N. Korean-Iranian Treachery

My physician friend, Robert Groves (now deceased), spent his childhood in what was then Persia, now Iran, where his father, under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church, was president of Alborz College. He once told me that the ultimate aim of an Iranian was/is to outsmart everyone with whom he has any relationship, no matter by what means.

This is especially meaningful now with the big news that Iran has shipped 25,000 lbs. of low-grade uranium to Russia, thus bringing very close the date upon which $100 billion worth of Iranian assets will become unfrozen by financial establishments worldwide. Iran will also be free then to sell oil on the world market, something current sanctions disallow, and participate in world financial operations.

Question: Since Russia is a cheek-by-jowl ally of Iran, what will happen to the uranium, which was 20% pure and being processed toward nuclear-bomb use? Former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi shipped his weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. soon after the Iraq War came on line in 2003, but Qaddafi was not a U.S. ally and, in any case, this nation had no known use for the material, already able to virtually wipe out the world with its arsenal.

This is not true vis-a-vis Putin's situation. The shipped material can be brought on line in Russia, with its refinement continued and then shipped back to Iran or simply made a part of Putin's arsenal. That Putin has designs on the enlargement of both Russian territory and influence worldwide is obvious by his actions regarding Ukraine.

All the major intelligence agencies worldwide such as Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad and Russia's FSB, not to mention the CIA, agreed in 2002 that Saddam had WMD in-country and, as already proven in his gassing of the Kurds and Iranians (during his war of the 1980s with Iran), could be expected to use it. Between September 2002 and February 2003, he shipped it out, probably to Syria, just using trucks at night.

Saddam had finally agreed to allow inspectors back into Iraq but delayed their entry from September to December of 2002 and then monitored where they could go, making their work useless. Despite the administration's insistence that Iran (with 24 days notice) must allow inspectors on Iranian military bases, the official word from Khameini is that this will NEVER happen, so the whole deal is back to square one realistically, though the administration will crow that a diplomatic victory has been gained.

As my friend indicated, the Iranians can be expected to continue their nuclear program somewhere, all agreements not worth the paper on which they're written, as was the case in 2002 when North Korea finally had to admit that its nuclear-arms effort had continued in direct violation of its 1994 agreement with the U.S. to the effect that the program would be shut down in exchange for help in building two nuclear reactors for peaceful objectives.

This admission came despite the fact that a U.S.-led consortium came up with the $4.6 billion for the power plants in December 1999. North Korea set off a seismic reaction when it made its second nuclear-bomb test in May 2009. In the Iranian mode, the North Koreans had hoodwinked the U.S. big-time. Obama and State Secretary Kerry will ballyhoo this great Iranian uranium-shipment as a colossal diplomatic victory but it means nothing except that Iran will now have access to enough money to do as it pleases.

The flimflam continues regarding the fight against ISIS, in which Obama and Kerry speak of the fight as belonging to the U.S. when in reality it's being conducted by both the ayatollah Khameini in Tehran and Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The U.S. has averaged about three airstrikes a day since last summer and has had no combatants in any strength on the ground.

Obama would show real intelligence if he withdrew all U.S. personnel from the Middle East as early as yesterday, told the arm-chair generals and colonels on Fox News to go fly a kite and let these worthies fight it out without any further loss of U.S. blood and treasure. The emphasis should be on homeland security (mainly rooting out Muslim cells), not being policeman to the world.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Preacher as Train-Wreck

God Will Not Be Mocked

In a Lexington Herald-Leader column of 27 December, religion-writer Paul Prather reckoned that he's a train wreck and his readers probably worse. He then goes on, quoting Frederick Buechner, to explain that the Christian gospel is part tragedy, comedy and fairy tale, pessimistic about human nature and optimistic about God's nature.

Train-wreck used as metaphor indicates a total catastrophe, at least consensually, since it is used quite often to describe most any complete disaster. I've worked as a railroad call-boy, clerk, switchman, brakeman, conductor but mostly as a locomotive engineer and have observed, participated in and labored to clean up many train wrecks and can claim that they come in all sizes, not all just total calamities.

There's the derailing of a few axles, for instance, just a slight derailment. Or, there's maybe 14 or 15 cars overturned, a serious derailment. Then, there's the real thing, a train-wreck of some 40 or 50 cars turned upside down, maybe on fire and all the rest. One sees an auto-carrier-car with its 15 or 20 new Fords on their roofs and says “train-wreck.” My uncle was conductor on a freight-train back in the 1960s when 95 of 167 cars in his train literally flew off the track just north of the old depot in Somerset, Ky., and I was engineering a train in the early 1970s through which a tornado passed in Moreland, Ky., blowing away trailers and some 18 cars of my train. Now that was scary.

