enjoyed reading and responding to them. But when I wrote a film script about Tupac Shakur, that changed. I received so many ugly, obscene, and insulting comments from purported fans of Tupac that I was obliged to pre-screen all comments before publishing them. This I have done for the past three or four years. I have read all comments, and published and responded only to those which I felt were relevant to the posts, civil in tone, and to which I had not already responded in detail. 

In recent months, however, the tone of the comments has again turned ugly. Anonymous readers have been leaving comments filled with venom and vituperation so regularly that I was forced to decide that I would not publish any anonymous comment, and, more recently, that I would not even read them. To those anonymous individuals I say: If you so dislike what I write, then read someone else. If you are incapable of voicing your opinions in a civil and rational manner, then why should I or anyone else take you seriously? And if you are too cowardly to identify yourself with your views, why should I acknowledge you?

Also, I have found that some readers use the comments section of my blog to air their views in elaborate detail. I would remind those people that I started this blog in order to air my views, not those of others. If you wish to record your thoughts and opinions at length, do what I did: Start your own blog. But please do not malign me for refusing to allow my forum to be usurped by you.

Writing a blog has taught me many things. I have been reassured that there are people out there who appreciate frank and controversial views, and enjoy engaging in reasoned and apposite discussion. But I have also learned how many nasty, bloody-minded, and petty people there are in cyber space. It used to be that such people were restricted to ranting in the privacy of their homes, or venting to the few friends they had left, or just wandering the streets shouting at cars. Now, thanks to technology and the Internet, the whole world is their stage.

Well, I am sorry to have to tell you that my little corner of that stage will no longer be available to them. I have reluctantly decided to disable comments on this blog. There is simply too much ugliness in the world without my allowing my forum to add to it. I will continue to write, and I hope that you will continue to read. And I shall miss the input of those who have encouraged me and stimulated my thinking these many years.

Playing the Odds

I am going to begin and end this post with the same words, just so there is no misunderstanding: Get your children vaccinated.

That said, the recent outbreak of measles has prompted a national debate on the question of vaccination, and whether it should be mandatory. I was surprised to learn that about sixteen percent of parents choose not to vaccinate, and in some communities, like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, the rate is much higher. The primary reason for this reluctance to vaccinate is the concern of parents that vaccination may cause autism.

Now, there is, so far as I understand it, no scientific evidence linking vaccination and autism, though there is some anecdotal evidence. And anecdotal evidence, while it can be emotionally affecting, is virtually worthless in determining matters of public policy, and even of personal decision-making. I once had a young woman tell me that she needn't stop smoking because her grandmother smokes and is healthy and 80 years old. There is simply nothing to this kind of reasoning, and it should not be allowed to determine important decisions.

One of those important decisions is whether or not to vaccinate a child. The autism link that has moved many parents not to vaccinate seems to have been alleged in a published study of a very small sample of children. That study has been discredited, and its author, I learned today, has lost his medical license. Nonetheless, the idea has stuck with some people, usually fuzzy thinkers who believe that disease can be prevented by eating natural foods and practicing holistic medicine, which explains, I suppose, why the rate of non-vaccinators is so high on the West Side of Los Angeles.

(I was stunned this morning when I heard the chief political correspondent for the Huffington Post declare on MSNBC {Yes, I do watch it occasionally.}, that the Koch Brothers are responsible for the measles outbreak. His logic ran thus: Right-wing parents who mistrust the government opt out of vaccination because they think there is a government conspiracy to harm their children. They are, he said, the same kinds of people who deny climate change because they listen to media outlets funded by the Koch Brothers. So: Conservative activists, right-wing media, climate change denial, no vaccinations, measles outbreak in California. And Rachel Maddow just nodded and did not object, and thanked the man for his input. And so, the measles has, inevitably, become a divisive political matter, as does everything in America these days.)

I can remember vividly sitting in the pediatrician's office with my first son on my knee while she held the vaccination needle in her hand. I balked. Though he was very young, I could see that he had a remarkable brain, was highly intelligent, and I had heard the rumors about autism. I agonized over the possibility that he might have an allergic reaction to the vaccine which would damage that beautiful mind. And so I spent a lot of time talking to the doctor about it, before I finally agreed to go ahead. She vaccinated him, and nothing bad happened. He was the first of my vaccinated genius children.

But at least the pediatrician took the time to talk to me, and let me decide. And I made the right decision, primarily on the basis that there was a 99% probability that my son would have no adverse reaction to the vaccine.

Now this is the point I would like to make, and I hope that parents will listen to it. Every major decision you will make in your child's young life will involve risk of some kind. There are simply no guarantees in parenting. What you must do as a responsible parent is to play the best odds you can get. If, for example, you went to Vegas and were told that there was a 99% chance that you would win at a game, wouldn't you take those odds? Of course you would. That is what we as parents must do, especially in matters of our children's health and well-being.

