Jerry West

 

One of the things that remind a man he is getting old is seeing the great players of his boyhood die off. There was another one today – Jerry West. Bill Russell and Jim Brown went in the last couple of years. Mantle, Musial, Williams, Unitas, Aaron, Berra, and most of the rest have been gone a while. Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Oscar Robertson are the only ones I can think of who are still alive, and they are very old men. And we boys who followed them and collected their cards in the 1950s and early 60s are old enough.

Jerry West was special – a great offensive player whom Russell rated as also a great defensive player. He was one of my favorites. I still remember vividly how good he was.

Pride in June

 

The first week of June is a very important one in the history of the armed forces of the United States. Between June 4^th and 6^th,1942  an outnumbered and outgunned American naval force defeated the Japanese navy at Midway in the most decisive and historically important naval battle since Trafalgar, ending Japan’s offensive in the Pacific. On June 6^th,1944, American forces landed in Normandy, securing their beachhead and beginning the great campaign leading to the destruction of Nazi Germany.

It’s a free country, and people can select what they want to be proud of and when they want to show their pride. For me this June, it will be the armed forces of the United States from the time of the revolution to the present. This year is the 80^th anniversary of the invasion in Normandy. I have read that there are major commemorations every five years on June 6^th , and that this year’s may be the last one with any veterans of the battle attending. We should honor and be proud of them and their valor especially.

Trump's Conviction

 

Statement A:

Donald Trump is a man who is unfit for any public office in the United States. He is an arrogant, vulgar, bullying, graceless, power mad ignoramus, and he doesn’t hide the fact. From December 14^th 2000 to January 6^th ,2001, he functioned as an enemy of the republic, conspiring and attempting to overthrow the government and remain in power illegally and unconstitutionally. The rally and riot of January 6^th had no other purpose. His order to Pence to change the results of the election was by itself an attempted coup. In 2022 he called in writing for overturning the Constitution and returning him to power immediately. He has made it plain recently that the only thing he regrets about the coup is that if failed. He is erratic to the point of instability, and apparently incapable of strategic thought beyond superficial transactional considerations.

Statement B:

The basis for the indictment of Trump in New York was farcically weak. The prosecutor was a Democrat party hack and scoundrel who acted for purely political reasons. The judge was another party man clearly biased in favor of the prosecution. There is evidence that the Biden administration was involved in the case in an attempt to ruin the leading candidate of the opposition party. The whole thing was a travesty and miscarriage of justice that Trump’s supporters have rightly called worthy of a banana republic. It also created a dangerous precedent, made millions of people more convinced that the ruling establishment is both corrupt and their enemy, and weakened the civil order.

These statements are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true, and I think they are. People celebrating this should be ashamed. They also should realize that from now on it is going to be harder to take their homilies about democracy and the sanctity of the rule of law very seriously. Besides that,  the thing probably will not even work. Unless the judge sends Trump to jail and keeps him from functioning as a candidate, it likely has raised the probability of Trump winning in November. If he does win, and this helps him do it, it would serve the people who did it right.

Five Days of Helicopter Jokes

 

Iran’s president, the butcher of Tehran, Raisi has died in a helicopter crash. Iran’s dictator has decreed five days of mourning in his honor. At the suggestion of the artist formerly known as Iowahawk, Americans are celebrating with five days of helicopter jokes. I have seen several good ones at various places, but my favorite so far is the following:

“As Allah as my witness, I thought Iranian presidents could fly.”

In the spirit of the thing and after reading the administration’s disgusting statement of condolence to Iran, I will quote the following more appropriate reaction from an anonymous, highly placed pentagon source, straight from the war room beside the big board:

“If I may speak freely, the raghead talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know how. I mean, you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant goat humpers to understand a machine like some of our boys.”

Jokes aside, there should have been no condolences, and certainly no prayer about the murdering scum in the senate. People should be glad he is dead and and willing to say so.

Call It Too Close to Call

 

In most elections voting (other than some protest voting) requires deciding which bad candidate is less bad. With the Republicans picking Trump, and the Democrats sticking with Biden, that surely is the situation this year. Neither of them should be elected president, but unless something surprising happens, one of them will be. I have thought that, bad as Biden is, Trump is enough worse that it was clear who was the lesser evil, and Biden should be reelected. I believed that while still respecting the opinions of people who think the plans and policies of the Republicans are better than those of the Democrats or see the green left, the bigoted DEI left, and the anti-civilization pro-Hamas left for what they are want a bulwark against them or figure they should pick the scoundrel likely to do them less direct harm and so favor Trump.