Prather is probably a slight derailment and I'm probably a serious derailment but I don't think he's a train-wreck. Prather described a friend who is a train-wreck (lost it all and occupies a prison cell), so he probably would give the general population a better shake than train-wreck. I think God would, too, though we're all susceptible to going off the rails occasionally.

The Christian gospel is far from pessimistic about human nature; otherwise, God would have concluded mankind to be essentially unable to accept it and thus would not have bothered with it. God created people, not animals, in his image, according to scripture, meaning that he gave them the ability to think rather than act on instinct alone, and therefore choose to accept the gospel, as Prather obviously has.

The Christian gospel is far from optimistic about God's nature. Optimism is defined as “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” The best possible outcome (ask any fourth-grader) in any situation is the least possible amount of pain. The scriptures are replete with instances in which God dealt unbelievably harshly with people when “they had it coming” because, using their ability to think, they chose to do wrong.

Optimism about God's nature gives license to political correctness, among other things. Correctness (as well as law), for instance, demands that men may marry each other but scripture condemns that out-of-hand, so one can expect the nation that permits this perversion of God's plan to not look optimistically at God's nature. Homosexuality, pedophilia and pederasty were hallmarks of both Greek and Roman cultures. One need only to consider their histories to contemplate God's nature.

Far from being tragic, the Christian gospel is “good news,” though Christ and others experienced tragedy in implementing it. It is not comedy since God's business is serious business, not fun stuff. It certainly involves no fairy tales, though many of the elite theologians,with their Ph.d's (maybe Prather, too), consider it mostly if not all myth.

Prather equated tragedy with sinfulness, comedy (strangely) with redemption, and fairy tales with blessings. The real tragedy lies with a culture caught on the horns of its own dilemma (perversion glorified); the real comedy with an institution (like the church) ridiculing hilariously its own faith, and the real fairy tale with the notion that there will not be a day of reckoning. The real scripture says that God will not be mocked, Prather's notions of political correctness notwithstanding.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Micro-Agression & the Mural

Much Ado About NOTHING

The entire editorial page of the Lexington Herald-Leader of 21 December (not even any letters to the editor) was devoted to the permanent mural that has been covered in the university's hallowed Memorial Hall, painted by a highly respected artist in 1934 depicting Kentucky society/history. Two UK professors say it should stay and become a “teaching tool;” a historian says it belongs to the U.S. (Great Depression WPA project) so the General Services Administration should get in on the act; and a group of “students of color” apparently want it removed, since it represents “micro-aggression,” the newest term defining racism.

One of the professors suggested having an African-American artist paint a mural in that location to represent whatever a logical refutation to the offending mural would be, a sort of “dueling paintings” approach. Maybe the new painting would depict Simon Legree with horns cracking his bull-whip although only one in four southern families owned slaves and virtually none in the North.

The students of color mentioned the statues that offend them. On the Mall in Washington, D.C., between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., the size of a three story building on four acres, with MLK, arms folded and glowering down on the memorials to Lincoln, and the dead of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The statue was sculpted in China by a Chinese artist, shipped to the U.S. in pieces and put together on the National Mall by Chinese workers...no people of color allowed.

Even if Lincoln had been sculpted standing instead of sitting, he would not be as tall as King, over 30 feet. A short distance away, the FDR sculpture shows President Roosevelt (1933-45) life-size in a wheelchair. Does anyone ever remark the disproportional aspects of that arrangement? No. However, there's no memorial to the 360,000 nearly all white Union soldiers who died of combat or sickness in the slave-freeing Civil War. My great-grandfather and two great-uncles, all Union soldiers, survived that war although great-grandad was wounded once and nearly died of disease once.

Or, take World War I, in which my father served in the Navy making those terrifying Atlantic crossings at the mercy – before radar and sonar – of the deadly German u-boats. There's no memorial on the National Mall to the 116,516 nearly all white GIs who died in that hellish conflict at the rate of 320 per day. As a personal matter, should I be offended, as a white person, by any of this? What difference does it make how I feel since it changes nothing?

That's precisely the message to send to ALL the students, not just those of color. The only way they can be offended is to allow themselves to be offended, something anybody half-bright can do. The constant drumbeat for more “togetherness” dialogue despite constant dialogue for the last 50 years is silly. A strong mind will disallow offense. A weak, victim-hood mind basks in being offended. That's the way of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

No “teachable moment” or “teaching tool” is needed because there's nothing to teach. I listened to a sermon a while back given in a white church close to an alleged slave-auction site on Main Street. The preacher was determined to lay an intensive guilt-trip on the congregants, none of whom or even their parents or grandparents had anything to do with that activity that ended in 1863. One wonders if she gave any thought to what a 14-year-old student of color might have thought about her vivid descriptions of an ancestor in chains. Obviously, she didn't or she knew that no young black was present or she was just dumb as a gourd.

During the basketball season last year, 23,000 fans (nearly all white) jammed Rupp Arena many times to see 12 students of color produce a record-breaking season for UK, with one white guy playing a few minutes infrequently. Did white people complain about that gargantuan disparity? No. They screamed themselves hoarse cheering on these offended (ask them) students.

Maybe the professors and administrators at UK ought to take back their university from teenagers and early 20-somethings of all colors and tell them to just suck it up and get on with it. Or is that just too, too offensive?

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Electoral Circuses

Christie's Folly

There's a certain sadness in watching the current circuses endemic to the U.S. electoral process—the whole mess, not just the ridiculous “debates,” which are not debates but just extensions of campaigns, with the networks turning them into profit. Ten people jawing at each other while moderators throw out gotcha questions and bask in the update of their resumes might be good entertainment for some but not me.

I check in for a few minutes (the preview debates are better) and then read or hear about them, admittedly from biased souls who make their living being biased souls spewing their conclusions as to the readiness (or the opposite) of the candidates for public office. The flamboyance factor plays well now, though facts often get in the way. Those lacking flamboyance (most of them) wax eloquent and serious but are so disagreed on solutions that one wonders if the nation will remain as leaderless as it is now...if that could be possible.

The process stinks. The primary campaign period should last no more than two months at most, with the final campaign for top spot confined to six weeks. The nation should not be put through two years of often acrimonious name-calling and opinions formed as responses to polls while candidates already holding office neglect their sworn duties for most of that period. Before the day of state-of-the-art communications time was needed. Now, the opposite is true, but with candidates in living-rooms ad nauseam anyway.

The many republican candidates are using the debates as 15-minutes-of-fame stuff, acting juvenile at best, as idiots at worst. N.J. Governor Christie said the other night that the U.S. should declare a no-fly zone over Syria, tell the Russians its location (Syria that hard to find?) and then shoot down any Russian plane therein. That's idiocy enhanced by a total lack of military knowledge, and other candidates have said the same thing.

What pilot knows his EXACT location when he's traveling at better than 600 mph? By the time he looks at his GPS coordinate, he's not there any longer. Christie's cockamamie remark points to the glaring weakness among all the candidates, to wit, no military experience, just like Obama, who nevertheless is smart enough not to put U.S. troops in significant numbers into a Vietnam situation, fighting not to win but to “contain.” Ohio Governor Kasich reckoned that the U.S. (surely not he) should punch Putin in the nose—playground mentality on parade. Egad!

What these wannabes fail to understand (except for Rand Paul and maybe Trump) is that the U.S. is not running the ISIS operation anymore, if it ever was. The Russians and Iranians have taken it over and Obama is a bystander. Putin knows about Afghanistan vs. the Soviets of the 1980s and if he wants to renew that debacle, let him have at it. Ayatollah Khameini is determined that Shiites kill as many Sunnis as possible, so let him have at it. Why pour U.S. bodies and treasure into that hopeless morass?

On the other side stands Sanders, Clinton and O'Malley, the first mentioned a self-confirmed, hard-core socialist whose greatest ambition is to confiscate 90% of the income of the wealthiest and give it to the rest, not bypassing that sacred middle class, presumably, that everyone keeps whining about. Clinton's greatest claim to fame (or infamy) is that she's the highest profile liar to crop up in American politics in decades. O'Malley is a bystander in it for the ride. None of them would know the difference between a salute and an obscene gesture.