There are now calls for legislation to require parents to vaccinate their children, and I am quite sure that such a bill will be introduced in Congress in the near future. And if the Congress can mandate that we buy health insurance whether we want to or not, what is to stop it from mandating that we vaccinate our children whether we want to or not? Imagine the spectacle: Parents who for whatever reason refuse vaccination are arrested, their children taken away by police, and a needle jabbed into their flesh against their parents' wishes. It would be the public health equivalent of Elian Gonzales.

We live in a putatively free society, and the children are ours. Not our property - our children; there is a difference. And we must have the freedom to raise them as we think best. Still, I have held for years that no parent has the right to volunteer his child to suffer for his beliefs, no matter how strongly he holds them. This is equally true in matters of religion and health. Thus, those parents who refuse vaccination on religious grounds are not taking a risk: they are volunteering their children to take that risk. And I believe it is wrong for them to do this.

If there is an overwhelming probability that vaccinating your child will mean he or she will never contract measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, tetanus, polio, pneumonia and other diseases that have ravaged human history, you have a responsibility to play the odds and get the vaccine.

But that being said, the government should not be allowed to compel you to do so under penalty of law. This would only further intrude the power of government into our personal lives, narrowing our freedom of choice, and infringing our personal liberty. And that is too heavy a price to pay in response to 100 cases of measles. What then should be done?

If parents feel they have compelling reasons to refuse vaccination, and insist on doing so despite all the evidence to the contrary, and despite the overwhelming probability that nothing will bad will happen, and knowing what the consequence may be, then they must take the consequences on themselves. Their children will not be allowed to attend school, but must be home-schooled, or must attend a school with other non-vaccinated children. If a child becomes ill, the parents cannot insist that the rest of us pay for his treatment. If the child suffers serious or permanent damage (which, though unlikely, is possible), then they alone are responsible for paying the cost of care. In short: If you choose not to vaccinate, you, and you alone, are responsible for the consequences.

Of course, as I have said, it is not the parents who will suffer the most serious consequences of the decision not to vaccinate - it is the children who will. And because this is true, and because the children are our responsibility (not property), we must play the odds, which are overwhelmingly in our favor, and get our children vaccinated.

Good Legs, Bad Legs

I was thinking the other day that it is good that George Orwell isn't alive to see what's happening. Then I reflected that perhaps it would be better if he was; he might actually have something to say about it. Perhaps he could snap us out of the stupor into which we've fallen... and make it clear whether two legs or four legs are, in fact, better.

Only the most recent examples:

The White House has begun an advertising campaign to support the President's illegal alien amnesty executive order. Now, the President had stated on over twenty separate occasions that he did not have the Constitutional authority to issue such an order. I heard him say it myself. Yet, when he did issue the order, he claimed that it was within his Constitutional authority to do so.

Two legs or four?

The thrust of the current PR campaign is to convince the American public that amnesty is good for the economy. Yet just six years ago in one of his memoirs (how many is a man entitled to?), the President stated that amnesty for illegals would be bad for the economy.

Four legs or two?

The President celebrated the release of Sgt. Bergdahl in a Rose Garden ceremony, and his National Security adviser declared on television that he had served honorably and with distinction. Now the Army has concluded that he was a deserter and will bring charges against him, and the White House is doing everything it can to prevent both the release of the findings and the pressing of charges. "Bergdahl is a hero," runs the logic, "and so we must not allow the public to know that he is a deserter."

Two legs or four?

And now, in the latest Orwellian contortion of logic, the Administration declares that the Taliban are not a terrorist organization. These are the same Taliban who offered a safe haven to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan from which 9/11 was planned, who have carried on an unrelenting and merciless campaign of terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan, who shot a Nobel Peace Prize winning child in the head for trying to attend school, who slaughtered an entire school full of children, and who, just yesterday, murdered two Americans in an attack on an airbase disguised as Afghan soldiers. They are the same Taliban who stone women to death for adultery, cut off the hands of thieves, and behead people in soccer stadiums for violating Sharia law. They are, by any conceivable definition of the word, among the most dangerous terrorists in the world. Yet, as of today, according to Mr. Obama's press secretary, they are not a terrorist organization, they are an "armed insurgency."

And why? The Administration negotiated with the Taliban for the release of Sgt. Bergdahl in exchange for five Taliban terrorist leaders. But the longstanding policy of the United States has been that we do not negotiate with terrorists. Yet we did negotiate with the Taliban, and so, deductively, the Taliban must not be terrorists. They are, instead, an armed insurgency. Just like the Continental Army.

Four legs or two?

Orwell made famous the question of how many legs are good, how many bad, to make the point that some leaders will distort logic to any extent necessary to serve their personal and political agendas. Doing so has been a hallmark of the Obama Administration. And allowing this President to get away with such egregious lies and contradictions has been a hallmark of the media which did so much to put him, and keep him, in office. Mercifully, he will be gone in a year and a half. What troubles me is that the same servile media who have covered for him these past six years will still be in place after he is gone.

And Hillary Clinton looms.