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A Tale of Two HIghways

A Tale of Two Highways

David C. Stolinsky, MD
March 8, 2010

San Diego is a beautiful city. The harbor is magnificent, especially the Navy ships at the docks and planes overhead. If your motel is across the harbor from Coronado Naval Air Station, you awake to a distant bugle sounding “attention,” followed by the National Anthem. It surely beats an alarm clock. But San Diego offers other meaningful experiences. If we keep our eyes open, we can learn valuable lessons from many things in the world around us, even highways.

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GySgt John Basilone Memorial Highway.

As we come south from Los Angeles on Interstate 5, just before Camp Pendleton a sign announces, “GySgt John Basilone Memorial Highway.”

There are many books about John Basilone. One is “I’m Staying With My Boys,” which sums up his life. Basilone’s father and maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants. Prior to World War II, he served a three-year hitch in the Army and was stationed in the Philippines. Later he regaled his friends with tales of his adventures, and became known as “Manila John.”

Not finding a niche in civilian life, he enlisted in the Marines. Soon the war broke out, and Basilone found himself on Guadalcanal, the first Japanese-held island we liberated on our long road to Tokyo. The Marines were outnumbered and poorly equipped, and they faced an experienced and determined enemy. During a fierce Japanese attack, Basilone manned machine guns for three days and nights, then fought through enemy lines and returned with urgently needed ammunition. For his heroic actions, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, our highest military decoration.

Basilone was sent back to the United States and went on a tour to sell War Bonds. But being a celebrity did not suit him. He made repeated requests to be returned to combat. Finally he was sent to Camp Pendleton to prepare for overseas duty. There he met and married Lena Mae Riggi, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.

Now a gunnery sergeant, Basilone participated in the assault on Iwo Jima. Japanese resistance was intense, and Basilone singlehandedly destroyed an enemy blockhouse that was holding up our advance. But then he was killed by a mortar shell. For his actions he was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, our second highest decoration for valor. He was 28.

In addition to other honors, a destroyer was named for him. It was christened by his widow, who never remarried. She too demonstrated Semper Fidelis.

Some time ago, I met an elderly man. He said he had been a Marine and fought in World War II. I asked if he had known Basilone. His blank look made me begin to doubt him. But then his face lighted up in a huge smile, and he said, “You mean Manila John?”

He had never met Basilone but had idolized him. The old gentleman died about a year later. I believe he finally got his chance to meet Manila John, and all the others who fought and died to keep us free − and to give the gift of freedom to others.

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Danielle Van Dam Memorial Highway.

As we drive east on Interstate 8, heading from San Diego to the outlet stores, we pass a sign announcing, “Danielle Van Dam Memorial Highway.” Our emotions are quite different from those at the “Basilone” sign. Each sign honors the memory of one who is no longer with us, but there the similarity ends.

The “Basilone” sign honors a man who lived at least some of life. He grew up and married. He became a man, in the full meaning of that word. He had the opportunity to demonstrate what he was made of − which he did. He died young, but he died a hero, saving the lives of many of his comrades. His death was profoundly meaningful. He died defending freedom from brutal tyranny.

We can feel sadness as we pass the “Basilone” sign, but it is overcome by enormous pride and gratitude. Not so with the “Van Dam” sign − we feel only sadness and anger. Her death was meaningless. She died because of a brutal creature in the shape of a man.

Danielle was seven. She lived with her parents and two younger brothers in a San Diego suburb. One night in 2002, her father tucked her into bed. The next morning she was missing.

Her parents made repeated appeals on TV. Searches of the surrounding area proved fruitless. David Westerfield lived two doors from the Van Dams. He was a 50-year-old engineer who lived in a motor home. Two days before Danielle disappeared, she and her mother had sold him Girl Scout cookies.

Four weeks after she disappeared, Danielle’s nude, decomposed body was found in the desert. She had to be identified by dental records. This proved difficult, because her teeth had been knocked loose. Her body was too decomposed to determine whether she had been raped.

Westerfield was the divorced father of two college-age boys. Unlike most child molesters and murderers, he had no criminal record. But most molestations go unreported, because of shame and reluctance to put the child through the stress of the “justice” system. And we wonder why an engineer lived alone in a motor home.

The day Danielle disappeared, police questioned neighbors, but Westerfield and his motor home were missing. By chance, bikers videoed his motor home in the desert, near the spot where Danielle’s body would be found. They turned the video over to police.

A dry cleaner reported that Westerfield had arrived two days after Danielle disappeared, disheveled and shoeless, with pillow covers, comforters and a jacket to be cleaned. The jacket had a blood spot later identified as Danielle’s by DNA analysis. The dry cleaner turned the objects over to police without cleaning them.

Police searched the motor home, which the suspect had just cleaned, and found Danielle’s blood on the carpet. They also found large amounts of child pornography on his computer, including images of an underage girl being raped. This was brought up at Westerfield’s trial. Defense lawyers countered by attacking the Van Dam’s lifestyle. They couldn’t blame the victim, so they tried to blame her parents.

During the trial, my wife and I happened to drive by the San Diego County Courthouse. We felt an odd, creepy sensation. We had felt that sensation only once before, in a movie theater lobby as we happened to pass O. J. Simpson. Some people are repelled by the presence of evil. Some people aren’t.

Westerfield was convicted of murder and kidnapping, and sentenced to death. Seven years later, he remains on death row in San Quentin, along with over 600 others. All executions in California remain blocked by a federal judge, who believes lethal injection − the way we put beloved dogs and cats to sleep − is “terribly painful.”

No, what’s terribly painful is waking up every morning, knowing your child’s murderer is sleeping in a warm bed, eating three meals a day and watching TV, while your child is in the ground.

What’s terribly painful is knowing that, like almost all of those on death row, your child’s murderer will probably die of old age, while your child died at seven.

What’s terribly painful is knowing that your child’s murderer had the opportunity to grow up, get married, have children, have a career and develop his talents, while your child was robbed of all those opportunities.

What’s terribly painful is looking forward to the Chelsea King Memorial Highway, and the Amber DuBois Memorial Highway, and then others. But before we run out of highways to rename, we might consider keeping children safe from predators.

We can learn a lot from highways.

We can learn about those who selflessly risk everything to defend freedom, and those who abuse that precious freedom for the most selfish purposes.

We can learn about those who are brave enough to confront the strong, and those who are cowardly enough to abuse the weak.

We can learn about those who give, and those who take.

We can learn about those who are concerned with what duty requires of them, and those who are concerned with what they imagine themselves entitled to.

We can learn about those who are always faithful, and those who never are.

The future of our country depends on which road we take. But in order to know which road we are on, we must read the signs.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Chelsea, I Apologize

Chelsea, I Apologize

David C. Stolinsky, MD
March 4, 2010

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Chelsea King was a 17-year-old California high-school senior. She will always be 17 to those who loved her.

Chelsea went missing from her San Diego area home. Her father found her car near a running trail. In addition to being a college-bound honor student who maintained a 4.2 grade-point average despite carrying four advanced-placement classes, as well as being an accomplished musician, Chelsea was also a long-distance runner.

Sheriff’s deputies and civilian volunteers searched the park where the running trail is located, as well as diving into a nearby lake. According to reports, her underwear was found near the trail. But five days after Chelsea vanished, her body was found in a shallow grave near the lake.

Chelsea’s parents gave her love, support, encouragement, a stable home, a good education, nice clothes and a car. But they could not give her safety. Only we as a society could have done that. We didn’t.

A suspect was arrested, reportedly based on DNA from the underwear. He will be charged with murder and rape. I will not humanize him by giving his name. The 30-year-old male is 6-feet-2-inches tall and weighs 230 pounds. In 2000 he pleaded guilty to molesting and beating a 13-year-old girl. For this he could have been sentenced to 11 years, in which case he would still be in prison and Chelsea would be looking forward to college. But despite a psychiatrist’s report that he showed no remorse and was dangerous, he was sentenced to six years and served only five. Isn’t mercy wonderful?

Still, his experience with the “justice” system did teach him a lesson: Don’t leave a witness.

The suspect may have been involved in fondling a 14-year-old girl a year earlier. He is also a suspect in two other cases, one an assault on a girl at the same park, and the other a missing girl. Amber Dubois disappeared a year ago and bore a striking resemblance to Chelsea. Unemployment in California is high, but this fellow really has kept busy.

When deputies went to the address listed on his parole report, he was not there. They found him living only 1000 feet from a middle school, which is illegal for a convicted sex offender. He was living on the same block as the young woman whose testimony sent him to prison. Of course, she and her family were never notified of this dangerous situation.

Parole officers are overworked. More prisoners are being paroled early because of prison overcrowding. It is estimated that 10% to 20% of prisoners are illegal immigrants. I mention this only to emphasize the overcrowding and consequent poor follow-up of parolees. The suspect in this case is a non-Hispanic white.

If you think this case is exceptional, remember Samantha Runnion, Danielle Van Dam and Mary Vincent. If you think such things happen only in California and not in Middle America, remember Dru Sjodin. These are merely the best-known victims − listing them in no way belittles the many other victims. We must ask ourselves some questions:

● How many girls and young women must a man assault before society becomes more concerned with protecting women’s lives than with protecting his right to roam free?

● Why does society place so little value on protecting 13-year-old girls that it lets this molester roam free after a brief prison term, while it lionizes another molester, film director Roman Polanski, though he remains a fugitive after raping a 13-year-old?

● How long can this go on before angry citizens take matters into their own hands? Citizens give up their right to punish criminals on condition that the state does it for them. If the state reneges on its part of the contract, the deal is off.

I never met Chelsea, so why should I apologize? I never did her any harm. Or did I?

When my mother went to school, she commuted by public transportation and used the library in the evening, but she was unafraid. My uncles worked late without fear of robbers, and raised their children without fear of molesters. My grandmother spent her last years without fear of a home invasion.

But things changed. The nation I left to Chelsea is less safe than the nation my parents left to me. No, I never did Chelsea any direct harm. But the indirect harm I did her was bad enough to get her killed. I’d say that merits an apology.

Note that I refer to Chelsea by name, not as “the victim.” That points up the first reason I have to apologize. Instead of unique individuals, each created in God’s image with unique talents, people are now thought of as mere members of groups. Dr. King taught us to judge people by the content of their character. We are doing the opposite.

If we could see people as individuals, we might be less likely to fall into racist thinking. But that’s a big “if.” And if we could see people as individuals, we might also be less likely to rob, rape and murder them. That’s an ever bigger “if.”

I say “I” owe an apology, and “I” allowed individuals to become mere group members. Yes, we all did this, and we all owe an apology. But if 307 million Americans owe something, then nobody does. Saying “we” is an easy way to feel self-righteous without feeling any personal responsibility.

We each have to feel that we have personal responsibility for what went wrong, and that we have a stake in what happens to our country. Only if people believe that they are individuals responsible for their actions to a just God, and not mere cogs in a machine, will anything get better.

I believe the death penalty is the appropriate punishment for first-degree murder (Exodus 21:14). I believe that it deters murder (click here and here). But a federal judge suspended all executions in California, because lethal injection is “terribly painful.” Really? Try waiting for your missing child to be found.

And there are other reasons that I owe Chelsea an apology:

We have devalued human life – first early fetuses, then late-term, viable fetuses, then the elderly and the disabled – to the point that whether a human life is worth protecting has become just a matter of opinion.

We have shown more concern for criminals’ rights than for victims’ rights.

We have been more upset when a cop kills or injures a suspect than when a suspect kills or injures a cop.

We have confused what is right with what is legal.

We have downgraded the Constitution into whatever a judge says it means, and we have virtually forgotten the Bible. Moral questions are no longer decided according to timeless principles, but have become just matters of opinion.
We have taken the therapeutic term “closure,” meaning getting on with life after a tragedy, and perverted it into meaning forgiving criminals and forgetting their crimes.

We have reduced our republic to a nanny state. The president has been demoted from commander-in-chief to therapist-in-chief. We worry more about second-hand smoke and trans fats than about murderers or child molesters.

We have lost ourselves in a moral fog so dense that everything appears a vague gray. Criminals became indistinguishable from victims, attackers from defenders, and terrorists from our troops who fight them.

Moral fogs are dangerous. They hide all manner of things, including the terrible damage done by criminals who are released instead of being executed or kept in prison. And if the fog is really dense, both Chelsea King and her attacker become merely vague figures of no concern.

We all owe Chelsea an apology. But she’s not here anymore. So the best we can do is work to make it less likely that there will be other innocent people victimized by the unworthy recipients of our misplaced sympathy. The best we can do is to dispel the moral fog, so that we can again see the difference between good and evil.

If we can do that, we will owe a lot fewer apologies.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Courts Make Key Decisions on the War

Courts Make Key Decisions on the War

Are We Crazy or Just Stupid?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
March 1, 2010

The legal definition of insanity is mental illness that causes one to be a danger to himself or others. In criminal law, a person is not guilty by reason of insanity if he does not understand the nature and quality of his action, or does not understand that it was wrong.

Think about these definitions as we discuss our treatment of suspected terrorists. Consider whether those now in charge of our government − in the Obama administration, in the courts and in Congress − are dangers to themselves and others, and whether they understand the consequences of their actions.

How things used to be.

During World War II, we knew we were fighting for our lives − and for our way of life − against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Even strident critics of President Roosevelt shut up and united in the war effort.

As the war progressed, we accumulated about 425,000 German and Italian prisoners of war. Most of them were transferred to America, where they were confined in over 500 prison camps spread across the country. One was near my mother’s home town. They were in the custody of the Army, under authority of the president. None − not one − was successful in having a civilian lawyer obtain a writ of habeas corpus that would place a civilian judge in charge.

These were prisoners of war, captured in uniform on the battlefield, and entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Still, many died of disease or injuries, were murdered by other prisoners − or were executed by the Army for these murders.

But what about those captured out of uniform, who came to cause destruction of civilian targets? What about those whose actions had stripped them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions? We knew what to call them: “spies” and “saboteurs.” And we knew what to do with them. In 1942, eight Germans sneaked into the United States by submarine, but they were captured before they could carry out their missions of sabotage.

What did President Roosevelt do with the German saboteurs? They were held by the Army and interrogated. They were tried before a military commission. Six were sentenced to death − including a naturalized American citizen − and the other two were given long prison terms. This was done without benefit of civilian lawyers or civilian judges.

Roosevelt insisted that he would execute the men regardless of what the Supreme Court might rule. He told his attorney general: “I won’t give them up…I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?” Roosevelt, the patron saint of liberals, had his priorities straight. He knew we were at war, and that his highest responsibility was the safety of the American people. The six were electrocuted less than two months after they landed.

Roosevelt clearly agreed with these words:

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
− Thomas Jefferson

And Roosevelt also would have agreed with these words:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
− Justice Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court [emphasis added]

Jackson knew what he was talking about. He had been chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of leading Nazis. He had seen what horrors had been stopped by our victory. He dwelt in reality, not in theory.

How things are now.

If you are subject to low blood pressure, may I suggest a way to raise it − perhaps to dangerous levels. Read “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.” The title tells the story. But key here is Chapter 7, which describes the pack of leftist lawyers who were attracted to the terrorist detainees the way rats are attracted to rotten meat. The effect in both cases is to make the Earth a more dangerous place.

The chapter details the prestigious law firms that are devoting thousands of free hours to defending those who perpetrated 9/11 and would like nothing better than to stage a repeat performance. Among those firms was one that had an interesting senior partner: Eric Holder.

Yes, that Eric Holder, now our attorney general, the man in charge of prosecuting the very detainees he chose to have his firm defend. The same Eric Holder was involved in the abduction at the point of submachine guns of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez, and the bungled siege at Waco in which 84 people died − including 26 children who were by definition innocent hostages. You can’t say that Holder isn’t tough. You can say that he gets tough with the wrong people.

Nor is Holder the only senior Justice Department official who was involved in defending terrorist detainees. Of course, none of these people has recused himself from taking part in terrorism cases − that would require integrity. There is an old proverb about not putting foxes in charge of the henhouse. But we are doing even worse. We are putting defenders of foxes in charge of the henhouse. How stupid is that?

To paraphrase novelist Stephen Hunter, it is difficult to argue national security with people who do not understand the concept of nation, much less security.

But no matter how misguided the leaders of our Justice Department may be, they could do little harm if they were not abetted by overreaching, power-hungry, ivory-tower judges. Contrast the necessary, life-saving actions of the Roosevelt administration with these recent decisions:

● In Rasul, the Supreme Court ruled that non-citizens detained by our military in Guantanamo, which is not U.S. territory, have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. This elevates civilian judges above the president as commander-in-chief of our armed forces, contrary to what the Constitution dictates.

● In Hamdan, the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions set up by President Bush to try terrorist detainees at Guantanamo must cease, because they lacked authority and did not follow the Geneva Conventions. But the conventions apply to prisoners of war, captured in uniform on the battlefield, not to combatants out of uniform or to terrorists attacking civilian targets. In effect, the court ruled retroactively that President Roosevelt was wrong to execute the six German saboteurs.

● In Boumediene, the Supreme Court ruled that even though Congress had passed a law authorizing military commissions, as the court had required in Hamdan, the law was unconstitutional because it stripped non-citizen detainees held outside U.S. territory of habeas corpus rights. That is, Congress did what the court asked, and the court slapped it down. The court asserted its power to control the conduct of an ongoing war, at the expense of the president and Congress. Petulance plus megalomania equals dangerous hubris.

In his dissent to Boumediene, Justice Scalia observed with characteristic clarity: “A consequence of the Court’s majority decision will be that how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch [the judiciary] that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails.”

We have gone from President Roosevelt authorizing the secret and prompt execution of German saboteurs, to the courts insisting on endless legal proceedings held in public − and thereby revealing information that will aid our enemies. We have gone from war being conducted by the executive branch and the military, with the assent of Congress, to war being controlled by the judicial branch − which knows little about national security, and is utterly unequipped to deal with it.

In regard to the question, “Are we crazy or just stupid?” my answer is, “Both of the above.” Here is another question: How long can crazy, stupid people survive in a dangerous world? Soon we will know the answer.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Roman Polanski as Arbiter of Morality?

Roman Polanski as Arbiter of Morality?

Ghost Writer or Poison Pen

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 25, 2010

If you are going to see Roman Polanski’s latest film “The Ghost Writer,” don’t read this until after you see it. Or better still, read this and don’t see it.

Not that the film is poorly made − it isn’t. Yes, it’s at least 15 minutes too long. But in general, it is competently directed and well acted. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson put in engaging performances. No, my complaints are not cinematic − they are moral and factual. My complaints concern who made the film, and what he is trying to tell his audience.

The story involves a ghost writer who is hired to complete the autobiography of a former British prime minister, a thinly disguised Tony Blair character. The ex-politician is pursued by a mob of war protestors, who look like stale leftovers from a 1960s anti-war rally. He is being investigated for “war crimes” by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, because of accusations that he transferred three suspected terrorists to the CIA to be “tortured.”

You can see where this is going. As the court is mentioned, a character notes that America does not recognize it, nor do Russia, China, North Korea and other undemocratic regimes. Here some in the theater audience laughed derisively, as Polanski intends.

Of course, the liberal laughers would never subject themselves to a foreign court that enforces vague laws without benefit of our constitutional guarantees. The Heritage Foundation states, “Americans who appear before the court would be denied such basic constitutional rights as trial by a jury of one’s peers, protection from double jeopardy, and the right to confront one’s accusers.” But no matter − to a liberal, anything called “international” must be good.

Nor do the liberal laughers stop to consider whether it is a good idea to criminalize politics. They want to prosecute George W. Bush for conducting a war repeatedly authorized by Congress, and they want to prosecute Tony Blair for conducting a war repeatedly authorized by Parliament, because they call the war “illegal.” To the liberal critics, “illegal” is defined as, “I really don’t like this.”

But what if the tables were turned? What if Bill Clinton were prosecuted for bombing Serbia without U.N. or Congressional approval? What if Barack Obama were prosecuted for drone attacks in Pakistan without U.N. or Congressional approval? How would liberals like “their” presidents hauled off to face a foreign court? No, that wouldn’t please them at all. But to consider that possibility would require something more than parroting leftist mantras.

Even worse, as the “CIA torture” is mentioned, a brief cut shows a prisoner on his back, with water being poured into his mouth − which is forcibly held open. This is a lie. In fact, the CIA waterboarded exactly three high-value unlawful combatants, one of whom − Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or KSM − revealed information that led to forestalling terrorist attacks, including attacks on airliners and Los Angeles.

Waterboarding was nothing like the scene portrayed by Polanski. Read “Courting Disaster” if you want to discover what really went on, and the attacks that were prevented.

· In fact, the interrogation techniques were no worse, and sometimes milder, than what is endured by basic trainees in the armed services, and surely milder than that undergone by prospective Special Forces soldiers, Force Recon Marines or Navy SEALS.

· In fact, the death rate for enemy prisoners during the War on Terror is only one-eighth of the death rate for German prisoners of war in Allied hands during World War II. (See “Courting Disaster,” pages 181-182.)

· In fact, during World War II the German SS massacred at least 86 captured Americans at Malmédy. After this, and after we began liberating concentration camps run by the SS, we took very few SS prisoners. A typical order states, “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoners but will be shot on sight.” This was not rough interrogation to obtain lifesaving information. It was vengeance − entirely understandable, but vengeance nonetheless.

Rather than treating enemy prisoners worse than in former times, in general we are treating them better. What is worse is the criticism. Those who spread anti-American slander are − intentionally or not − aiding our enemies and making future terrorist attacks more likely.

In their professed concern for the comfort of terrorists like KSM, the critics are spitting on the graves of the terrorists’ victims. Among his other charming actions, KSM was a planner of 9/11, as well as taking time off to behead American journalist Daniel Pearl. This is a striking illustration of the proverb that he who is merciful to the cruel will in the end be cruel to the merciful. The more mercy we squander on terrorists and criminals, the less we have for their victims − until we have none at all.

As a result of his pending prosecution by the International Criminal Court, the Tony Blair character in the film dares not go home to Britain and must remain in America. The irony here is so thick you could choke on it:

· We have Polanski, for many years a fugitive from justice who dares not come to America, depicting a British fugitive from justice who dares not leave America.

· We have a character who saved many lives by his courageous anti-terrorist actions, and we must sit and see him defamed by a director who enjoys drugging and raping 13-year-old girls. Talk about an inverted moral compass!

But it gets even worse. The Tony Blair character is not really responsible for his “war crimes.” You see, unknown to him, his wife is a covert CIA agent. She influenced him to act in the interests of America − which are assumed to be evil. This is an example of the “devil” theory of world events. To Nazis and other anti-Semites, “the Jews” are responsible for all the ills of the world. To leftists, “the Americans” are responsible. But otherwise, the same irrational world-view applies.

One need not examine problems to find the real causes. One need only blame them. No deep thought. No honest examination of the facts. Just prejudice laced with ignorance and bitterness. Just contempt for America specifically, and for ordinary people in general.

A reason leftists dislike America is that it honors and empowers the ordinary people whom the “elite” look down upon as too ignorant to know what is good for them, and who therefore need to be ruled by − surprise! − the “elite.” Is nationalized health care unpopular? No matter. President Obama and the Democratic leadership intend to shove it down the throats the poor, ignorant masses.

European leftists, and those who imitate them, are made uncomfortable by our respect for ordinary people. They are accustomed to being ruled − first by kings, then by dictators, then by central committees, and now by bureaucrats. They are accustomed to looking down on ordinary people, using them and − in the extreme − abusing them. They are clearly not accustomed to standing up for the abused. Which brings us back to Polanski.

I wanted to see Polanski’s film, but I did not want to support him financially. I hoped to buy a ticket to another film in the multiplex, then sneak into “The Ghost Writer.” But this theater checks tickets, so I was forced to buy the correct one. Whether you wish to support child molesters who make anti-American films is your decision.

The praise the film has already garnered, and the support for Polanski in his legal troubles, make it all too clear that the leftist “elite” view child rape with the same benign tolerance with which they view terrorism. They reserve their condemnation for those who prosecute the molesters and fight the terrorists. I am proud to be a citizen of the nation that earns their hostility.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Complexity Can Be Dangerous

Complexity Can Be Dangerous

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 22, 2010

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
− Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer, USS Enterprise

To make something simple is a thousand times more difficult than to make something complex.
− Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of AK-47

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius − and a lot of courage − to move in the opposite direction.
− Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe.
− Albert Einstein

This is tax season, and the very fact that it is a season illustrates my point. The last time I checked, the Internal Revenue Code and its accompanying regulations took up over 5000 pages. When even the secretary of the Treasury and the director of the Internal Revenue Service are unable to prepare their own income-tax returns, can we at least agree that we have a problem?

One can argue that tax rates are too high, or too low, or just right. But no one can deny that the regulations are too complex for even intelligent, educated taxpayers to comprehend. Question: Why are the laws so complex? (1) They grew over time, with each special-interest group lobbying Congress to enact its pet provision. (2) Bureaucrats love indecipherable laws, so they can impose their own interpretations and increase their own power. (3) Both of the above. Answer: (3).

The same question arises in regard to the pending health-care bills, which run in excess of 2000 pages. And if a bill is enacted, it will require more thousands of pages of regulations, making the whole thing even more incomprehensible. A tax law too complex to fathom is painful. A health-care law too complex to fathom can be lethal.

Unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats can already take our money. That they may take our health or our lives is a possibility that should frighten anyone. That it does not frighten many people is even more frightening.

These people must believe in magic. They believe that individual citizens are too stupid and irresponsible to control the health care of themselves and their loved ones, but once an individual becomes a bureaucrat, he suddenly acquires the wisdom to control the health care of 307 million Americans. Really?

Even worse, under ObamaCare, the individual’s requirement to buy health insurance of the “correct” type would be enforced by − surprise! − the Internal Revenue Service. An overly complex, incomprehensible law affecting our health and very lives will be interpreted and enforced by the same bureaucrats who now do such a superb job interpreting and enforcing complex, incomprehensible tax laws. There, doesn’t that make you feel more secure?

Needless complexity affects government and law, but it affects other fields as well.

● Since the early days of the automobile, a key and an ignition switch have worked well. But now, keyless ignitions and on-off buttons are having fatal results.

A veteran Highway Patrol officer was driving his wife, daughter and brother-in-law to the 13-year-old girl’s soccer practice. The car accelerated spontaneously. The officer was trained in high-speed driving and was able to control the Lexus at 120 mph. But technology prevented him from stopping it, and all four were killed in a fiery crash.

Power brakes depend on vacuum assist, and at wide-open throttle, there is very little vacuum. So after a few applications, the brakes reverted to non-assisted and were unable to stop the speeding car. Even worse, the car had the new “on-off” button instead of the old, reliable ignition switch. The driver repeatedly pushed the button, but the engine did not shut off. He did not know that if the car was moving, he had to hold the button down for three seconds − during which the car would travel over 500 feet.

This is an ingenious solution to a nonexistent problem. The familiar ignition switch is user-friendly − turn right for on, left for off. A button used for both on and off is a user-unfriendly gizmo looking for trouble.

I once had a stuck accelerator, and I was able to shut off the ignition switch, coast to a stop and make temporary repairs. It was easy and instinctive, and did not require reading a lengthy owner’s manual that I probably would not recall in an emergency.

Air bags, antilock brake and stability control save lives. But technologic innovations should solve existing problems, not create new ones. Engineers should think like engineers, not like salesmen − and surely not like toymakers.

● The CAT scan is a life-saving innovation. But an excellent hospital exposed over 200 patients to about eight times more radiation than a scan should produce.

The excess radiation remained undetected for 18 months, until a patient reported hair loss. Apparently there was no monitoring of radiation dose. Perhaps the computer software was developed elsewhere and simply installed − and was never checked. Perhaps the software or hardware malfunctioned − and was never checked.

No one took responsibility for assuring that the equipment was working properly. Everyone trusted the computer.

Misuse of technology is a different problem. If people choose to use cell phones or text while driving cars − or even locomotives − that is their fault. This problem is the new technology itself, which may be less effective or less safe than older technology.

Take Windows Vista. Can anyone understand 15 gigabytes of code and write it error-free? Vista was advertised as faster and more secure than the earlier Windows XP. In fact, it is slower, and its security is arguable − security updates come every few weeks. Now comes Windows 7, which again is advertised as faster. Tests show it is slightly faster than Vista, but about as fast as XP.

If Windows, which most of the world uses, is continually “updated” but rarely improved, what does this say about computer programs that control dangerous devices like cars, CAT scanners or airliners? Recall the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 persons aboard? There was speculation that the flight-control computer malfunctioned, as happened before.

If Mercedes, one of the finest carmakers, produces models that are rated by owners as average or less for reliability, this suggests that even the best engineers and workers cannot construct devices that are both reliable and needlessly complex.

We cannot turn out a generation less educated than earlier generations, yet expect them to run more complex devices. Instead, the complex devices will run them. We cannot let computers control our lives − computers that are too complex for anyone to understand, but which act too quickly for anyone to control in real time.

Don’t forget “algorithmic investing,” in which computer models supposedly gave objective evaluations of investments, but which actually allowed the biases of those who wrote the models to continue without being questioned − until banks and investment firms went broke, and nearly brought down the whole economy.

Finally, in both senses of the word, we have “end-of-life care plans,” which supposedly allow “terminal” patients to die painlessly, but which actually allow the biases of those who wrote the plans to continue without being questioned − until salvageable patients are killed. No more Hippocratic Oath. No more individual patients cared for by individual doctors. Just rote, mechanical, unfeeling, government-run “algorithmic medicine.”

The human mind can handle only a limited amount of detail in a limited amount of time. We are continually “updating” our laws, our computers, our cars, our phones and our very lives with increasingly complex new versions. Meanwhile, the pace of life increases.

Soon − if it hasn’t happened already − the lines will cross. Increasing complexity will cross decreasing time to master it. As a result, cars will accelerate uncontrollably, airliners will crash, our phones will reveal our location, and our health care will be managed by computers.

We must heed Scotty’s advice. If we continue to overthink the plumbing, the drain will surely stop up, and we will drown in sewage before we ever get to the stars.

●

Author’s Note:

I am neither a mathematician nor a computer geek. Still, I would like to point out how rapidly things get too complex to check for all possible errors. Take a simple program that has a decision tree of 20 yes-no steps. The number of possible permutations is 20! or 20 factorial. This is greater than the number of seconds since the Big Bang. Could you check that thoroughly before it entered production?

The reason that Windows is updated frequently is not that Microsoft is incompetent, but that we may be at the edge of human capability to develop reliable electronic devices in a reasonable time. Think about that the next time you push the on-off button on your new car, or step onto an airliner.

●

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Sympathy for Monsters

Sympathy for Monsters

Vampires, Werewolves, Criminals, Terrorists

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 18, 2010

When I was a kid, I enjoyed being scared by monster films. There was Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, a repulsive, creepy vampire. There was Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, a frightening ogre. There was Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, who changed into a bloodthirsty beast when the moon was full. And best of all, there was “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” where we could cheer for our favorite monster.

True, these monsters occasionally had their sympathetic moments. But it was clear that they were, in fact, monsters. The problem of the other characters in the films was how to escape from them − and eventually kill them.

Of course, those were simpler times. We had recently come through a terrible war, in which we and our allies crushed the brutal tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. We had learned a horribly costly lesson on the dangers of ignoring evil until it grew too large to be ignored.

In those days, we were still unashamed to use the words “good” and “evil.” We had not yet heard “nuanced” used as a code word for, “I’m too lazy, too apathetic and too cowardly to do anything about the current problem, so I’ll pretend it’s so complex that I can just sit here and study it endlessly.”

In those days, we could watch monster movies, eat fistfuls of popcorn − and still know how to react when we encountered real monsters.

But then things changed. In high school, American history and civics were replaced by “social studies.” Schools of education turned out teachers who had a leftist bias, which they transmitted to their students. If you doubt this, compare the anti-American “A People’s History of the United States” by leftist Howard Zinn with “A Patriot’s History of the United States” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen. The problem is that Zinn’s book is one of the most widely assigned texts in high schools and universities, while the “Patriot’s History” is sold by single copies. The leftist educational establishment is firmly entrenched.

Classes and textbooks took on a pacifist tint. Schools adopted “zero tolerance” for weapons, as a response to growing street violence. But no one thought to restore the religious and moral education that had allowed most boys to carry knives to school − Boy Scout knives − and yet there were no stabbings. No one thought to restore ROTC that had allowed master sergeants with combat ribbons to teach us how to handle firearms safely − and yet there were no shootings.

Then “zero tolerance” was pushed to ridiculous extremes. One small boy was suspended for bringing a tiny plastic toy gun to school. An older boy went to the high-school library to find a book on the Marine Corps, but he was told that they had no “violent” books. Yet the street violence continued − and spilled over into schools. No one understood that if boys do not have positive male role models, they may find negative ones in the local gang.

This effort to demasculinize boys may have the reverse effect. Banning dodgeball and tag from schools, and removing adventure books, may play a role in boys’ attraction to extreme sports and other dangerous or perhaps illegal activities. If you make healthy male activities impossible, you make unhealthy activities inevitable.

“Modern” educators never heard of Jeff Cooper, who taught us, “Unarmed men, and unarmed nations, can only flee from evil. And evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.” So schools pushed their “zero tolerance” for weapons, until it became zero tolerance for common sense. They tried to raise a generation that could not recognize evil, much less fight it. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, instead of teaching young people to fight evil, they taught them that it is evil to fight − thus facilitating the triumph of evil.

Besides, an increasing percent of Americans attended a university. They had to. High school was dumbed down to the point that graduates were poorly educated and lacked essential job skills. And at the university, they were exposed to professors who were frankly leftist, and who did their best to undermine Judeo-Christian and American values.

So perhaps it is no surprise that the current generation of young people empathizes with monsters. Vampire films follow one another with regularity − and make money with equal regularity. Preteens and teens identify with the sympathetically portrayed young vampires. Many young people have trouble “fitting in.” They see themselves as outliers − not quite as odd as vampires, but still peculiar and not accepted by their peers.

Of course, the moral implications of doing evil to attain eternal life escape them completely. The moral implications of almost anything escape them. Alarming numbers of young people freely admit not only cheating on tests, but also shoplifting and other forms of theft. Such behavior is now accepted as normal, while the few who object are seen as eccentric.

Second only to movie vampires are werewolves. Here we see even more clearly the underlying dynamic. A normal person is bitten by a werewolf, then becomes one himself or herself. Evil is not intrinsic. People don’t do bad things because they are bad. No, some external force acts on them, impelling them to criminality. Here it is the bite of an imaginary beast. Elsewhere, it may be economic or social factors.

How often we hear, “Poverty causes crime.” But if so, why has the crime rate continued to fall during the current severe recession? And we even hear, “Poverty causes terrorism.” But if so:

· Why is Osama Bin Laden the son of a billionaire?

· Why is his chief deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, a physician and the son of a professor?

· Why is the Christmas Day underwear bomber an engineering student and the son of a prominent banker?

· Why were the 9/11 terrorists upper-middle-class young men?

· Why does Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, have a degree in engineering from an American university? Perhaps his engineering training helped him behead journalist Danny Pearl more efficiently.

· Why are Haitians and other poverty-stricken peoples not prominent among terrorists?

No, economic factors are not the principal causes of crime or terrorism. That is leftist drivel. Money, education and job opportunities are no guarantee that a person will not become a terrorist.

If we raise young people without a solid core of moral values, there is danger that the emptiness at their center may be filled with toxic material from an outside source. Rather than the bite of a mythical creature, it can be exposure to extremist fanatics abroad, or exposure to violent street gangs at home.

Real monsters cannot be overcome with silver bullets or wooden stakes. To overcome real monsters requires courage, clear vision and common sense − all of which are in short supply. It requires bringing up the next generation with a solid core of moral values. If you can do this without religion, more power to you. But I know of no evidence that a purely secular society can preserve its moral values and transmit them down the generations. I know of no evidence that a purely secular society can even preserve itself. In fact, Western Europe is proving the exact opposite.

But before we can hope to overcome real monsters, we have to resolve to fight them. And before we can do that, we have to learn to recognize them. We have to stop calling violent criminals “victims of society.” And we have to stop calling terrorists “militants” or “activists,” while trying to make excuses for them.

It is not a hopeful sign that young people now see vampires and werewolves not as horrible monsters, but as unfortunate, misunderstood outcasts. Sympathy for monsters inevitably leads to lack of sympathy for their victims. And that leads to more victims.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Presidents Day? Which Presidents?

Presidents Day? Which Presidents?

Washington? Lincoln? Millard Fillmore?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 15, 2010

February 15 is Presidents Day. It isn’t Lincoln’s Birthday, which was Feb. 12. It isn’t Washington’s Birthday, which will be Feb. 22. It is just a day planned so we can have a three-day weekend. Instead of a day to honor our great leaders of the past, it became merely a day not to work and to enjoy sales at stores. The meaning was removed.

Presidents Day? Which president? Millard Fillmore? He was an anti-Catholic bigot who signed the Fugitive Slave Law, which forced slaves who escaped to free states to be returned to their owners. Why should I honor him? Why should I mix the inferior with the outstanding? The result is a mediocre average that inspires neither admiration nor imitation, but merely apathy.

Now young people are taught not to honor even our great men. Lincoln held the Union together, ended slavery and was shot for his efforts. But he expressed − by today’s standards − racist views, so we can’t honor him. Washington was indispensable to the founding of our republic, but he owned slaves − though he freed them at his death − so we can’t honor him, either. No human is perfect, so all role models are removed, leaving our nation, like so many of our young people, fatherless.

America is undergoing a historectomy. No, not a hysterectomy, removal of the uterus, but a historectomy, removal of our history. But the two are related. Without a uterus, an individual can’t have children. Without a history, a nation can’t teach its values to the next generation. In both cases, continuity becomes impossible.

Unlike most nations, America is a relatively recent invention. Its population shifted over time with waves of immigration, and is still shifting because of continued immigration.

Unlike most nations, America is an idea. To define America, we cannot refer to an ancient land with a stable population. No, to define America we must refer to the ideas and ideals on which it is based.

But are we trying to preserve these ideas and pass them on to the next generation? Or are we doing our best to eradicate these ideas from our collective memory? Are we attempting to induce national amnesia? Are we performing a historectomy? Are we taking the soul of our nation and hitting the Delete key?

When I went to grammar school, we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning. We were taught patriotic songs for national holidays. And we enjoyed Christmas and Easter vacations, not winter and spring breaks. After all, the vast majority of Americans, and all of the founders, identified themselves as Christians.

In junior high, I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the first and fourth verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” If you want to learn how a house is constructed, first study the foundation. But now, memorization is “old fashioned.”

In high school, I had to take American history and civics, not “social studies.” We learned about the great people and great events of our history, and (to a lesser degree) some of the unhappy events. I took ROTC, where my role models were master sergeants who had fought to defend my freedom. But now, ROTC has been kicked out of many high schools and universities.

I went to school, but I loved movies. I saw “Sergeant York,” the true story of how a pacifist farmer recognized that violent evildoers must be opposed by force, then went on the win the Medal of Honor. I saw “They Died With Their Boots On,” a fictionalized account of General Custer, but at least I learned that he played a key role in the Civil War, which is more than today’s kids know.

And there was “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” depicting Father Duffy’s role in this New York unit’s World War I exploits. So when I passed his statue in Times Square, I may have been the only one on the tour bus who knew who he was – not bad for a Jewish kid from North Dakota. But, you see, I was brought up to be an American.

Then there were the John Ford films of the West, where the U.S. Army was depicted in a sympathetic (perhaps overly sympathetic) light. I saw depictions of Abe Lincoln and Thomas Edison. I was being entertained at the movies, but I was also being exposed to my country’s past.

Contrast my upbringing with that of today’s kids:

· Today’s kids read books and hear lectures that describe America’s past as questionable at best, and evil or downright genocidal at worst.

· Today’s kids mumble a few words of the first verse of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at sports events. Forget about the fourth verse, the one that mentions (gasp!) God.

· Today’s kids are taught that the founders were deists, not Christians – that is, if religion is mentioned at all.

· Today’s kids are lucky to place the Revolution or the Civil War in the right century, much less the right decade.

· Today’s kids identify Grant as the man on the $50 bill, not the man who led the Union to victory and helped end slavery.

· Today’s kid’s see movies depicting our leaders as scheming warmongers, and our military as sadistic morons (“Spartan,” “Rendition,” “Syriana”).

· Today’s kids see clergy depicted as idiots or criminals, and Christianity shown as an oppressive, destructive force (“Sin City”, “The Godfather Part III,” “The Da Vinci Code”.

· Today’s kids, and even law students, are taught that the Constitution is a “living document.” (Do you give it mouth-to-page respiration if it collapses?) That is, it means whatever a judge says it means today. Tomorrow it may mean something else. In effect, kids are taught that we have no Constitution, but are ruled by the “elite.”

· Today’s kids are deprived of ROTC instructors or Scoutmasters as role models, so they may turn to a gang or cult. They are no longer exposed to the traditions that I was lucky enough to have passed on to me.

Traditions are important – they help us carry on when it is easier, or safer, to quit. People who have been deprived of their history and traditions are unlikely to survive as a nation in times of danger. To me, this would be a tragedy. But to those who have been erasing our history and traditions, whether we survive as a nation is a matter of indifference.

The current generation of Americans has been taught little of the foundations of their country. And what they were taught was often negative. What they saw in movies only served to strengthen this negative impression. No wonder they view America with ambivalence at best, and with open hostility at worst. Are “Taliban” John Walker Lindh and “Al Qaeda” Adam Gadahn aberrations, or just the tip of the iceberg? Time will tell.

People in other nations have also been taught to see us as despicable. Hollywood depicts us that way, and liberal politicians describe us that way. Why are we surprised when others see us that way? Why are we shocked when terrorists act on this belief? We are doing it to ourselves.

If you want to destroy a house, undermine the foundation. If you want to destroy a nation, do the same. If you want to destroy people who are defined by ideas, trash the ideas. If you want to bring down a society that is sustained by its history, perform a historectomy.

You want a meaningless day off work, so you can check out the sales? Then Presidents Day is for you. But I prefer Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays. I’m old enough to remember when holidays had a deeper significance.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Intellectuals and Other Dangerous Characters

Idealists, Intellectuals and Other Dangerous Characters

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 11, 2010

Most people live in the real world. They have to. But some people have the luxury of living in their heads. They have the leisure time to imagine an ideal world organized in an ideal way and run by ideal officials − in other words, themselves.

These people went to a university, and perhaps graduate school. They studied gurus from Plato to Marx, who fantasized their own version of the ideal. They were taught by professors who often had done nothing outside the university, and who looked down on ordinary working people.

Yes, they preached the virtues of the working class. But in private these elitists held blue-collar workers in contempt, just as Lenin called the peasants “cattle.” Similarly, Sarah Palin is derided for graduating from a non-Ivy-League university. President Obama belittles newly elected Senator Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck, and disparages Middle Americans: “They get bitter; they cling to their guns and religion…” No, Mr. President, they get bitter because liberal idealists like you pour scorn on their deeply held beliefs.

● First came Plato, whom we studied at the university. His idea of a “republic” was a state where a few self-anointed “elite” governed the ignorant masses, using propaganda to control them. He believed that − surprise! − philosophers like himself should be in control. One can only speculate about how much misery has been caused, and is still being caused, by people − consciously or subconsciously − trying to put his ideas into practice.

● Then came Marx, who was from an upper-middle-class family but had difficulty supporting his own wife and children. He constantly thought about money, because he rarely had any. So he assumed everyone was like him, motivated by economics. He sat in the British Library, theorizing about work he had never done, performed by workers he had never met and whom he held in contempt. He was an atheist, so he transferred his zeal to politics. He imagined a beautiful system where “the people” owned everything. He believed that − surprise! − “intellectuals” like himself should be in control. Others composed variations on the same theme.

A glaring example of intellectual hubris is Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest novelist who ever lived. Because he could write well, he believed he could redesign society. (Similarly, because he graduated from Harvard Law School, Obama believes he can redesign the health-care system.) Tolstoy was wealthy, so he thought private property was unnecessary. He lost faith in the church, so he thought organized religion was unnecessary. He had seen war, so he advocated pacifism. He sought to benefit “the world,” so he tried to disinherit his wife and children.

Then we have Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and disciple of Marx. He proclaimed his devotion to the peasants, but privately derided them as “cattle.” And what do you do with cattle? You herd them, pen them, and then slaughter them. Lenin was followed by Stalin, who put this program into effect.

These people, and those like them, were enormous narcissists. They judged everyone and everything by themselves. They had no insight that others might have different experiences and different needs and wants. Thus Obama cannot believe that most people do not want government-run health care, so he repeatedly tries to “teach” the ignorant masses what they should want.

These people “love all the peoples of the Earth,” but have little feeling for their own nation. They “love humanity,” but have no respect for individual humans. They want to “save the planet,” but have no regard for the wants and needs of the people who inhabit it. They “respect all cultures,” except their own. They “honor all religions,” except their own. Their empathy is like a doughnut − with a hole in the center.

Voltaire taught us, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Liberals compare our nation, and our political and economic systems, to some theoretical ideal, rather than to actual alternatives:

● Does our Constitution have flaws? They don’t compare it to the constitutions of other nations. Instead, they compare it to some ideal constitution that exists only in the minds of liberal law professors. So we need not amend it by the difficult process it requires. We need only declare it a “living document,” subject to constant reinterpretation by the latest decisions of liberal judges. These judges do not understand that law which is arbitrary and unpredictable is not law at all, but merely their own whim − and thus undeserving of the people’s respect or obedience.

● Does our government have flaws? They don’t compare it to actual governments elsewhere, with their restrictions of freedom. Instead, they compare it to some ideal government that exists only in the minds of liberal political-science professors. So we need not take care to avoid the fatal pitfalls into which others have blundered. We need only rush blindly toward “change” and “transformation.”

● Does our economic system have flaws? They don’t compare it to actual economic systems elsewhere, with their stagnation and smothering of individual initiative. Instead, they compare it to some ideal system that exists only in the minds of leftists. And if we point out that the Soviet Union, the Eastern European Bloc, North Korea and Cuba are abject failures, they simply parrot, “True communism hasn’t been tried yet.” Yes, it has, from the first two years of the Plymouth Colony to the Israeli collective farms. It doesn’t work. But never mind, it’s the “ideal” system.

● Does our health-care system have flaws? They don’t compare it to socialized systems elsewhere, with their lethal waiting times, their severely rationed care, and their stifled innovation of new medicines and treatments. They don’t ask why America accounts for only 4% of the world’s population, but over 60% of the Nobel Prizes in Medicine, as well as having the best survival rates for most forms of cancer. But never mind, socialized medicine is “fairer.”

Even the finest horse can’t compare to a unicorn. But unicorns exist only in the imagination. Idealists spend their lives − and often the lives of others − searching for unicorns, while horses suffer from neglect.

Instead of comparing our systems and policies to actual alternatives, liberal idealists compare them to ideal systems and policies that always work perfectly − in their imaginations. Instead of comparing us to real people, liberal critics compare us to mythical beings who can defeat homicidal fanatics by nonviolence and diplomacy.

It’s not easy being a wife, if your husband compares you not to real women he has a chance to attract, but to plastic-surgery-enhanced, air-brush-altered Miss February.

It’s not easy being a husband, if your wife compares you not to your peers, but to flashy millionaires, or to stars on movie-magazine covers.

It’s not easy being a kid, if your parents compare you not to your classmates, but to ideal children who get straight A’s while being champion athletes and volunteering in homeless shelters – in their non-existent spare time.

It’s not easy running a war against fanatics who want to kill us, if your critics compare you not to your political opponents, but to a vague concept of the ideal leader − who can win a war without bloodshed, and who treats terrorists like honored guests.

The best is enemy of the good. If the best were available to us, we wouldn’t deserve it, or probably even recognize it. In real life, we must choose between imperfect alternatives. The ideal is something we keep in mind as a distant landmark toward which to strive. The ideal is not something we expect to reach in this world, and certainly not something we insist that others achieve in order to gain our support.

Only ideal husbands deserve ideal wives, and only ideal wives deserve ideal husbands. Only ideal parents deserve ideal children. Only ideal bosses deserve ideal employees. Only ideal citizens deserve ideal leaders. The rest of us must choose between less-than-ideal alternatives that exist in the real world, not merely in our imaginations. The rest of us must not allow our good society to be torn down, in the vain hope that we can create perfection.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Audacity of Hope, or Paucity of Truth?

Audacity of Hope, or Paucity of Truth?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 8, 2010

It may be that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
− Will Durant, historian

Politics can be a rough game, and finding the truth can be frustrating. President Obama has been in office only one year. Why is it that “Obama lies” yields 30,400,000 hits on Google? In contrast, after eight years of an often unpopular presidency, “Bush lies” yields 17,500,000 hits.

Why is it that Obama claims Republicans blocked legislation with more filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and 1960s combined, when in fact there was not even one? Why is it that Obama claims to be for reduced taxes and a balanced budget, but pursues the opposite policies? Why is it that the president’s statements on health care have been contradicted so often − by Obama himself?

Obama promised that under his plan, we could keep our health insurance, and that the government would never come between us and our doctor. But then, Obama declared that an elderly patient should have a cardiac pacemaker only if “experts” told doctors that it would “save money.” And he proclaimed that perhaps an ill patient should not get a hip replacement, but instead just “take a painkiller.”

Granted, there is a difference between lying and not being able to keep a promise. But if there was no intention of keeping the promise in the first place, the difference disappears.

● Obama’s plan involves “experts” telling doctors what they can and cannot do for patients, based on what “saves money.” In what sense is it true that the government will not come between us and our doctor?

● Obama’s plan involves “experts” deciding that we are too old or too sick to receive any treatment except a pain pill. In what sense is it true that we can keep our current insurance?

● Obama’s plan transfers crucial decisions involving the lives and health of ourselves and our loved ones from us and our doctors to faceless, unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats. In what sense are we still free citizens of a republic, rather than subjects of a soft tyranny?

Sarah Palin was ridiculed for charging that Obama’s plan included “death panels.” But what would you call bureaucrats whose arbitrary whims can determine whether or not you get a lifesaving pacemaker, or whether you must end your days in bed with a painful, unhealed hip fracture? What Palin did that so angered the liberal media was not to misrepresent the plan, but merely to describe a key aspect of it in simple, blunt words.

When telling the truth is called lying, we are in deep trouble. When speaking plainly is ridiculed, we know that language has become a propaganda tool rather than a means to convey knowledge.

I used to know a medical colleague who was well trained. I hoped to use him as a resource, and I asked him questions regarding the care of our patients. He invariably responded with a definite answer.

For a short time, I believed he was unusually well informed. But soon I caught him in egregious errors. Anyone can make mistakes. But he made statements with the same genial smile and the same pompous self-assurance whether the statement was provably true, questionable, or provably false. He never said, “I’m not sure, but I believe that…” And he never replied, “I don’t know.”

Finally, I began to doubt everything he said, even if I knew it to be true. He became a negative source of knowledge. After listening to him, I knew less than before. As a result, he was worse than useless. But at least I knew it, so I learned to pay no attention to anything he said.

And I learned the truth of the proverb that if you can’t trust a person in one thing, you can’t trust him in anything. This man often disappeared in the afternoon, and I had to cover for him. He was as unreliable in his actions as in his words.

The best leaders are those who project confidence, but who also inspire trust by making sure that what they say can be relied upon. Some aspects of leadership can be taught, as the armed services do daily. But charisma cannot be taught − you either have it or you don’t. The problem is that the word is derived from the Greek for “gift,” specifically “divine gift.” We don’t need leaders who believe they are divinely anointed.

Charisma can be extremely useful. George W. Bush had little. So when he mispronounced nuclear as “nuke-you-lar,” he was castigated as a moron. But Barack Obama has a great deal of charisma. So when he claims he visited 57 states, and when he twice mispronounces Navy corpsman as “corpse-man,” his blunders are ignored.

Ideally, a leader will have both superficial charisma and the deeper qualities he needs to lead effectively. But charisma alone is insufficient. It can even be dangerous.

Charisma can dupe people into accepting the leadership of someone who is fundamentally unsuited to be a leader.

Charisma can fool people into following someone who is more a lecturer than a speaker, thus demoting themselves from citizens being informed into students listening to a professor talking down to them.

Charisma can blind people into confusing a charming beta male with a real leader. If you doubt this, recall how Obama bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia and the emperor of Japan, and how he responds to each new nuclear threat by Iran with new offers to negotiate.

Charisma can mislead people into following someone who is not sure where he is going, but insists that we all go there with him − as fast as possible.

Charisma can hoodwink people into mistaking childish narcissism for self-confidence based on actual accomplishments.

Charisma can con people into trusting someone who is so narcissistic that he believes he can charm foreign leaders with the force of his personality, rather than formulating a realistic foreign policy.

Charisma can bamboozle people into voting for someone who is a glib talker but who views the truth as a casual acquaintance.

Charisma can swindle people into listening to someone who cannot distinguish objective facts from what he fantasizes.

Charisma can delude people into admiring someone who has spent so much time living in his head and shuffling papers that he no longer recognizes external reality.

Charisma can deceive people into believing someone who is a negative source of information, so that after listening to him, they know less than they did before.

Charisma can trick people into entrusting their fate to someone whose words cannot be relied upon, in the mistaken belief that somehow his actions can be relied upon.

But sooner or later, people will wake up to the fact that neither his words nor his actions can be trusted. We can only hope that it will be sooner rather than later.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

The Underwear Bomber

The Underwear Bomber: Being Kind to the Cruel

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 4, 2010

On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutellab boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 bound from Amsterdam to Detroit, with 80 grams of the high explosive PETN in his shorts. He attempted to detonate it over Detroit and kill all 289 people on board, plus more on the ground. Fortunately, only a fire resulted, and before the terrorist could do more, he was tackled by a courageous Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa. The terrorist was taken into custody when the plane landed safely.

The 23-year-old Nigerian comes from a wealthy family. His father is a prominent banker. (“Poverty causes terrorism.” Really?) He studied engineering at University College, London, but dropped out a year ago. How much engineering he learned is a question. But there is no question that he was radicalized by Muslim student groups and mosques in England. He then went to Yemen, where he learned bomb-making from Al Qaeda.

Regarding the interrogation of the terrorist, or should I say the non-interrogation, crucial questions should be raised:

● Why was the interrogation stopped after only 50 minutes? The initial explanation was that the bomber was then given the Miranda warning, and promptly did as he was told − remained silent. The second explanation was that after 50 minutes, the bomber had told everything he knew. The third explanation was that at that point, the bomber stopped talking spontaneously. The fourth explanation was that at that point, the doctors insisted on sedating the bomber to treat his burns − and sedated him so heavily that he could not talk, rather than more lightly, so he would talk with fewer inhibitions. The fifth explanation is that the terrorist is still cooperating − which contradicts the second and third explanations, and comes suspiciously soon after criticism of the decision.

Recall Murphy’s Law of Excuses: The more excuses people give, the less believable is each excuse. Excuses are subtractive, not additive. If people offer multiple excuses, their action was probably inexcusable. If they give mutually contradictory excuses, their action was surely inexcusable.

● Who decided to advise the bomber of his right to remain silent and obtain a lawyer? This question remained unanswered for six weeks. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair admitted that mistakes were made, but denied making them. FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which should have been in charge, was not − for the very good reason that a year after President Obama announced its establishment, it has not yet been established. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (who claimed “the system worked”) and Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter also denied involvement.

After six weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder finally admitted responsibility. Holder was a key figure in the kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez at the point of submachine guns, as well as the Waco siege, in which 84 people died, including 26 children who were by definition innocent hostages. There’s a man who knows how to be tough on women and children, but how to be merciful to terrorists.

Recall Murphy’s Law of Blame-Shifting: The greater the number of people who come forward to declare themselves blameless, the more blame there is to go around.

This is reminiscent of Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Multiple administration officials pushed each other out of the way to reach a microphone and proclaim their non-involvement. We should hurry to the kitchen and count our silverware, before we are reduced to eating with our fingers. If key officials are not involved in crucial decisions affecting our safety, what good are they? Proclaiming their non-involvement is, in fact, proclaiming their own incompetence.

● Why do officials claim that everything useful the bomber knew was obtained in those 50 minutes? The only way to know that would be to continue the interrogation − including rough methods − for days or weeks, then find that nothing new emerged after the initial 50 minutes. Since this was not done, the claim is pure speculation. The terrorist himself claimed that others would follow him.

Recall Murphy’s Law of Justification: The more an action is defended by speculation, the more indefensible the action must be.

● Why do self-anointed “humanitarians” lose sleep worrying about the harm enhanced interrogation might do to terrorists? But the “humanitarians” sleep soundly, untroubled by the incalculable suffering and death that terrorism can cause if the attacks are not prevented? Why do they condemn waterboarding, which reportedly was used on only the three worst detainees at Guantanamo, but say nothing when waterboarding and other rough techniques are used on our own troops to prepare them for possible capture? These are the same people who claim that lethal injection of a powerful sedative is “terribly painful” for convicted murderers, but that 13 days without food or water was “peaceful, even pleasant” for disabled Terri Schiavo.

Recall Murphy’s Law of Compassion: You can tell a great deal about a person by those he has compassion for, and those he does not.

● Why do the media insist on calling the Christmas airline bomber not just the “underwear bomber,” which at least describes where he concealed the explosive, but also the “panty bomber,” which trivializes the event? Why does President Obama insist on calling him a “Nigerian student” rather than a terrorist? In fact, for a year he has not been a student in any school − except the Al Qaeda Academy of Terrorism, Yemen Campus. This is akin to calling terrorist murderers “militants” or “activists,” or referring to a severe beating or an armed robbery as a “mugging.”

Recall Murphy’s Law of Description: You can tell a great deal about a person by what he emphasizes and what he minimizes.

● Why do apparently intelligent people sermonize about the Geneva Conventions? The Conventions prescribe the treatment of prisoners of war. But the Obama administration never uses the expression “war on terror,” and instead concocted the term “overseas contingency operations” − an expression as vague as it is weak. If there is no war, there can be no prisoners of war − only terrorists.

But if there is a war, and there surely is, then what do you call a man who comes from abroad in civilian clothes, carrying explosives with which to attack civilians? You call him a spy. And you do with him what President Roosevelt did with German spies during World War II − you interrogate them, try them before a military commission, and then execute them, without consulting civilian judges.

In fact, Roosevelt insisted that he would execute the spies regardless of what a judge might order. He told his attorney general: “I won’t give them up…I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?” Roosevelt, the patron saint of liberals, had his priorities straight. He knew we were at war, and that he held the ultimate responsibility for the safety of the American people.

Recall Murphy’s Law of Legalism: If you insist on quoting laws as an excuse for acting against the public safety, you had better be sure the laws actually apply to the current situation. Otherwise people will see you not only as a fool, but as a dangerous fool.

Finally, recall the ancient proverb: “He who is kind to the cruel will in the end be cruel to the kind.” We need to get our priorities straight, for both moral and practical reasons. If we use up our sympathy on criminals and terrorists, we will have none left for their victims − or for their future victims. But what would that say about us?

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Slandering America for Fun and Profit

Slandering America for Fun and Profit

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Feb. 1, 2010

I just saw “Edge of Darkness,” Mel Gibson’s latest film. If I were a film critic, I would make a snide remark about the edge of dullness. I would mention Gibson’s enforced absence after his drunk-driving arrest and his anti-Semitic rant. I would note that in this case, absence did not make the heart grow fonder.

But I am not a film critic. My point is not the film’s artistic merit, or lack thereof. My point is that it is the latest and worst in a long line of Hollywood films that slander America.

The film shows Gibson as a police detective whose daughter is murdered. It turns out that she had uncovered a terrible secret and was killed to shut her up. And what was the secret? Did it involve a plot by Muslim fanatics to crash airliners or set off bombs? Are you joking? The typical Hollywood villains in recent years are not real foreign enemies, but fictitious American evildoers.

The plot involves (surprise!) a big corporation, which was hired by (surprise!) our own government to construct nuclear bombs out of foreign-made material. Why? So that when they are exploded in this country, the evidence would indicate that we had been attacked from abroad.

Anti-military, anti-capitalist, frankly anti-American films are nothing new. But what is new is a major studio film stating bluntly that our own government is planning to attack us with weapons of mass destruction, for the purpose of justifying our going to war with some country somewhere. This is as close as anyone in the mainstream has ever come to claiming that 9/11 was an inside job.

In other words, we need not fear extremist Muslims − we attacked ourselves. But what about the bombings in Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai? Did the Indonesians, the Spanish, the British and the Indians also attack themselves? This goes beyond the incredible and reaches the delusional.

“Edge of Darkness” is a blood libel. In the Middle Ages, the Jews were accused of using Christian blood to bake Passover matzos. This false charge resulted in multiple massacres. And today, for a similar purpose, extremist Muslims accuse the Jews of using Muslim blood to bake Purim cakes.

A blood libel is a terrible sin in itself. But even worse, it leads to attacks on those who are falsely accused. If Hollywood films were seen only by Americans, they would evoke contempt for our own nation. But they are seen worldwide. Do we want to advertise ourselves so repulsively? Do we want to alienate our friends and enrage our enemies?

What is Hollywood thinking? Or is it thinking? Do film moguls care about the likely effects of their products? They whine about corporate polluters, but they are the real polluters. Polluting the body is harmful enough, but polluting the mind is even worse. Someone with a polluted body may get sick or even die. But someone with a polluted mind may kill thousands, as we discovered on 9/11.

Though this blood libel is the worst example, lesser slanders against America have been emanating from Hollywood for decades. True, there are occasional exceptions, such as “The Hurt Locker.” But such films stand out because of their rarity. The vast majority of Hollywood films show our nation, our government, our military and our religion in a most unfavorable light.

● “Seven Days in May” is a 1964 film about a military coup that almost overthrows the president, because he wants to sign an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviets.

● “The Package” is a 1989 film about a military coup that almost kills the president, because he wants to sign an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviets. Sense a pattern here?

● “First Blood” is a 1982 film about a mentally disturbed, unemployed veteran who is irritated by police and goes on a killing spree.

● “The Hunted” is a 2003 film about a mentally disturbed, unemployed veteran who is irritated by police and goes on a killing spree. Yes, there’s a pattern.

● “Full Metal Jacket” is a film about Marines in which the drill instructor holds up Lee Harvey Oswald to his trainees as a model marksman. In reality, our military has always been loyal to the civilian leadership − though the reverse has not always been true.

● “In the Line of Fire,” “Under Siege” and “The Rock” contain that Hollywood staple, the crazed ex-military or ex-CIA man who runs around killing people.

● “American Beauty” depicts the retired Marine next door as a sadistic, homicidal neo-Nazi.

● “Three Kings” and “Buffalo Soldiers” show U.S. soldiers as thieves. The latter title besmirches the nickname of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, which patrolled the Southwest and were made up of black troopers. Apparently Hollywood believes that being anti-military allows it to insult the memory of brave African Americans.

● “Spartan” involves an Army officer who tries to rescue the president’s daughter from kidnappers. But the girl is a political embarrassment, so our government decides to let her die – then tries to kill the hero to shut him up.

● “Courage Under Fire” describes how our troops shoot their female officer, then abandon her to be captured by the enemy.

● “The General’s Daughter” depicts a female officer who is sexually harassed, then murdered. But the Army attempts a cover-up, though she is a general’s daughter.

● “Syriana” contains only one sympathetic character − a suicide bomber who blows up an oil terminal.

● “The Constant Gardner” depicts pharmaceutical companies killing Africans. Good guys blow up oil terminals and kill people. Bad guys build oil terminals and develop life-saving drugs. Talk about an inverted moral compass.

● “Man on Fire” shows a hero so disturbed by his work for the CIA that he becomes a suicidal alcoholic.

● “The Bourne Identity” and its sequels involve a hero so disturbed by his work for the CIA that he develops amnesia. There’s a positive view of government service.

● “Jarhead” shows Marines as irresponsible juveniles. In fact, young people in the military tend to be more mature and responsible than their civilian peers.

● “Rendition” shows American agents seizing an innocent citizen of Middle Eastern ethnicity, then torturing him to extract information he does not have. There’s a positive view of the war on terror. Excuse me, now it’s called “overseas contingency operations,” words hardly designed to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies.

● “Brothers” is a film about an officer reported killed in Afghanistan. His brother arrives to help the widow and her two young children. The brother falls in love with the woman, and the children quickly accept him. But the officer was captured and remained alive by killing a fellow Marine. When the officer comes home, his wife greets him coolly, and a daughter blurts, “Why couldn’t you stay dead?” The officer brandishes a pistol and winds up in the psychiatric ward. There’s a positive depiction of the brave American and his loving family.

And I haven’t mentioned the films that show American business people as bloodthirsty killers (“The Pelican Brief,” “Michael Clayton”) or spreaders of lethal pollution (“Erin Brockovich,” “Michael Clayton” again). Of course, Christian clergy are shown as fools at best and murderers at worst (“The Godfather Part III,” “Sin City”).

Long, sad experience taught me to expect Hollywood to slander America. But I did not expect a blood libel. I intend to be more selective in my film viewing in the future. I intend to avoid films made by purveyors of paranoia and merchants of hate. I intend to avoid films that excuse our enemies and blame our friends.

I have no time or money to waste on people who slander the economic system that enriches them, who libel the nation that gives them freedom, and who defame the troops who risk everything to defend that freedom.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Scorning Pickup Trucks - and Middle America

Scorning Pickup Trucks − and Middle America

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 28, 2010

When Republican Scott Brown was elected to the Senate from heavily Democratic Massachusetts, President Obama tried to minimize this repudiation of his agenda by denigrating the messenger. He told his audience, “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.”

Well, no, actually. Because of the recession, which may have been prolonged by Obama’s counter-productive “stimulus” spending, many people can’t afford a truck. Liberals habitually respond to conservative arguments with personal attacks on the conservative. Recall how Sarah Palin was disparaged for coming from Middle America and − yes − for driving a pickup truck. Palin+truck yields 1,590,000 entries on Google. What logical reason is there for Palin’s choice of vehicle to have attracted so much comment from the media?

One gains the distinct impression that the liberal establishment doesn’t think much of pickup trucks, or of Middle America, for that matter.

Often liberals call conservatives “cruel,” “heartless,” and “unconcerned with the poor.” Howard Dean, when chairman of the Democratic Party, put it bluntly: “Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.” And if these insults don’t suffice to take the focus off the actual argument at hand, liberals descend to calling conservatives “enemies of the planet,” “fascists” or even “Nazis.”

In this case, the president took a different tack, implying that Scott Brown drives a pickup only for show. But the truck has almost 200,000 miles on the odometer. If this is a show, it surely is a long-running, successful one. I doubt that the Obama Follies will run nearly that long. In fact, it looks like it will close after Act One. The audience is already leaving the theater, and cast members are deserting through the back door.

Pickup trucks are the most common vehicles sold in America. Ford pickups are the most popular vehicles sold, while General Motors pickups (one of which Scott Brown drives) are the fourth most popular. Pickups score even higher in number of vehicles on the road, because they tend to be driven longer. In part, this is due to their usefulness for both personal and business purposes.

Many new cars are smaller than they used to be, and are unable to carry or tow large loads. People with a boat or a trailer now need a pickup. And pickups tend to be sturdier and to last longer than many new cars, which now are built partly of plastic. Even the metal is so thin that a fender can be dented by the gentle shove of one hand. I know − I’ve done it, and I’m hardly a heavyweight wrestler.

Our rutted, potholed roads often require the extra ground clearance of a pickup or SUV. Moreover, midsize and large pickups tend to offer better protection from injury than do midsize cars, and much better than small cars. In order to “save the planet,” one must remain alive.

But the key point is that Obama is so tone-deaf to the needs and feelings of ordinary people that he feels free to mock a pickup truck. To him, it is an affectation. But to many of the owners, it is a necessity.

If there is anything that irritates me, it is hypocrites who pretend to be friends of working people, but who in fact hold them in contempt. This obnoxious habit goes back to Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and apostle of communism. He posed as champion of the poor, but he privately referred to peasants as “cattle.”

And what do you do with cattle? You herd them, you pen them, and then you slaughter them. The record of Lenin, his successor Stalin, and their whole criminal gang is brutally clear. The deliberately induced Ukrainian famine, with the resulting 2.6 to 10 million dead, is but one example. The widely differing estimates of the dead reflect the cold indifference to human life in totalitarian states. Who knew how many millions died? Who cared?

Millions of peasants disappeared without even receiving the honor of being tallied. Why not? They’re just “cattle,” aren’t they? Didn’t Lenin himself say so? And if we couldn’t care less if they live or die, why would we care what they feel, what they need, or how they really live? All the working class represents to these people is raw material to be used − or used up − to support the construction of their dream world of socialism.

I am not implying that utopian socialists are identical to totalitarian communists. I am implying − in fact, I am stating plainly − that utopian socialists are on the same page with communists when it comes to professed admiration and concern for working people. They emote about their empathy for blue-collar workers, but in fact they have little empathy.

They may have sympathy − a feeling of concern for those they consider beneath them in intelligence, education and ability to make decisions. But empathy? Revealingly, the German word for empathy is Einfühlung − onefeeling, or feeling one with a person. To feel true empathy is to understand other individuals well enough to appreciate their emotions, their beliefs, their problems and their accomplishments.

Does President Obama feel empathy with blue-collar workers, or with Middle America in general? Consider his disparaging remarks while he was campaigning: “They get bitter; they cling to their guns and religion…”

No, sir. They cling to their guns because guns are the final guarantee that they can defend themselves against domestic criminals and foreign terrorists − the very people whose “point of view” you and your fellow liberals want to “understand,” and whose crimes you take every opportunity to explain away. Middle Americans cling to their guns because guns are their last defense against tyrants and meddlers who want to destroy their freedom.

And they cling to their religion because it is an essential part of their lives and their very being. They know that without religion, they would not deserve freedom, or know what to do with it. But they get bitter when seemingly well-intentioned liberals like you want to deprive them of the things they value most highly, in exchange for illusory promises of cradle-to-grave security.

Why does Obama belittle Middle America with his “guns and religion” and “truck” remarks? Because, correctly, he does not see Middle America as his base. His base is made up of over-educated people in Manhattan, San Francisco and West Los Angeles. His base was indoctrinated by their professors in leftist beliefs, so they support his agenda to centralize power in Washington. In contrast, Obama sees Middle America as raw material to be shaped and led, because they are too ignorant to know what is best for themselves and their families.

Sometimes a pickup truck is just a truck. But sometimes it is a vehicle for expressing the freedom to go where we want, work where we want, and do what we believe is best. Sometimes a pickup truck is a vehicle for expressing our independence, and not for impressing others with our affluence, our good taste and our political correctness.

Sometimes a pickup truck is a symbol of Middle America. Politicians who belittle it may score points with the over-educated fools who make up their circle of friends and colleagues. But come November, those politicians will discover that there are a great many Middle Americans, and they have excellent memories. They may even drive to the polls in pickup trucks. How’s that for karma?

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Can the Ship Turn in Time?

The Election of Scott Brown:

Can the Ship Turn in Time?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 25, 2010

I hard-a-starboarded and reversed the engines, and I was going to hard-a-port round it, but she was too close. I could not do any more.
− William Murdoch, First Officer, RMS Titanic

The events of the past week, especially the election of Republican Scott Brown in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, have pundits talking about a national turn to the right. But it takes time and distance to turn a large, fast-moving ship.

The Titanic was moving at full speed through a moonless night. The sea was dead calm, so there were no waves breaking on the iceberg for the lookouts to see. When they finally saw the berg and alerted the officers on the bridge, only about 37 seconds remained to avoid disaster. But in this short time, the ship had barely begun to turn.

First Officer Murdoch did the best he could, but it was too late. Like the captain and most of the other officers, he went down with the ship. This was honorable, but it did nothing for the 1500 passengers and crew who died that night.

From this tragedy, we can learn about life-threatening recklessness and arrogance − lessons that are relevant to today’s politics:

● We assume that technological advances have made our ship unsinkable.

● We assume that our ship is too large, too modern and too powerful to sink.

● We ignore repeated warnings of danger.

● We proceed full speed ahead when forward vision is restricted.

● We refuse to listen to suggestions to slow down and alter course.

● We assume we will be able to turn in time, once the danger is clearly visible and can no longer be ignored.

● We remain silent and passively acquiesce to a dangerous course of action, but we imagine we are better than those who are directly responsible.

● We watch our freedom drowning in a sea of bureaucratic regulations, but if all we do is watch, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Before we presume to steer a ship on an ocean laden with icebergs, we must study seamanship and learn the dangers. But before we presume to steer a nation in a world filled with dangers, we are not required to learn the dangers − or learn anything useful.

We can attend a major university, where leftist professors proclaim the evils of capitalism and the benefits of socialism. We can attend a major law school, where we learn that the Constitution is a “living document” that has no fixed meaning, but means only what a judge says it means today.

We can live and work in a liberal enclave, eat lunch with liberal colleagues, and eat dinner with liberal friends. We can hear liberal opinions on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. We can read liberal opinions in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and most papers in between. We can live in a self-congratulatory, mutually masturbatory liberal cocoon.

But we don’t have to learn history. We don’t have to read “The Black Book of Communism,” which describes in painful detail the approximately 100 million human beings who were murdered by communists. Stalin’s Ukrainian famine? Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”? Pol Pot’s Cambodian auto-genocide? The Vietnamese boat people? And what about Fidel’s 15,000 dead and 100,000 imprisoned dissidents? Does that stop celebrities from adulating Cuba, or young people from wearing Che Guevara T-shirts?

When I mentioned these sad statistics, a colleague quoted Lenin: “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.” But why have Marxists broken so many eggs, and made so few omelets? Would you hire such a destructive cook?

On another occasion, the same colleague parroted, “Pure communism hasn’t been tried.” Yes, it has. It was tried during the first two years of the Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims nearly starved, so they divided the land into privately owned farms − and prospered. It was tried on Israeli collective farms, but most have been privatized, and they now account for only 2% of the population.

The Soviet Union lasted 74 years. These years were marked by repeated famines, lack of consumer goods, and harsh oppression of dissidents. Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist East Germany and its East Bloc neighbors were poor, gray contrasts with their free, Western counterparts.

But if “pure communism” has repeatedly proved itself an abject failure, what about “impure communism”? What about the mixed but heavily socialized nations of Western Europe? Their economies continue to lag far behind America in productivity and growth.

Even worse, Western Europe’s populations are not replacing themselves. When people are infantilized by cradle-to-grave government care and control, they fail to have enough children to maintain the population over the long term. And in the short term, there are too few young workers to pay into the health-care and pension funds, so immigrants must be imported from Eastern Europe and North Africa − immigrants who do not share the values of Western civilization.

America isn’t Western Europe, but the liberal “elite” are steering it in that direction. Supreme Court justices claim that they should take foreign law into consideration in making their decisions − a clear violation of their oaths. Liberal politicians repeatedly compare us unfavorably to the socialist nations of Europe.

The birth rate of Americans has now fallen to near replacement levels. If it falls any lower, immigration will no longer be a subject of controversy. We will be in the same predicament as Western Europe − dependent on immigrants to pay into Medicare and Social Security.

But if we view ourselves as children and the government as our parent, why should we have children? Children don’t have children. Children only want to be taken care of. We want mommy to take care of us when we are sick. We want daddy to make the rules and give us an allowance.

Eventually, we will become like Western Europeans, working 35 hours a week, then taking eight weeks’ vacation and 22 holidays − that is, unless we wish to live on generous unemployment benefits and retire in our fifties. As one Frenchman admitted, “The aim is to keep your job without working; it’s not to go higher.” Of course, this cannot continue, but we will pretend it can.

Life-saving drugs are not developed by such people. Technological advances are not made by such people. The onslaught of hostile ideologies is not resisted by such people. Far from defending others, such people are becoming unable to defend themselves.

To paraphrase Mark Steyn: a welfare state, an effective military − choose one. Even a wealthy nation can’t afford both. And the more that people become addicted to socialism, the less they even want to defend themselves. It might interfere with their vacations. Besides, children don’t defend themselves − they depend on adults. Europeans depend on Americans. But who will defend us if we infantilize ourselves?

America is a huge ship. Changing its direction takes time and effort. When Democrats are in control, they turn the wheel to the left. But when Republicans are in charge, they return the wheel to the center position. “Moderate” Republicans and Republicans-in-name-only never can muster the courage to turn the wheel to the right, even temporarily. Obviously, when our ship is heading left, returning the wheel to the center position merely continues its leftward course a bit more slowly.

The election of Scott Brown caused only a minute change of direction. The Supreme Court decision on free political speech, the continuing collapse of the global-warming hoax, and the demise of liberal radio network Air America added slightly to the change.

But we are still heading toward the iceberg on our left. We are not heading to the right. We are merely heading to the left more gradually. The hope is that recent events herald greater changes, but only time will tell − time and our continued vigilance and effort. Only time will tell whether we will find ourselves in the unfortunate situation of First Officer Murdoch.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Laughing at the Constitution

Laughing at the Constitution

Giggler Pelosi and Her Merry Band

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 21, 2010

Good people can differ on many questions. But sometimes an event occurs that makes things painfully clear. At a recent press conference, a reporter from CNSNews.com asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful persons in the nation and second in the line of presidential succession, a question of fundamental importance:

CNS: Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?

Pelosi: [Giggles] Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNS: Yes, yes I am.

Pelosi: [Takes question from another reporter.]

Pelosi’s press assistant, Nadeam Elshami, then drove another nail into the coffin of the Constitution by telling reporters that asking where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a “serious question.”

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

No, that is not a serious question to would-be tyrants, who recognize no limits to their power. They want to jail those who dare to disobey their health-insurance decrees. But it is a very serious question to us. We and our children and grandchildren will have to live with the consequences of the answer.

And when Pelosi was asked about President Obama’s promise to televise the health-care negotiations, she again replied with a giggle, noting, “There are a number of things that you swear on the campaign trail.” Indeed there are. But do promises and oaths really mean so little that they have become causes of laughter?

Compare Giggler Pelosi’s response with the oath of office she, and the other representatives and senators, took before assuming their duties:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Houston, we have a problem. If high government officials believe they are no longer bound by the Constitution, and even treat the question as a joke, then what is the source of their power? All government employees, from the president to the most junior clerk, hold office by authority of the Constitution. If the Constitution is meaningless, they have no legal authority to do anything at all.

Pelosi and all her colleagues swore a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution. It is identical to the oath I swore when I was commissioned in the Army Reserve, and again in the Public Health Service. It has been many years since I was discharged, and legally I am no longer subject to that oath. So why do I still feel bound by it, and will till I die? But Giggler Pelosi and many of her colleagues obviously do not feel bound by their oath, though they still hold the positions for which they swore it.

Why do I take an oath seriously − deadly seriously − but some people do not? Why do I believe that when I take on a job, I assume its obligations as well as its privileges, but some people do not? Why do some people view an oath as meaningless verbiage, mouthed only to provide a good photo opportunity? Why do some people view a job, even a high government position, as merely an opportunity to increase their own wealth and power?

It is not a matter of age. Many members of Congress are of my generation, but see things radically differently from what I believe. On the other hand, there are thousands of young men and women in the armed services who are risking their lives to prove just how seriously they take their oath.

Age does not give wisdom − it gives only the opportunity to attain wisdom. An elderly jackass is still a jackass, while a young thoroughbred is a thoroughbred.

It is not a matter of religion, at least outward religion. Many of the members of Congress attend houses of worship more frequently than I do − whether for reasons of religion or merely for publicity. But I learned something about religion in wood shop in junior high school. Some wood is high-quality hardwood throughout, while other wood is cheap softwood with a thin veneer. The quality wood will take a beating and show only a few scratches and dents. But the cheap wood needs only a minor bump before the thin veneer is broken, and the poor-quality interior shows through. For some people, religion is a thin veneer designed to conceal what is inside.

Religion does not give wisdom − it gives only the opportunity to attain wisdom. Young soldiers praying together have more wisdom, and more genuine religion, than their elders who spent 20 years in a church where their pastor preached “God damn America” from the pulpit.

Learned law professors argue about whether the health-care bill is constitutional. Liberals say it is, because the Constitution gives the federal government power to regulate interstate commerce, and courts often interpret this clause loosely. Health care and health insurance affect interstate commerce, in the sense that they add to the cost of goods that are shipped interstate.

But carrying this argument a bit further gives the government power to regulate every aspect of daily life. The toilet paper I use was shipped interstate − can Congress decree how many pieces I am allowed to use? The food I eat was shipped interstate, as were the medicines I take − can bureaucrats decree that my weight must not exceed a certain amount, lest obesity add to my health-care costs? What about the talk shows I listen to, or the websites I visit − can the government control these as well, to prevent me from thinking the “wrong” thoughts?

Congress already decrees what kind of light bulbs I can use, and what kind of toilets I can buy. Anyone who believes that the signers of the Constitution intended all this must be delusional.

What liberal law professors mean, in effect, is that what the Constitution actually says, and what its signers actually intended, makes no difference whatever. All that matters is what judges say − in the end, what five out of nine Supreme Court justices decide. If this is the case, we have no Constitution − we have only a government of politicians, bureaucrats and judges, and what they say is the law.

Hitler assumed the titles of Führer (leader) and chancellor (prime minister). He then fired the war minister and assumed that role as well. But even then he was not satisfied − the lust for power never is. Hitler became angry with judges, though many of them were Nazis, and assumed the title of oberster Gerichtsherr or supreme lawgiver. Whatever he did was legal, even if it had been illegal. Whatever he forbade was illegal, even if it had been legal. He was the law.

Style is unimportant; only substance matters. What difference does it really make if high government officials wear military uniforms, or trendy civilian clothes? What difference does it really make if they shout and gesticulate, or speak quietly and calmly? What difference does it really make if they frown in anger, or smile in false benevolence − or even giggle?

All that really matters is whether government officials believe they work for the citizens, and they are bound by a written Constitution; or they believe the citizens work for them, and they are the supreme lawgivers. That question we must answer for ourselves, and soon.

People don’t lose their freedom because fanatics seize power and suddenly take it away. People lose their freedom because they sit passively while it is taken away bit by bit. But judging by the news from Massachusetts, that passivity may be ending.

Author’s Note: If you want to know the meaning of an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, read “The Only Thing Worth Dying For” by Eric Blehm, and “Lone Survivor” by Marcus Luttrell. Then tell me if you feel like giggling.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Education for Freedom...or Servitude?

Education for Freedom…or Servitude?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 18, 2010

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.
− Thomas Sowell

Suppose you wanted to take over a country. You could subvert the military and stage a coup. You could invite a foreign power to send in secret agents. You could start your own political party and try to attract voters.

Or you could simply take over the schools of education and journalism, and wait. The teachers and journalists would do your work for you. They would convert the next generation − or at least a good portion of it − to your way of thinking.

This is already happening. The Left is exerting a pervasive influence on students of education and journalism, who then go on to influence their own students and readers. The influence of the Left on primary and secondary education is undeniable, but its influence on the universities is even greater.

My parents revered education. My wife and I have doctoral degrees. So it is painful for me to say this. I believe that the decline of Western, and specifically American, civilization occurred simultaneously with the greater percent of people who attend university.

● There they learned leftist dogma taught as if it were truth revealed on Mount Sinai.

● There they learned to reject facts that refute leftist dogma, rather than to reject the dogma.

● There they learned to call anyone who rejects leftist dogma a “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “xenophobe,” “fascist” or even a “Nazi,” and not to waste their valuable time with logical, fact-based arguments.

● There they learned to admire the ability to talk glibly, but to disregard the ability to actually do something. And they vote for their leaders accordingly.

● There they learned to talk endlessly about working people, but in fact to look down on them. They never learned the proverb, “Parents who do not teach their children a trade teach them to be thieves” − or, in modern terms, to be dependent on the government, and to vote accordingly.

● There they learned that everyone deserves a university education. So they teach algebra in middle school, but cancel vocational classes. As a result, many students − especially minorities − drop out, or graduate from high school with no marketable skills.

● There they learned that “higher” education entitles one to make decisions for others, regardless of whether the education had anything to do with the subject in question. Thus President Obama believes that merely because he graduated from Harvard Law School, he is qualified to decide who gets pain pills instead of hip surgery, and who gets his best wishes instead of a cardiac pacemaker.

● There they studied Plato, and learned that a few self-anointed “elite” should rule the “masses.”

● There they studied social sciences under leftist professors, and learned the same thing.

● There they studied natural sciences, but even here, the Left can twist things to suit their agenda − as witness climategate. Do you think someone who doubts human-caused global warming has an equal chance to have his research project approved, to get a government grant, to have his article published in a prestigious journal, to be promoted or to get tenure? Are you dreaming?

● There they learned to blame the victim, not the assailant. So they make excuses for criminals at home and terrorists abroad, even blaming us for 9/11. Similarly, they advise victims not to resist criminals, despite the fact that victims who resist with a firearm are least likely to be injured or killed.

● There they learned to misuse language. They prepare legal papers that non-lawyers find incomprehensible − or even deceptive. They pass laws too complex for them to understand − or even read. Of course, complex laws require bureaucrats to interpret them and lawyers to litigate them. Thus ambiguity becomes an asset − in power for bureaucrats, in money for lawyers.

● There they learned that the Constitution is a “living document” that means only what a judge says it means today. Tomorrow it may mean something else entirely.

● There they learned that there are no moral absolutes, only matters of opinion. Of course, the only opinions that matter are those of the leftist “intellectual elite.”

● There they learned, “War is not the answer” − that is, if the question is, “What’s for dinner?” But they never learned to ask, “What ended slavery?” or “What defeated Nazism?” or “What kept South Korea from becoming a slave state like the North?” or “What freed the women of Afghanistan from being beaten for not wearing burqas or for going to school?”

● There they learned to have contempt for the U.S. military. But who else does as much to help the Haitians after the recent earthquake, or the Asians after the 2004 tsunami?

● There they learned to have contempt for capitalism. But what other system generates enough surplus to help others after natural disasters?

● There they learned to have contempt for religion. But they never learned that religious people are more likely to give to charity − both in money and by volunteering.

● There they learned to “question authority.” But they also learned never to question leftist professors, who may punish dissent with lower grades.

● There they learned to indoctrinate schoolchildren with leftist dogmas, and even to train kids to sing hymns to the Leader. But they did not learn to teach kids to love freedom.

● There they learned “multiculturalism” − that is, to respect all cultures, except their own.

● There they learned to refer to the “Prophet” Muhammad with respect, and even an upper-case P, but never to refer to the “Prophet” Moses or the “Messiah” Jesus.

● There they learned that “feminism” applies only to them, so they never criticize head scarves, chadors, burqas, or even genital mutilation − and they ignore “honor” killings.

● There they learned to remain in an infantilized state, as students, well into their twenties, so they concluded that it is normal for adults to be told what to do − and what to think. When the government acts as an over-controlling parent, they see no problem. That was what they became accustomed to in the first quarter-century of their lives.

True, there are exceptions. There are conservative colleges as well as the service academies. But most universities have a distinct leftward slant.

Perhaps the most insightful conservative columnist is Mark Steyn. He dropped out of preparatory school and never attended a university. I see no correlation between a university degree and the ability to think clearly and express oneself engagingly. If anything, the correlation may be negative.

Some students learn to respond to dissenting opinions merely by mouthing liberal mantras. A colleague of mine responded to any criticism of Fidel Castro by repeating, “He got rid of Batista.” Yes, and John Gotti got rid of Paul Castellano − so what? Some liberal professors train students to be high-functioning parrots. Many liberals respond to any problem by repeating, “Spend more, raise taxes, enlarge government.” Can that be the answer to everything? It is on the intellectual level of “Polly wants a cracker.”

In the past, there were many jobs − good jobs − that did not require a university education. In those days, high-school graduates were capable in spoken and written English, history and basic mathematics, as well as having good work habits. But then the schools were dumbed down.

Now, a high-school diploma is often a guarantee of little. As a result, most good jobs require a university degree. That degree may also guarantee little in real abilities. But as in “The Wizard of Oz,” the brainless believe a diploma is all that is needed.

Needed or not, meaningful or not, a university diploma is now considered the key to the good life. As a result, more and more young people feel that they must attend a university − and are therefore exposed to the most left-wing area of the educational system.

If we hope to save our republic, we must improve primary and secondary education, and we must appoint teachers and professors who have Judeo-Christian and American values − which are now called “conservative.” If we hope to remain free, we must not allow the next generation to be trained to become cogs in a state-controlled machine.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Education, Economics and Self-Government

Guest Column:

Education, Economics and Self-Government

Larry P. Arnn, PhD
President, Hillsdale College
Jan. 14, 2010

I have been asked to talk today about education and economic development. The standard thing to say on this topic is that the former is vital to the latter. We live in the modern world, so we all have to be highly informed and highly skilled and understand the power of modern science. It is a task of the very first importance to train a workforce that will be able to compete in the global marketplace. That is the standard thing to say, and we hear it said often by education bureaucrats from the federal level on down. And of course it is perfectly true, as far as it goes. But there is more to be said.

The practical point of this standard thing to say is that America needs more technical education − more scientists and mathematicians. And of course we do need scientists and mathematicians. But I like to remind people when they say this that the word “technical” comes from the Greek word “techne,” which means “art.” And Aristotle points out that art is about making, and that the question of what one should make is always superior, in point of order and logic, to the question of how to make it.

What does this mean? Consider one of the greatest scientific achievements of the last century − the development of the atomic bomb. The question of whether to build an atomic bomb, and then the question of whether to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end World War II without the need of invading and conquering the Japanese mainland, were more important questions − superior in order and logic − to the question of how to make the bomb. The brilliant physicists who accomplished the latter had immense technical training, but that training gave them no special knowledge about those more important questions. Or to put the point in a slightly different and more general way, a technical education can make a person wealthy and famous, but it does not teach that person what is best to do with wealth and fame.

So the first point I would make about education and economics is the importance of liberal arts education, which is the kind of education offered at Hillsdale College. Many think of liberal arts education as a broad education, but in fact it is a high education. We understand things to be arranged in a hierarchy. Hillsdale College has plenty of science and math majors, and our students go on to the very best graduate and professional schools. But whatever their majors, they learn the distinction I just made about questions of greater and lesser significance, and they study how to think about the very greatest ones.

The second point I want to make has to do with politics and education. The greatest example of economic development in human history was in the United States during the 19th century. At the beginning of that century, we were about five million people huddled along the East Coast. By the end of it we had grown at a rate of about 25 percent − much faster than China is growing today − and had settled an entire continent, largely without the help of modern science. To the question of how it was done, I think the short answer is the Homestead Act − the greatest piece of legislation I know. Signed by President Lincoln in 1862, the Homestead Act is short and beautiful − two qualities good legislation should have, and two qualities in which legislation today is utterly lacking.

What the Homestead Act did was to take the western land of the United States − surely one of the greatest assets ever held by any government in history − and give 160-acre plots to anyone with the backbone to live on them and work them. These plots of land were granted regardless of who someone was and with the certainty that no one settling on them could ever vote for this congressman or that. It is one of the greatest impartial acts of legislation in all of human history. It, and things like it, built America and the character of the people who spread across it.

How does this connect to my first point? It connects because the spirit of the Homestead Act, which led to unprecedented economic growth, could not be more different from the spirit of our legislation today. And the key to this difference is the difference between the education our leaders today have had, and the education students get at Hillsdale.

The principle that justified the Homestead Act has two parts, and both are found in the first 15 lines of the Declaration of Independence. The first is the idea of human equality − the idea that it does not matter what race or what family you come from, it only matters what you do − which has been the source of our greatest struggles in an attempt to live up to it. The second is the idea of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” At Hillsdale College, we study the Declaration of Independence as the greatest thing of its kind. The signers of the Declaration were risking their lives. There is a beautiful passage at the end of it where they write, “...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” But the document begins in an opposite mood, because the cause they are willing to die for is not specifically about them at all: “When in the course of human events” − that means not our time, but any time − “it becomes necessary for one people” − that means not our people, but any people − and then this sentence goes on to speak of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” laws true always and everywhere.

Understood comprehensively, the Declaration points us to an unalterable law of God, visible in nature, that man is inferior to God and superior to the beasts, such that it is unjust for one human being to rule any other without his consent. And it is this same understanding of human nature on which Madison rests his case in Federalist 51, in explaining why government is both necessary and must be limited:

[W]hat is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This is the understanding that animates legislation like the Homestead Act. And note the humility in it. America’s founders understood themselves to be bound and limited by something higher. And it is precisely this understanding that is missing among our political leadership today. Nearly 20 years ago now, when Clarence Thomas was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings, several senators questioned him about the idea of natural law, which seemed to them a foreign and dangerous idea. And why would it seem that way?

These senators have been taught to understand government as a means by which they can do marvelous things, changing society for the better in countless and unlimited ways. And in this light, the old-fashioned idea of natural law − which, as we saw in the passage from Madison, leads to the idea of limited government − becomes simply an impediment to progress.

President Obama is an impressive man, and there is much good to be said about him. But he falls firmly into this newer school of thought. Let me read you a passage from his book, The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

One can see immediately the practical results of this in the health care debate. Advocates of one of the latest plans are proud to place the cost at only $900 billion − apparently it takes $1 trillion to impress in this day and age! But consider that, in most of the plans that have advanced in the Congress, people making in the range of $30,000 to $80,000 a year will be forced to pay health insurance costs − or fines of about the same amount − that come to between ten and 20 percent of their income. They will be compelled to buy plans that have certain specific features. There will be an allocation of health care resources as part of the plan. And it will not be legal to buy or sell a plan that does not fit the criteria. Compare the spirit of this legislation with the spirit of the Homestead Act. There is a bullying spirit behind it. And that bullying spirit is becoming ever more pervasive.

The means are already in place for the federal government to control what people say in elections. As a recent example of how it tries this between elections, consider that Henry Waxman − a congressman of some power and influence − sent a letter in August to the CEOs of health care companies asking for schedules of all salaries above a certain amount, and of the conferences they had been to, and how much they cost, and who was there. Was it a coincidence that he wanted this information just as a health care debate was starting up? Could it be that he was trying to intimidate and silence potential opposition? One of the many “czars” − isn’t that an ominous word? − in the Obama administration is Cass Sunstein, the czar of regulatory policy. Mr. Sunstein is a very smart man − a law professor, like the president − but he is on record saying that speech rights should be redistributed by government bureaucrats much as wealth is redistributed through post-New Deal tax and entitlement policy. This is not supposed to be a country where there are czars dealing with things like speech. But it is such a country right now.

The economic policies being proposed these days are very bad. But the principles behind them are worse. They represent a return to the idea that the American Revolution repudiated − the idea that some are equipped by nature or training to manage the lives of others without their consent. I have been making the point lately that people are wrong who accuse the Obama administration of being socialist. I take the president at his word when he says that he has no desire to own the automobile companies. Instead, he wants to control them − and the rest of us as well − through a regulatory apparatus overseen by czars and bureaucrats. And again, his intentions are good. What is bad is the view underlying them of what human beings are. Rather than looking on us as equal beings with a set nature − such that none of us should rule another in the way that God rules man or man rules beast − our political leaders today have been taught to see us as material to be shaped and perfected by experts who have the proper technical training.

It has been close to 100 years now that the majority of people teaching in American colleges and universities have agreed with Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the Progressive movement and the first to write explicitly that the Declaration of Independence is obsolete, and that we need to liberate the Constitution from the Declaration’s restraints. This liberation leads to the idea of a “living Constitution,” characterized by constant change or progress. Absolute truth, to the extent that ordinary people still believe in it, obstructs change or progress − which is why President Obama refers to it, in the passage I read, as tyrannical. But if change or progress is the rule, who is to determine what version of change or progress is good? And the logical problem here − as any Hillsdale student could tell you − is that once you deny the existence of absolute truth, the definition of “good” becomes subjective and the only standard of behavior is what we want − “we,” in the political sense, meaning the government or bureaucracy. It reduces politics not to right, but to force. That is why there is this bullying spirit about our government today, and why so many Americans are worried.

It is time for that to stop, and there are two conditions for stopping it. The first is for the ordinary folk of the United States to see in this the despotism that it is, and to rise up and repudiate it. The second thing is longer term, but equally vital: It is to replace leaders who have bad educations with leaders who have good educations. This is our work at Hillsdale College. We aim to recover the meaning of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” and to place that meaning firmly in the minds and hearts of ambitious young men and women who have the courage to do something with that knowledge. And I swear that we shall not stop pursuing that task.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. It is well worth reading.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

The Barren Rocks of Aden

The Barren Rocks of Aden

Confronting Terrorism…or Not

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 11, 2010

I’ve always loved the sound of bagpipes. I learned to do so as a child at the movies. I saw films like “Gunga Din.” The film was hardly a realistic portrayal of the British experience in India, but it did teach me that homicidal religious fanatics must be suppressed by military force. And the film also taught me to associate the sound of the pipes with the approach of rescuers.

Recently I was looking through my music files, and I came across one I had forgotten, “The Barren Rocks of Aden.” It commemorates the time when Aden was a British naval base. From 1874 to 1967, British naval, land and later air forces were stationed there to protect the outlet from the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. This represented a key choke point on the trade route from Europe via the Suez Canal to India and beyond. But then the Brits left.

Aden harbor was the site of the suicide bombing of USS Cole by Al Qaeda in 2000. The ship was almost sunk, with 17 killed and 39 wounded. Earlier in 2000, a similar attack had been attempted against USS The Sullivans, but the small boat was so overloaded with explosives that it sank. However, Al Qaeda is nothing if not persistent, and they succeeded against the Cole.

The Sullivans is the only U.S. Navy ship named after more than one person. The name honors the five Sullivan brothers who were killed when their ship was sunk off Guadalcanal in World War II. From this incident we learn the following: (1) This was the greatest loss by any American family in World War II. (2) It is unwise to station close relatives together in wartime. (3) Freedom isn’t free, but some pay a very high price, while others are freeloaders and ingrates.

The waters around Aden are infested with Somali pirates. We recently cheered the rescue of Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama, when Navy SEALS simultaneously shot the three pirates holding him hostage. But we have the right − in fact, the duty − to question why these waters remain infested with pirates in the first place.

And now, Yemen is also a hotbed of Al Qaeda activity. There the bomber of Northwest 253 had 80 grams of high explosive sewed into his underwear. There Imam Awlaki e-mailed his protégé, the Fort Hood shooter, advice on attacking fellow soldiers. Awlaki recently survived an air strike. But would he survive a raid by Special Forces?

There is a limit to what an air strike can accomplish, especially when it is carried out by Yemenis, who may have divided loyalties. Sometimes what is needed is a team of SEALS, Force Recon Marines or Green Berets − or a sniper and his spotter. When all else fails, one can use the method of Carlos Hathcock and his more recent disciples.

Does this sound brutal? Is killing a few enemy leaders more brutal than air strikes or ground assaults in which hundreds or thousands of young troops are killed? By any moral or legal standard, killing a few leaders is less brutal − more difficult, perhaps, but less brutal.

Aden remains a key choke point in the flow of world trade. It remains vulnerable to terrorism and piracy. When I played the music file of “The Barren Rocks of Aden,” I was reminded that Aden used to be a British naval and air base, and I realized that the world would be a safer place if it still were.

Interestingly, the best video clip of this tune that I found was by a pipe band in Luxembourg − hardly a part of Scotland. This fact leads me to conclude that love of music is universal. It also leads me to conclude that love of freedom, which the skirl of pipes evokes, is also universal, or at least widespread.

If Luxembourgers can form an outstanding pipe band, perhaps others can take the place of the British in patrolling the waters around Aden. Clearly, the United Nations is not up to the job. To call the U.N. impotent is to insult eunuchs. At least they have an excuse for inaction.

The United Nations has been called the United Governments, to indicate that most of the 192 member regimes are far from democratic and do not represent their peoples. But even this title is optimistic − often the U.N. is very far from united. Many member regimes range from authoritarian to despotic. Can any sane person claim that the Iranian theocracy represents the Iranian people, when street demonstrations are being brutally suppressed almost daily?

Who can replace the Royal Navy in patrolling the Gulf of Aden, now that two world wars and socialism have reduced Britain to the status that it can barely protect its own sailors and marines, much less protect the shipping of other nations? Clearly, Britannia no longer rules the waves. No one does. The U.S. Navy is the world’s most powerful, but repeated cuts and widespread responsibilities have stretched it thin − perhaps too thin.

Liberals often ask, “Who made America the world’s policeman?” The answer, of course, is, “No one.” But liberals misinterpret the answer. America didn’t rip the badge of world policeman from the shirt of the United Nations, which had been wearing it honorably. No, we found the badge lying in the gutter, where the U.N. had dropped it. We picked up the badge, cleaned off the mud, and looked around to see whether anyone else wanted it. When no one did, we pinned it on our own chest.

The problem is not that we appropriated the badge. The problem is that no one else wants it, but we no longer seem to have the desire or the ability to wear it effectively. If we are unwilling to increase the size of our military, then we need to join with other free nations to create an effective force. This assumes that other nations would be willing and able to join us − a dubious assumption. So it almost certainly is up to us. The alternative is chaos.

In the early 19th century, in the days of sailing ships and muzzle-loading guns, international chaos was less dangerous. Yet President Jefferson did not tolerate it. When North African pirates interfered with the free passage of ships, he sent the infant U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to solve the problem. They did so, the origin of “To the shores of Tripoli” in the Marines’ Hymn.

But in the era of 9/11, with long-range missiles, and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, chaos is far too dangerous to tolerate. Yet to a great extent, we tolerate it. People who tolerate the intolerable will themselves become intolerable − and eventually extinct.

The sound of bagpipes is still stirring. The rocks of Aden are still barren. The waters around them, and the other key choke points along trade routes, still need to be patrolled against pirates and terrorists. But who will do it?

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Confronting Evil

Confronting Evil

What the Left Refuses To Do

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Jan. 7, 2010

Do you remember Daniel Pearl? Like many other victims of terrorism, he vanished down the media’s memory hole. The reporter was captured by Al Qaeda. He was tortured, his throat was slit, he was stabbed repeatedly, and then he was beheaded.

Similarly, images of the collapsing Twin Towers are rarely shown. And now, the Christmas Day underwear bomber is already fading from memory − as are the 289 innocent civilians he almost succeeded in murdering, had it not been for a courageous Dutch passenger.

Of course, it’s hard to remember something if you deny that it ever happened. Thus Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano initially claimed that “the system worked.” Meanwhile, President Obama referred to the bomber as an “isolated extremist.” And counter-terrorism czar John Brennan found nothing wrong with giving him a lawyer and telling him he could remain silent − rather than transferring him to Guantanamo and interrogating him about the terrorist network and future attacks. To some people, observing dubious legal niceties is more important than saving lives.

If you deny that the system failed, then you believe there is nothing to remember. If you see the bomber as a common criminal rather than another enemy combatant in an ongoing war, then you believe there is nothing more to do.

Meanwhile, TV and films are filled with images of phony violence, and “reality” shows display actual car crashes and other calamities. It isn’t images of violence and ugliness that we censor – it’s images of evil. The result is that we become used to violence and ugliness, but we remain unfamiliar with the appearance of evil. And if we don’t know what evil looks like, how can we avoid it, much less fight it?

What we should do, if we have the guts, is to look evil in the face. No, I don’t mean look death in the face – I mean evil. There’s a big difference, but one that many Americans have trouble recognizing.

I first saw death when I was in the second grade, and a classmate was run over near my home. Our class attended the funeral. I can’t recall if the coffin was open, but I think it was, because for years I associated death with satin cushions. My father died of a heart attack when I was 19, and I vividly remember his wax-like face as family and colleagues paid their respects at the funeral home.

Then I went to medical school, where we spent a semester dissecting a cadaver. Unlike the frail, elderly cadavers of most students, ours was muscular – he had died not of old age but of a gunshot wound to the head. I realized that our good fortune of having well-developed muscles to study resulted from his bad fortune of having been shot.

For the first time, I began to separate the tragedy of death from the evil of murder. The deaths of my father and my little classmate were tragedies. This man’s death resulted from evil. Of course, it was also tragic for his family and friends, if he had any. But the cause of death was a gunshot wound, resulting from murder, resulting from evil. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I learned more than anatomy in that class.

When I was 26 I had a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver on a freeway. Both cars were estimated as going 50 miles per hour at impact. Death has many faces. To Daniel Pearl it looked like the blade of a knife. But to me that day, it looked like the front end of a Chevy. The elderly driver was killed, his wife was seriously injured, and both cars were demolished, but I got out of the hospital in one day. I figured that every day from then on was a gift.

Later I specialized in medical oncology. Today there are effective treatments for many kinds of cancer. But decades ago, what we did was mainly to try new treatments on patients for whom there was no other hope. All physicians know that their struggle against death must ultimately be lost, but oncologists know it better than most.

One day during my training, I developed fever and abdominal pain. I examined myself and found an enlarged spleen. My professor hospitalized me on my own ward, in a room that had been occupied by patients I knew – some of whom had died. There’s a weird feeling for you.

My professor showed me my blood smear under the microscope. He pointed out abnormal cells that might be signs of “mono.” But they were so abnormal that they might represent acute leukemia. I sensed that he was preparing me for the worst.

That day death looked like cells with bizarre nuclei. But everything subsided, and I went back to being a doctor, not a patient. This experience, as well as the car crash, helped to give me empathy for the unexpressed fears of my patients, and to enable me to pass on the empathy to the students I trained.

Later, my mother died, as did uncles, aunts and colleagues. Of course these deaths hit me hard. But by that time, death was no stranger. It always came as a shock, but not a surprise. It was always a tragedy.

But if I wanted to see the results of evil, I could visit the emergency room and observe gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings and other evidence of man’s inhumanity. The difference between tragedy and evil was always clear to me.

Some time ago, I was treated for a health problem. The treatment was successful and I’ll probably be around for some time yet, which may (or may not) please my readers. But as I said, every day is a gift.

So I speak with some authority when I say that I have looked into the face of death. Believe me when I tell you that it is not the face of evil.

We worship health, youth and beauty, so we are terrified – even disgusted – by the thought of death, illness or disability. Worship of health, youth and beauty tends to produce fear of losing them, rather than empathy for those who have lost them.

Younger Americans have gotten so used to good health that they take it for granted. Often even middle-aged people have never had to endure the death of a family member or friend, and many have never seen a dead body. Death is even more frightening when it’s an unknown.

But when you have seen death face to face, as have soldiers, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses and doctors, it’s a bit less frightening. What’s really frightening is evil, with its far-reaching effects and many varieties.

One reason for the fear is that reality shakes us out of our peaceful illusions. It shakes us out of the comfortable fantasy that human nature is exclusively good. Reality forces us to realize that although we may have good intentions, we aren’t going around with haloes that others can see. Our good intentions can’t protect us from evildoers. In fact, our good intentions are worthless unless they are translated into good deeds.

Another reason for the fear is that we are forced to recognize that evildoers don’t always attack someone else – someone in the “bad” part of town. If 9/11 taught us anything (and that’s a big if), it’s that the whole world is now the “bad” part of town. The oceans no longer protect us, nor do upscale suburbs or gated communities.

We can no longer afford the illusion that violence afflicts only those in the inner city, or in the Middle East. And these thoughts are frightening – especially to those who hold onto their peaceful illusions most strongly.

The first thing to do when we fear something is to understand it. The only way to understand evil is to look it in the face. The face is horribly ugly, but once we have the courage to look, it becomes a bit less frightening.

Equally important, it becomes recognizable. Once we can recognize evil, we can fight it. True, the fight will be difficult and dangerous. But if we have things in perspective, we realize that evil is to be feared even more than death itself.

Otherwise, we will continue to treat each attack as an “isolated incident.” In order to connect the dots, first we need the intellectual honesty to recognize that they are dots, and then we need the courage to connect them.

It’s unnerving to have your enemy stare unflinching into your face. We need to look evil in the face. Then we’ll know what to do.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

ObamaCare? Why Not LegalCare?

Guest Column:

ObamaCare? Why Not LegalCare?

A Dose of Their Own Medicine − Bitter, Isn’t It?

Matthew S. Rice, MD
Jan. 4, 2010

According to the American Bar Association, thousands of innocent working Americans are wrongfully convicted of crimes every year, in part due to negligent or poorly trained lawyers, careless judges, and prosecutorial misconduct. Samuel R. Gross, Professor of Law at University of Michigan, estimates that between 3.3 percent and 7 percent of convictions are erroneous, meaning that between 60,000 and 140,000 innocent Americans are incarcerated.

With attorney-legislators scrutinizing and planning the reform of medicine and the health insurance industry, it is only fitting that physicians apply the most current progressive healthcare reform principles to the legal profession. Attorney-legislators and other politicians and appointees are strongly encouraged to use the present healthcare reform momentum to simultaneously reform the legal profession. Doing so would greatly add to their credibility among constituents and other stakeholders, since they know essentially nothing about medicine and everything about law. Legal reform: it is time.

Illustrative anecdotes.

● Cameron Willingham was convicted of murdering his children by arson in 1992. Due in part to poverty, inadequate representation by legal counsel, and an inefficient, haphazard, paper-dependent legalcare system based on medieval principles and practices, he was executed in 2004. The Texas Forensic Science Commission has been examining the flawed investigation that contributed to the execution of this man, thought by many arson experts to be innocent.

● Jimmy Bromgard’s public defender failed to investigate the facts of his client’s case, filed no motions on behalf of his client, failed to give an opening statement, failed to prepare for closing arguments, provided no expert witnesses for his client, and failed to file an appeal. As a result of our two-tiered legalcare system, Bromgard languished for 15 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.

● Eddie Lloyd was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in 1985. Contributing factors to this tragic injustice included representation by a court-appointed attorney, poor hand-off between defense attorneys prior to trial, and the fact that another state-appointed attorney failed to meet with Lloyd or file a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Lloyd was exonerated after spending 17 years in prison, and died two years later.

Scope and severity of the problem.

Legalcare costs in the U.S. are skyrocketing, with tort costs alone draining Americans of $865 billion dollars annually, a sum greater than the entire combined gross domestic products of New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ireland, Vietnam, Qatar, Ecuador, and Luxembourg. Billions more are wasted by fearful business owners complying with dubious regulations drafted by lawyers. Are we getting our money’s worth? Is the United States any more safe, just, or lawful than Japan or Great Britain, where the legal-cost burden is half of what we pay? According to The Times of London, our legal system is worse than that of either Russia or China. The prohibitive costs of lawsuits and liability insurance are smothering small business owners and working Americans, who bear almost 70 percent of business tort liability costs.

Class-action lawsuits result in multi-million dollar payouts to lawyers while consumers end up with nothing of value. David de Alba, a California Superior Court Judge, awarded attorneys who filed a class-action lawsuit against Ford Motor Company $25 million. What did the plaintiffs receive? Coupons they could apply toward the purchase of a new vehicle.

Expenses related to defensive medicine practices add $124 billion annually to healthcare costs, more than enough to give a $10,000 health insurance premium to each chronically uninsured American. The burden of lawsuits in America is an unseen “tax” of $9,827 on each working family of four. 6 Unless you’re Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, your family or small business is just one serious legal bill away from bankruptcy, and all bankruptcies in America involve at least one expensive legal bill.

A large percentage of all legal spending goes to administrative and overhead costs, needlessly increased by reliance on antiquated paper-based records and information systems typified by the 8½ x 14-inch yellow legal pad.

While half of all Americans will require legalcare services in any given year, almost 280 million Americans lack legal insurance. For those few Americans who do have legal insurance coverage, most plans only cover a limited number of attorney visits and fail to provide coverage for preexisting situations such as divorce proceedings, custody cases, bankruptcy, or cases involving alcohol or drugs, thus exposing hardworking families to unlimited financial liabilities Even those Americans with coverage are struggling to cope with soaring legal expenses. As a nation we can no longer afford to accept the status quo. The cost of inaction is simply too much to bear.

Lack of affordable legalcare is compounded by serious flaws in our legalcare delivery system. Limited access to legalcare by the uninsured poor and racial minorities results in unacceptable sentencing and incarceration disparities. It is critical that we close these gaps in legalcare for all Americans, but particularly for blacks and Latinos, where the incidence of conviction and incarceration is disproportionately high. More than 60 percent of inmates are racial minorities, and one in eight black males in their 20s is in jail on any given day.

Racial minorities, the poor, non-citizens, and men receive longer prison sentences than whites, the wealthy, citizens, and women, respectively. Recent studies by the American Bar Association estimate that half of all poor Americans suffer from at least one serious legal problem each year, but 75 percent of them have no access to legalcare services. While the average profit per partner of the most successful law firms soared to $755,000 annually over the past 10 years, these same attorneys only provided eight minutes per day of pro-bono legalcare services to the needy and helpless who suffer from serious legal conditions. Clearly, perverse profit motives have hindered the ability of many attorneys to reach their potential in providing low-cost or free legalcare services to the poor.

Imagine an America in which disenfranchised socioeconomic groups and disparity ethnic groups had access to the same quality legalcare afforded to the wealthiest Americans!

Too many Americans go without high-value preventive legalcare services such as professional income tax preparation and reviews; estate, will, and trust planning; legal risk reviews; pre-crime legal mitigation assessments; and other critical legal services available only to the wealthiest Americans. Routine use of preventive legal services could help Americans avoid future liabilities, but owing to prohibitive costs, many working American families forgo such counsel only to suffer the far greater consequences of future legal or regulatory noncompliance. Our legal care system has become a criminal and civil punishment system, and the time for reform is well overdue.

Lower costs to make our legalcare system work for people and businesses − not just for lawyers.

Inefficient and poor-quality legalcare costs the nation hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Billions more are wasted on administration and overhead, and this problem will only worsen as legal spending increases over the next decade. We must redesign our legalcare system to reduce inefficiency and waste, and improve legalcare quality, driving down costs for families and businesses.

We can do this by: (1) adopting state-of-the-art legal information technology systems; (2) ensuring that clients receive, and attorneys deliver, the best possible counsel, including preventive legal services and chronic-offender management services; and (3) liberating attorneys from perverse profit incentives by implementing a national single-payer legalcare system.

Legal costs and quality can vary tremendously among firms and attorneys; however clients have limited access to this information. We must require firms and attorneys to collect and publicly report measures of legal costs and quality, including data on hourly fees, legal errors, miscarriages of justice, attorney-to-client staffing ratios, overruled motions, reversed verdicts, and conviction rates.

We must align incentives with excellence. Sadly, many attorneys collect fees based on the volume of services provided rather than on the quality of those services. For example, a working parent might take her obese child to an attorney to sue a school for damages arising from chronic illnesses caused by the federally funded school lunch program. The attorney might think to himself, “I could make a lot more money by taking this case and billing these people $400 per hour, rather than telling them that the case is futile.”

Enter LegalCare, a national single payer legal system that would set reimbursement rates for attorneys and link quality legal counsel with incentives. LegalCare would cover all Americans and drive down legal costs across the board. LegalCare would be administered by a Department of Legal Services (DLS). Reimbursement rates would be modeled on the highly successful Medicare program, and would range from $12.56 to $170.65 per attorney-client session, based on coded documentation of the complexity and quality of legalcare services provided.

Tackling the disparities in legalcare.

Although all Americans are affected by this crisis in our legalcare delivery system, an overwhelming body of evidence indicates that certain populations are significantly more likely to receive lower quality legalcare than others. Do not all Americans deserve access to the best available legalcare? Could a poor working minority group member accused of drug possession simply walk into the office of a politically connected trial lawyer, and receive the legalcare he needed and deserved at an affordable price? Of course not! Lawyers demand cash retainers, ranging in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for criminal defense.

He would likely end up with a poorly trained, non-connected public defender, and spend years languishing in prison. According to a damning 2002 report, many public defenders are “unqualified, irresponsible, or overburdened and do little if any meaningful work for [their] clients.” It is our nation’s moral duty to ensure that attorneys and law firms provide affordable counsel to all Americans, especially our most vulnerable and disenfranchised; and to end the practice of “cherry-picking” easy clients or lucrative cases.

We must challenge the legal system to eliminate inequities in legal outcomes by requiring law firms, attorneys, and judges to collect, analyze, and report legal outcome inequalities for disparity populations, and we must hold them accountable for any differences found. We must also diversify the legal workforce to ensure culturally effective legal counsel.

Attorneys must be required to keep electronic legal records (ELR) for their clients, the benefits of which are substantial: improved administrative efficiencies, improved quality of legalcare, elimination of legal errors, reduction of redundancies and paperwork, and lower legalcare costs, among others. The ELR should be modeled after the functional and efficient Department of Defense electronic medical record, AHLTA, which is arguably the “Porsche” of electronic medical records.

The National Coordinator of Legal Information Technology would ensure that attorneys who fail to be meaningful users of the approved ELR (Attorney Hypermetric Longitudinal Technology Application) by 2015 face reduced payments and other financial penalties from the DLS. In a general sense, meaningful users of the ELR are defined as attorneys who demonstrate to the government that they are using electronic documentation, that their technology is connected in a manner that provides for electronic exchange of legal data to improve quality of legal services, and those attorneys who submit information to the government on legal outcome measures.

The National Institute of Comparative Legal Effectiveness would monitor attorney-client decisions via the ELR to make sure that lawyers do what the DLS deems appropriate, fair, and cost-effective. The goal is to reduce costs and guide attorneys’ decisions, with the aim of standardizing and improving legal outcomes for all Americans. Lawyers, judges, and other legalcare providers will have to adjust to a values-oriented system.

In too many cases legal professionals are providing legalcare that doesn’t reflect the latest laws, societal norms, or sentencing guidelines. That will have to change. They will have to learn to operate less like solo professionals and more like team members, working with attorneys in other practices, state bar associations, and the DLS to optimize legalcare. In return, they will enjoy the benefits of working in a simpler, seamless system that emphasizes and rewards excellent performance and fair legal outcomes.

Affordable, accessible coverage for all.

We must guarantee affordable and accessible legal counsel for all Americans. Currently, with nearly 280 million Americans lacking legal insurance, rising costs are a burden on working families and small businesses. It is simply too expensive for individuals and families to buy the legalcare they need and deserve on the open market, and is impossible for many with ongoing or preexisting legal problems.

We must require law firms and attorneys to accept clients with pre-existing legal problems (to include recalcitrant criminal behavior, drug and alcohol addictions, and civil problems such as complicated divorce and custody battles), at fair reimbursement rates set by the DLS. We can no longer allow attorneys and firms to accept easy or lucrative cases while dismissing those who cannot pay, or who suffer from challenging legal conditions.

LegalCare would be budget-neutral if it were funded with a small addition to the existing Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), and a federal tax of 75 percent on all tort awards and on all court filing fees. LegalCare will enable all deserving Americans to get the comprehensive and quality legal benefits they need and deserve at a fair and stable price. It will eliminate the two-tiered legalcare system currently in place, keeping courthouse doors open for all, regardless of economic status or race.

Matthew S. Rice, MD is a family physician in Tacoma, Wash. Contact: matthew_s_rice@yahoo.com. Also see http://www.SinglePayerLegal.org. This article appears by permission and was published in the winter issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, where references are available at http://www.jpands.org/jpands1404.htm

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Editor’s Note:

Dr. Rice shows, with relentless logic, how LegalCare would destroy the independence of the legal profession. Lawyers would become double agents − ostensibly representing us, but in reality serving the government. The same logic applies to ObamaCare, and to the independence of the medical profession.

A lawyer who serves the interests of the government can cost you your money or your freedom. A doctor who serves the interests of the government can cost you your health or your life. An incomprehensible, 2000-plus page “healthcare” bill is a poor substitute for the Hippocratic Oath.

It takes tradition, training and experience to produce an independent professional. It is much easier to produce a bureaucrat. But if your airliner were hijacked, which would you rather have aboard − Jack Bauer, or Janet Napolitano? And if you were ill, which would you rather consult − your own doctor, or a bureaucrat, even if the bureaucrat wore a white coat?

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

New Year's Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 31, 2009

It is customary to make resolutions for the New Year. Often these include vows to lose weight, exercise more, or clean out the garage. Almost as often, the resolutions are broken before the end of January. Rather than these praiseworthy but easily discarded goals, may I suggest a different set of resolutions:

Hire people who at least look like they know what they are doing.

After a radical Muslim from Nigeria nearly brought down Northwest 253 on Christmas Day, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano declared, “The system worked.” Really?

The terrorist’s father, a prominent banker, reported his son’s radicalization to U.S. officials. The young man was put on the Terrorist Watch List but not on the No-Fly List. Britain refused him a visa, but we gave him a multi-entry visa. He paid for a one-way ticket in cash and traveled with only a backpack. He may have been allowed on the plane without a passport.

The screeners failed to detect 80 grams of PETN in his underwear, more than enough to bring the plane down. The attack was foiled by a courageous Dutch passenger.

That’s the system working? No, that’s the system failing miserably at all levels, but Jasper Schuringa and the cabin crew working.

Later, Napolitano amended her statement, but the damage had been done. What will our enemies conclude from our pathetic response to the near-downing of an airliner carrying 289 people? If we cannot appoint competent officials, at least let us appoint ones who give the appearance of being competent − we may fool people for a while.

Avoid the deceptive expression, “Stop the cycle of violence.”

We did little or nothing after:

● Our embassy in Iran was seized in 1979 and 53 of our diplomats mistreated for 444 days.

● Our embassy in Lebanon was bombed by Hezbollah in April 1983, killing 63 and wounding 120.

● Our Marine barracks in Lebanon was bombed by Hezbollah in October 1983, killing 241 and wounding 60.

● USS Stark was hit by Iraqi missiles in 1987, killing 37 and wounding 21.

● Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky by a Libyan bomb in 1988, killing 270.

● The first World Trade Center attack occurred in 1993, killing six and wounding 1042.

● Our barracks in Saudi Arabia was bombed by Hezbollah in June 1996, killing 20 and wounding 372.

● TWA 800 was blown out of the sky in July 1996 by an explosion of uncertain cause, killing 230. The explosion involved a fuel tank where the wing meets the body of the plane. Later, shoe bomber Richard Reid was blocked from igniting a bomb on American Airlines 63. He insisted on a seat over the wing. And now, a man was blocked from detonating a bomb on Northwest 253, and he too sat over the wing. But if the last two planes had been brought down, they also might have been consigned to the trash can of “freak accidents,” just like TWA 800.

● Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by terrorists linked to Bin Laden in 1998, killing 223 and wounding over 1000.

● USS Cole was bombed by a group linked to Bin Laden and nearly sunk in 2000, killing 17 and wounding 39.

There was no “cycle of violence.” There was a series of violent attacks, and we lacked the brains, and the guts, to respond. Our enemies saw our passivity not as patience and love of peace, but – correctly – as cowardice and apathy. And then came 9/11.

Don’t confuse health, health care, and health insurance.

Perhaps the confusion began when medical care came to be called health care, and then health care came to be written “healthcare,” and finally we referred to the “healthcare industry.” The further the terminology is removed from medicine and physicians, the more we think of it as an industry, and the more we turn to economists, MBAs and lawyers. Instead of a doctor talking to a patient about what is best for that patient, we now have politicians and bureaucrats deciding what is best − or cheapest.

Health insurance is what we buy to help pay for health care. Health care is what we seek in order to retain our health. Health is a state of physical and mental well-being. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but politicians tell us that 40 million Americans lack health care. No! Whatever the correct number is, they lack insurance.

True, those who lack insurance may receive inferior care. But anyone can go to an emergency room and receive acute care. Anyone can go to a public hospital and receive acute and chronic care from doctors, nurses and technicians who dedicate their lives to caring for those in need. People may lack insurance, and they may not get optimum care, but they do get care.

Some politicians go even further and, God-like, proclaim that they will provide us all with health − perhaps a slip of the tongue, perhaps not. Those who lie to others are despicable; those who lie to themselves are even more dangerous.

Predict the future, not the past.

The word “predict” means to “say before.” Climatologists construct theories to explain the slight rise in global temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 1850s. But their theories did not predict the slight fall in temperature in the 21st century. This failure is clearly demonstrated in the e-mails that were hacked − or revealed by a whistleblower.

If a scientific theory cannot predict events, it must be thrown out. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was verified by observations during the solar eclipse of 1919. It was further verified by GPS satellites. Had Einstein failed to predict these events, few would remember his name. A genius must have his theories verified; so must lesser men.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel laureate in physics. When a researcher presented results that were “corrected,” Feynman asked how he knew when to stop “correcting,” or which way the “correction” should go. Feynman was asking whether the “correction” was a genuine effort to remove error, or a “fudge factor” to yield results the researcher wanted all along. The e-mails reveal that the quack climatologists are in the latter category. They “fiddled” with the data to conceal their failures and further their agenda.

But the quacks can’t even explain the past. Their computer models can’t explain the Medieval Warm Period, so they are trying to erase it from climate histories. Do the words “incompetence” and “fraud” come to mind?

Save horrible insults for real enemies.

Although I am a Jew, a colleague called me a “Nazi” because I did not agree with him about Bill Clinton. Although he is black, a man I know was called a “Klansman” because of his conservative views.

Hurling terrible insults at those who disagree with us has two harmful effects. First, it poisons political dialogue. How could I continue a discussion after I was called a mass murderer? My options were to get up and leave, or to let loose a stream of obscenities that would shock a Marine gunnery sergeant. The man who insulted me was relieved from any responsibility to support his viewpoint – which was probably the reason for the insult. Vile name-calling is a poor substitute for rational discussion.

Second, and even worse, the terrible words are cheapened until they no longer carry any force. If I’m a “Nazi,” then Nazis must be harmless conservatives. If my black friend is a “Klansman,” then the KKK must be a benign group whose only activity is talking.

Trivializing racism and genocide is a terrible sin. It is also a terrible mistake. If we can’t recognize evil when we see it, how can we hope to combat it? Inflation of insults is like inflation of money − value is lost until the thing becomes worthless. If we fire off our worst insults at political opponents, we will have no ammunition left when mortal enemies threaten us. We think in words. If we have no appropriate words for evildoers, we will be unable see them clearly – and that can be fatal.

Eating less and exercising more can lead to a healthier New Year for individuals. But carrying out these resolutions can lead to a truly happier and safer New Year for all of us.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He can be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Christmas Lights

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 28, 2009

I have always loved Christmas lights. The days grow short at this time of year, especially in the North, and colored lights in windows and on trees and porches help to relieve the gloom.

But the lights do more than that. Because they are Christmas lights, not merely “holiday” lights, they hold a deeper significance. This is obviously true for Christians, for whom this season marks the birth of Jesus − whom they believe to be the Light of the World.

Still, the significance is there for non-Christians, too. For Jews like me, the Christmas season coincides with Hanukkah, which usually is called the Festival of Lights. But the word means “dedication.” It commemorates the Jewish revolt against the Greco-Syrians, who had defiled the Temple in Jerusalem with pagan statues and tried to eradicate belief in the One God.

The Temple was rededicated and the eternal light rekindled. The usual account is that there was only enough oil for a day, but it burned for eight days until more oil could be obtained. Yet there never was a shortage of olive oil in Israel − there was a shortage of sanctified oil suitable for use in the Temple. The lights mark the distinction between the sacred and the profane, a distinction we have almost lost today.

I spent my early years in a small North Dakota town, where my family and I were the only Jews. The Christmas lights and caroling at school did not bother me in the least. To the contrary, I enjoyed these expressions of the season.

Later we moved to San Francisco, where my public high school had an annual Christmas program. Because it was organized by a Catholic priest, I came to love the Latin words to “Adeste Fideles.” Although there were many non-Christian students like me, nobody complained. Those who did not wish to attend could go to the library, so there was no compulsion − only enjoyment of the beautiful program.

My parents explained that this was not our holiday, but it was the holiday of most Americans, so I learned to honor it without observing it. My parents grounded me in my religion, so they had no fear that seeing a holly wreath or hearing “Silent Night” could shake my faith or cause me distress. They would have found that idea laughable.

I learned that there is nothing wrong with being different − that going along with the group is not always required. I learned that my worth derived from what I did as an individual, and not from mere membership in a group. No matter how worthy the group might be, my behavior was what counted.

And I learned that being different didn’t mean I was better or worse than anyone else − just different. This lesson helped me avoid the pitfalls of the teen years. Perhaps it made me a bit of a loner, too, but at least I didn’t believe that belonging to some clique or “in” group would mean anything in the long run.

Most of all, I learned not to be easily offended. When someone wished me “Merry Christmas,” I replied with the same words. It wasn’t my holiday − so what? A colleague wished that my day would be merry. How could that offend me? Why should people take offense at greetings or decorations for a holiday they don’t celebrate? What is offensive about pretty decorations and good wishes?

No, objecting to these beautiful things is what is really offensive. If I were in France, I would expect most people to celebrate Bastille Day. And if France were attacked, I would expect people to display the French flag and voice patriotic feelings. I would be a fool to expect otherwise, and an ingrate to take offense.

So why is it that some Americans take offense when Christmas lights are hung, or when people displayed the flag after the worst terrorist attack in our history? What offends people often reveals more about them than about the event that offends them.

The ease with which people take offense today is a manifestation of childish narcissism and intolerance: Why should I have to adapt, even in the slightest, to the people around me? No, I insist that they adapt to me.

When infants are hungry, they want to eat now. As children grow older, they learn to wait until the food is ready. They realize, reluctantly, that the world doesn’t revolve around them. They begin to accept that other people have needs and wants as strong and legitimate as their own.

But narcissists remain in an infantile stage emotionally. They expect 307 million Americans to adapt to them. They don’t like colored lights? Go to court and have them extinguished. They don’t like Santa Claus? Kick him out.

They don’t like the word “Christmas” because it denotes the birth of Christ? Insist that “holiday” be substituted. What holiday? Groundhog Day? Guy Fawkes Day? And rename Christmas vacation “winter break.”

For “Christmas” substitute “winter holiday.” Instead of the birth of Jesus, celebrate the winter solstice. Of course, the position of the sun imposes no moral obligations on us − which may be the real reason for the change.

Did they feel uncomfortable when flags appeared everywhere and signs proclaimed “God bless America” after 9/11? Fob off their own feelings onto foreign visitors, who probably couldn’t care less, and demand greater “sensitivity” and “tolerance.”

What about sensitivity and tolerance for the deepest beliefs and feelings of the majority? What about appreciation for the charitable work done at this season, and for the Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells and collecting donations for the poor?

And what about gratitude? Our country, whose freedom and abundance we enjoy, was founded by Christians who used the Bible as one of their principal guides. Wisely, they provided that no one sect would be allowed to predominate. They founded a secular government for a religious people.

But now, many would deform freedom of religion into freedom from religion. They take offense at anything that does not accord with their own beliefs − or lack of belief. They insist that the nation revolve around them.

They believe that moral principles can be handed down from one generation to another without any Source for these principles. This belief requires a leap of faith just as much as does a religious belief.

There is no historical basis for the assumption that a purely secular society can preserve its moral principles − or even preserve itself − over the generations. Yet we are betting everything we have that the assumption is correct. Is this a wise bet?

In fact, Western Europe is proving precisely the opposite. Europe is not only failing to reproduce itself; it is also bending over backward to be “fair” to those who aim to destroy it. Last year the BBC, Britain’s state-run broadcasting system, followed Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas message with a rant by Iranian dictator Ahmadinejad, a man who oppresses women, gays, and ethnic and religious minorities; who calls for the destruction of Israel; and who seeks to demolish Western civilization.

Why should we emulate Europeans, who are committing demographic and cultural suicide before our eyes? Those who show “tolerance” for the intolerant will themselves become intolerable − and eventually extinct.

● Is there too much happiness in the world? Is there a shortage of sadness and grief? Does hearing “Joy to the World” really cause a problem?

● Is there too much brotherhood in the world? Is there a deficiency of hatred and strife? Does mingling with a happy crowd really feel oppressive?

● Is there too much tolerance in the world? Is there a lack of egocentric intolerance masquerading as “tolerance”? Is there a lack of narcissistic insensitivity disguised as “sensitivity”?

● Is there too much courage in the world? Is there a need for cowardice in the face of a noisy minority of ingrates?

● Is there too much friendliness in the world? Is there a dearth of hostility and ill will? Does a hearty “Merry Christmas” really give offense?

● Is there too much light in the world? Is there a scarcity of darkness and gloom? Do pretty lights really cause distress?

A long time ago, Confucius taught us that it is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness. But what would he have thought of those who curse the candle?

A prior version of this article appeared last year. Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He can be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Christmas Lights

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 28, 2009

I have always loved Christmas lights. The days grow short at this time of year, especially in the North, and colored lights in windows and on trees and porches help to relieve the gloom.

● Is there too much happiness in the world? Is there a shortage of sadness and grief? Does hearing “Joy to the World” really cause a problem?

● Is there too much brotherhood in the world? Is there a deficiency of hatred and strife? Does mingling with a happy crowd really feel oppressive?

● Is there too much tolerance in the world? Is there a lack of egocentric intolerance masquerading as “tolerance”? Is there a lack of narcissistic insensitivity disguised as “sensitivity”?

● Is there too much courage in the world? Is there a need for cowardice in the face of a noisy minority of ingrates?

● Is there too much friendliness in the world? Is there a dearth of hostility and ill will? Does a hearty “Merry Christmas” really give offense?

● Is there too much light in the world? Is there a scarcity of darkness and gloom? Do pretty lights really cause distress?

A long time ago, Confucius taught us that it is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness. But what would he have thought of those who curse the candle?

A prior version of this article appeared last year. Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He can be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

More Politically Correct Carols

More Politically Correct Carols

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 24, 2009

Thanks to http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/Pics/no-el.png

What Child Was This?

News item: Planned Parenthood, which receives taxpayer funds, now offers gift certificates for its birth-control services, including abortion. Mark Steyn suggests including a greeting card showing an empty manger − which may be the real purpose.

What child was this who, laid to rest,
In the trash is sleeping,
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet
To cover up their weeping?
This, this is no one now,
While only to ourselves we bow.
Haste, haste to turn away,
We may have a child another day.
(Or not.)

＊

Guide Me, O Thou Great Obama

News item: Schoolchildren taught to sing hymn to Barack Obama.

Guide me, O thou great Obama,
Unhappy with this blessed land.
I am weak but thou art mighty,
Heal me with thy powerful hand.
Rationed healthcare, monstrous bailouts,
Till the budget bursts in two,
Till the budget bursts in two.

Open now the bottomless treasury,
Whence the people’s cash doth flow.
Flowing like a mighty river,
Spend it till we’re all laid low.
Change is all that we’ll be left with,
When the debts will all come due,
When the debts will all come due.

＊

Once in ~~David’s~~ Muhammad’s Royal City

News item: At Middle East peace conference, Saudi foreign minister refused to shake hands with Israeli prime minister, or even be in same photo. Meanwhile, Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, has gone from a majority to a decreasing minority of Christians. Hebron, burial place of Abraham, now has 130,000 Muslims, 530 Jews and three Christians. The trend is clear. The plan is to make all Israel “judenrein” – that is, “cleansed” of Jews, with perhaps a few Christians allowed to remain in subservient positions, subjected to discrimination.

Once ’twas royal David’s city
Where stood a cattle shed
But now, more is the pity
All David’s people fled.

Where a mother laid her baby
In a manger for his bed
Do you think, just maybe
Their memory is dead?

His birthplace we forsook
For empty words of peace
Gave not one backward look
As our future hopes decrease.

＊

The Twelve Days of Holiday

News item: Six Muslim imams removed from airliner after they pray loudly, make anti-American remarks, sit separately controlling all exits, and refuse to be re-screened. Three had one-way tickets and only one had a checked bag. One requested a seat-belt extension, though he was not obese, and flight attendants wondered what the extension could be used for. The imams sued, and the airline settled for an undisclosed amount.

On the twelfth day of holiday, my sex partner gave to me
Twelve Santas silenced
Eleven lawyers suing
Ten Commandments missing
Nine judges squawking
Eight cowards cringing
Seven crèches cancelled
Six imams flying
Five brazen jerks
Four chicken birds
Three French hens
Two fallen towers
But no Christmas, like when we were free.

＊

No Joy to the World

News Item: Schools, government offices and businesses ban Christmas trees and carols. It’s too bad Christmas isn’t a failing business − then the government might bail it out.

No joy to the world, no Lord is come,
The judge acts like a king.
Let all the people fear, to show a sign of cheer.
No heaven or angels sing,
No heaven or angels sing,
No heaven, no heaven or angels sing.

No joy to the world, the judges rule,
Let folks no songs employ.
In towns and hills and plains, wherever P.C. reigns,
Suppress the sounding joy,
Suppress the sounding joy,
Suppress, suppress the sounding joy.

＊

Away With the Manger

News ite m: University of Texas students put up “ACLU Solstice Barn” to replace banned Nativity Scene. Included are Gary and Joseph instead of Mary and Joseph; Nancy Pelosi as an angel; Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the Wise Men; and a shepherd with an explosive belt − but no Baby Jesus.

Away with the manger, the parents and child,
A scene of religion will drive them all wild.
They fear him, and hate him, and send him away,
But who fears a baby asleep on the hay?

Away with the manger from people’s front lawns,
The Free Exercise Clause evokes only yawns.
They profit from holiday sales all the way,
But can’t stand the real name of this holiday.

Away with the manger from schools and from homes,
Of their hate for religion they make no bones.
This country was founded by Christians, get real!
But a small group of ingrates will bring them to heel.

Away with the manger from hearts and from minds,
But replace it with what kind of symbol that binds?
Our enemies have strong beliefs that don’t fail,
But believers in nothing, how can we prevail?

＊

Silent Night, Unholy Night

News item: Stores ban Salvation Army Santas.

Silent night, unholy night,
Kick out Santas without a fight.
Gone are bell ringers ‘round the store,
Kettles for charity are no more.
Shop in selfish silence,
Shop in selfish silence.

Silent night, unholy night
No idea what happened tonight.
No reminder to help the poor,
No tinkling bells outside the door.
Shop in selfish silence,
Shop in selfish silence.

＊

Bad King Wenceslas

News item: Judge blocks mayor from telling police to take homeless people to shelters during freezing weather.

Bad King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight
Shiv’ring like a fool.

Bring that man in near the fire
The king said to his pages,
But ACLU raised its ire
And went into its rages.

They went to court and told the judge
It’s against the Constitution,
What it really said they’d fudge
That’s legal prostitution.

The judge ruled people have the right
Outdoors to be freezin’,
His ruling was quite out of sight
And counter to all reason.

Judge and lawyers all went home
All went home together,
While homeless people had to roam
In the bitter weather.

We now think a homeless guy
Is something like a fetus,
Their only right is just to die
What poets call quietus.

Inconvenient folks beware
Unborn, old, disabled,
We’ll kill you all without a care
We’re legally enabled!

When before the Lord we stand
And praise ourselves with boldness,
They’ll be people close at hand
Accuse us all of coldness.

Careful now before you speak
Sitting by your fire,
Twist the law against the weak
You’ll surely raise God’s ire.

＊

Deck the Hall with Nothing at All

News item: Dean orders Christmas tree removed from law school lobby after student complains of feeling “excluded.”

Don't deck the hall with boughs of holly,
There's no limit to our folly.
Follow me in mournful measure,
We're throwing out our sacred treasure.

Fast away our culture passes,
Speak up now, O lads and lasses.
“Tolerance” applies to others,
But not to us or to our brothers.

Note: “Fa-la-la” was omitted, as there was no way to be sure whether or not it is politically correct.

＊

Santa Claus Ain’t Coming to Town

News item: Employees told to say “Happy holidays,” not “Merry Christmas.”

No need to watch out
No need not to cry
No need not to pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus ain’t coming to town.

He’s making no list
Not checking it twice
Couldn’t care less who’s naughty or nice
Santa Claus ain’t coming to town.

The people all are sleeping
The lawyers are awake
The court says that it knows what’s best
So obey for goodness’ sake.

No caroling, fool!
No wreath on the door
No tree in the school
Makes all of us poor
Santa Claus ain’t coming to town.

＊

A prior version of this article appeared last year. Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He may be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Politically Correct Carols

Politically Correct Carols

And Thoughts on “Happy Holidays”

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 21, 2009

Thanks to http://texasscribbler.com/images/Say-No-Christmas_Tree2.jpg

No Christmas Tree

News Item: Colleges order Christmas trees removed after a few students complain of feeling “excluded.”

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
Though pretty are your leaves,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
Your presence here me grieves.

You make me feel excluded
Though I'm quite deluded,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
You'll wind up in a Dumpster.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
Your boughs are always green,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
You irritate the dean.

Atheists will all take fright
But neutered deans will make things right,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
You’ll wind up in a Dumpster.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
You’ll cause a revolution,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
We’ll blame the Constitution.

The Founders all would love your green
But now you’ll never more be seen,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
You’ll wind up in a Dumpster.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
Though you fill the room with beauty,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
To trash you is our duty.

We already think it's odd
To see the slightest trace of God,
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
We'll join you in the Dumpster.

＊

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Atheist

News item: School board tries to ban “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” from grade school because song mentions Santa and Christmas, and has “religious overtones.” So does “Don’t steal” − must we remove that, too? Ironically, the song was written by a Jew.

Rudolph the Red barged in here
With his most intrusive nose,
Poked it into all our business
Narcissistic, I suppose.

All of the other people
Wanted to have Christmas fun,
But he worked very hard to block them
That ungrateful son of a gun.

＊

Don’t Tell It on the Mountain

News item: High-school band forbidden to play Christmas music, including “Frosty the Snowman,” even without words.

Don’t tell it on the mountain,
On the hills or anywhere,
Don’t tell it on the mountain,
That you-know-who is born.

While ACLU’s watching
Over silent folks by night,
Behold throughout the city
There is no holy light.

Don’t tell it…

The people feared and trembled,
When lo! above the earth,
Rang out the judges’ orders,
Don’t hail the Savior’s birth.

Don’t tell it…

＊

Come All Unfaithful

News item: Children’s hospital stops handing out Christmas CD to patients because it mentions Jesus.

Come all unfaithful
Joyless and resentful
Come ye, O come ye
To trash the CD.

Run to the courthouse
Backed by flocks of lawyers
O come let’s file a lawsuit
O come let’s file a lawsuit
O come let’s file a lawsuit
And stop all the joy.

Come all ungrateful
Unhappy and embittered
Come ye, O come ye
They’re lighting the tree.

Run to the courthouse
Narcissists offended
O come let’s file a lawsuit
O come let’s file a lawsuit
O come let’s file a lawsuit
And throw out the tree.

＊

Unholy Night

News item: Judges ban Christmas program from schools but allow Mexican Day of the Dead. This is called “diversity.”

News item: Eight-year-old student told to draw picture about the holidays. He draws Jesus on the cross, but is sent home for drawing a “violent” picture and told to seek therapy. When his father complains, the father, a school custodian, has his hours cut. This is called “tolerance.”

Unholy night, the stars are brightly shining
But heavy clouds will obscure them from view.
Long lay the world in frightful error pining
Till we were set straight by ACLU.

No thrill of hope, no weary soul rejoices
The gloom unbroken by any light of morn.
Fall on your knees, O hear the judges voices!
No night divine, no sign of who was born
O night, unholy night, no reason not to mourn.

Led by the might of courts and judges beaming
No Constitution upon which to stand.
Led by their whims, to us quite senseless seeming
They pose as wise men to rule our fair land.

The judges rule us all despite the danger
Pretending always to be our loyal friend,
Ignore our need, to our wishes are a stranger,
They scorn life’s start, but celebrate its end.
Behold the judges, before them lowly bend!

＊

O Muslim Town of Bethlehem

News item: Christian population of Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, continues to decline, having fallen from over 80% to less than 20%, because of continued violence, and discrimination by the Palestinian Authority.

News item: Christians in Gaza Strip living in a “state of fear,” warned by Muslims to hold only “small, quiet” Christmas observances.

News item: “Liberal” church stages program of ”carols” with anti-Israel lyrics. The massive contradiction completely escapes the organizers.

O Muslim town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie,
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The crescent-star flags fly.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
No everlasting light,
The Christians here for all these years
Have sadly taken flight.

O holy child of Bethlehem
Will you please go away,
Leave us in sin, don’t enter in
There’s no one left to pray.

There are no Christmas angels
Who great glad tidings tell,
They’ve all left town, no one around
No one to ring the bell.

＊

Thoughts on “Happy Holidays”

Polls reveal that 96% of Americans celebrate Christmas. How is it “inclusive” to exclude this vast majority? And 90% believe it is the birthday of Jesus. How is it “tolerant” not to tolerate expression of this widely held belief? Liberals claim that our Founders were deists or agnostics who wrote the Constitution to prevent any influence of religion on our public life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? Insist on it at work. Nativity scenes on city property? Rule them illegal. Salvation Army Santas collecting money for the poor? Kick them out of malls. Carols or Christmas trees in schools? Never! But skeletons and ghouls for Halloween? No problem. The first year West Hollywood, California was incorporated as a city, the city offices were closed for Halloween but open on Christmas Day. What does that tell you?

Then we have the usual complaints about Christmas being commercialized, and that we are deep into “consumerism.” These complaints might be legitimate, if they came from clergy who want to emphasize the spiritual meaning of Christmas. But why do secular liberals make similar complaints? And why do these people never complain that Halloween is too commercialized? After all, Halloween is now our second-largest shopping season. There may be a clue here. Witches and devils? No problem – shop till you drop. But Baby Jesus in the manger? No way!

This isn't the first time that totalitarians have tried to ban Christmas. The communists did, and still do in Castro’s Cuba. Most Christmas ornaments are made in China – but not allowed to be used there. The Nazis replaced Christmas with “Julfest,” a pagan winter Yule festival. You see, totalitarians can’t tolerate any Authority higher than themselves. A former conscript in the Nazi SS recalled that he was forced to celebrate not Christmas, but a counterfeit winter holiday concocted by the Nazis:

On Christmas Eve, there was a celebration, not a Christian one, but a pagan German “Julfest.” We were all together and had to sing some trash about the night of the clear stars and other sad substitutes for the true Christmas message.

Those who want to eradicate all signs of our Judeo-Christian heritage imagine that this will lead to a tolerant, secular nation. But the 20th century proved that secular nations can turn out to be anything but tolerant. If you doubt this, study the history of Nazism and communism.

Now we are confronted by the threat of Muslim extremists. If we have no deep beliefs, how can we hope to resist the onslaught of fanatics? Observe what is happening in Western Europe. It would be ironic if the campaign against Christianity results not in “tolerance” and “inclusiveness,” but in an extremist Muslim theocracy.

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, one of the greatest churches in the world, was turned into a mosque and is now a museum. Is it possible that the same thing could happen to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or Westminster Abbey in London? This seems unlikely now, but we shall see – perhaps sooner than we imagine.

Whenever you feel pressured to say “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” consider these points. But while it is still permitted, may I have the pleasure of wishing you and yours a merry Christmas!

＊

A prior version of this article appeared last year. Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He may be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com

Oppose ObamaCare = Mass Murder?

Signs of the Times:

A mosque is being built just two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. New York City authorities favor the project. But a New Yorker observed, “You’ve got to be kidding me. If this is true, our beloved country is already gone. We no longer have the America I know and love.” Amen.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was nominated by President Obama for a second term. But is he trying to tell us something about the economy?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sW65ilskOC8/SpPT48Q3C2I/AAAAAAAAZrk/Z0yXWjU-I3I/s400/BenBernankeMiddleFinger.jpg

Oppose ObamaCare = Mass Murder?

David C. Stolinsky, MD
Dec. 17, 2009

A Washington Post blogger charges that by opposing ObamaCare, Sen. Joe Lieberman “…seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.”

Typically, the liberal blogger claims to see no possible motive for Lieberman’s actions other than revenge. Fear of government-run health care denying needed treatments to save money? Destroying the health insurance with which most citizens are satisfied? No, Lieberman couldn’t be worried about those very real possibilities. His motives couldn’t possibly be decent.

Conservatives tend to see liberals as mistaken, ill-informed and even foolish. But liberals tend to see conservatives as selfish, immoral and even evil. This liberal blogger is a perfect example. Perhaps he is referring to the study that estimates that about 22,000 people annually die prematurely because of lack of health insurance.

Clearly, health insurance is an important aid in obtaining optimum care. Those lacking insurance tend to have diseases diagnosed later, in less curable stages. But in considering this problem, there are other factors to take into account:

● Lack of health insurance is not the same as lack of health care. I spent my professional life working in public hospitals, providing care to patients who were largely uninsured and often indigent. To equate lack of insurance with lack of care is to insult the work of thousands of doctors, nurses, technicians and others.

● Lack of health insurance is often temporary, when people are between jobs, or have moved to another state.

● Lack of health insurance is often voluntary, when young people assume they will remain healthy and prefer to spend their money elsewhere, or when recent immigrants prefer to send their money back home to relatives.

● Lack of health insurance may be associated with unhealthful lifestyles, including extreme poverty, poor diet, alcoholism, drug abuse or criminality − all of which can contribute to poor health and premature death, but none of which are related to insurance.

Health insurance is only one aspect of health care, and health care is only one aspect of health − together with lifestyle and heredity. I become angry when I hear politicians claim that 40 million Americans lack health care, and even angrier when I hear politicians claim that they intend to provide everyone with health. Listen closely − some actually say it.

Besides, even if we accept that lack of health insurance causes deaths, we must also consider that single-payer insurance, which is President Obama’s goal, also causes deaths. Recently a government panel recommended that mammograms be routine only between the ages of 50 and 74. It also recommended against breast self-examination. The recommendations are already being implemented.

How many deaths will result if government-run health care makes the recommendations universal? How many women under 50 and over 74 will die of breast cancer that could have been cured if it had been discovered earlier? How many women will die if they stop breast self-examination? And how many men will die of prostate cancer if PSA screening, especially of younger men, is discouraged?

The sad fact is that a great deal of money will be saved by Social Security if people do die years before their time. How many deaths and how much suffering will result if we all are forced to take Dr. Obama’s prescription of “take the pain pill instead of the hip replacement,” and “get the cardiac pacemaker only if ‘experts’ tell doctors that it saves money”?

When did placing money above prolonging lives and relieving suffering become a “liberal” position? Imagine the uproar if President Bush had said something like that. He would have been excoriated as a heartless beast and a Nazi. But when President Obama says it, it goes virtually unnoticed. If you need further proof of the bias of the mainstream media, there it is.

The current system of health care in America is hardly ideal. But in our quest for the ideal, we risk destroying what is good. A reasonable person asks about the possible harmful effects of proposed changes. A reasonable person notes that America, which has a supposedly “broken” system of health care, also has the best cancer survival statistics in the world, while Britain, with “universal” health care, has much worse results. Why?

Perhaps these results are inevitable when physicians are replaced by paper shufflers and pencil pushers. Perhaps these results are inevitable when the people elect a president who, when a state senator, demonstrated his disregard for human life by three times voting against a “born alive” bill, which would have required medical care for babies born alive after botched abortions.

In doing so, Obama proved himself to be even more pro-abortion than NARAL, which is no small accomplishment. A similar bill passed the U.S. House with only 15 “no” votes, and passed the U.S. Senate unanimously.

Obama is far from the mainstream on the issue of the sanctity of human life. To me, this is extremely troubling. But to the liberal media and most liberal politicians, it is insignificant. It ill behooves a liberal blogger to cry crocodile tears about the supposed future deaths that Joe Lieberman is prepared to ignore, when his idol, Barack Obama, has demonstrated that he ignores current deaths − and hardly anyone seems to care.

In short, if Lieberman’s opposition to government-run health care makes him a mass murderer, are those who favor government-run health care also mass murderers? If not, why not?

Are liberals “compassionate” just because they say they are?

Are conservatives “heartless” just because liberals say they are?

Are deaths terrible if they are ignored by conservatives − or by independents like Lieberman − but deaths are insignificant if they are ignored by liberals? Who, precisely, is heartless now?

Under our current system, if you have no insurance, you can go to any emergency room. If your insurance won’t pay for a needed treatment, you can go to a public hospital. You can complain to your state insurance commissioner. You can apply to a charity for help. But under a government-run system, where do you go if the single payer won’t pay?

President Obama has demonstrated his lack of respect for young life by his votes against “born alive” bills, as well as by his statement that if one of his daughters became pregnant as a teenager, he would not want her “punished with a baby…or an STD.” I have many faults, but at least I do not regard an unplanned baby as a “punishment” equivalent to syphilis or gonorrhea. In fact, my medical training, and my religious outlook, both prevent me from viewing disease as a punishment, so the thought that a baby is a punishment is even more foreign to my belief system.

And Obama has demonstrated his lack of respect for older or disabled life by his statements regarding hip replacement and pacemakers, as well as by his claim that a procedure should be done not if it prolongs life or relieves suffering, but only if it “saves money.” This lack of respect is further shown by his notion of funding ObamaCare by “saving” $500 billion from Medicare, as well as by the seemingly coincidental recommendations of “experts” to restrict mammograms.

For all these reasons, I do not favor government-run health care. This is especially true when the prime mover behind it is someone who lacks respect for the vulnerable among us.

Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.
− Barack H. Obama, 2009

If we’ve got experts that are advising doctors that the pacemaker will save money…
− Barack H. Obama, 2009

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
− Hubert H. Humphrey, 1977

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. He can be contacted at dstol@prodigy.net.

www.stolinsky.com