Candidates keep insisting that the downfall of ISIS will protect the U.S. and therefore must be done, on the ground if nobody else offers. This is nonsense. Every agency from the FBI to the CIA to all the Homeland Security gangs are responsible for that job whether ISIS lives or dies or, most likely, re-starts if necessary in Libya. The key currently is absolutely barring entry into the U.S. of anyone from the Middle East or North Africa or who has traveled there recently. That's also a way of saying no Muslims, whose religion demands the deaths of infidels like American citizens.

One wonders if the nation can survive its electoral process, not to mention the results of such a flawed mishmash of lunacy.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

End-Times?

CAVEAT ALERT! This piece will have something to do with religion(s) and so people such as atheists and agnostics who for any reason impute no importance to faith (supernatural beliefs) are forewarned concerning time wasted. The emphasis herein will have most to do with the Judeo/Christian God and biblical references to same, as well as with Islam and its holy book, the Koran.

This is not a scholarly approach, just observations concerning elements in both Christianity and Islam having to do with the “end- times.” Some scholars consider end-time prophecies in both the Old and New Testaments, especially in the books of Daniel and Revelation, respectively, to be in process. There's no argument with that though it's unacceptable to believe that God knew everything that would ever happen before the Creation. One simple reason for disbelieving in predestination/foreknowledge is that there would be no need for prayer, since God has already mandated the answer.

It needs to be understood that the Bible is neither myth—any of it—nor a figment of imagination. Just the historical accuracies are enough to prove that its origins reach back farther, even, than the written record. The Koran is a creature of Mohammad, who hijacked a good bit of the Bible in its composition in the seventh century. Mohammad was the Jesse James of Arabia, attacking caravans for his livelihood and that of his 14 wives and families, one of which wives he took to bed when she was ten.

In both Christianity and Islam, there's an end-time scenario, with the Islamic one probably influenced by the Bible. Scholars disagree on interpretations but generally agree on the main points. The Antichrist of Christianity is reflected in Islam by the Dajjal, both of which command and subdue huge armies in bringing on the final things.

The Antichrist is to arise as a world figure, an icon at first of tremendous attraction gathering power among the nations followed by uncomprehending fear as he rules well for 3.5 years, then in chaos and war for 3.5 years, after which Jesus Christ, with an army from Heaven will subdue Antichrist, his henchman, the false prophet, and the army, setting up a thousand-year reign of peace, followed by an eternity of some sort (Heaven).

The Dajjal can come to power only after some entity or entities stir up enough chaos to foment a war. He and his army will subdue all peoples, either putting them to the sword or enslaving them except for Jews, who will be killed. Then the Twelfth Imam will arrive and dispatch the Dajjal, who will have one eye and a terrible scar on his face, and set up a kingdom of indefinite length with infidels either being killed or paying the tax, though Jews will be summarily killed.

Anyone trying to specify an end-times schedule is on a fool's errand, as many would-be prophesiers have discovered. However, particularly with the bloodshed, uncivilized treatment of innocents, and all around chaos connected to ISIS and the attempted structuring of a worldwide caliphate, Muslims may have reason to rejoice at the coming of the end, Dajjal taking over the whole ISIS enterprise.

Indeed, could al Baghdadi, ISIS strongman, be their Dajjal? Probably not, unless he loses an eye and is wounded facially, as was the recently departed Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban and terribly wounded battling the Soviets in the 1980s. He might have qualified. For Christians, Israel as a nation is the main qualifier to bring on the end.

Christians have only to look at the pathetic conditions in the world and wonder if evil has become so powerful that only God can redeem his creation for the final time through the advent and defeat of Antichrist and the resultant events. The ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ created the redeeming vehicle (the atonement for mankind) for the final action. It remains for a “unifier” to arise as Antichrist. Is there one on the horizon?

When he was Iran's president, Ahmadinejad had $17 million set aside for the building of the the mosque for the Twelfth Imam in Jamkaran, just south of Tehran. In his 2004 UN address, he prayed for this man, also known as the Mahdi, to return, puzzling everyone.

None of this is to be construed as more than just a mention. However, both the U.S. and the rest of the world are in such immoral or amoral morasses, that one wonders if God could be fed up.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

P.S. This subject comprises much of the material used in my novel The Biggest Con, a brief description of which is found in the right margin. The time-frame for that novel is 2001-02 and has to do with events leading up to 9/11, the defeat of the Taliban, and events leading up to Saddam's agreement to re-allow WMD inspectors in late 2002.

