geopolitics

Immigration is the one issue I agree with Trump on. We need to control who's coming into this country; we need to be bringing in people with education and skills that will benefit us as well as them. Anybody who thinks it's a good idea for us to allow in millions of illiterate peasants from Mexico and Central America just because they can make it across the Rio Grande ought to have his head examined.

That said, it seems to me that we ought to be paying a lot more attention to these countries-- our neighbors, after all-- than we do. We should pay a lot less attention to the Middle East-- where, IMHO, we're basically on the side of the Bad Guys. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan after 17 bleepin' years? And Iraq? A war we should never have instigated in the first place. Instead, we should be concentrating our efforts on trying to help our neighbors become prosperous, orderly societies-- first-world countries-- whose people would be perfectly content to stay where they are.

hollywood and hookups

This Harvey Weinstein business brings to mind a thought that's been growing in my mind about Hollywood and its influence on our popular culture. Weinstein was hardly unusual in the Hollywood culture; he was hardly the exception to the rule. No, he was emblematic of that culture. It's just that he was such a powerful figure that he was able to bend more women to his will. But this promiscuous 'hookup' attitude is the sexual subculture of Hollywood. This is the 'casting couch' culture. It's nothing new, people have known about it for decades.

What's relatively new is Hollywood's attempt to foist this culture on the rest of us, to tell us that this should be the 'new normal' in matters sexual. I think they're wrong about this. I don't think this is really what people want, and young people in particular, and young women especially.

I think there should be clubs in colleges, high schools, maybe even middle schools called, simply, 'Monogamy.' I think monogamy is really what most kids want, especially if their parents seem to have successful marriages. These clubs would be totally voluntary, not affiliated with any religion, but the kids who join them would basically be saying, 'I want to find a life partner with whom to have children and a family. I'm not interested in promiscuous sex.' The hookup culture tries to pressure girls, in particular, into having casual sex when they may not want that at all. 'Monogamy' would be a cultural alternative that would allow these young people to avoid that pressure.

our neighbor to da nort

This Samantha Bee brouhaha brings to mind a thought I've been nurturing for some time now about Canada. I think the seed of this thought was planted in my mind in the wake of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaid's Tale.' The idea is that Canadian claims to moral and intellectual superiority over us are really based on something entirely different, to wit: the fact that we've got, you know, California and Florida whereas they're left with the likes of, ah, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In other words, it's basically sour grapes.

nyc haywire

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has come up with a truly awful plan to impose virtual racial quotas on the city's top examination schools. It seems there aren't enough blacks and latinos at these schools, because not enough of them do well on the rigorous entrance exams. (Unspoken, of course, is that there are too many Asians at these schools, where they typically make up well over half of the student population.)

We need to be making sure that the brightest kids get the education they need. Affirmative action quotas for these schools create only the illusion of ability, and the result will be that the good students at these schools will inevitably be slowed down while the quota students try to keep up. A terrible, self-destructive idea that will produce predictably horrible results.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/de-blasios-latest-bad-idea-will-hurt-citys-elite-schools/

he, her, hers

This is a rather personal post, but I think it solves a problem that has been bedeviling writers and editors for some time now.

It has to do with the third person singular of the personal pronoun. This pronoun is gender-specific in all three cases: nominative: he, she; objective: him, her; and possessive: his, hers. This has led to a lot of handwringing in the gender-neutral world we now live in-- and some very tortuous locutions. When this first started becoming an issue, writers would say 'his or her' or 'his/her,' which is pretty clunky: 'Each student should put his or her notebook in the drawer.'  Later they tried putting things in the plural so they could use they, them, and theirs. 'Students should put their notebooks in the drawers.' This involved rewriting whole paragraphs and passages, though. Another ploy was to put everything in the passive voice, which was even worse: 'All notebooks should be put in the drawers.' And now we have a whole new issue with transgender people who don't fit into either of these 'binary' categories.

Solution: Just dispense with she, him, and his altogether. Simply dispatch them to the dustbin of syntactical history, along with thou, thee, and thine. Thus fragile male egos would preserve pride of place in the nominative case with he, but the female forms her and hers would obtain in the objective and the all-important possessive cases. The he- form is preserved in all three cases, for simplicity; and each term is totally inclusive and so would include all varieties of 'nonbinary' preferences.

Problem solved, and rather elegantly if I do say so myself.

arithmetic

Even something as simple as arithmetic is related to our remaining a first-world country. Don't you think so? Wouldn't it be a good idea if all the schoolkids had to memorize their multiplication tables from 1 to 10 before they graduated from elementary school? Don't you think they could do it? After all, it's basically rote memorization, right? Only later might it sink in what these relationships actually are. And it would give kids a certain basic confidence around numbers that might lead on to further mathematical understanding. It's that kind of understanding-- that logical-mathematical intelligence-- that will keep us in the ranks of the first-world nations.

schizophrenic google

It seems there are actually two separate Google companies. One is the successful high-tech company whose great service we all use. The other is a politically correct second company that has been piggy-backed onto the first and advocates for a 'multicultural, diverse' tech universe that doesn't quite seem to exist in reality. Here's an example of their output, bemoaning the attributes of a 'white/male dominant culture.' I doubt you can have it both ways.