Now I am not sure, because of what has happened in the last few weeks. In the war in Gaza Israel is right and should win, and Hamas’s savages are wrong and should lose. Seven months ago Biden seemed to know that. Now he does not and has betrayed an ally in wartime. The betrayal goes beyond the disgraceful public carping and refusal to give Israel needed munitions. He and his administration effectively have switched sides by advocating for the wrong outcome of the war. If Hamas survives as a capable force, the war will have been a strategic victory for it and its masters in Iran. An end of the fighting without Israel finishing Hamas off in Rafah would produce that result. The savages would have won, and civilization would have lost. Yet that is what Biden and his administration favor. Meanwhile Trump, who I feared would abandon Ukraine, did not go on the warpath against the speaker’s plan to give more weapons and munitions to that country, giving some reason for hope he would show some sense there.

Right now if people asked me who in this race would be less bad for the country, I could not give them an answer. The best recommendation I could make would be to watch both of the scoundrels until November and hope something happens to make the right choice clear, as I thought it was a while back. (As I have written before,  my plan  now is not to vote for either of them, but most people won't see that as an option and will settle on one or the other.)

The Bulwark and the Shark

 

The Bulwark is usually worth reading. Its mainly accurate coverage of Trump and its articles on other subjects are often well written and informative. However, it is possible to jump the shark even with Trump, and lately its writers have. A few days ago there was a piece suggesting with no evidence that the judge in Trump’s case in Florida will make a few rulings in favor of the prosecution to make sure she can stay on the case and then dismiss the charges with prejudice when the trial started, letting Trump skate. There have been articles characterizing the coming election as one in which the survival of democracy in America is at stake – warning that Trump would destroy the republic and that there might be no more elections after this one with Trump ruling by decree. That goes too far and frightens people unnecessarily - confusing what he might want to do with what he would be capable of doing. It may also help Trump. If it happens, a second Trump term will be bad, but it will not be the end of the world or the end of the republic. Pretending it would makes it easier for Trump’s defenders in the conservative media to argue to voters that the warnings about him, including the many appropriate ones, are just wild hyperbole from panicky Democrats.

It is also counterproductive to attack voters who favor or may favor Trump. Insulting people usually is not the best way to persuade them to consider your point of view. Today Mona Charen equated people supporting Trump to those supporting Hamas’s murderous savages. Other articles have insulted Trump voters as ignorant rustics too stupid to know what is good for them (“Cletus” and “Lurleen”), something not only vulgarly condescending to rural people but clearly false. If only country people, smart or otherwise, supported Trump, he would not be leading in the polls. There are too few of them. I cannot vote for Trump, but I understand that people can have good reasons for doing so. Some simply believe that the plans and policies of the Republicans are better than those of the Democrats. They may know Trump is a power hungry scoundrel, but note correctly that lots of politicians are power hungry scoundrels and decide to ignore it. Some see the green left, the bigoted DEI left, and the anti-civilization pro-Hamas left for what they are and favor Trump and the Republicans as a bulwark against them and the harm they want to do to the country. Some are very unhappy with inflation and the open southern border. Comparing him to Biden, some just see Trump as the lesser evil. Instead of attacking the voters, people at the Bulwark should urge the Democrats to move to the center, with or without Biden. The Dems probably won’t, but it would not hurt to tell them they should.

Two Old Tales for Tax Week

 

Here in tax week and apropos of nothing really, I recalled a couple of stories about citizen’s interactions with our nation’s public servants. The first was told to me twenty five or more years ago by a man who was old then and is probably long since dead now. I don’t recall his name, and so I’ll call him Smith. One day years before he told me the story, Smith and his wife were being rudely threatened and insulted in their home by a nasty IRS agent wearing a green sports jacket. At one point the agent turned to Smith and said “do your realize I can throw you in jail?”. Being something of a hard head, Smith replied “do you realize I can blow your brains out?”. The agent then left in a hurry. Smith then picked up the phone, called the local IRS office, and warned them that there was a man in a green sports jacket going around town impersonating an IRS agent and threatening people. According to Smith that was the end of affair, and he never heard any more from the IRS.

The second was told me over thirty years ago by a colleague named Bob. Bob lived out in the country in the plains of west Texas. He enjoyed guns and shooting and decided it would be fun to become gun dealer. He filed his application with the ATF, and eventually an agent named Chauncey showed up to interview him. He took Chauncey out to the small out building behind his house which he intended to use as his store. Bob had applied for an ordinary license to deal in sporting and personal arms, but somehow in the bureaucracy his application had been coded as one for a license to deal in weapons of war. When Chauncey asked Bob what he would be doing with a license to sell such weapons, Bob, instead of explaining the error, decided to have a little fun. He stepped outside and pointed to the flat plains around him and said “well I guess I’m not going to be selling them to the communists in the hills”. That was a mistake. Chauncey was not amused, but eventually the error was corrected, and Bod got his license.

I believe Bob’s story. It sounded just like him. I’m more skeptical of Mr. Smith’s tale, but both are interesting yarns.

Deciding How to Vote

 

I  usually have voted for Republicans for president. I have never voted for a Democrat. The closest I came to doing so was in 1976 when I almost voted for Carter but finally decided on Ford. I voted for the Libertarian candidate the first time I was eligible to vote (John Hospers as a write in in 1972) and in both of the last two elections, three votes I am still proud of given the other choice of Nixon, McGovern, Trump, Clinton, and Biden.

Once it became clear that Trump would be the Republican candidate, I thought about breaking my streak and voting for Biden, bad as he is, because Trump is so extraordinarily bad. I surely did not want to, but it seemed to be the right thing to do. I knew I believed the country would be better off if Trump lost. Then Biden decided to turn on Israel in its war against Hamas, and that, on top of all the rest that is wrong with him, brought me to my senses. I plan to sit out the presidential election, vote for the Libertarian, or write in Nikki Haley or Liz Cheney. I still think Biden is less bad than Trump and should defeat him, but I cannot vote for him. Sometimes the lesser evil is just too rough, and this year is one of those times.

Biden and Israel

 

As a matter of humanity and human sympathy the killing of seven innocent civilians in a mistaken attack by the Israeli armed forces was horrible. As a factor in deciding whether and how much the United States should side with Israel in its war against Hamas’s savages, it is irrelevant. Informed people know that horrible mistakes happen in war. (I have read that some GIs in World War II began calling the Ninth Air Force the American Luftwaffe after some of its mistaken attacks on American positions.) They also know there inevitably will be civilians killed in wars where civilians are present and especially in a war where the “fighters” on one side have made it a policy to hide among civilians. According to reports from experts, the Israeli armed forces have made extraordinary efforts to minimize casualties among civilians. That is all, and probably even more than, a reasonable person can request of them. In this war Israel is right and should win, and Hamas is wrong and should be destroyed.

Biden began well by siding unequivocally with Israel at the start of the war. Lately he and people in his administration began equivocating in an effort to appease voters in the pro-Hamas left. Now there are stories in the news suggesting that they may be moving away from supporting Israel. That would be a repugnant betrayal of not only a trusting ally but of the cause and values of liberal civilization. If they do not care about that, they should consider that it also could be a political mistake. Neither Biden nor Trump is an attractive candidate. Foreign policy has been one important point in Biden’s favor – especially given his generally good job on Ukraine and the fear that Trump might abandon Ukraine. If Biden turns against Israel, it could cause people to see him as being no more trustworthy on foreign policy than Trump and as throwing in again with the left, making a formerly fairly easy choice between him and Trump less so. It would me. Sitting this one out or a protest vote for the Libertarian might look pretty good. Sometimes the lesser evil is just too rough.

A Time for Hobson's Choosing

 

I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I had hoped Republican voters would come to their senses and nominate DeSantis or Haley. I had hoped Smith would get a conviction in one of his cases against Trump. I had hoped Biden would move toward the center, or the Democrats, fearing defeat, would replace him on their ticket with a moderate. None of it happened, and so here we are. Unless something very unusual happens, if they both stay alive for the next eight months, it will be Trump versus Biden in November.

Biden is a bad president. He is a dishonest, lying, unprincipled party hack and scoundrel, as his record over several decades makes obvious. He shows evidence of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia. His administration has been mainly a leftist one. He and his administration are in bed with some really bad people on the green left and the bigoted DEI left, and recently have become more sympathetic toward the pro-Hamas left. If Biden is reelected and gets some of the things he wants, people’s lives would be worse. Electric power would become less reliable, and it would become harder or impossible to buy the car or appliances one would like. The problems coming from the immigration of too many poor and unskilled people into a welfare state would get worse. Higher taxes and more regulations would make the country poorer than it would be otherwise. Increased spending by the government would add more to the dangerously high federal debt. The nanny state would become more intrusive and obnoxious, and the IRS, the EPA, the FBI, and the rest of the gang more nearly unrestrained.

Then there is Donald Trump, a man who should never be considered for any public office in the United States. He is an arrogant, vulgar, bullying, graceless, power mad ignoramus, and he doesn’t hide the fact. From December 14^th 2000 to January 6^th ,2001, he functioned as an enemy of the republic, conspiring and attempting to overthrow the government and remain in power illegally and unconstitutionally. The rally and riot of January 6^th had no other purpose. His order to Pence to change the results of the election was by itself an attempted coup. In 2022 he called in writing for overturning the Constitution and returning him to power immediately. He has made it plain recently that the only thing he regrets about the coup is that if failed. He is erratic to the point of instability, and apparently incapable of strategic thought beyond superficial transactional considerations. His vice president has refused to support him for another term. Other serious and decent people who worked with him in his first administration have warned that he is dangerously unfit to serve. It is possible he would abandon Ukraine to Putin, effectively abandon NATO, and throw away much of our victory in the cold war. His vile demagoguery takes the country’s already low level of civility in politics lower. He has demanded full immunity from any crimes he might want to commit when back in office (including murdering political opponents according to his lawyers). He shows no sense of being or wanting to be bound by laws or the Constitution.

In 2016 P. J. O’Rourke argued for supporting Hillary Clinton on the grounds that, while she was wrong about almost everything, she was wrong within the ordinary boundaries of American politics, while Trump might do something really crazy and destructive. That summarizes the case for supporting Biden for those of us not  Democrats or leftists. The case for supporting Trump is that the plans and policies of the Republicans generally are less bad than those of the Democrats, and the hope that Trump would mainly follow those and be restrained from doing anything really crazy and destructive, likely producing a better outcome for the country than we would get with Biden.

It is truly a Hobson’s choice, and I can see good reasons for people deciding either way. There are serious people I respect who have picked Biden and others who have picked Trump. My choice based on what I know now is that the less bad choice is to elect Biden and work for Republican majorities in both houses to mitigate the damage he would do. But it is not a choice a person can be comfortable with.

The Coming Election

 

Joe Biden is a bad president. He is a dishonest, lying, unprincipled party hack and scoundrel, as his record over several decades makes obvious. He shows evidence of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia. He and his administration are in bed with some really bad people on the green left and the bigoted DEI left. If he is reelected and gets some of the things he wants, it would make people’s lives worse. Electric power would become less reliable, and it would become harder or impossible to buy the car or appliances one would like. (If Biden wins, it might be a good idea to buy a backup generator, purchase and store for future use functional, affordable appliances while one can, and maybe trade for a new car a little sooner than usual and plan to keep it a long time.) The problems coming from the immigration of too many poor and unskilled people into a welfare state would get worse. Higher taxes and more regulations would make the country poorer than it would be otherwise. Increased spending by the government would add more to the dangerously high federal debt. The nanny state would become more intrusive and obnoxious, and the IRS, the EPA, the FBI, and the rest of the gang more nearly unrestrained. Yet with all that, Biden should be the preferred choice in November.

That is how bad Donald Trump is. He should never be considered for any public office in the United States. He is an arrogant, vulgar, bullying, graceless, power mad ignoramus, and he doesn’t hide that fact. From December 14^th 2000 to January 6^th ,2001, he functioned as an enemy of the republic, conspiring and attempting to overthrow the government and remain in power illegally and unconstitutionally. The rally and riot of January 6^th had no other purpose. His order to Pence to change the results of the election was by itself an attempted coup. In 2022 he called in writing for overturning the Constitution and returning him to power immediately. He has made it clear lately that he regrets nothing about the attempted coup except that it failed. He has repeatedly and apparently sincerely expressed his admiration and affection for the world’s dictators. It is likely he would abandon Ukraine to Putin, effectively abandon NATO, and throw away much of our victory in the cold war. His vile demagoguery takes the country’s already low level of civility in politics lower. He has demanded full immunity from any crimes he might want to commit when back in office (including murdering political opponents according to his lawyers). He shows no sense of being or wanting to be bound by laws or the Constitution. His vice president has refused to support him for another term. Other serious and decent people who worked with him in his first administration have warned that he is dangerously unfit to serve, something we have not seen when other presidents of either party have tried for a second term.

People who revere the Constitution should not vote for a man who disdains it and wants to overturn it. People who believe in limited government should not vote for a man who demands unlimited power. People who think this country needs to work with trusting allies to defend itself and freedom and liberal democracy in the world should not vote for a man who doesn’t. Republicans and others who usually vote for Republican candidates for president should grit their teeth and realize that between the two choices they have, Biden is the right one. They also can work for Republican majorities in both houses of congress to mitigate the damage Biden can do, something which is a good idea since Biden 2.0 may need all the mitigating we can find.

Misunderstanding RIghts

 

There was a small controversy this week over comments by journalist named Heidi Przybyla about Christian nationalism. She did get something very important wrong, but it was not anything she said about Christian nationalism. It was what she implied about rights. People have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whether one believes these rights come from a supernatural source or from the nature, quality, and value of humanity, the essential point is that they are fundamental and unalienable. They are not gifts from kings, courts, or legislatures, and are not contingent upon the approval of officials. People in North Korea have the same rights as human beings as Americans do. They are enslaved because their government violates their rights. Taking the term “Christian nationalism” to mean the religious aspects of today’s national conservatism, as listed in the national conservatives’ manifesto, her criticism is mainly valid, irrespective of how well or poorly stated. America is a secular republic with religious freedom for all. Any attempt to create an established religion or a government created Christian commonwealth is contrary to the principles and Constitution of our country, which is to say it is anti-American.

Lincoln's Birthday 2024

 

Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. I suppose there were speeches and celebrations in some places, but it seems that people do not celebrate it much these days – retailers aside. They should. It is good for people to see that such greatness is possible, especially these days. It is easy to be of two minds in thinking about today’s politics in light of Lincoln. A person can feel better about the political situation by remembering that he and the country he led faced far worse and more dangerous things than we do and came through successfully. So maybe we will too if we work at it. But he can surely feel worse after studying Lincoln and reading his writings and speeches and then looking at the sort of people who have sought and won the presidency in the last few years, especially at the leading candidates from both major parties this year. It can ruin a person’s lunch, dinner, and breakfast the next morning. Even worse it is not necessary to measure Trump and Biden against Lincoln or other great presidents to see how bad the likely present choices are. Comparing those two to Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, or Bob Dole would make the point well enough. It is a mess, and if nothing changes, we will suffer for it.

Time to Hang It Up

 

Yesterday the special prosecutor did not exonerate Biden as Democrats have claimed. His report said Biden knowingly broke the law in taking classified documents and keeping them when he was a private citizen. The prosecutor declined to recommend prosecution because Biden was cooperative with investigators, his offenses were less severe than the ones with which Trump is charged, and as a well-intentioned elderly man with failing memory, he likely would appear too sympathetic to jurors for them to convict him. The report contained various examples of seriously failing memory. (Attacks by Democrats on the prosecutor as some sort of MAGA agent are both silly since Garland picked the man for the job and hypocritical enough to make a person wonder how serious their worries about eroding respect for the legal system really are.) Biden’s problem is not his age. It is his mental condition. He gives easily noticed signs of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia with memory loss. He is not fully up to the job of serving as president now, and will become less so over time. (A president is accompanied by the “nuclear football” with which he can order nuclear retaliation. We should hope that Biden or those functioning as Edith Wilson and Colonel House if things have come to that have delegated control of the football to someone, such as Secretary Austin, who is consistently up to the responsibility.) Pointing out correctly that Trump is an ignorant sociopath who often sounds like a raving lunatic changes none of the facts about Biden. The world situation is tougher than it has been since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the country needs a president who is competent, mentally and otherwise. Biden should pull a Lyndon Johnson.

A Good Time for Gratitude

 

Earlier this month we in Texas got a several day taste of harsh winter – really cold weather with highs in the teens or twenties, lows around zero, and strong winds in West Texas where I live. Much of the rest of the country got worse. It was unpleasant but nothing like what people endured in similar conditions a couple of hundred years ago. For that people should be grateful and grateful specifically to the oil, gas, and coal industries of this country. They deserve gratitude not only for the obvious accomplishment of keeping the power on and the furnaces running throughout the country but for something more general – creating necessary parts of the economic, industrial, and technological environment which has made the modern world with its modern windows, insulated houses, heated cars, snow plows, central heat, nylon shell parkas, and so on possible. I appreciate it, and other throughout the country should too. The fact that they are despised by the greens says something about the greens and a lot about what the greens want and have planned for us.

Boeing and Diversity

 

Many years ago an old boss of mine told me that the trouble with performance measures was that people meet them. That comment came to mind when I read about Boeing’s latest failures with the 737 – this time a section of the fuselage falling off in flight. Boeing along with many other corporations has for years been active in affirmative action - now usually called ESG or simply diversity - hiring, promotion, and selection of subcontractors based on race, sex, ethnic group, and/or supposed gender. It recently added it formally to the criteria for judging and rewarding the performance of its executives and managers.

Some conservatives have said that that might have been at least a partial cause of the years of failures. Leftists have countered that such suggestions reveal a bigoted belief that black people and members of other favored groups are less competent that white and Asian men. In that they are wrong. Something like the reverse is true, with leftists showing a systematic belief in such inferiority. If they believed that black people and others they favor were equally competent, they would be fine with basing things on quality, ability, and merit, as are the conservatives. That they are not shows they do not.

The conservatives are right on the obvious fact that one cannot maximize two unconnected variables (here quality and “diversity”) simultaneously except by coincidence. I would be hard to know whether they are right in tying that to Boeing’s failures. They surely are right on a more general point. Most of us would rather have the designers, manufacturers, and pilots of the planes we fly be selected to be the most competent that can be found rather than the most diverse looking.

Trump and the 14th Amendment

 

An insurrection is an attempt to overthrow a government as distinct from only conspiring or thinking about doing so. On January 6^th and the in days before it, Trump clearly made such an attempt. The election was decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th, 2020 when the electors voted. Trump’s efforts after that to remain in power were intended to overthrow the government of the United States. I have often wanted to ask some of Trump’s defenders what other purpose than blocking the final certification of the election they think there could have been for staging the rally on January 6^th. It surely wasn’t Bing and Danny getting the men of the 151^st division to show up on Christmas Eve to show the Old Man he wasn’t forgotten. I think the frightened, overwrought supporters Trump brought to Washington and stirred up with talk of losing their country if what was about to happen in the Capitol was not stopped probably were called in on some vague idea of Trump’s to use them to provide muscle for the efforts to remain in power illegally. However, it really does not matter if I or anyone else is wrong on that. Trump would have been guilty of insurrection if his supporters had stood peacefully outside the Capitol and chanted slogans instead of attacking. Trump’s order to Pence to not allow Biden’s election to be certified and instead recognize bogus Trumpist electors from several states was by itself an act of insurrection and an attempted coup. Again, the election had been decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th. Anyone working to overturn it after that was an insurrectionist enemy of the republic. I doubt if it will matter, but the 14^th Amendment applies to Trump.

Troubled by Christmas

 

Conservatives often complain this time of year about a war on Christmas by the leftists – generally attributing it to leftist disdain for Christianity. Many leftists do have a problem with the Christmas season. It has become a point of political correctness not to say Merry Christmas. There are scolding warnings in various media that references to Christmas should be avoided to avoid offending or “marginalizing” people who do not celebrate the holiday. Ads for retail companies talk only about holiday shopping and holiday gifts, not Christmas shopping and gifts, as though the corporate weasels running those companies expect to make their numbers and get their bonuses based on purchases of Kwanzaa gifts or New Year’s presents. The conservatives have a point, but I think their explanation misses something important.

There surely are leftists who are hostile to Christianity, and that likely explains some of the so-called war on Christmas, but not all or, to me, even most. Leftists usually say or do nothing about Easter, and Easter is a far more nearly completely religious holiday than Christmas. Christmas in our time is as much a secular holiday as a religious one, and many non-Christians enjoy Christmas and the Christmas season. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, decorating trees, decking halls, giving presents, Christmas dinners, and a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. I think that for many leftists, the real difficulty is not with the Christmas but with the merry. A season of ordinary, unsupervised people enjoying themselves and their lives, vigorously displaying good will to the people they meet, giving and receiving presents, and generally feeling benevolent and happy, on their own without external direction goes against many of the left’s fundamental notions of how the world is and should be. It is no wonder many lefties do not care for it and feel uncomfortable with it or even threatened by it.

They might feel worse if they knew how little effect their feelings and opinions have had. Except among cowardly corporations which can be bullied into just about anything and the generally left leaning traditional media, their efforts seem to me to have been mainly a failure. In their private lives people behave as they like and enjoy Christmas. That’s good. They should keep it up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

No Cease Fire Before Victory

 

People need to remember some basic facts about the war in Gaza. This war has a right side and a wrong side. Israel is right and should win. Hamas is wrong and should lose. It is right and appropriate to have regret and compassion for casualties among civilians. However when one side hides behind civilian human shields as a matter of strategy, it, not its opponent, is morally responsible for those casualties. The civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas and not the armed forces of Israel, and it is wrong to demand that those armed forces stop or back off because Hamas has human shields. Demanding a cease fire before Hamas is defeated is demanding that Hamas gets away with what it did on October 7^th and remains capable of doing it again. It is interesting that those demanding a cease fire because of casualties among civilians in Gaza do not suggest or even mention the obvious way to minimize them. Hamas’s “fighters” could dig in in strong points from which they had evacuated civilians and fight it out like men. My guess is that is because they either side with Hamas or realize that there is no chance Hamas’s murders would behave as soldiers, or both.

Phobias and Other Things

 

A phobia is an intense and unreasonable fear of something. In our time the word is used incorrectly and misleadingly to denote something else altogether. “Homophobia” has always been a silly term. The problem wasn’t that people were afraid of lesbians and gay men. Almost no one was. The problem was persecution of and discrimination against lesbians and gay men. The same thing is true of “transphobia”. The issue is not one of fear but rather one of discrimination.

Things are different with “Islamophobia”. It is also a misleading term but for a different reason. It is quite reasonable and not phobic at all for anyone to be at least a little worried about a religion with millions of its followers believing and much of its clergy teaching that it is not only acceptable but desirable to kill non-believers. A non-believer living in a Muslim domain would have reason to be more than a little fearful. Such sensible concerns do not justify Islamophobia as the term is used vulgarly – discrimination against Muslims for being Muslims. There are plenty of Muslims who have no interest in murdering non-believers and a good number who are liberally minded. Individuals deserve to be judged as individuals, whether they are embracing liberal values or revealing themselves to be savages by cheerleading for Hamas savages.

Nuanced on Hamas?

 

Since the atrocities of October 7^th there has a been a lot of appropriate condemnation of leftists who have sided with the Hamas savages. While these have been the worst, there are other leftists whose behavior has been bad enough – those who, while unwilling to go whole hog Hamas, push notions of false moral equivalences or hide their refusal to side fully with the victims behind some vague criticism of meanness in general. Several lefties have written that, while Hamas may have behaved badly, conservative Christians are just as big a danger or worse. Five and more centuries ago, there was little to choose between Christianity and Islam in terms of savagery, repression, intolerance, and brutal fanaticism. Jihads, crusades, pogroms, religious wars, tyrannizing and enslaving non-believers, forced conversions, and persecution of heretics were common practice in both Christian and Muslim domains. Over the last three or four hundred years, at different speeds in different places, Christianity mainly has adapted itself or at least resigned itself to liberal civilization. Islam mainly has not. This is a statistical statement of averages and one with many exceptions. There are many liberally minded Muslims and plenty of Christians who would go back to medieval authority if they could. But overall it is valid and a reason attempts to equate American Christians to Hamas or similar organizations are not only wrong, but at least suggestive of where the sympathies of those doing it lie.

An outfit has come up with a different sort of nuance. It is  running a TV spot which begins decrying the increase in antisemitism, “Jewish hate”, and then goes on to warn against anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian hate. In the present, post-October 7^th context this is weak, dishonest, and a disservice to those suffering from antisemitism. The implications are first that "hatred" is being applied equally to Jews, blacks, Muslims, and Asians and second, that the trouble is coming from the main demographic group left out of the list – those awful, redneck Christian white folks. Both are false. American Jews now are facing numerous systematic, organized, vigorous acts of antisemitism going far beyond the nasty social media posts the ad warns against and coming from racially diverse, antisemitic, pro-Muslim groups of supporters of Hamas terrorists and the genocidal destruction of Israel, very few, if any, of whose members are Christian conservatives. That is an easily observable fact. It is harder to defend people when you refuse to admit where their danger is coming from.

Should Have Been an Easy Vote

 

After the atrocities of October 7^th the governments of Germany, Britain, and other European countries denounced the terrorists and announced their support for Israel. Recently at the UN they had a chance to put a small part of their money where their mouths were in a vote in the general assembly on a resolution for an immediate cease fire, meaning a victory and no serious consequences for Hamas. It was an easy test to pass, but most of them and most of America’s other allies failed it. A few did not. Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and a few countries in Latin America and the Pacific joined the United States in voting no. Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, Ukraine(!), Australia, Canada, Estonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, and Sweden could not work up the nerve to oppose the resolution, but at least avoided siding directly with the terrorists by abstaining. Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and France threw in with Hamas. A cynic might think the commitment of some of our friends in Europe and elsewhere to defending the liberal, civilized order is less serious  than they would have us believe, except of course when their sorry  hides are the ones being threatened. That cynic would have a point.

Students for Hamas

 

Private employers and citizens are free to refuse to hire or do business with someone because of his beliefs. They have that right. The question is whether they should. I think that most of the time they should not. In a free and diverse society one will find people with all sorts of opinions about all sorts of things. Tolerant acceptance of such diversity of opinion usually is a good thing. A person’s opinion one way or the other about whether to believe Rachel Levine when he tells people he is a woman or whether Donald Trump is nuts does not have much to do with what sort of worker or vendor he is and should not be disqualifying.

However there are exceptions when the beliefs and opinions are bad enough that ostracism is justified. For example I see nothing wrong with the blacklisting of communists in Hollywood in the years after World War II. I would not want to hire someone who was a supporter of and propagandist for the regime of Josef Stalin and an obedient member of an organization controlled by that regime’s secret service. Lately some employers have announced they will not be hiring students who rallied in support of Hamas’s murderous savages and the atrocities they committed. That seems reasonable to me. I would not want to spend time around people who think gang rape, purposely slaughtering infants, and torturing and intentionally murdering civilians as a tactic are good admirable activities. The excuse that the students are just kids does not work. They are young adults - older than many enlisted men and women in the armed forces – and responsible for their actions and deserving of the consequences.

Israel and Hamas

 

First one has to state the obvious. People are not the same everywhere. Those in Hamas committing atrocities are inhuman savages, and so is anyone cheering them on in their savagery. Then one can make the point that that does not apply to all Muslims or even to all Palestinians in Gaza. The ideal solution for dealing with Hamas’s terrorists would be (to paraphrase Jacob McCandles) to hunt them down and kill them, every mother’s son of them. A good practical solution is to come close enough to that ideal that they and their organization no longer have a capability to do harm. Hamas is known for using civilians as human shields, even to operating out of schools, mosques, and hospitals, causing enemies to hold back for fear of harming innocent civilians. This time the priority should not be to harm Hamas some, while avoiding civilian casualties, but rather to destroy Hamas, while inflicting as few civilian casualties as are consistent with that objective. The blame for civilian casualties in Gaza is Hamas’s, just as the blame for civilian casualties in the American bomber offensive over Germany was Hitler’s. Americans should support Israel in its war, and the American government should be ready to take direct action to free Americans held as hostages and to punish those who harm Americans. Beyond that the government should find a way to make the rulers of Iran suffer painfully, since Iran is behind the attack.

A Note on The Fountainhead

 

The following is not a review of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead but only a note on one aspect of the novel. It contains spoilers, and people who have not read the book and do not want to see them should stop here.

This year is the 80^th anniversary of the publication of The Fountainhead. It is a very fine novel – for its vivid and original characters, its presentation and integration into its story of serious ideas and principles, its critique of the social and cultural milieu of its time and ours, its vision of artistic and personal integrity, its psychological analysis of collectivist and some types of assumed to be humanitarian thought and behavior, its satire, its encomium to human creativity and achievement, its sense of and call to the heroic, and its defense of individualism in life and spirit. It is also something of a counterexample to its author’s later literary theories, because The Fountainhead’s plot, in its conclusion, is the weakest part of the novel.

The main fault of the plot is that the actions in the latter part of the book of the main characters do not make sense in terms of who and what they are. Roark, the iron individualist who neither cares nor often even notices what others do, the great artist who values his ability to design and build more than anything else in life or the world, having reached a point in his career where he can design and build all the projects he can handle, decides to invite an almost certain career ending prison sentence (or at best becoming marked as an unhirable weirdo if he somehow got away with his crime), because he is annoyed that some people changed a design of his that he had given away to someone else. Wynand, Roark’s equal in talent, drive, intellect, will, strength, ruthlessness, and determination, a man so great that Roark recognizes him instantly as a kindred spirit and later calls the only unrepeatable encounter in his life, a man who has dedicated much of his life to building a vast newspaper and real estate empire and fortune and using them as he pleases becomes an emotional leech and embarrassing fanboy because he has met a really good guy, risks losing his flagship newspaper in a crusade that can do nothing to benefit the person he is doing it for, then loses his nerve, changes his mind, and hates himself for it. Dominique, whose revulsion at Roark having to live in a world she detests and fear of him suffering transitory or even trivial setbacks are so great that she is driven to bizarre, self-destructive, and even insane behavior throughout the book suddenly decides when Roark is facing actual catastrophe that all her worries are over, and she can handle it. (Only the major and minor villains remain true to character. Toohey is as malignant as ever, and Keating remains weak, unprincipled, and easily led.) Besides all that, the happy ending requires a very unlikely deus ex machina from a jury of people selected from a general public whose members are presented throughout the book as incapable of understanding or appreciating someone such as Roark. The ending just does not work.