Muslim Immigration

Trump Not a Bigot

The media elites, both liberal and conservative, as well as all other elites such as in academia or some church hierarchies have expressed outrage with Donald Trump's assertion that no Muslims should be allowed to come to this country until some questions are answered, perhaps one having to do with how a young couple with a six-month-old child (the folks next door?) managed the San Bernardino carnage, complete with assault rifles, pistols, and bombs. Trump has a point.

Trump did not articulate his point well because it smacked of some sort of discrimination based on religion, though one wonders if a manual for living—such as the “holy” Koran—can be accounted religious in that it demands the death or enslaving of the infidel, i.e., anyone not a Muslim...virtually everyone in the U.S. He would better have said, instead of Muslim, anyone from the Middle East or North Africa or anyone traveling recently in those areas, at least for starters.

Trump does not see this as a matter of religion but as whether or not the president intends to look out for the safety of U.S. citizens on their own real estate, in which case the government has a compelling interest in who is allowed in the country, especially based on past experiences and evidence. The 9/11 butchers were all Muslims, as were both the unsuccessful shoe- and underwear-bomber, the Times Square would-be bomber, the attackers of the USS Cole, the murderers in the Khobar Tower affair and the bombings with great bloodshed and death of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

This doesn't even touch the murderers at the Chattanooga armory, San Bernardino state facility, Benghazi, the four officers killed in their tent just before the overthrow of Saddam (grenade tossed by a fellow soldier), and the butchery at Ft. Hood, in which an army major on duty screamed “Allah Akbar” as he shot down unarmed civilians like dogs. There is nothing good to say about the connection of this country with Islam. There are two Muslims in Congress, neither of Middle East descent, who should be shamed by both the Koran and the willful murder of infidels for which it calls and which takes place throughout the world every day.

The strangest argument against Trump is that the Constitutional rights of the Syrians (all Muslims) are being violated, notwithstanding that the Constitution governs people in the U.S. and nowhere else in the world. No would-be immigrant has any Constitutional rights. Article 2, Section 2, of the Constitution designates the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Section 1 indicates that he takes an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the document, without constraints as to how.

The Fourth Amendment indicates that citizens are to be secure in their houses, papers and effects and protected from unreasonable seizures. The lives of 14 citizens in San Bernardino and 3,000 on 9/11 were seized by Muslims and snuffed out in seconds. The president's job is to see that such seizures do not happen, one way being most logical, to wit, disallowing any possibility of seizure by keeping the threat out of the country.

The only meaningful mention of a “test of religion” as a qualifier is in Article 6 of the Constitution and mandates that no religious test may be used to qualify for any office or public trust. This applies only to the U.S. and has nothing to do with anyone anywhere else in the world, certainly not Muslims.

The argument that withholding immigration on the grounds of violating the “who we are” argument, i.e., that the U.S. is a melting pot to which all people have been invited is spurious in the case of Muslims. All ethnic groups – Irish, English, Chinese, Italian, German – came to this country to take advantage of opportunity. The notion that they came to kill Americans for any reason—especially religious—is too off the wall to consider.

This is not true of Muslims, even if only a handful are perpetrators of murder. It's almost impossible to weed out the perpetrators—as seen on 9/11 and in later bloodbaths—so the only way to have adequate protection is to not invite any Muslims (or Middle Easterners or North Africans) at least until something sensible can be done to assuage the fear of people who are looking over their shoulders. This is not barbaric or unpatriotic, just plain common sense.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Blowing in the Wind

The San Bernardino Massacre was serious enough to compel the president to address the nation from the (gasp) Oval Office though not as any fireside chat a la FDR of WWII fame or even of Jimmy Carter in his sweater. No...that wouldn't be good enough for the commander-in-chief. The podium with the presidential seal was brought in so the great unwashed could recognize royalty when they saw it...none of that sitting behind a desk stuff.

The president apparently has assumed that the citizens are all cringing in their cellars in the aftermath of the massacre and so must be reassured that he is doing everything possible to see to the collective saftety. In that regard, he introduced no new information, just mostly reiterated what the country is already doing, especially intelligence-wise, to forestall another butchering. What he didn't say was that another such jihad caper could happen anywhere anytime and pulled off by people totally off the radar.

This is what happened at San Bernardino. A couple with a six-month-old baby decided to do the massacre thing, dropped the baby off with its grandmother, loaded their materiel—quite an arsenal—and did the martyr thing while in the process murdering 14 and wounding a number of others before being shot to death themselves, making them fit for the best Paradise (or at least the nearest ayatollah) can offer. They were just your average young couple next door. This could happen anywhere, notwithstanding anything the president said.

These people are already in the country, many of them already apprehended...but not all. The Marathon Bombers were just two brothers, one with a wife and child and the other a college student. The younger chickened out on the martyr thing and accepted arrest but the older shot-it-out and set off for Paradise and the 72 virgins as if such a place exists. The two unsuccessful airliner bombers and the unsuccessful Times Square bomber—whether stupid or chicken—could have killed hundreds if they had detonated their devices. They were off the radar, too, so the president can't crow too loudly about intel.

The president finally got to what the speech was all about. When the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, the president's spiritual guru, became a problem for him, Obama gave a speech in 2008 in Philadelphia, tagged a speech on race, but it was actually an apologetic for Wright. He did the same vis-a-vis the massacre, i.e., tried to convince the public that Muslims are just plain ordinary citizens, nothing to worry about.

He sold the citizens short. By now, the citizens understand that the holy book of Islam, as attested to by Islamic officials, calls for the death or enslavement of infidels, practically all Americans. He finally threw Wright under the bus but not until the minister had exhibited his hatred of the U.S. vehemently on nationwide TV in a speech at the National Press Club. Now, even though the president was raised in a Muslim household, he needs to throw Islam under the bus, once and for all, denounce it as not a religion but as a violent cult begun by Mohammad in the seventh century and kept alive by radicalized “non-religionists” through the ages.

This would do no violence to Muslims themselves, who, as the president noted, are collectively peaceful; however, strict allegiance to Islam and to its leaders makes them enemies of the state on the basis of their declared marching orders as outlined in the Quran, their holy book. Some become radicalized like the Farooks of San Bernardino, meaning that others (next-door neighbors) could be just as radicalized, following the holy book. Allah Akbar, as shouted in some of the killings, like Ft. Hood, make these killings the absolute outgrowth of allegiance to the Quran. The president won't say it, but the problem is Islam.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Islam=Cruelty

The San Bernardino Massacre, now officially called by the FBI a terrorist attack though the Obama administration, unlike people who can think, refuses to call it jihad, i.e., butchering by Muslims in accordance with the mandate of the Koran. Indeed, the term terrorist is anathema to Obama, whose first Homeland Security honcho, Janet Napolitano, scrubbed the word “terrorism” from the lexicon and replaced it with “man-caused disaster.” So, SB was an Islamic man-caused disaster even though a woman did much of the killing.

So much for semantics! The official suggestion from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies now is that every citizen should be on the lookout for strange behavior by strange people at strange times and report same to the proper authorities. There's no argument with this, just plain common sense. However, it does smack of an important tool used in communist countries in which citizens are commanded to do the same thing, with the results often amounting to tortures and killings of people who have been reported on by even family members, not to mention neighbors, fellow workers, etc.

This gives an indication as to the viability of a democracy, in which people are morally expected to mind their own business and not interfere with that of others. In the SB case, it was reported that a neighbor of the assassins noticed peculiar activity at their home carried out at times by peculiar people, whom he did not report lest being accused of profiling. Attorney General Lynch was present in the press conference at which the FBI official made his statements, the implication of which was that profiling is absolutely necessary.

Profiling, however, is anathema to the political-correctness crowd, probably including the president. That word would traumatize the faculties at most universities and colleges. They would immediately bring up the issue of profiling vis-a-vis the black community, even though it would be perfectly reasonable in hunting down killers in Chicago, where 455 murders have been carried out this year, 95% of them by blacks on blacks, 20 more already than in all of last year.

Now that a definite link to ISIS by the Muslim/Pakistani woman in the SB killings has been recognized and noted for the public by the FBI, there will be a flurry of activity amongst the faculties against the profiling of Middle Easterners although people will be looking over their shoulders now or at their next-door neighbors if they see women in head-scarves or men of obvious Middle East descent, no matter how innocent they are of anything. Plain common sense. This creates a troubling circumstance, not least because mistakes in both reporting and responses could cause horrific outcomes.

The matter is compounded because it involves religion, not least because no fanatic is more dangerous than a religious fanatic, who considers his cause worth his very life...or hers. The SB butchers were riddled with bullets. The Charlie Hebdo and Paris theater/restaurant killers were shot to death or died at their own hands. The killers of 9/11 died in the plane crashes. Muslim Saladin and the Christian Crusaders were the ancient examples and probably set the tone for the extant divide/animosity between Christians and Muslims or that of their nations today.

