Presbyterians & Perversion

The foolishness of political correctness, with its primary emphasis placed on diversity (whatever that actually means), has done considerable damage to the society, leading to loony-tunes social engineering in everything from the military to other government agencies/bureaus to sports to education to crime. It virtually nullifies both freedom of speech and just plain common sense.

For instance, murder is a crime. In 45 states it's just a crime or a (gasp) hate-crime but what difference does that make? The victim is dead either way, political correctness notwithstanding and with motive (if it can actually be determined) not a factor. The n-word can be used by blacks whether in jest or in rage but not by whites even in jest because for them it, ipso facto, connotes hate. This is not to say the n-word should ever be used; rather, to show how silly the emphasis on diversity is.

Diversity is a noun connoting the differences among people, so it's a divisive element that provokes antipathies and animosities. Yet, it has captured the society to the point that people are wary of saying or doing anything lest they be accused of racism, hate, discrimination, prejudice, superiority or anything anyone else cares to signify as politically incorrect. This flies in the face of nature because words like diversity don't change people. They are who/what they are.

Perhaps the saddest takeover of a culture by political correctness is occurring vis-a-vis religion. This has mainly to do with the so-called mainline denominations. The so-called evangelical groups and at least to some extent the Catholic Church have not yet succumbed, though the pressure of political-correctness advocates in their ranks is always operative.

When a religious group buys-in to PC it actually “buys-out” to the scriptures, liturgies, creeds, statements of faith and operations. PC becomes the new religion. The latest-mentioned denomination to bow out of the faith and into PC is the Presbyterian Church (USA), the largest Presbyterian group in the country, with 1.8 million members and some 10,000 congregations. PCUSA has just sanctioned same-sex marriage and given permission for same-sex weddings to be conducted in every congregation.

This is political-correctness carried to the nth degree since scripture as well as tradition, not to mention common sense, absolutely condemn this aberration. It represents the final casket-nail for the denomination, which has been drying on the vine for years anyway, as the “social gospel” has become a substitute for the biblical gospel, which, while emphasizing the doing of good works, condemns forthrightly and often the filthiness connected to homosexual behavior, as well as other unacceptable behaviors such as adultery, fornication, lying, murder and stealing.

In 2011, the PCUSA authorized ordination of homosexuals, so exiting the denomination during 2011-13 were 428 churches (nearly 5%) that do not worship PC. In 2013, the membership was still at 2.7 million, so one-third of the membership since then was lost primarily over the buildup to this same-sex decision concerning marriage. The handwriting had been on the wall for a number of years. In 1960, the membership stood at 4.1 million in a vibrant denomination. Since then, the church has lost 56% of its membership (33% in just the last two years) while the U.S. population has grown by 75%.

Gene Robinson, a practicing homosexual, was the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire 2003-13, though he had been married at one time and had two children. He and his “partner,” also known as the husband of their sordid “marriage” (civil union in 2008), are now “divorced,” as if they were ever actually married. The Episcopal Church (another “mainline” denomination) lost 41% of its membership 1960-2013. Churches that succumb to PC dry up on the vine as they become more like social clubs.

By contrast, the largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (about 16 million members), gained in membership 1960-2013 by 65% though it lost about a million members between 2007 and 2013 and is now sort of plateaued. This says much about religion and the twenty-first century, to wit, that the nation is impacted less and less by the religious community as it becomes more attuned to political correctness instead of the scriptures.

The “main-liners” have just about completely surrendered to PC, while all denominations are held in much less respect today than probably ever before in this country, which was founded primarily by people holding faith in God and surrender to scriptures as key to both fulfillment spiritually and success materially and militarily. It's sad to watch evil win over rectitude, especially religiously, a deplorable commentary on the nation's mores.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Military Social Engineering a BUST

Given President Obama's latest military brainchild, to wit, that the time has come for women to join the crack Navy Seals teams, I was surprised at the segment on the CBS Sixty Minutes program on 15 March having to do with the initial 86-day training-period required of Marine lieutenants who aspire to be qualified as Infantry Lieutenants. CBS is a virtual propaganda arm of the president, as are both NBC and ABC, and would hardly be expected to air something as obviously adverse to the president's decision-making and/or his actual understanding of anything military other than how to get on and off Air Force One.

David Martin was the main CBS reporter in the segment and was allowed to see just some – actually very little – of what the aspirants have to endure in order to continue. In the group of Marine lieutenants beginning the ordeal were five women, one of whom allowed herself to be interviewed and filmed during part of the first day, which involves a grueling combination of exercises featuring everything from actual bare-knuckled fights among the aspirants themselves to an obstacle course to a grueling 16-mile hike carrying extremely heavy equipment. The first day is designed to make or break as far as effort is concerned, while others may fall out along the way. None of the five women made it past the first day.

By day 70, there were 59 Marines left out of the 85 that began the three months of torture designed to tax to the limit both the physical and the mental capacities of the aspirants, no quarter given to either gender. On this day, the aspirants began cliff-climbing and -descending in the Mojave Desert...temperature 110 degrees. The packs they carried weighed 115 lbs, and there were no paths or directions. It was every man for himself and it was not a one-day affair. The general in charge of the training mentioned that the packs in some situations weight up to 130 lbs.

Martin interviewed the candidate who was at the top of the class at that point, asking his weight. The young man, who stood 6-2, weighed 170 lbs. and had begun the course at a weight of 200 lbs. Losing 30 pounds in 70 days has much to say about what's involved in becoming an infantry officer, and he still had two weeks to go. The general explained that in fighting conditions the enlisted men had to have faith in their leader, thus the rigorous training and weeding out of less worthy men, not on the basis of desire or mentality but on the basis of leadership skills and strength honed by the most demanding training possible.

There is also an infantry course for enlisted personnel, though nowhere near as demanding as that of the officers. One-third of the women who try make it through this course. Martin interviewed one of the women who passed this course but her remarks were surprising. She said, even though she completed the training, that the infantry was not the place for women. Two of her reasons were that the weight that had to be carried was too heavy (women might have been allowed the rope-climb without packs, but I'm not certain) and that women's hips were not built for that strenuous requirement, translated as the idea of unisex being loony-tunes.

The Navy Seal training is even more comprehensive and demanding than that of the infantry officers not least because much of it is in and below water and involves precision parachuting over all kinds of seas or terrain. No mention was made of these things vis-a-vis the Marine Infantry Officer training, done on the land.

Field officers made known unmistakably their unease with the admittance of practicing homosexuals into the military when Obama instigated that foolishness and doubtless are as distressed with yet another effort to weaken the entire military establishment with respect to actual combat. The inevitable result of attempting to combine men and women militarily was proven years ago just in boot camps, namely, the gradual easing of rigorous training eventuating in a soft cadre of fighting men. This arrangement was stopped.

Social engineering usually destroys everything it touches. So far, the Marines are holding out and, hopefully, will continue to actually train men to break things and kill people until the ruinous Obama presidency is history.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Freedom of SPEECH at OU?

Fox News liberal analyst Juan Williams surprised me the other day when he said about the recent Oklahoma University SAE Frat scandal that OU president Boren had made a mistake in summarily throwing the fraternity off the campus and ordering the SAE residence vacated immediately, forcing all the students to get all their stuff out and find somewhere else to live. Apparently, Boren took that action over a nine-minute video showing SAE members singing a song he considered offensive to African Americans. The song was offensive and even included the n-word.

It was predictable from the start that legal action was in the offing, especially since the parents of fraternity members are usually well-heeled and often can wield a very big stick without having to walk softly. Williams was right, not because the video was not offensive but because the guys who sang the song had the right of freedom of speech just as the rappers, probably 99% black, have the right to call very publicly for the murder of white cops and the rape of any female available. And this is just some of their milder stuff.

Apparently, Boren made the sad mistake of acting impulsively without thinking things through and without enough actionable information to warrant doing anything. This is the same mistake Obama and Holder made with regard to the Ferguson matter last summer and the Trayvon Martin thing in Sanford, Florida, a while back. It's the same mistake Obama made in 2009 when without any information he said the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, acted stupidly. He was dead wrong.

I saw on CNN on 13 March a press conference held by an attorney (represented Timothy McVeigh in 1995) who has been engaged by the local SAE organization at OU. He, of course, mentioned the obvious, that no sort of hearing was held to get the facts straight. For instance, the bus on which the video was made was only one of five in the entourage furnishing transportation connected to the event in question. Should Boren have made the effort to see just who and/or how many people were involved in the offensive behavior?

It was reported that two students had been expelled. The attorney indicated that both students withdrew before Boren got into the matter. It was reported that other actions might be taken by the university, meaning Boren, of course, who served as both governor of Oklahoma in the 70s and as a U.S. senator 1979-94. He should have known better than to act summarily and by now probably has discovered that certain hoops have to be negotiated before action as drastic as his can be undertaken.

Remember the Lacrosse Affair at Duke University in 2006. Three players were accused by an African American woman of rape at a party in which she was hired as a stripper...admittedly, nothing pretty about that. For some strange reason, the team's inordinately successful coach, Mike Pressler, was forced to resign even though he had just been given a new 3-year contract and graduated 100% of his players over 16 years.

The rest of the season was suspended, a large faculty-group was up in arms and the university assumed that the players were guilty. The president of Duke acted just as Boren did, though maybe he wouldn't have if the affair had concerned the basketball team. The players were innocent. The woman had plenty of DNA proof but not from the guys charged or, apparently, any other Duke lacrosse player. It would be fun just to go through the lawsuit material in that fiasco, something Boren might be facing.

Freedom of speech is just that—freedom to speak, or sing. Political correctness freaks scream for something chargeable and called “hate speech,” which is just what anyone says it is...in this case, Boren. If a black group or a rapper had sung something about whiteys in connection with the f-word, they might have been admonished to be nice, certainly not suspended or thrown off the campus. That's the way political correctness works, and Boren would probably agree...at this point.

The 9-second ditty was offensive but so were both Obama (Jimmy Kimmel show) and Holder in their agreement that the Ferguson protests (protesters) were justified. Protesters burned down part of Ferguson twice and two white police officers have been shot. For them and Obama and Holder that's freedom of speech—burn and shoot—and all their disclaimers contrariwise amount to naught.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Selma/Ferguson/Obama

The president's speech at Selma was inspiring and well delivered. He covered all the usual points of reference such as historical events, the Bible and the poet. He also mentioned the hot-button issues (a number of mentions of Ferguson) that have to do with race, just as he has throughout his six years in office, along with Attorney General Holder, who famously said recently that Americans are too cowardly to talk about race.

Americans are not too cowardly to talk about race...they are simply sick and tired of both talking about and hearing constantly about race. There's racism in the country. “Okay! We get that,” is the response of the average white guy, who knows that racism is here to stay no matter how much it's discussed. Since Selma and all the civil rights legislation of the 60s, it's been drummed into the minds of especially young blacks that they are the victims and will always be the victims of racism.

Race was the theme of Obama's autobiography of 1995, Dreams from My Father, and has remained his focus throughout his career, even though he, barely out of diapers at the time of Selma, is the prime example that racism does not drive the society, governmental or otherwise. The black community responded so negatively to all the legislation, with results being relatively inconsequential, that, absent admitting the obvious reason for so-called inequality, it screams racism.

Ferguson is the prime example. Whites make up only 29% of Ferguson's population, meaning that black voters outnumber whites far more than two-to-one, yet the mayor and five of six City Council members are white, as are 50 of the 53 policemen. This situation could be completely turned around in just ONE election cycle, with blacks taking over the town lock-stock-and-barrel and making whites so miserable that they would have to sell out and leave.

Nor does it make much sense to talk about inordinate black arrest numbers or mistreatment received. Sixty-seven percent of the population is black, so it would be expected that such an overpowering black-to-white ratio vis-a-vis lawbreaking would be expected. Until he gained further information about Brown's just committed theft, Officer Wilson merely asked Michael Brown to walk on the sidewalk instead of in the middle of a busy street.

He didn't pull a gun and threaten Brown and his friend. He merely asked them to do something both lawful and sensible, as well as reasonable concerning the drivers who had to swerve in order to miss hitting them, possible especially since Brown was high on marijuana and could conceivably wobble all over the place. Even Holder admitted that Wilson was guilty of no crime in the killing, and the grand jury deliberations, not the usual case, were published on the Internet or printed in their entirety to evince total transparency.

There's no question that prejudice—even hate—existed on the part of some Ferguson policemen. A couple have resigned. This is true in any police force in any town of any size throughout the nation and is not confined to just white officers. Holder didn't mention the number, if any, of black applicants for the police force or what, if any, disposition was made of those applications. Whose fault is it that a mere 6% of the police force is black while 67% of the population is black?

The president would have been well-served not to mention Ferguson, where no crime was committed except the crimes by blacks burning down much of the town TWICE, thus running people out of business TWICE. The report months-long in the making by Holder's DOJ excoriating the police did not include excoriating blacks who, bent on some strange notion of revenge instead of justice, burned their own. It would be interesting to know how many have been brought to justice.

In Obama's inner circle as well documented is the highest profile black crook, Al Sharpton, who has made an industry out of violent protests in order to eradicate racism. He's worth $5 million and owes the government $4 million in unpaid taxes but is a White House guest never bothered by Eric Holder or the IRS, which the administration has used to its political advantage in abusing white organizations. This is the message the president sends to young blacks...and it stinks.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Academia 2015

In Academia two-o-one-five
The most important thing to thrive and jive
Is basketball or football one-o-one,
The most sought-for degree – game to be won;
The “student” athlete is B-M-O-C,
For him attending class a novelty,
Since he flies to and fro across the land
For weeks in transit to some new grandstand.

The coach is now a multimillionaire,
The profs – with luck – afford some underwear,
The “student” athlete is okay to play
If he can spell his name the same each day;
Next to the coach, the A-D's deal is best,
His bonuses alone he can invest
In hedge-funds run by cronies all well-heeled...
The president envies and is...gasp...thrilled.

Assistant coaches struggle mightily
–Six-hundred-thou a puny salary–
But, after all, on some days there is rain
So on the practice-field must risk a sprain;
Assistant profs pay rent but get a lift
Moonlighting, flipping burgers on night-shift,
The renovated stadia can now
Accommodate more fat cats—sports cash-cow.

Yeah...education is the best deal found
When TV-folks spread billions all around,
The straight-A students work the fast-food store
While scholarships abound for any score
Above D-minus for one who runs fast
Or puts a quarterback in six-week cast –
Corruption is the campus-game throughout,
Take that right to the bank and never doubt.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

KERA's Curse – School-based Councils

In the largest pork-barrel legislation in the state's history at the time, the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) of 1991 was the worst assault imaginable on two generations vis-a-vis their primary and secondary education possibilities, although the gradual disintegration of nearly all the act has lessened the effect in more recent years. The legislature is now in the process, at least hopefully, of dissolving the worst aspect of KERA, the school-based council consisting of the principle, two parents and three teachers. These councils rendered the elected school-boards virtually powerless.

These councils have had a stranglehold on the process, completely controlling curriculum, textbooks, and personnel, even to the hiring of their own principles. The state Supreme Court made it plain years ago that superintendents cannot overrule these councils in something as important as the hiring of a principle, ergo, just about everything else as well. The process has meant that grade-school students enter middle schools without any collective background and that middle-schoolers enter high schools the same way. The predictable result was the downward spiral of achievement across the board. Standardization has its place.

Additional KERA requirements: (1) Grades 1-3 combined; (2) Some reasonable method of testing; (3) Monetary awards to teachers, administrators and schools for simply doing their jobs; (4) Youth Service Centers; (5) Family Resource Centers; (6) Regional Service Centers. Busing (social engineering) had been such a colossal failure by 1991 that it played no part, thankfully, in KERA.

So, what happened? (1) Teachers simply ignored this foolishness and it was legislated out eventually. Strangely, part of KERA required that no more than two grades be mixed in grades 4-6, when by that time the 1-3 lunacy would have condemned the 4-6 gang even worse. (2) The worst messes imaginable accrued to testing, with tens of thousands paid to various private groups that were probably less able to perform than the locals. Some tests were even lost in the mail, not that it mattered a whit. One could read or listen to the media accounts and just laugh at the ineptness and waste.

Number (3) comprised a fiasco of enormous proportions. Predictably, some schools and staff were never to be eligible just because of the demographics so teachers and administrators did the necessary—they cheated on scores or whatever else and took the money. A $34 million trust fund was set up to assure the rewards. Students were bribed, even excused from school for doing their very best on tests which they were told meant nothing to their grades. They were even taken to amusements parks. The students didn't care about doing well on the tests since there was no grade-reward. This was stopped not long after it was begun but it reflected the mindset of the legislator—throw money at every problem.

There may have been some sense to (4) if it included actual tutoring. The major effect of (5) was probably that it provided baby-sitting (pre- and post-school-hours) for parents, although there may have been some social benefits. (6) The eight regional service centers were discontinued in July 2003, with the reason given that there was not enough money to support them. That reason was laughable since they were supposed to save the worst schools, obviously no matter the cost.

The system was called “outcomes-based education” and the major emphasis, unbelievably, was on enhancing self-esteem. More unbelievably, there was even serious consideration given to there being no winners/losers in sports, lest someone be offended. Because so many teachers retired when it was passed, KERA was dubbed the Kentucky Education Retirement Act or something like that. Harlan Representative Roger Noe sort of shepherded the bill through the legislature, if memory serves, and, ironically, was not returned to the legislature in 1993 after having served since the late 70s.

In an in interview with Eric Moyen (University of Kentucky) in March 2004, Noe, a college professor then and now, seemed to have second thoughts about KERA, or at least some of it, and expressed doubt that the legislature should ever enact pedagogy. He said he thought more of the old traditional philosophy and mentioned John Dewey, claiming “those folks may have been what we needed to stay with.” He was right. The solons were in way over their heads...but the pork can guarantee a legislative career...except for Noe, apparently.

And so it goes
Jim Clark

School Transgender Nonsense

There seems no limit to the triviality connected to legislative sessions in Kentucky. The Senate Education Committee has just passed by 8-1 a bill for vote that simply requires public school students to use the toilets and locker-rooms designated for them based on their obvious gender. One wonders how this subject could even come up, much less be taken seriously.

The big thing in political correctness currently is the “transgender issue.” Should a student who has all the attributes of a male be allowed to use the girls' facilities if he announces that he is actually a female dressed as a male? Likewise, the female student who claims transgender-status using the boys' locker-room after a hard day's practice in football or volleyball, respectively.

The main claim of the transgenders has to do with bullying, although such would never occur normally if they just went about their business and said nothing about their gender hangup. Classmates don't know them by their psychological structure but as other-sex only if they're immature (or dumb) enough to announce to one and all that they're “different.” This is probably what has happened.

One would think a sensible parent or other appropriate person would take care of this matter by simply telling the youngster that the world doesn't revolve around him/her, and that 99.99% of female students should not be exposed to a guy doing his thing (such exposure means jail time legally), and vice versa for the girls, just so he/she can prove something, namely that school administrators are mentally-challenged enough to even bother with this problem.

The lone negative Senate vote was cast by Lexington's Senator Reginald Thomas, who said such a law “will stigmatize transgender students.” Just the opposite is true. A boy entering the girls' facilities automatically stigmatizes himself. A girl entering the boys' facility might suffer the stigma attached to just “wanting some,” especially after hours.

Exactly how does a principle determine the truth when a guy with male features and dressed as a male announces himself as transgender and therefore entitled to feminine privileges? Surely just his word is not good enough. Absent a clinical determination (if there is such a thing), the boy is a boy. Even if he shows up in feminine attire he's still masculine, all the artificial processes to make him look girlish (transvestite-mode) notwithstanding.

The same is true with respect to girls. Is a girl's word all that's necessary for special gender-treatment, the privilege of showering with the boys after a phys. ed. class? Or, should she just be told to disrobe before the lady teachers in order to prove her masculinity or lack thereof? Thomas's sense of stigmatization is about as warped as it gets.

Thomas may not have thought of a more serious problem connected with gender-reversal as related to the rest rooms and other gender-related issues, such as eligibility for sports teams. Picture the girl in the boys locker-room shower after a football practice when one of the guys suggests to the other guys having some fun with her, all of them high on Gatorade, with the adrenalin still coursing through their hormones. No one is thinking of consequences (sophomores thinking ahead not likely), so there could be hell to pay all around.

In this era of political correctness, think what would happen if a girl claims to be a boy and presents herself to the football coach. Or, think of the boy who presents himself to the girls' volleyball coach and tries to un-embarrassingly wear the little hot-pants gear designed for voyeurism as much as for any athletic reason.

The financial cost of building new rest/locker-rooms is obvious, not to mention the stigma attached to those who must use unisex facilities, although the transgender-claimers might just be seeking notoriety for the everyday attention and enjoy being watched. Sexual perversions of one kind or another are big right now in the world of political correctness and being thought “different” can be very attractive to an immature student. Is it any wonder that ISIS uses Twitter to recruit teenagers on the basis of be-headings, stoning, amputations, etc.?

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

LAMEDUCK

At the midpoint of Black History Month and especially during the exact celebration of President's Day, President Obama spent a bachelor golfing-weekend in California, landing back in Washington on Air Force One in a snowstorm on the evening of 16 February. At the same time, virtually the eastern half of the nation was undergoing some of the most threatening weather in a long time, with thousands if not millions losing utilities and facing subzero temperatures. Boston, for instance, is trying to dig out from some nine feet of accumulated snow.

Just as the case with the executive orders unconstitutionally governing immigration, this move was an in-your-face gesture to the body politic. The president is so severely lame-duck currently that he seems to have decided to ride it out until January 2017 by having a good time flying AF-1 all over the country to make speeches simply to make speeches and play golf.

Perhaps he's recognized finally that he's relatively irrelevant, a president with no policies concerning much of anything except his pet project—immigration amnesty of one kind or another and an occasional cheap shot at policemen, something never done, of course, in his hometown of Chicago, where life in gangland is worth about what it is in ISIS-land. The nation is not with him as he flounders in Islam-protection mode, though he makes solemn pronouncements occasionally regarding the gratuitous genocide taking place in Syria, Iraq and—now—Libya by monsters operating in the name of ALLAH, with the Koran and ayatollahs calling the shots.

He may not have recognized that his legacy is going down in flames before it even has a chance at ignition. The Libyan-ISIS connection has just beheaded 21 Christians on the shores of the Mediterranean not far from Benghazi, Obama's chosen place about which to tell perhaps his biggest LIE, aided and abetted by his then state secretary, who may have the audacity to try for his job. These tragic murders would not have happened but for Obama's decision—with no congressional consultation/participation—to attack Libya in 2011 as his contribution to the ISLAMIC-inspired Arab Spring, which resulted in the utter devastation of Libya, now being rapidly taken over by ISIS.

This is the centerpiece of the Obama legacy...the murder of both a nation and much of its population. His legacy will not be Obamacare. His legacy will consist of decisions so wrong as to defy comprehension, especially as commander-in-chief, a constitutional office he has besmirched even as he consistently reminds the great unwashed that he speaks and the world jumps...except that it doesn't. He has introduced the non-American concept of “leading from behind,” thus making him and the office a laughingstock worldwide.

His misjudgment a year ago of ISIS (that “jay-vee” outfit) will appear in the history books as a glaring and damning event of immense proportions. Most folks do not expect him to put an army on the ground in the Middle East—and he shouldn't—to fight hopeless losing-wars for people too weak or cowardly to protect themselves. But folks do expect him to tell it like it is, to wit, that Islam is a curse upon the world and that—one way or another—its jihad operatives, governments in some cases, must be eliminated. Until he puts the arm (sanctions and weapons, for instance) on the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and even Algeria and Morocco (troop-strength of 130,000 and 195,800, respectively, to add to the more-than-a-million troop-strength of the others, not to mention hundreds of planes and other weapons), this cancer on the world will metastasize.

Leading from behind will not get this done. Muslims will have to fight Muslims until the Muslims of ISIS are totally neutralized. The president is overseeing a diminishing of U.S. military capability at the very time he should be enhancing it in a world possibly as dangerous as that of the 1930s-40s, when nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan decided to conquer free nations and then fight each other to the death to rule the world. Jordan and Egypt have joined the battle but only after the latest atrocities, the immolation of a Jordanian pilot and the beheading of the Coptic Christians.

To his credit, Obama is not willing to sacrifice blood and treasure for losing causes but he must step up and lead in the fight against ISIS, which has announced and is fulfilling its plan to savage Christians and set up a worldwide caliphate on bloody Sharia Law. It's the Crusades all over again and Western Civilization must NOT lose. The Saracens are at the gates of Europe in force (especially Italy now) and in sleeper cells everywhere.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

High Horse Tallyho!

Dear President Obama:

There are bunglers in the operation I head, the Institute for Modifying All Governmental Entities, known familiarly as IMAGE, so I feel your pain when inferiors must be disciplined, dismissed, even water-boarded occasionally, though I appreciate your good judgment in being discreet about that. The rumor that you have threatened Axelrod account the assertion in his book that you lied about same-sex marriage in 2008 is, I'm sure, unfounded, since you said in 2012 what you said in Illinois in 1996, to wit, that same-sexing should have its whoopee made legal.

My effort herein is to suggest that you consider heading an arm of IMAGE upon your retirement from the presidency in 2017, assuming you avoid impeachment and conviction by those squirrelly republicans or, heaven forbid, being caught in a crossfire in Chicago or on the practice-green among jealous golfers with handicaps higher than yours. Your recent prayer-breakfast speech—a work of teleprompting that even God must envy—has triggered the need for a new IMAGE agency to be called the Headquarters for Instituting Gregarious Humorous Hegemony Over Relatively Senseless Erudition, to be labeled inevitably by the talk-show lunatics by its acronym HIGH HORSE, though this title is merely coincidental and has nothing to do with that part of your God-informing homily (He may not have noticed) regarding the location of the disreputable proletariat.

HIGH HORSE will develop strategies for avoiding too much seriousness about any subject, such as ISIS decapitations, starving Kurds or date-rape. These things call for consideration, of course, but have existed ever since people evolved from snail darters—little joke there to prove my point that a bit of levity is always in order, else the whole population suffer PTSD of one kind or another. Fox News listeners will be taught through HIGH HORSE, for instance, that the so-called political analysts (mostly lady lawyers in miniskirts) are in the tradition of Jon Stewart...fun and games masquerading as intellect and news...as should be the case.

In the planning as a part of HIGH HORSE is an agency labeled the Societal Laboratory for Acknowledging Vicious Enslavement amidst Righteous Yammering or SLAVERY, for short. You made it clear at the prayer breakfast that folks in the U.S. carried on slavery in the name of Christ, implying that perverse pontificating by preachers sanctified the practice. It will be the business of SLAVERY to put the clerics (especially evangelicals) on notice (especially in Mississippi) that they are racist, bigoted, discriminatory, disingenuous and therefore guilty of verbal hate crimes, with AG Holder on their case. Just as the president has determined that the term “terrorist” be replaced by “man-caused-disaster,” he is signing an executive order that the term “hell” be replaced by “la-la-land” and anyone continuing to mention hell will be prosecuted.

Within SLAVERY is planned the Council on Heretical Rhetoric Invoking Sanctimonious Torpor, or CHRIST, for short. The Rev. Dr. Presidential-Adviser Resident-Tax-Cheat Protest-Organizer/Looter-in-Chief Al Sharpton is being considered for this job since he's a theological heavyweight and can reinterpret the scriptures to indicate that God wants his followers to do absolutely nothing religious, evangelical, prosyletizing or spiritual since to do so causes excitement, especially among the Tea Party gang, which it is rumored will soon organize tee-ins at golf courses, thus embarrassing the president. Sharpton has already prepared a manual entitled “Theological Torpor,” which will also contain a chapter on the glories of same-sex marriage, thus encouraging heresy among the great unwashed Bible-thumpers.

Finally, there will be a sister-agency under your direction as an extra enticement called the Constitutional Reordering of Ugly Sanctions Against Diversity Excellence, or CRUSADE, for short. This working group under your direction will devise ways to essentially neutralize the Bill of Rights, a favorite subject of yours. For instance, you can work to prove that freedom of religion means that Muslims cannot be frisked for suicide vests and that European Christians who fought Saladin were warmongers, not Christ-followers and should have worshiped Allah, with Muhammad as his prophet.

As you often say on your way via Air Force One to the golf course du jour, there's more work to be done. Once out of office, you will have it made in running HIGH HORSE and CRUSADE.

Best regards,
I.M. Otherself, CEO
IMAGE

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Subterfuge as Sanctuary

Much has been made of the fact lately that NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been guilty of lying in some of his “reports,” though news-anchor reports are always suspect since they seem to be done on a quick trip somewhere to show up in whatever wardrobe fits the circumstance, climate, etc., and confer with the reporter on the spot, perhaps even giving greater credibility to whatever is said/shown just by his/her august presence. Such was the case back in 2003 when Williams reported from Iraq that the helicopter he was riding had been shot down.

Williams lied. The helicopter blessed with his presence landed safely. Williams made a weak apology the other day and allowed that he'd step down for a while. That was sort of a lie, too, since it happens that NBC has actually suspended him without pay for six months, as if six months will magically restore his credibility. According to CELEBRITY NETWORK, Williams “earns” $13 million annually so he's coughing up $6.5 million for a lesson too late for the learning. CN claims his net worth at $40 million, so don't shed any crocodile tears. Unfortunately, some subsequent fact-checking has produced other Williams shady shenanigans, so NBC may suggest another line of work for him.

If anything, NBC is guiltier than Williams since employees ranging from those who just carried Williams's luggage to his producers to the camera-people to the head honchos at the system knew about this stuff and just sat on it. This reminds of the “Dan Rather Subterfuge” back in 2004 when he and CBS tried to ride out the storm occasioned by Rather's bogus documents claiming military dereliction by George Bush. Finally, some folks were fired but Rather got to stay on until he sort of disintegrated and disappeared.

The consensus is that NBC as well as CBS, ABC, CNN and MSNBC are shills for the Democrat Party in general and Barack Hussein Obama in particular. This is interesting in considering the positions Obama has taken on same-sex marriage. His campaign honcho, David Axelrod, has just published a book in which he notes that Obama lied in 2008 when he said marriage was a man-woman thing, not same-sex. Obama was very emphatic. In 2012, Obama claimed he had “evolved” to the point (evolution is such an exact science) of understanding that marriage between homosexuals was quite normal.

Whoa...in 1996 when he was running for the Illinois State Senate, he said he favored legalizing same-sex marriages and would fight efforts to prohibit them—strong stuff. So, is there a serial liar in the White House in the Williams tradition, a sort of extension of NBC on governmental steroids? The president said he knew nothing about “Fast & Furious” or the IRS manhandling of the Tea Party and insisted that a 13-minute YouTube film caused the “Benghazi Massacre.” These were momentous affairs that could not have escaped his attention...thus the LIE. He even cited the Benghazi lie in a speech to the United Nations two weeks after disgorging the initial lie in the Rose Garden while on his way to a fund-raiser in Hollywood.

Okay...there are liars in both political parties, maybe ALL political parties. But democrats seem to have a natural—even compulsive—talent for it, especially when the stakes are high. The consensus is that Hillary Clinton will be the presidential nominee in 2016, though she has been very quiet for the last six months or so. That's just as well since she told an even bigger lie than Williams, Rather or Obama when she claimed in 2008 that she had undergone sniper-fire in Bosnia in 1996 and had to run for it, with Chelsea at her side, as if the army would have let the then first lady and first daughter anywhere near sniper-land. She and Chelsea simply walked across the tarmac at an airport and were greeted by a pretty girl-sniper holding a bouquet.

Williams, Obama and Clinton all told lies that—surely to their knowledge—could be easily exposed just by the cameras and mikes that recorded what actually was the truth. Or...could it be that they were actually ignorant of that fact? Or...could it be that they were/are so cynical that they figured it didn't matter, sort of like they could walk on water and the great unwashed could just suck it up? Shades of NBC and CBS—just like Rather—that's probably the answer.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Obama & the CRUSADES

This is what President Obama said in his speech at the Prayer Breakfast in Washington the other day: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this [prostituting religion, presumably] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was [sic] justified in the name of Christ.”

There's no argument with the fact that people since the beginning and for whatever reason have committed atrocities sometimes too horrific to imagine. There is an argument, however, when any historical event(s) is referenced but judged outside its proper context. This is what the president did. The Crusades (officially, more or less, between 1098 and 1291) represented contests for territory more than for religious reasons in that the Muslim thrust, perhaps beginning with the conquest by Muslims of Jerusalem in 638, had to do with subjecting whole populations and their territories. This would be akin to the Baptists attempting to take over Catholic New Orleans...a land-grab.

Muhammad (530-632) was a caravan-raider and also participated in tribal warfare. In 610, he declared receiving revelations from Allah through the angel Gabriel (apparently co-opted from Holy Scripture), began preaching to his own tribe and claimed his position to be that of prophet. His “brethren” in Mecca would have none of it and he was forced to make his headquarters in Medina in 622, from where he and his followers remained solvent by raiding caravans, with horrible violence part of the action, not to mention vindictiveness against the “brethren.” Not long after, Jerusalem fell, thus the contention established between the followers of God of the Bible and the followers of Muhammad.

The Islamic movement headed west throughout North Africa and even into Spain (Muslims called Moors), an actual invasion of Europe, in 711. The Moors ruled Spain until they were defeated in 1492 at Granada by the Católicos (Catholics). In the meantime, Muslim forces contested with Christian (actually mostly Catholic) forces back and forth as Muslims (remember the great Saladin) tried to take over Europe, with the Crusades organized to push back. The battles didn't stop in 1291 but continued for centuries into the 1600s...Ukraine, Vienna, Poland, for instance. The Muslim effort was always to establish the worldwide Caliphate, the announced goal of ISIS today.

The battles were actually wars no different from wars today, for territory. It happened that they pitted Muslims against Christians, each faction claiming divine ordination from Allah (actually Muhammad) and God of the Bible, respectively. So, Crusaders fought in the name of Christ, something for which everyone in Europe and the U.S. should be proud and grateful. Imagine Sharia Law in all statehouses, courthouses and in Washington, especially as applied to women.

The president's allusion to slavery and Jim Crow as being justified in the name of Christ comprised a cheap shot. There may have been some zealots back in the day who approved and/or preached that contemptible position but there was never any movement—at least to my knowledge—which had as its focus God of the Bible ordaining slavery. The entire world economy almost from the beginning of the human race was built upon slavery, the strongest subjecting the weakest. Scripture-writers dealt with it as a fact of life ordained by morally challenged people and even included rules dedicated to the treatment of slaves, but the practice was conducted in the name of homo sapiens.

The president made a feeble attempt to tiptoe around what everyone in the room knew to be a curse on the world—militant Muslims conducting jihad, the actual proponents of slavery as exercised against the infidel. It's called Dhimmitude. Officials of Islam, as must all Muslims, admit that according to the Koran the infidel is to be killed, pay a tax or become a slave. This is sort of understandable because Obama's entire childhood was Muslim-oriented. Using a prayer breakfast to further divide people into camps, however, by trying to get them to “understand” what is beyond comprehension, to wit, more than a billion Muslims worldwide failing to neutralize murderers claiming divine impetus for genocide—often torturous beyond belief—was disingenuous, dishonest, totally out of place.

Of course, it could be that the president is ignorant of the history. That's even worse.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

ISIS & the U.S.

Muslims make up 7.5% of the population of France. That might not sound like a lot but if that percentage were applied to the U.S. there would be some 24,000,000 Muslims in this country, roughly equal to the entire populations of the adjacent states of Illinois and Indiana. Currently, there are about 6,700,000 Muslims in the U.S., or 2.1% of the total population. Though largely concentrated in a handful of states, they live throughout the country and their mosques, having expanded in number by around 75% in the last 13-15 years, now number more than 2,100.

Though it's politically incorrect to say anything about Islam since it's alleged to be a religion, one has to take notice of the possible number of “sleeper cells” in a population of about 1.5 million households, with four members as the average makeup. In the obviously expanding number of such households will be an increase in the number of mosques, some of which have already been quietly infiltrated by agencies such as the FBI because planning for terrorism-activity has been proven to take place in these supposed places of prayer and worship.

The recent “Charlie Hebdo & Deli Massacres” in Paris perhaps form just the tip of the iceberg in the total amount of problems created by Muslims in France, in which by 2030, according to a recent TIME article, Muslims will make up 10.3% of the population. This will happen while the birth-rate of the French-Europeans falls below sustainability. A similar situation exists in Austria, Belgium and Sweden but by a significant degree throughout Europe, thus increasing the number of sleeper cells, the small groups of mostly young Muslims, many if not most born in European countries (homegrown), who have been or are being taught how to make weapons of mass destruction (bombs) and in some cases brainwashed into considering homicide-suicide missions.

The claim is often made, especially by elected officials like Senators McCain and Graham, that ISIS must be defeated on the ground in Syria/Iraq in order to militate against these sleeper cells; however, the word is out in the ISIS entity now that would-be jihad fighters traveling to the Middle East are being encouraged to stay home and do their mischief there. Training for ground-battle prepares no one for sleeper-cell activity since these cell-members will never openly fight anyone in this country, not even the police. They can learn from manuals and even the Internet how to make bombs, strap them on and trigger them, whether suicidally or by remote-control.

ISIS does need to be thoroughly defeated on the ground because its goal is the conquering and enslaving of the people in the Middle East and northern Africa and eventually the world. The countries in the area know this—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, each having a border with Syria/Iraq. Currently, 90% of the aerial activity to defeat ISIS is said to be carried out by the U.S., not these countries, in either drone or fighter action. This should not be the case, and President Obama is right in insisting that no significant number of U.S. troops should be on the ground anywhere over there.

Saudi troop-strength stands at 233,500 boots that can be on the ground in Iraq in a matter of hours. The Saudi capital, Riyadh, is only some 300 miles from the Iraqi border and ISIS strength is said to number only about 40,000 fighters, giving the new king an advantage of about 7-to-one. The king also has 1,095 tanks; 7,202 armored fighting vehicles; multiple rocket-launch systems and 652 military aircraft, 229 of which are deadly, modern jet-fighters secured from the U.S. and Europe. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Iran, which have troops numbering respectively, 233,500; 510,600; 100,500; and 523,000...for a total of 1,367,600 boots can put them on the ground immediately to stop evil ISIS. This doesn't even count Iraq, which this year is supposed to have 271,400 boots of its own minus the deserters and defectors.

ISIS is a greater threat to these countries (all that oil) than to the U.S., and it's the elephant in their collective living-room. In a matter of days, they could drive ISIS into oblivion, with or without the U.S. It's time for the Shi'ites and Sunnis to bury the hatchet, clean out ISIS and then fight each other if so inclined. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. can do their job, as they have been doing anyway, in discovering and neutralizing the sleeper-cell crowd.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

TIME & the Glass Ceiling

In the 09 February issue of TIME, editor Nancy Gibbs discussed the lack of women “at the top” (only 5% of Fortune CEOs) but also mentioned that 75% of women polled by REAL SIMPLE indicated no interest in their boss's job, preferring “happiness and a sense of purpose”—neither preference defined by Gibbs—over “fame or money.” TIME writer Rana Foroohar, in an article about the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, wrote that a proven solution for boosting economic growth was putting more women to work but lamented only 17% female participation at Davos. Could she be missing something?

More women- than men-students populate university campuses and are increasingly entering medical and legal professions. Soon if not already, most justice/court-systems will be run by women. Girls outperform boys scholastically K-12 as do females in college except perhaps in math. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (November 2013), 31.9% of physicians are women. According to the American bar Association (July 2014), 34% of practicing attorneys are women, both figures representing enormous expansion in the last 40 years and climbing rapidly.

Foroohar suggested that the government—presumably on all levels—should subsidize child-care, thus freeing women to do their thing and climb the ladder, greatly increasing their income but necessitating political action, something she opined in short supply. In his $4 trillion budget plan, Obama has just included subsidized child-care and mandated birth-leave, mostly by soaking the rich. He said he wanted to replace “mindless austerity”—something the bankrupted Greeks seem about to try, with—“smart investments.” His attempt, predictably, is the socialist model...government even raising the children.

According to the Wall Street Journal (05 February 2014), 69.3% of women worked outside the home while the other 30.7% weren't even looking for work. Is Foroohar missing something here, too? She sells women short. While surely acknowledging the intellectual superiority of women, she insists on a certain victim-hood for them as if with all their smarts they can't get it together. Is income inequality (whatever that is) the fault of intellectually inferior men, who subject women to low wages just because they can?

The women's movement has always insisted upon unisex as norm, an obvious insanity but politically correct, notwithstanding that it equals women with men in every aspect up to and including physical strength but non-unisex-wise embodying the claim that men are not as smart as women. Yet, victim-hood is the scream. In both 2012 and 2013, the Pentagon reported that there were, coincidentally, exactly 26,000 unreported rapes in the military. The figure for 2014 will probably be the same since anything unreported can be...well, anything. But women military types are supposed to handle assault because they're taught how to protect themselves, even when falling-down drunk. Get the picture?

Victim-hood is claimed by brilliant college coeds vis-a-vis rape. College administrations hem and haw when they should be banning coed dorms and enforcing strict “rules of engagement” among equals. Coeds have carried stupidity (hormones over brains) to a new level by getting drunk, drugged and hanging out at bars and frat houses, all avoidable circumstances, then screaming rape. A tipsy University of Kentucky freshman coed allowed a tipsy guy in her dorm-room in January 2013 and something happened. She said rape, got the kit, the whole nine yards. According to him (no witnesses, of course): “He said, she said.” He went free, she committed suicide.

Finally—to get down and dirty chauvinistic—women often sell themselves as shallow, literally. A program on Fox News is called “Outnumbered,” a guy dressed to the nines on a couch with five women, knees forward and no coffee-table between viewer (voyeur) and group. The off-the-shoulder deep cleavage along with the high-thigh and never-uncrossed legs by the women told the story. The guy was there to talk. The ladies, steeped in leftover adolescence, seemed hellbent on showing everything they had. Taking them seriously was a laugh. The same is true in the serious news-programs. The picture accompanying Foroohar's piece included a picture of four CEO-type men—suit and tie—and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg— deep cleavage and bare thigh-to-foot—in the same pose...made her look silly and even disrespectful.

Lesson: Reality trumps whining and facts beat fantasy.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Lest We Forget

Auschwitz

I hovered over trains and tracks each day
And watched as shipments came without delay,
The box-cars crammed with flesh and detritus,
The living and the dead bathed in their pus.
Storm troopers strutted, whips so quick to wield,
Their courage proved not on the battlefield,
But as they scourged and laughed with ridicule,
Defenseless masses died beneath their rule.

I watched as families were torn apart,
The children and the aged condemned to start
Their journeys to the gas striped by the lash,
Their bodies then cremated into ash.
The older, stronger ones with arms tattooed
Were listed just as numbers – garish, crude,
And herded toward the work-camps all around
Or into labs, with screams the only sound.

Throughout the deadly compounds rose the stench
As flames from charring bones the flesh would wrench
And then consume the whole in fiery glow
As martinets yet strutted to and fro.
Throughout the work-camps also rose the stench
As work from filthy bodies life would wrench,
The weaker ones went soon beneath the whip,
The road to charnel house their final trip.

I watched starvation take its daily toll –
It was a tool to gain complete control,
The martinets would laugh and lash in glee,
But starving ones came quietly to me.
The ones marked out like guinea pigs or mice
For every sadist’s fancy – volt or slice,
Throughout a threefold hell ere they could die
Like bugs were smashed…their ash then filled the sky.

Ten-thousands met their fate just through disease
While martinets kept strutting in their ease…
No doctors, medicines, no treatment there,
Regaining health was less than even rare.
Through fevered nights, they wept their bitter tears,
Warehoused in stacks like boxes tiers on tiers,
Emaciated bodies broken, bare,
Were sanitized in flames…then filled the air.

Oh yes…I had been there at Anzio,
Throughout the South Pacific…at Iwo,
I gathered in those places friend with foe,
Saw battle-hardened troops their mettle show.
They came to me – to Death – I gathered them,
They came blood-soaked and spewing bloody phlegm,
They came with honor, fighting for a cause,
They faced me, fears in check, without a pause.

But Auschwitz…what an evil travesty
On what Almighty God had meant to be
A thing of beauty…yes…and called mankind
But seen in martinets so ill-defined!
At Auschwitz they became an evil force,
Satanic animals…sadistic…coarse,
Who sent their victims, shorn of dignity,
So inhumanely…yes…they cursed to me.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

The EDUCATION Racket

Ripoffs of taxpayers are routine in Kentucky in every government department, both local and state. They're possible because legislative bodies and/or other entities such as school boards are empowered to tax citizens, who often don't notice how they're manipulated. Recent shenanigans in every entity from the airport board to those outfits ostensibly serving towns and counties (Bluegrass District something or other, for instance) have been egregious, especially, in granting inflated salaries for the anglers who can work the systems.

Public education systems are ripe for ripoff. Case in point: State Auditor Edelen found long ago that the administration of the Lexington/Fayette County School System had so messed-up its finance-arrangement that the school-board was forced to hire someone to straighten it out. Firing the perpetrators of the mess might have been appropriate but that didn't happen. Kyna Koch was hired months ago as a consultant to help do the job.

Alas...the system is in such a mess that it hasn't been fixed, so Ms. Koch will be paid $10,000 a month through June to get this done. Predictably—Ms. Koch, apparently no longer just a “consultant,” has been given a title for her new “temporary” job: Administrative Services Senior Director. Nice work if you can get it...but a sharp MBA grad at UK or certified CPA could probably straighten out the mess in a month for a song. The job hasn't been advertised for perhaps less cost, but so what!

Only in education Kentucky-style could such an important official have as a task (probably her main task), as reported in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 30 January, helping two employees to make the “financial picture really sound.” Really? Edelen described the relationship between the budget director and the finance director as “toxic,” so Koch's job is to get them to at least speak and okay the official spreadsheet. Egad! What happens if the toxicity remains? Firing either of them would be impossible, lawsuits being routine, with the school-board losing every time.

Education often equals greed and graft. The law concerning the president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education: “The president shall be compensated on a basis in excess of the base salary of any president of a Kentucky public university. The council shall set the salary of the president, which shall be exempt from state employee salary limitations as set forth in KRS 64.640.” The CPE administrator's credentials (or lack) matter not a whit vis-a-vis salary.

University of Kentucky President Capilouto's base salary, perhaps the highest and last adjusted in September 2014, is $535,000 plus $150,000 in bonuses, so CPE President King must be paid more than $535,000 or more than $685,000, depending upon the whim of the CPE council. Whether the housing and automobiles and country club memberships are also counted could apply. Who knows? The Fayette County School superintendent is worth at least a quarter-million per year, while teachers average around $50,326 (2013). The point: Administrators are grossly overpaid, though not to the extent of assistant football/basketball coaches at UK, who make better than half-a-mil annually and with perks probably approach $600,000—in the name of education.

Jay Box, newly installed president of KCTCS (community colleges) should gripe because he's being paid less than his predecessor, who was the highest paid community-college president in the whole nation. Box will make only $345,000, while his predecessor made $328,326, plus a $78,000 bonus, a $90,000 housing allowance (okay, rent is high these days), and a $43,000 car allowance...total: $539,326. In addition, Box's predecessor, Michael McCall, will make another $328,326 as president emeritus in 2015 for doing nothing...almost $27,400 a month, more than many folks make in a year of actual work. Should Box sue?

After just 18 months on the job, UK Provost Christine Riordan resigned effective 31 December 2014 to take another position far from Kentucky. Predictably, she is being paid $35,000 a month in absentia by the taxpayers through June (maybe longer) ostensibly to finish important work that no one else at UK is smart enough to handle. She will be an “executive adviser.” Get the point?

Education is the right racket for gaming the system. Eight education service-centers were part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (pork-barrel records set), with some 8 or 9 top professionals at each site, if memory serves, making top salaries to help local systems escape pedagogical nihilism. Very costly, they didn't work and were finally rescinded, but were examples of education-waste on a grand scale. It's called system-salary-sucking.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

New Kerry&Taylor Agent

Mon Cher John Kerry,

Although Je ne suis pas Charlie but appreciate that tu es Charlie, as you would insist that people everywhere should be (dodging fatwas, of course—little joke there), I'm writing to suggest you use the services of the Department for Instilling Promulgations of Love Overcoming Murders and Tortures, usually known by its acronym DIPLOMAT, of which Je suis CEO. Your genius in having James Taylor sing “You've Got a Friend” to the French president the other day, along with your hugging him twice or thrice to calm French discomfiture over the assassinations at “Hebdo,” will move you toward legend-hood in the hallowed ledger of Secretaries of State. It doesn't hurt, also, as rumor has it, that you considered English as your second language at Yale and tried to get “Skull and Bones” changed to “Crâne et Tibias.”

One agency at DIPLOMAT that will help is the Rhythmic Options for Classical Kinetics, known as ROCK, for short. It will help you choose American music that will endear the U.S. to the French, who, as everyone knows, hate everybody up to and including themselves. George Gershwin's tone poem “An American in Paris” comes to mind, having even the taxi-horns in the movement. Also, someone like Tony Bennett singing that pensive “La Vie en Rose” with a cool quartet (piano, sax, bass, drums) would have French women in a swoon, nothing like Taylor and his guitar, blue jeans and sandals?—I don't remember. Bennett would be coat-and-tie, have his hair combed and sing on pitch. “You've Got a Friend” was...well...so ditsy. Parisians don't want friends...they need money and the National Guard to clean out the no-go-zones. ROCK is an unintended acronym but in the U.S. great music is either amplified and done in clouds of mary-jane smoke or consigned to the netherworld.

Another agency for help is tagged Rhyming for Asinine Poems, or RAP, for short. The music (actually people beating mostly on anything handy, sometimes each other) is designed to greatly offend Muslims—actually everyone, though the French may not be offended since the lyrics are sort of racy and the French are known for such things as prime ministers with harems and may not recognize the goodwill gesture. Perhaps the most elite artist is Gangsta-Rapper Drake, so maybe he could go over and “recite” his big hit “The Motto,” which has this uber-intellectual line, “almost drowned in her pussy so I swam to her butt.” Or...you might send another rap-king, Bruno Mars, whose “Locked Out of Heaven” has this French-toned line, “Your sex takes me to paradise.” Get it? The shooters knew they would inevitably be killed and thus headed, according to the late Imam al-Awlaki, to join him in paradise with their own 72 virgins apiece. Another rapper, using a revered rap-word for woman—bitch—is rumored to be putting together a new masterpiece called “Beating Burka Bitches Back to Baghdad Bared and Bruised.” He's already claimed he'll make a half-billion on it. He's mostly using lyrics applied to cops and mothers in the U.S.

Then there's Diplomat's agency, Bureau for Appealing Love Lyrics and Ditties—you guessed it, BALLAD, for short. This is a work in progress since most of the appropriate music was written 1900-1960, especially in the 20s-50s and today's U.S. singers aren't actually singers, a requirement for this music. The male award winners sing into a mike a half-inch from their mouths, sound raspy or hoarse or both and have no intention to sing words anyone will hear over the bedlam of the amps. Maybe someone like Harry Connick could go over and sing old-fashioned stuff like “More than You Know” or “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Stardust,” national life-sanity-saving-stuff during World War II and Korea in both France and the U.S. Girl-singers are more interested in bump-and-grind nudity than music so they can't out-French the French in that. Beyonce might go over and lip-synch the French national anthem La Marseillaise like she did the U.S. national anthem during the last inauguration but they would hardly notice. Anyway, if she should take a bow and flash the whole country there might be an incident.

In any case, cher John, give DIPLOMAT some serious thought in the interest of showing solidarity with the French. Let ROCK, RAP and BALLAD help you do better than James Taylor the next time. We also have plans for other nations, too, especially the ones insulted by the administration on practically a daily basis, like the Brits, for instance.

Bien Cordialement,
Je Suis Otherself, CEO
DIPLOMAT

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Big Joke...Deflated Football

The inordinate nationwide interest (furor, too) vis-a-vis the slightly deflated football used by the Boston Patriots in their walloping of the Indianapolis Colts for the right to play in the Super Bowl is strange, at least perhaps to those like me, who figure that cheating has always been a part of the sports-scene. Whether it's a boxer “taking a dive” or nearly the entire Chicago White Sox team in 1919 “fixing” the world series and later called the “Black Sox,” it's just par for the course to get an “edge” over the opponent, often by any means necessary.

In the 1940s-50s, some starters on the University of Kentucky basketball teams apparently “fixed” games not necessarily to lose but simply to guarantee the right point-spread for gamblers and/or themselves (with payoffs) to get well. The reason the players could pull it off was simply that they were so much better than other players that they could hit and miss at will. Three players on another UK team in the early 1990s “fixed” foul shooting in at least one game (maybe more) when in confusion after a foul call on Vandy they twice substituted a player at the foul-line who was not fouled but who was a sure shot for one who wasn't. Nobody caught the subterfuge at the time and the players just figured they were doing “what comes naturally”—getting an edge.

More seriously, during 2009-11 there was a “bounty hunter” effort among some of the NFL New Orleans Saints players and coaches, in which players received bonuses for knocking opposing players out of the game, i.e., hurting them badly enough to gain an “edge.” Quarterbacks knocked out of a game represented an especial accomplishment, removing the most key player. A coach and player were actually suspended for a year but other players in on the butchering just received suspensions for a specific number of games. A broken limb means 6 weeks on the sidelines but a concussion, a favored outcome, while a short-term disability, can ruin a player's life.

Why all the hubbub about the deflated ball? MONEY! The average yearly player's salary in the NFL is a paltry $1.9 million, much less than in the NBA, MLB, and NHL at $5.15 million, $3.2 million, and $2.4 million, respectively. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is guaranteed $110 million 2015-19 while Patriot quarterback Tom Brady (deflated football) will make $24 million 2015-17. The 2014 Super Bowl winning player's (Seattle) bonus was $157,000 counting the playoffs, too. Compare that to the 2014 World Series winning player's bonus of $388,606, not counting the playoffs, which bumped it closer to half a million.

Just as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing about the coal miner selling his soul to the company store, the professional athlete, especially in football, sells his body for the highest bid. The use of all kinds of drugs that enhance short-term skills cause long-term problems including everything from suicide to Alzheimer's to broken bodies. The baseball scandals of the last few years are just the tip of the iceberg—human-growth-hormone and other drugs pumping up the bodies of folks like Barry Bonds (artificial hitting records) and Alex Rodriguez, suspended for the entire 2014 baseball season. According to Baseball Reference.com, A-Rod's career salary is at $356,285,104.

Neither Patriot coach Belichick nor quarterback Brady had any knowledge of anything as dastardly as “fixing” a football for a game played in the driving rain, according to what both said in separate press conferences. A while back, Belichick—or at least the organization—was fined a half-million for spying on another team in order to discover its defensive signals. I believe spying on other teams doing anything is considered part of the game, so I was surprised at such outrage by the NFL, which lately has been trying to make itself responsible for punishing domestic-violence offenders in its ranks, something that belongs to law enforcement and the courts—another sham.

Players DO strive to win games and honors, as they often claim, though sometimes sanctimoniously; however television, the driver of the huge amounts of money for both players and organizations, corrupts everything it touches. The winning-player's share in the 1968 World Series was $10,937 as opposed to that of 2014, $388,606. That says it all. Players and organizations DO cheat. Spectators know this and generally don't care.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

S-O-T-U...Much Ado about Nothing

Under Article II(3) of the U.S. Constitution, the president is required “from time to time” to inform Congress of the state-of-the-union and make recommendations as to what should be done. Early in President Obama's speech on 20 January, he announced that he would send Congress a budget. According to Article I(7), however, all bills for raising revenue (actually the budget since spending is a determinate) are to originate in the House of representatives, with the Senate proposing or concurring with amendments.

S-O-T-U could be done without the ballyhoo connected to a speech delivered to Congress, the SCOTUS justices, the military head honchos, a balcony with “guests” of the president's wife, a royal promenade in and out, etc. The state-of-the-union address, as is, comprises a circus meant to give everyone involved—with video coverage throughout—an extra 15 minutes of fame. It could be far more concise and detailed if simply delivered in a document and presented to everyone involved, who could then advance it to the media of choice for nationwide perusal.

Until the early twentieth century (pre-Wilson), most presidents merely submitted a written report. With the advent of radio and TV, the temptation to use this constitutional requirement as a purely political ploy has been too great to overcome, thus the s-o-t-u propaganda-machine, complete with all the trappings of a monarchy, even to the bellowing of the sergeant-of-arms that his highness is about to favor the unwashed with his presence, sort of like “h-e-r-e c-o-m-e-s B-a-r-a-c-k, reminiscent of the Carson talk-show intro back in the day.

I stopped listening/viewing this circus some time ago, preferring to simply read the transcript although, admittedly, watching and listening to Ronald Reagan was rewarding just as an opportunity to observe an art-form, actual rhetoric as opposed to mere speechifying. By comparison, Obama has about as much speaking ability and charisma as a bear in hibernation, but then so have most other presidents. Watching grown people clap and act like jacks-in-the-boxes is simply comedic.

I wondered if Nancy Pelosi might not break something in her frantic up-and-down gyrations in a speech I at least partly watched a few years ago. One watched then to see if Veep Biden fell asleep. I tuned in the other night (after reading a book with ballgame ended, sound muted) at 9:54 to catch the end (I thought) of the great speech of 2015 and determined to suffer it through until it ended at 10:11—seventeen boring minutes in which nothing was speechified about the state of the union, while a SCOTUS person slept a bit, or so I thought.

What I heard was what one might expect a coach to say to his team—35 points down—at halftime. It was a colossal pep-talk and had little or nothing to do with how substantive things stand in the nation. Obama spoke of exterminating partisanship and gridlock but has already established gridlock with his executive orders and veto-threats. He spoke of comforting grieving families but didn't mention the humongous lie he perpetrated on the grieving families vis-a-vis the Benghazi massacre. He heralded same-sex marriage as being promoted from a wedge issue to “a story of freedom.” Perversion as freedom? Egad!

Predictably, Obama brought up Ferguson and New York and the son who can't walk around without being harassed, but not his hometown, Chicago, where murders happen well over once a day and “sons” are killed in gangs and girls in cross-fires. Ironically, it has just been announced that the army of prosecutors Obama and Holder sent to Ferguson to create civil-rights charges against Officer Wilson found no grounds for any action.

Obama said that every child should know that he/she matters. Well...as Gomer would say—Shazzam! At least he didn't mention Trayvon Martin, his son if he had one. As a railroader with layovers in Chattanooga back in the day, I discovered that a white guy had better be careful where he walked, although the worst that happened to me was being the target of rock-throwers.

Both the substance and the delivery of this sophomoric 17-minute epilogue/sermon were poorly chosen, poorly done, respectively. I've been though the transcript, a hodgepodge of two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage. I didn't see the term al Qaeda. What I saw was the same old class-war approach and I don't remember seeing the term Benghazi, either, or IRS or Fast-and-Furious or the salvation of Libya...but in my scan I might have missed some things.

But it was great political theater...meaning nothing, except, maybe that the emperor has no clothes.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

“Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) has been the rallying cry of people in both the U.S. and Europe regarding the “Charlie Hebdo Massacre” in Paris a few days ago. However, “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I am not Charlie). This has nothing to do with what actually happened, but with the victim/cartoonists who created the horns of their own dilemma, whether by malice, honest opinion, artistic endeavor, atheistic philosophy, attempt at comedy/entertainment or anything else. It's abundantly obvious that the Muslim jihadists, ipso facto, must be exterminated.

The cartoonists' viewers can decide—if they even care enough—about the motivation for creating unflattering depictions of Mohammad. Examples of their work are available on the Internet, one such location being here: Je Suis Charlie. Just a cursory examination will indicate that the Hebdo gang reveled in denigrating not just Mohammad/Islam, Christianity/Jesus, Jewry, Catholicism, religion-in-general, government and people. They did it through depicting hate, obscenity and porn, some of it so sophomoric as to cause giggles more than reasoned reaction.

In this country and in Europe, Christianity and Jesus Christ can be lampooned, insulted, denigrated and demeaned, with the public's (including the Christians') managing a ho-hum. Freedom of speech is a Constitutional right and, no matter how offensive it is to some people, cannot be abridged. Moreover, Christians are not disposed to “protecting” God or his good name because they understand that God needs no protection. A feeble Homo-sapiens attempt to either prove or defend God on any basis other than personal faith or scripture is wasting his time. People can't prove God empirically to any greater extent than scientists can empirically disprove God.

Cartoonists and other commentators who make a constant effort to ridicule God and people of faith never realize that they score points only when a reader/viewer rises to the bait. For instance, Herald-Leader resident atheist Larry Webster lampooned Jesus in the 18 January issue, using Christ's physical appearance as the vehicle for ridicule, something completely unknown and therefore eligible for comparison to everything from Popeye to the junk-yard dog. As a person of faith, I just laugh. I'm not the least bit offended. A Charlie Hebdo cartoonist would have compared Christ to the north end of a southbound mule or to Beyonce's derriere if she had bent over while lip-synching the national anthem at the last inaugural.

The same is true with the scientists who claim to know what they can't even imagine. When they tell me the earth is 4.6 billion years old, or 5 billion or any billion, I just laugh. They do well to merely conceive of recorded history of a few thousand years. If they claim the Grand Canyon was carved out by river-erosion over billions of years, that's fine with me, but I reserve the right to believe that the “big split” happened in a minute...a gigantic eruption of some kind perhaps. Even though the data they derive from the data inputted to their computers indicates the earth to be much warmer a thousand years ago than now, I view the exercise as merely interesting, though damning to global-warming alarmists who think they can change the climate and bring-on universal AC.

I'm not a “flat-earther” believing that mankind is only 6,000 or so years old but I believe others have the right to believe otherwise, especially since none of us was around then. When the “big-bangers” write scholarly papers about earth's origins but never locate earth's origins, I grin a bit, yet admit that man is created to and should strive for understanding. When the evolutionists describe how a chimp became me after trying for a billion years...or two...or three, I applaud their effort, hopeless as I believe it to be. Sometimes I wonder if the chimp might be insulted.

Je ne suis pas un fou (I am not a fool). Perhaps this separates me from the Parisian cartoonists, who see what they do as freedom of speech sort of like yelling “incendie en le théâtre” (fire in the theater). Freedom of speech is not foolishness of speech. If the cartoonists want to risk suicide over a smutty adolescent depiction of Mohammad—fine—but only up to the point at which they do not endanger others, like innocent non-cartoonists or police killed in protecting what is actually their non-right to lunacy.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Baptist Editor Blasts Franklin Graham

Baptists Today is a liberal magazine published in Macon, Georgia. Its editor is John D. Pierce, a Baptist minister, who in a recent blog wrote this: “Recently, Nikolai Novikov has been repeatedly fined, jailed, and restricted in his freedom to travel, according to Forum18. His crime: Holding worship services in West Kazakhstan without government permission. Like Novikov, Maksim Volikov is also a Baptist Christian in Kazakhstan. He was fined the equivalent of one’s month’s average salary according to the news service.

These examples — and worse — of real religious discrimination and persecution occurring around the world (to people of various faiths) need to be contrasted with the silly claims that flow from many American Christian leaders who love to play victim. Franklin Graham is such an example with his continual thoughtless commentaries — which, thankfully, he is free to express in this great country.”

Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham and president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, located in Boone, NC, perhaps the nation's largest worldwide charity, is an ardent participant in the Southern Baptist Convention, accused by Baptist liberals of being “fundamentalist” and therefore ensconced in theological ignorance. Baptists Today is aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a relatively small denomination (actually a consortium of churches not listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches as a denomination) that is an outgrowth of the “split” in the Southern Baptist Convention occasioned about 1979 through 1991 over questions of theology, primarily the ordination of women.

The SBC, with some 16 million members, is the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the U.S. At least half of its members are female and apparently satisfied with the SBC position, but liberals view it as not politically correct, therefore heretical. Theologically, the jury is out—disagreement on all sides, including those with Ph.d.s—but liberals can't tolerate disagreement when it clashes with PC, the new norm doctrinally. The fact that Islam is the driving force currently behind genocide in especially the Middle East and Africa doesn't signify to the PC-crowd as enough to make one wonder about mounting the prayer rug and facing toward Mecca, not to mention the carnage of 9/11.

Pierce's angst was occasioned by his belief that Duke University recently reversed a decision to allow its chapel “bell tower” to be used to call Muslims to prayer on Fridays because Franklin Graham spoke out against it. However, according to the Charlotte Observer of 16 January, Michael Schoenfeld, a Duke vice president, said the university had received hundreds of calls and emails, many of which were quite vitriolic. Translated, some big contributors to Duke financially, as well probably as many others, viewed that decision with enough jaundice to turn off the dollar-faucet. That gets the attention of any college administrator.

Graham did have something to say in a post: “I think it's wrong [muezzin in the bell tower]...I think many people have a problem with it.” Graham mentioned the raping, butchering, beheading of Christians and Jews and anyone not submitting to Sharia Islamic law. While liberal Christian-tourists take vacations worshiping God in the Holy Land—with side-trips to maybe Greece and Italy—Graham shows up in places like northern Iraq and ebola-country in Africa or anywhere there's been an earthquake, tsunami, tornado or displaced refugees.

Unlike most if not all large charities, Samaritan's Purse places its entire financial status on the Internet for everyone to see. According to its federal form 990 for 2013, Graham oversaw a budget of $460 million with 87% of it going directly to ministry (doctors, hospitals, churches, schools, drilling pure wells, housing, disaster relief, etc.), only 8% for fund-raising, and 5% for administration. Perhaps the next largest charitable agency is the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which had a 2014 budget amounting to $299 million that supported 4,793 foreign missionaries.

Liberal Christians in many denominations and churches expend much hot air talking the walk but Graham and the IMB walk the walk, making actions much louder than words. They also take strong stands on other questions such as the absurdity of men marrying men and engaging in deviant behavior, another PC no-no, but while the liberal churches are dying on the vine, these conservatives, if not exactly flourishing as the faith is demeaned from the White House through the media to the man on the street, are at least doing good and holding their own.

As for Pierce and his wholly gratuitous slandering of Graham, he's not alone in that activity. Actually, Graham should be flattered.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Paris March Eligibility?

This is from Aljazeera of 22 August 2011: “Gaddafi repeatedly blamed the unrest on al-Qaeda and a 'colonialist plot.' He called those opposed to him 'rats,' and alleged that they had been influenced by 'hallucinogenic drugs'.” Gaddafi was fighting the U.S and NATO at the time and had mentioned in his infamous UN speech in 2009 that al Qaeda operatives were being held in Libyan jails. In 2003, Gaddafi began turning Libya's weapons of mass destruction over to the U.S. In that UN speech, he also lionized Obama for the obvious reason, a black man as a U.S. president.

Okay...Gaddafi was weird and did strange things like sleeping in a tent when he traveled abroad, though one as susceptible to assassination as he was would be expected to take precautions. His precautions didn't help him in October 2011, however, when Obama's attempt at assassinating him was successful, sort of like the assassination of bin Laden, for which Obama never misses an opportunity to take credit, as commander-in-chief, of course.

It isn't too big a stretch to connect all this with the absence of any high-ranking U.S. representative, especially the president, at the solidarity march of world leaders against Islamic jihad in Paris, France, on 11 January. Gaddafi was about the only Middle East Muslim head honcho in 2009 and 2011 actually fighting al Qaeda, the primary consortium of Islamic jihad butchers at the time. Al Qaeda butchers were trying to take over Libya then but Obama and NATO and the UN threw in with the butchers, who finally did take over Libya and then transported their murderous legions/weapons to Syria.

In Syria, where are those mercenaries now? Who knows? Are they fighting Assad, whom Obama unsuccessfully ordered to leave his presidency in 2011 and turn Syria over to whoever could grab it and keep it? Or, are they a part of ISIS, now in the process of horrifically and incomprehensibly terrorizing northern Syria and most of Iraq, featuring genocide especially of Christians and other religious adherents, and displaying be-headings on the Internet to cow whole populations into submission?

Where did these Muslims, for whom former State Secretary Clinton orated in December (one of those $100,000 speeches/conferences?) we must exercise empathy and respect, get their weapons—both small arms and big stuff? The small arms went from the U.S. to Libyan “freedom fighters” (what a laugh!) and to the freedom fighters in Syria. The big stuff was given by the U.S. to the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, which turned tail and ran before the ISIS onslaught and simply gave ISIS all those big guns, vehicles, rocket-launchers, missiles, RPGs and on and on.

Considering his Libya fiasco, it would have been embarrassing for Obama to take part in the Paris march since he was on the wrong side in 2011. He didn't even send old “God love ya” Biden or State Secretary Kerry (busy in India) or UN Ambassador Power (probably hunting for another Libya to liberate). Attorney General Holder was in Paris but not in the march, although he had time for five TV appearances that day, in which he explained that the terrorists were not Muslim terrorists; rather, they were terrorists “using Islam as their apologetic for murder,” or something like that. People like German Chancellor Merkel and British Prime Minister Cameron do not agree, marched, and prefer calling a spade a spade.

Many of the jihad Muslims in Europe are “home-grown,” i.e., citizens born in Europe. There are an estimated 750 “no-go-zones” in France alone, in many of which insulated neighborhoods the police or fire-fighters dare not go, and where “Sharia Law,” prevails, under which women, particularly, are turned into chattel. From these zones come the young religious fanatics, who ARE driven by Islamic directives in the Hadith and Koran (the words of Mohammad), as well as by the radical mosque functionaries who preach hate and murder. Europeans understand the threat all too well, as should Americans who have become too complacent about 9/11.

The time has come to absolutely forbid entrance to immigrants from any Muslim-dominated country (that's all Middle East countries and many African), including even tourists. There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, or 23% of total population. There are about 6.7 million Muslims in the U.S., 2.11% of its total population.

This is from Pew Research of April 2011: “Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere. A relatively large proportion of Muslim immigrants are from Arab countries, but many also come from Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.” The enemy is in the land, especially the young converts, as in Europe (sleeper cells), who mean harm on the basis of their religion. Paris ignored notwithstanding, this is the problem for the U.S.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Professor Skewers Voter-ID Laws

The Lexington Herald-Leader presents on at least a monthly basis a column prepared by a University of Kentucky professor in the interest of making sure that neither UK nor the newspaper (McClatchy-owned) is ever accused of being middle-of-the-road, conservative, or anything other than far-left-fringe. The column in the 10 January issue by history professor Ron Formisano dealt with undue hardships placed on blacks in certain states regarding their ability to vote. The states he picked for enlightenment: Alabama, Texas, Mississippi. The subject: voter ID.

To make his point, Formisano used university football games in those states, noting that most of the players are black but most of the spectators, as well as (gasp) the alumni, are white but didn't mention that 74% of the U.S. population is white. He conceded that the white spectators showed enthusiasm for the playing of the blacks but noted grimly “the efforts of its elected representatives [Alabama in this case] to prevent the young players, black and white, from voting.” The reason: those awful Voter ID laws, though he didn't mention that the laws apply to everyone, black and white, not just football players.

Formisano mentioned other southern states with the abominable, unfair ID-laws on the books, and even conceded that some non-southern states (implying that one might expect better of them) had those laws. His state, Kentucky, whether considered southern or non-southern, has had voter-ID laws for many years, but Formisano didn't describe the hardship it places upon him and others, black or white, football players or not, to cast a ballot.

Most of Kentucky's football players are black and the basketball team is so black that a white guy, if in existence, can expect to play only when UK is ahead by 40 points in the final two minutes. The coach uses a two-platoon system in which all ten starters are black. Though not as boisterous as Alabama's, UK's fans are nevertheless quite supportive of blacks who risk concussions and assorted broken bones every week. The basketball fans' arena-elevators vis-a-vis sanity are one floor short of the top—frenetic! Formisano didn't mention how the skewed numbers of blacks vis-a-vis the demographics are due to to the ID-punished majority white voters. No quotas in sports, just everything else!

Formisano opined that viewing stadiums packed overwhelmingly with whites jogged his memory as to how most of those whites voted in recent presidential elections: 10% for Obama in Alabama in 2008; 10% in Mississippi in 2012; 14% in Louisiana in 2012. He didn't suggest that attendance at football games had any influence on the voting where he claimed “football is a religion,” but one infers that to be his standard for dissing Obama, or maybe mixing metaphors is just his style. He didn't mention that about 93% of the black vote throughout the entire nation went for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, but that fact had nothing much to do with football anyway, so why bother?

The strangest twist that Formisano gave the subject, though having nothing to do with football, was the claim that southern white democrats in the 1960s began becoming the “bedrock of the modern Republican Party,” thereby deserting Lyndon Johnson, civil rights, and all the rest. Well...no! The democrats deserted because of racial prejudice while the republicans were Johnson's supporters, just as they were Lincoln's supporters in the 1860s. But Formisano wrote that republicans moderated the tirades of Alabama governor George Wallace and began using “coded racial language,” whatever that is/was. He gave no examples.

Predictably, Formisano connected all those social upheavals in the South, presumably including the worship of football, with the religious right becoming a “force among southern evangelicals.” Actually, the evangelicals are a force among the religious right. To a committed liberal, southern evangelicals are roughly equivalent to Attila's Huns and would never worship Harvard football.

In finishing, Formisano wrote that everything he had written is well known with regard to “what is now a solid republican South,” and added, “Less remarked upon are the ironic contrasts that now exist between Southern football and the politics of the white South.” So, thanks to the professor, now we know. Hypocritical white southern spectators should be booing instead of cheering in those sanctified stadiums.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Newest Lunacy—Dating Laws

The latest big news in Kentucky (front-page above-the-fold in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 05 January) is that Governor and Mrs. Beshear are (again) pushing the enactment of laws in the new legislature establishing domestic protection for mostly teenagers and 20-somethings who have a problem, defined as “dating couples—people who have not been married, lived together or shared a child.” One wonders what “sharing a child” is but the governor and wife probably mean the conception of a fetus through normal sexual intercourse.

If two unmarried teenagers conceive a child in the backseat during a date and get in a fight some time after the child is born, does one of them apply for a protective order, or would such order be available after their fight only if they hadn't conceived a child? The appropriate definition of domestic: “of or relating to the household or the family.” Since domesticity is not an issue in either case above, what kind of protection do the Beshears have in mind? The legislature has been tied up with this nonsense for ten years, with no action, and there likely will be none this time around.

In 2008, Steve Nunn and Amanda Ross lived together for about six months and were supposedly engaged. They were not married, had a fight(s), and the affair went very sour, with Nunn moving out and Ross filing a domestic-violence petition against him. Nunn was forced out of his state-job in Frankfort in February 2009 and in March 2009 a judge ordered Nunn to neither have any contact with Ross for a year nor possess a firearm during the order's duration. The suggested new legislation would not have been effective in this case.

In September 2009, Ross was shot to death and Nunn was charged with violation of the protective order and murder. In June 2011, Nunn pleaded guilty to murder with aggravating circumstances and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In the meantime, there was a hue and cry for more laws presumably to stop people like Nunn from committing murder and the legislature's time was eaten up over this matter, just as it will be with this new “domestic” matter. The result was “Amanda's Law,” which featured electronic monitoring of people violating domestic orders under certain circumstances such as assault. Would this monitoring have stopped Nunn at six in the morning (with whereabouts unknown) before he could have driven a few minutes and done the deed?

Apparently, Amanda's law is not enough to curtail violence/murder, at least regarding people, young and old, who are just “dating” and get into a fight. How will “dating” be defined in the new law...“going steady” for a certain number of days or weeks? Cohabitation is vaguely definable, whether for short or long periods, though it lacks documentation and therefore actual definition. What will be the age parameters effected by the new law? People vote at age 18, so will the new law involve just people who are minors? Apparently not, since people date when in their 70s-80s and at the time are not married, living together or “sharing” a child. The same is true for people of any age.

Imagine two “dating” teenagers getting into a fight. If the 17-year-old guy has been guilty of assault and the judge orders electronic monitering when the 17-year-old girl blows the whistle and gets a petition authorized, what happens to school-attendance? Will a policeman have to check out the guy every day to see if he actually is in school, or does he just have to quit school or continue as an object of curiosity/derision? If monitoring was vital to Amanda's Law, won't it be vital to the “dating” law?

In KET's Kentucky Tonight program of 05 January, there was no non-partisanship on this subject, Senate majority leader Republican Stivers against it and House Speaker democrat Stumbo for a “dating” law, mentioning that the House has passed such a law for ten years. The progressive (democrat) position is that government must control the “daters,” apparently of any age, while the conservative (republican) position is that current laws are good enough, as was the case before Amanda's Law was enacted.

College “date-rape” is at the core of much of this waste of time, though nobody believes that 20% of all coeds, the current insistence, are violated in some way. Co-ed dorms are a huge part of the problem and girls getting drunk at frat houses are another. The legislature might do some good if it outlawed co-ed dorms and did away with fraternities altogether. Even better, parents should teach their teens that animals “do it instinctively,” while people are given the power of brains over hormones. Instead, the big deal is free condoms—and WHOOPEE!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark