Note: This is my weekend op-ed for VCTR.

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot

As we ring in the New Year, the news is full of accounts of the High and the Mighty and their great plans to do us good in an awful hurry. The question of whether we want good done to us is regarded as of no consequence.

The more of life I see, the more I appreciate the truth of Eliot’s observation.

In national politics, importance means accomplishing Great Reforms, or eliminating Great Evils. Nobody promises just to be a capable executive, frugally administer public funds, and cautiously tweak the system to see if some improvements can be made. Indeed it’s doubtful if anyone could get elected running on such a platform.

In journalism, importance means breaking The Story of the Century. (How many have we read in the first decade of this century so far?) Nowadays big time journalism regards itself as the fourth branch of government and a mighty Force for Good, rather than the watchdog of a free people.

Case in point. Last week I watched journalism goddess Lesley Stahl on former Republican Governor Mike Huckbee’s show on FOX. They were commemorating the life of legendary journalist/producer Don Hewitt, who founded the “television news magazine” 60 Minutes in 1968.

Stahl described how she started at 60 Minutes in 1991. A few years ago she had to take a $500,000 pay cut so CBS could afford Katie Couric ($15 million per year,) but still makes a reported $1.8 million per year.

Stahl’s first journalistic coup was an expose of the baby selling market in Romania. She posed as an American woman trying to buy two handsome boys, ages six and eight years, from their mother for $2,000. Huckabee ran clips of the piece, showing Stahl and a middleman haggling with the mother, right in front of the kids.

Baby selling! The very words invoke horror. As opposed to a civilized American adoption where the agency gets exorbitant fees and the mother nothing.

“We shut them down,” Stahl crowed, as Huckabee nodded appreciatively.

I had a different reaction. You see, I’ve been to Romania too.

Five years after that broadcast I relocated from Poland to Bulgaria by train. The trip included a four-hour stopover in Bucharest. By the time I got on the train to Sofia, I didn’t know whether to get out of the country and never come back, or stay and join a religious order.

Because communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu mandated high birth rates while impoverishing the country, the capitol was full of abandoned children. For blocks around the train station, no manhole had a cover, because the children where living in the tunnels under the streets.

I saw legions of filthy children begging. Some showing off hideous orthopedic deformities, some sniffing glue in corners. many reportedly HIV positive.

Though I lean lukewarm against the death penalty, I’m glad they killed that monster and his wife. (Yes I know, the trial was a farce and the verdict a forgone conclusion. Guess what? I don’t care.)

When I went back a few years later, the children were gone. I like to think they’re being cared for. But I didn’t ask.

Any mother in those circumstances who loved her children would joyfully send them to America with a loving family, even at the cost of never seeing them again. I’ve known two lovely, healthy, and intelligent young women raised by American families who found them abandoned on their doorsteps, in India and Korea respectively. They bless the mothers they never knew.

But you shut them down Lesley, you and 60 Minutes.

Congratulations.

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Note: This is my weekend op-ed for the newspaper. I penned it early because this Saturday I’m headed out on the road again! My son and I are going car camping through the north western states, maybe all the way to the Pacific.

Maximilien François de Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution and architect of The Reign of Terror, was sitting with a friend in a sidewalk cafe in Paris.
Suddenly a huge crowd rushed by. Robespierre jumped up and ran after them.
“Robespierre! Where are they going? What are they doing?” his friend calls.
“I don’t know, but I have to be in front. I’m their leader!”

Last Saturday, September 12, a crowd of protesters descended on Washington, D.C., a big one.

They came to protest the massive expansion of government and the national debt.

How big a crowd is debated. News reports first said, “thousands,” quickly revised to “tens of thousands.” Eyewitnesses known to me say, “six figures minimum.”

The London newspaper Daily Mail, estimated at least a million, others as high as two million. To the cautious that sounds a bit over the top.

All of these figures come from eyeball estimates. Counting crowds is dicey at best. You define a square, get a rough count of the people inside it, then count how many squares cover the crowd. Then there’s the question of how dense the crowd is. People tend to cluster near speakers, for example.

The National Park Service said they’d have an estimate later this week, based on analysis of aerial photos. The Park Service hasn’t done crowd estimates for 14 years, since their 1995 estimate of the Million Man March sponsored by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam turned out so disappointingly low.

We’ll see how long it is before they’re allowed to do another crowd estimate after this. But from the pictures, no one can doubt this was huge.

From photos and interviews some facts are emerging.

This is not the Republican Party still sore about the election. This is a lot of Americans from all over the country who are really sore about both parties. A sentiment expressed on one T-shirt, “Impeach Everybody!”

There are Republicans trying to ride this movement’s coat tails like Robespierre – and they’re being told to sit down, shut up and listen. They should consider themselves lucky, Robespierre was guillotined.

Media call the crowd “conservative,” and it may be in the sense that 41 percent of the electorate label themselves. Which means something different from what conservatives in Washington (a.k.a. Big Government Republicans) mean by it. It might be Populist, if anyone could tell me what that means. There appears to be a strong libertarian “leave us the hell alone” streak in it.

These people are not happy about insults they’ve received, as expressed on one sign, “It doesn’t matter what this sign says, they’ll call it racist anyway.”

This is the real thing, in that overused phrase, a grass-roots movement. Not “astroturf.”

The pictures show a crowd generally well-dressed though not upscale, orderly, an average age surprisingly high, and contrary to critics not lily-white either. Minorities are represented though sparsely, as are a surprising number of immigrants.

This is the middle class on the march, and I’ve seen it before. In several countries where people got utterly fed up with their government.*

A people fed up with a recklessly spendthrift Republican administration turned them out of power. Democrats took that as permission to join the Republicans in running up debt to levels many say looks like national suicide. Someone’s not listening.

After Sunday an anonymous commenter remarked, “When people with jobs demonstrate, you know something is happening.”

Folks, this is a game-changer. A lot of angry Americans have learned that when you’re frustrated, insulted, and feel like nobody is listening, demonstrating is fun.

*In Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania I marched with people who had had enough of their government and turned out in numbers too big to ignore or shoot down; students, professionals, workingmen, little old babushkas and elegant ladies in fur wraps. In Yugoslavia it was a very near run thing. I may owe my life to a police chief who refused to give the kill order – and was killed for it.

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My weekend op-ed in the newspaper.

To conspire,” verb: from the Latin con spirare, “to breathe with”: 1. to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement . 2. to act in harmony toward a common end. – Merriam-Webster

“Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- The First Principle of Conspiracy.

The Daily Kos website recently posted the results of a survey that purported to find that in spite of contemporary birth announcements in newspapers and Hawaiian state documents, 28 percent of Republicans believe President Obama was not born in the U.S. and 30 percent are not sure.

Note however, this is the same website that took seriously columnist Andrew Sullivan’s claim Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not the mother, but the grandmother of her child Trig.

In 1997 when I was living in former Yugoslavia a student very seriously asked me, “Do you think (President) Milosevic is working for Clinton?”

After 9/11 a student in Poland asked me, “Is it true that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?”

What is the appeal of the notion events are ruled by sinister groups of conspirators?

For one, conspiracy theories appeal to our sense of self-importance and the thrill of possessing occult knowledge. “Everybody’s been duped about how the world really runs but me and a few like-minded comrades. We know things nobody else does.”

Conspiracy theories offer reassurance. The realization the powerful are not inherently wiser than we are can be terrifying. The idea those in charge are sinister conspirators is actually reassuring, if the alternative is that no one really knows what’s going on.

And then there are people so convinced of the self-evident rightness of their position the mere existence of people who disagree is incomprehensible. They must have ulterior motives for denying what is so obviously true.

For example, the reaction of the proponents of the administration’s health care plan to the opposition amounts to sheer incomprehension that so many people could sincerely disagree. Which causes them to, equally sincerely, attribute dissent to “a vast right-wing conspiracy” in Hillary Clinton’s famous words.*

Real or not, widespread belief in conspiracies has driven historical events more often than we’re comfortable thinking about. Historian Bernard Bailyn has documented how much popular belief in a conspiracy against American liberty motivated the American Revolution. The Nazis claimed a Jewish conspiracy against Germany justified the “Final Solution.”

Calling a claim someone is making a “conspiracy theory” can be used to dismiss, rather than address a position.

The Associated Press recently ran an article stating, “Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.”

Calling it a “conspiracy theory” is disingenuous. In fact, there is a “conspiracy” in the sense of “acting to a common end,” but it’s not the least bit secret. It’s openly discussed in articles, websites, and speeches by Mexican officials and Mexican-American intellectuals who have never forgotten what Americans never remember – that the southwest quarter of the U.S. was once the northern half of Mexico.

And, sometimes there really are conspiracies. That’s why we have criminal conspiracy laws.

“Never be surprised by conspiracy. Conspiracy is normal primate politics.”
- The Second Principle of Conspiracy

* Hillary’s dismissal of claims her husband had “sexual relations with that woman” and lied about it under oath.

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This is the Doonesbury strip from July 1.

Mother Boopsie says, “See how many female protestors there are? That’d be impossible in most Arab societies. Images like that are incredibly empowering to gals all over the Middle East.”

Daughter remarks, “Arab girls need empowering.”

First of all, let me say that I agree whole heartedly.

It almost makes me regret what I’m about to do to Gary Trudeau.

I’ve been following Doonesbury on and off since near the beginning. More off than on these days I’m afraid. Since Gary Trudeau became more a social commentator than a cartoonist he’s been preachy, snide, and to put it baldly – either a liar or woefully ignorant of history.

He recently identified waterboarding as the same torture practices used by the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese in WWII – a lie. Whether you excuse the practice of waterboarding by American interrogators or not, the fact is the torture techniques used by the Inquisition and the Japanese are similar only insofar as they use water.

But the worst sin of all is – he’s not funny anymore. At least not as much or as often as he used to be.

As an Okie, I still treasure his hilarious take on the Oklahoma county commissioners scandal, lo these many years ago.

“Say, you’re Emma Doonesbury’s boy ain’t you? Well, we just want you to know your Uncle Henry is a good ‘ol boy who always took care of his people.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that,” Uncle Henry replies.

“Say Henry, do you think you could do my driveway afore you goes to jail?”

So it’s with a certain “gotcha” feeling that I have to point out to Mr. Trudeau, IRANIANS ARE NOT ARABS YOU TWIT.

And furthermore, I am gobsmacked that anyone who has been so loud about his opinions on the war on terror (silly term though it is) and the Iraq strategy thereof, wouldn’t know that.

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Note: A slightly different version of this appeared as the weekend editorial in the paper..

I’m watching the demonstrations in Iran with the oddest feeling I’ve seen this movie before. In fact, I think I was an extra in a street scene.

In late 1996 I was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, and working at the Institute for Foreign Languages as an English teacher. It was interesting work, my students were a delight to teach, and the country was very beautiful.

Unfortunately, the work was rewarding only in the spiritual sense. I was getting paid in the local currency, Bulgarian leva, which was inflating at the rate of about 10 percent a day. My last payday amounted to $40 for the month, which became $36 dollars by the end of the day without me spending any of it.

On top of that, government offices would not accept their own country’s currency for fees and permits.

About that time, I heard that a friend of mine, Tomas Krsmanovic, a Serbian dissident, was being leaned on by the secret police. After communicating with a dissident-support network I worked with, I decided to relocate to Belgrade, on the theory that if I lived in Tomas’ lap, the thugocracy wouldn’t want to murder him in front of a foreign witness.

What was happening in former Yugoslavia were demonstrations in the capital, Belgrade, and many other cities around the country, to protest electoral fraud attempted by the government of Slobodan Milošević after the 1996 local elections.
Before I left, I marched with the people of Sofia down the yellow brick road (I’m NOT kidding) past the government offices, in a protest that brought down the last communist/coalition government.

A British traveller told me, “You ought to head to Albania, you’re on a roll!”

Within 24 hours I was in Belgrade in the middle of their demonstrations.
My friend helped me find jobs at two language schools and a room to rent (payment in Deutchmarks.) The lawyer of one school helped me get work and residence permits in order. (She was, by the way, a lovely young woman who bore, with reasonably good humor, the name Biljana Dracula.)

The demonstrations in Belgrade went on for 96 days and nights from November 1996 to February 1997, when Slobodan Milošević recognized the opposition victories.
Every night an estimated 17 percent of the city’s population (about 1,182,000 though it was hard to tell with war refugees and constant in-migration from the countryside) were on the streets marching, singing and making as much noise as they could during “pandemonium half-hour” when the official government news was broadcast. People not on the streets made noise from their apartment windows and balconies. Construction of homemade noisemakers was a thriving cottage industry.

I marched with students, working people, elegant ladies with furs, and little, old Babushkas beating on metal soup bowls. I couldn’t help it, the demonstrations were impossible to avoid. After work I just took the first demonstration heading home.
The government lined the streets with heavily armed paramilitaries recruited from Bosnian Serb refugees who had no connection with the local people – because the army announced they would not leave their barracks or fire on civilians.
The president’s wife, Mira Markovic or “the Red Queen,” made no secret she wanted the paramilitaries to fire on the demonstrators, but ultimately couldn’t find anyone willing to give the order. The order went down as far as it could go, to a vice-police chief who refused even after they had his son beaten up.

Finally, they had to cave in to the demands of the protesters, and the regime’s days were numbered. In revenge, they had the vice-chief murdered with machine guns Chicago-style, in a pizzeria not far from my work.

Milosevic had to resign from the presidency of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000 and ultimately died in prison while on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

That’s how tyrannies fall, and that’s what we should watch for in Iran. Whether the demonstrators win this round or not, my gut tells me this is the death rattle of a dying regime.

Maybe later than sooner – this regime may indeed be willing to shoot down demonstrators by the hundreds. But if it does, it’ll never be able to pretend legitimacy again, and our diplomatic president will have a really hard time explaining how his silver tongue will fix everything.

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Note: A shorter version of this appeared as the weekend Op-ed in the Valley City Times-Record,

Thursday was the anniversary of what the Chinese government calls “the June 4 incident.” That nice bit of understatement describes the killing of somewhere between 241 and 2,600 protesters by the People’s Liberation Army.

The first is the official government figure. The second is an early estimate by the Chinese Red Cross, which they now deny they ever said. Really. You must be confusing us with somebody else.

The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 followed the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, former Secretary General of the Communist Party of China and prominent advocate of reform, from a heart attack. Hu had been forced to resign by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and humiliate himself publicly in a “self-criticism” session.

A demand for a reversal of the verdict against Hu was the focal point for a growing demonstration in the 100-acre square in the heart of Beijing by Chinese students, workers, disillusioned Party members and masses of people who felt the longing people in communist countries had for anything resembling a normal life.

Protesting students erected a statue of the Goddess of Democracy, modeled on the Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face.

At the time I was a grad student at Oklahoma University, and helping a couple of Chinese students defect.

I’d gotten involved by helping Tang, an archeology student in our department, by proof reading his papers. I actually don’t know how he’d gotten in, his pronunciation was horrible and his written English needed a lot of editing. And to give you an idea of how naive he was, he told me his original destination in the U.S. was Harvard, but a friend had talked him into coming to OU with him.

One evening at a party I was making small talk about history and made some off-hand remark about the good fortune of our country in having such a wealth of natural resources.

Tang burst out, “No! Here you are rich because you have freedom!”

“We’ve got to talk,” I said.

In the course of conversation, it turned out Tang desperately wanted to stay in America – and was an overstay on a J1 student visa.

The J1 visa allows one year of study in the U.S., after which the student must return to his home country and must wait two years before he or she is eligible to return. At the time, we had about 40,000 Chinese students in the U.S. on J1 visas.

It also turned out that Tang had been rather free with his pro-democracy sentiments and admiration of America, and had just discovered his room mate was an informer for Chinese Security. He found out when he got the phone bill, and saw the record of a few hundred calls to the Chinese consulate in Houston.

I couldn’t help but laugh, “Tang this girl can’t have been a professional if she didn’t know all long distance calls are itemized on American phone bills. A real pro would sneak down to the pay phone on the corner.”

I introduced Tang, and his new fiancee Ying, to my housemate who was Director of Hispanic Student Services at the university, on the assumption he might know something about immigration problems.

All this time, the tension was building in Beijing at Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” We saw on TV that heroic, unnamed youth standing in front of a line of tanks, and making them back off.

Then the killing started and we all saw the face of a protester on the cover of Newsweek, lying on the pavement his face covered with blood.

The next day, the Chinese students on campus held a demonstration, and crossed their own Rubicon by signing a petition condemning the killings. I saw them on the oval carrying the American flag and singing the Star Spangled Banner.

Since the Vietnam war, the national anthem had left a bad taste in my mouth when I remembered young barbarians burning the American flag, and old scoundrels wrapping themselves in it. I hadn’t sung the anthem myself in a long time, and here were all these Chinese kids singing their hearts out.

They were, in a word, awful. It’s a difficult song at best and they were so off-key they needed a search party to find it. And in the middle of it I realized I was crying.

The rest is history. The protests were crushed, and a number of protesters tried and executed. But reportedly only workers, no students or intellectuals. The statue of the Goddess of Democracy was demolished. George Bush Sr. solved my friends’ problem by unilaterally abrogating the visa treaty, and we got 40,000 new Americans.

But I came across the goddess years later, while out walking in Washington, D.C. There she was at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues and G Street, NW, within view of the U.S. Capitol. She was chosen as the appropriate symbol for the Victims of Communism Memorial. There people from many lands lay flowers and light candles at her feet in memory of their own dead.

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Note: This appeared as an op-ed in the Valley City Times-Record. The title is from an essay by Eric Hoffer, which seems prescient at present.

Question: What is the most dangerously stupid thing that walks the earth?

Answer: An above-average bright adolescent.

What’s that you say? If the kid is so smart, why do you say he’s stupid?

It’s this, the better-than-average bright adolescent can see that he’s better-informed about many things than most of the adults around him. What he cannot realize is that experience counts for something. He can’t see it of course, because he doesn’t have any.

I’m not being holier-than-thou. I was that smart-aleck adolescent, and the memory of it is painful.

But what’s really painful now, is my growing suspicion that we’re ruled by highly-educated people with no experience of normal life, i.e. bright adolescents.

Case in point. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom paid the first state visit to the United States in this administration. He brought the gift of a pen holder, carved from the timbers of the Royal Navy vessel HMS Gannet, which played a prominent role in the anti-slavery crusade, a gift designed to symbolize the “historic ties” between the two nations.

In return, he got a set of DVDs that probably won’t play on English sets, and a couple of toys from the White House gift shop for his kids.

It’s customary on such occasions to hold a joint press conference with two podiums and the flags of both nations prominently displayed. The president didn’t have time for that, though he did have time to meet with the Boy Scouts that week.

The British press are aghast. Speculations abound. The President is tired and on the verge of a breakdown, he’s hostile to Britain because his father was Kenyan and Kenya was a British colony, he’s signaling an end to the “special relationship,” etc.

The thought that the head of the mightiest state on earth simply has no idea how to behave on the world stage and has no one to tell him how, hasn’t come up. Probably because the thought is just too scary.

Remember how scornful the Europeans were that cowboy George Bush didn’t have a passport, didn’t know people from Kosovo are “Kosovars” not “Kosovians,” and couldn’t pronounce “nuclear?” Do you think they’re reassured now?

When the present economic crisis emerged in the last months of the Bush administration, Bush junked everything economics and common sense says about not going deeper into debt, and threw money we don’t have at the problem.

Can anyone see anything different in the present administration’s policy? Except perhaps for who gets the pork?

Do I have to point out that indifference to tradition, courtesy, and the long-term consequences of profligate self-indulgence are the hallmarks of an adolescent mind?

Obama has spent his entire working life seeking every-higher public office, except for a grand total of one year’s experience in the private sector. A year he described as like, “being a spy in the enemy camp.”

Bush’s experience in the private sector was brief, heavily dependent on family connections, and largely a financial failure.

And it’s not just presidents, it’s cabinet officials, advisors, and congressmen. We are increasingly ruled by people whose career choices begin and end with the pursuit of power.

Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern realized this is a bad idea too late, after leaving office for the private sector. “In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business…. I wish that during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better Senator and a more understanding presidential contender…”

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When I came back to the States, I’d been working as a teacher (among other things) for 13 years in four countries – not counting stints as a guest lecturer in a couple others.

I taught English at all levels: high school (fun but exhausting), college (better), adult education (best of all!) and a few times at the primary school level (my second favorite thing – right after rolling naked in broken glass.)

From time to time I’d heard about various lunacies in American primary and secondary schools, and more sinister stuff like totally unfounded accusations of sexual abuse, prosecuted by authorities with the help of “experts,” who had to subject children to real abuse to get “evidence” of phony abuse.

Anyone remember that before Janet Reno incinerated 50-odd children in Waco, Texas, she warmed-up by sending a number of almost certainly innocent people to prison for terms up to and including life, on the most bogus charges you could imagine?

See here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/medialog/?id=105001974

and here, for example: http://blog.neo-libertarian.com/posts/1130795746.shtml

I wondered of course, if these cases were typical, even common, or just statistically rare extremes. But I nonetheless decided that I’d never under any circumstances get involved in primary or secondary education in America.

Now look here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTIwMWJmMjEzYzk5ZDYxNzEwNDViMmI0MjgzOWM1ZDQ=

at John Derbyshire’s article, ‘Short-changing the Gifted,’ about the cancellation of more of the College Board’s Advanced Placement exams.

Da Derb knows something about secondary education, if you follow another link provided, here: http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Straggler/073.html

you’ll see that some years back he taught at a special school for “Educationally Sub-Normal” boys in a Liverpool slum.

These were teen boys who, “Without their having any known physical, mental, or emotional abnormality, they had finished their primary schooling still unable to read or do basic arithmetic.”

It’s an interesting, and depressing article.

“It was depressing work, with little to show for months of effort. Perhaps the most depressing thing of all was that none of the boys was very capable at anything. To play soccer, for example, needs a modicum of thought as well as some minimal physical fitness. Our boys could not rise to it. The masters-boys soccer match was a rout of them, strapping 15- and 16-year-olds, by us, wheezy desk-wallahs with a median age around 40. Up to that point I had assumed that even seriously un-intellectual people must have some ability at something. That this is not necessarily the case, is one of the saddest true things I ever learned.”

But to my mind what’s really depressing is the quote from supposedly “normal,” or even brighter-than average New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon, when interviewing Charles Murray, author of ‘The Bell Curve’ and ‘Real Education.’

DS: “Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will?”

CM: “You’re out of touch with reality in that regard.”

Note that comment in bold.

John Derbyshire’s poor boys, for whatever reason, nature or nurture, could not help being what they were.

What’s this woman’s excuse? It takes a willful disregard of the evidence of everyday reality to come up with an assinine statement like that.

There’s a word for people who do that habitually. The word is, “stupid.” Dumb is forgivable, stupidity is not.

First of all, an observation. At a journalism seminar I attended a while back, the lecturer pointed out one of the principles of good journalism vis-a-vis interviews.

He said, “There is one star in the interview – and it isn’t you.”

An interview is a time to ask tough questions, not for a debate. There’s a difference. Your own opinions might inform the questions, but it’s the interview subject’s opinions you’re reporting on. Yours belong on the op-ed page.

Now for something totally different. A question that has bugged me for years, stemming from my background in anthropology.

Homo Erectus, thought to be our direct ancestor, appears from the skeletal remains to have been a small man from the neck down, and about half a man from the neck up.

Meaning, he had a cranial capacity about half the modern norm.

(Of course, Neanderthal man evidently had a cranial capacity about 300 CCs more than the modern norm, and everybody in the field really wonders what that means.)

Yet, he survived and thrived in environments as diverse as the African veldt to Java. And, he was less “strapping” than the Derb’s students at that Liverpool school.

What is the difference, if any, between a modern retarded person and an archaic Homo Erectus, in terms of basic capability and ability to cope with life?

Next: I’m going to take on the other end of the spectrum, and reflect on the stupidity of the educated inteligentsia.

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If you go here, you’ll find a column on Col. Ryszard Kuklinski by an author who attended a seminar on him and his role in preventing WWIII at Langley (CIA HQ.)

http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidRStokes/2008/12/21/the_spy_who_really_came_in_from_the_cold

I have the book on the stack of “must reads” that only seems to get taller. I think I’ll move it up in the queue.

As some of you know, my father-in-law was an officer in the Polish military at the time of the events described, which lends the affair a certain interest for me. The impression I get from him is that a fair number of Polish officers thought Kuklinski was a patriot and hero, who did what a lot of them would have liked to have done.

It says something disturbing about our political and academic culture that this story is so little-known. This man, more than any other single individual, may have literally saved the world.

All evidence from the unimpeachable source, the former Soviets themselves, now shows that the invasion of Western Europe and the initiation of World War III by the Soviet Union was a “when,” not an “if.”

What saved the world, or at least Europe, was American military readiness, espionage, and the crucial information supplied by this man.

Gestures of good will, the philosophy of peaceful coexistence, all the enlightened attitudes of western intellectuals counted for precisely nothing.

Is this why this story is being, can we say, “militantly ignored”?

Have they forgotten the lesson of Archimedes?

“But nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes, who was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through.”

Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Marcellus. Translated by John Dryden

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My friend Robert Bidinotto has an interesting piece with many interesting links on the Obamenon here: http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=742

My wife and I were talking last night about Obama and his speech which wasn’t at the Brandenburg Gate after all.

Evidently Angela Merkel thought better of giving the Obamessiah the venue of Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech (and never mind his pronnunciation was hideous and he may have said, “I am a large jelly doughnut”), and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall!”

I mentioned to her that conservative pundits had been saying, “He hasn’t earned the Brandenburg Gate.”

Monika said, “That’s not the point, Brandenburg is the past.”

I was nonplussed.

She continued, “The Soviet Union is gone, the danger is over. He should have given the speech at the site of the Madrid train bombings, or the London subway tunnels.”

Double nonplussed.

See why I love her?

P.S. What Robert is too modest to point out (it happens from time to time) is that he’s the guy who broke the “Willie Horton” story in Reader’s Digest during the Bush/Dukakis race, lo these many years ago. And BTW he never referred to him as “Willie” but always as William Horton.

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