In any case, the die has been cast, to wit, that unless and until Muslims convince non-Muslims (infidels) that their holy book does not demand that infidels must pay the tax (become slaves, except for Jews, for whom death only) or die, they will be the objects of surveillance, organized or otherwise. The SB killers were a man (worked for California at $70,000 per year) and woman who had a six-month-old baby and appeared as dangerous as a pumpkin. People have a right to be wary and should not be blamed for it.

The effort is made every day in this country by Muslim officials to the effect that Islam is peaceful. The problem is that Americans look to events like 9/11, SB, the Koran, the Iranian ayatollah and the ISIS headman Baghdadi for the actual truth, to wit, that at its core Islam is unrelenting cruelty. To honestly renounce Islam is to become believable.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Microaggression Nonsense

Re-Segregation, Anyone?

The latest buzzword connoting victimhood is microaggression. No, it isn't in the dictionary...yet, but it notes a very important social phenomenon, especially on college campuses, actually the locations of the origination of the new class of the abused, misused or whatever.

Its most recent high-profile representation was at the University of Missouri a few weeks ago, where some students alleged that other people (maybe students, maybe not) had traumatized them by referring to them in unflattering terms. In fact, some insensitive soul had apparently fashioned a swastika on a bathroom wall, using—of course—feces as the substance of the moment.

This was just too much although no one seemed to know what the Gestapo symbol referenced...could have been the Girl Scouts or even the Red Cross. The perpetrator was not caught either in the act or after for some elucidation on the matter. Even worse, an officer in some African-American campus organization felt he had been the object of verbal slander, an absolute no-no in the era of political correctness. His sensibilities had been traumatized, case closed.

The uproar was so...well...uproarious and intimidating that 32 football players threatened to strike if the president did not resign as early as the day before. He acquiesced, as did the chancellor, all in good spirits and acknowledging that being insulted was tantamount to death by debasement, something no one should undergo. Later, the coach, who sided with the players, gave up the ghost as well (and $2.7 million per year), proving that in Missouri the good guys sacrifice although losing seven conference games might have signified.

The microaggression movement has spread to other campuses, with speech police-persons hard at work to put the finger on verbal abusers. The movement has branched out into the world of lectures, speeches, pep-talks, class assignments, test questions, etc., i.e., any area in which a person—especially a super-sensitive student—can have his/her feelings hurt or be subjected to any proposition/interpretation concerning anything counter to his/her own.

The issue, of course, is racism, real or imagined, with the potential perpetrators being anyone who is not black. Okay, the blacks have included the American-Indians in suffering microaggression but that's it. The Indians don't seem to care that much but they have to be educated in victimhoodness. Actually, some whites have included themselves in this new victim class, noting, for instance, that having “under God” in the pledge or on coins causes them a bothersome rash due to the stress of being inordinately affected every time they pay for a whopper.

Into the mix constantly occurs the “educational achievement gap,” sort of like the “income inequality gap,” to wit, that the playing field has not been leveled for everyone to feel properly accommodated or referenced politely. So...what's a society to do to make everyone happy again?

CAVEAT ALERT! Dare one say it...re-segregation? How better to curtail microaggression on any campus than to guarantee it won't happen because the perpetrators have been banished to their own kind and the victims banished to their own kind, with all things being equal, of course? After all, Doctor James Coleman, University of Chicago distinguished professor who introduced school-busing, stated some 10 years after its inculcation that it didn't work, even though the buses and schools were equal.

Most states can divide their education establishments into black and white institutions in which no derogatory remarks will be encountered. This should already be done on a gender basis anyway, thus terminating the ceaseless cries of rape by sober coeds after being falling-down-drunk at frat parties and getting what they came for. The same stuff can be done in most public school systems (regarding education, not frat parties), especially in sizable towns/cities. Schools can be all-black or all-white or all-girl or all-boy. This would engender much greater learning.

What's to lose? Under current conditions, the education gap grows wider every year. Also, achievement across the board for both blacks and whites diminishes every year. Asians improve every year. If the racism and other education problems are being exacerbated daily now, why not defy political correctness (at the root of all this evil) and do something sensible? Top education experts (and most men) will attest to the fact that some types of segregation help. At this sorry point, they can't hurt.

Microaggression...what nonsense! This is only partly tongue-in-cheek.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark