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Monday, May 30, 2016

Toke! Toke! Toke! That Cigarette!

by Chris James
(With apologies to lyricists Merle Travis and Tex Williams)

Cigarette smokers are society’s most reliable whipping boy. The latest pitch-fork and burning-torch taxation mob was inflamed by the Surgeon General’s scathing 2012 report on smoking, focused on smoking-related health care costs and the approximately 400,000 “avoidable” U.S. deaths directly attributable to cigarette smoking (an un-stratospheric mortality rate of less than 1% of U.S. smokers).

The Disinvitation Season Is Upon Us

by John Stevenson
(published in March 2014)

With springtime comes an annual ritual.  Universities compete for high-quality high-profile speakers for their upcoming commencement ceremonies.  Negotiations are made, invitations are issued, announcements are made, and faculty-student protests of the commencement plans commence.  Like the annual nativity scene war, it’s become a tradition.

Sometimes the invited speaker does not fit the political mold of the always liberal faculty organization and their like-minded disciples among the student body.  Then the university administration is in for a fight.  Time was, university campuses were bastions of free thought---the marketplace, as the saying goes, for the free and open exchange of ideas.  Diversity of opinion was valued in academia.  No longer.

Another Casualty of Campus Thought Police

by John Stevenson
(published in April 2014)

Mohammed Bouyeri is serving a life sentence for the 2004 murder of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh.  Van Gogh had made a movie called Submission, shown on Dutch television.  It’s purpose was to draw attention to the plight of Muslim women; it was unflattering to Islam and it’s fair to say it was blasphemous.  Bouyeri stabbed Van Gogh to death in the street.  With his dagger, he then stabbed into Van Gogh’s flesh a letter addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, threatening to kill her as well.

“What Are They Afraid of Hearing?”


by John Stevenson
(published in June 2014)

Michael Bloomberg, Harvard Business School alumnus and former Mayor of New York City, delivered the commencement speech at his alma mater on May 20.  His address had an unusual theme---tolerance for differing points of view.

“This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw, or have their invitations rescinded, after protests from students and… shockingly, from senior faculty and administrators who should know better.”

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Newspeak---the sequel

by John Stevenson

My column “Newspeak” was published on May 4.  If you read that column, you’ll recall that Newspeak was the official government language of George Orwell’s “1984.”  I cited two dictionary definitions of Newspeak: “speech or writing that uses words in a way that changes their meaning especially to persuade people to think a certain way” and  “an official or semi-official style of writing or saying one thing in the guise of its opposite, especially in order to serve an ideological cause while pretending to be objective…”

Right on cue (but I do not take credit for this) Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason inadvertently provided another Newspeak example in her May 4 Washington Post guest editorial.  I found this coincidence irresistible, so here it is.

A Teachable Moment

by John Stevenson
(published December 2015)

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said “It doesn’t matter who gets the most votes. It only matters who counts the votes.”  A Soviet version of democracy.

“When we reviewed the results of our Associated Student Body election…we saw that it was not fully representative of our school population.  I made the decision to pause on sharing the results with the students in order to capitalize on a teachable moment.”  So wrote Principal Lena Van Haren, trying to explain to dismayed parents and students why she had put the election results on hold.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

New York Values?

by John Stevenson

The dispute between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz over “New York values” has played a part in this year’s Republican primary electioneering.  Cruz’s use of the term drew applause in rural, conservative, religious states.  Trump’s counter-attack likely figured into the trouncing he gave Cruz in the New York primary.

Here’s a story which may shed some light on the difference between New York values and those of fly-over country.

New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were traitors.  They stole atomic bomb secrets and transmitted them to the Soviet Union.  They were convicted of treason and espionage and were executed in 1953.

A Job for the U.N.

by John Stevenson
(published in February 2014)

“Gonna take my problem to the United Nations”
Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran, 1958

Here are some observations just to put our America and the world around us in perspective.

Taking Responsibility

by John Stevenson
(published August 2014)

The most dreaded disease of our generation was Poliomyelitis.  You probably remember the newsreels showing polio victims being kept alive, forever trapped in their “iron lungs.”  In high school I knew two kids who had had polio and survived, but they were partially paralyzed, and would be for the rest of their days.

Then in the late 1950s Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed vaccines which would immunize us all against polio.  Sabin’s was an oral vaccine.  In about 1962, when I was a student at Cal, it was made widely available.  Here’s how it worked.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

“Zany” Pronunciations

by John Stevenson

Donald Trump has been counseled to “act more presidential.”  So on April 27, he gave a teleprompted speech on foreign policy.  The thrust of the speech was that American interests should be paramount in national security, international diplomacy, and global trade.  Reviews were mixed.

But critics pounced on his pronunciation of the African nation Tanzania.  Trump was slammed by political pundits.  White House press secretary Josh Earnest got in on the fun, saying “Apparently the phonetics are not included on the teleprompter.”

Pria Lal, an assistant professor of African History at Boston College, said there is “no debate” about the correct pronunciation.  She also declared that “it is a serious error and it is ignorant” and that “it seems quite flippant to mispronounce the name of a big country.”

But was it a mispronunciation?  Trump said tan-ZANY-a which, by the way, was the pronunciation in common use when I was a youngster.  Those who seized upon his pronunciation as needing criticism declared the correct pronunciation to be tan-za-NEE-a.

Those Clairvoyant Republicans

by John Stevenson
(published October 2015)

In a presidential campaign debate on October 22, 2012, President Barack Obama ridiculed his challenger: “Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda….The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Newspeak

by John Stevenson

Newspeak was the official government language of George Orwell’s “1984.”  Merriam-Webster defines Newspeak as “speech or writing that uses words in a way that changes their meaning especially to persuade people to think a certain way.”  Dictionary.com defines it as “an official or semi-official style of writing or saying one thing in the guise of its opposite, especially in order to serve an ideological cause while pretending to be objective, as in referring to ‘increased taxation’ as ‘revenue enhancement.’”

Orwell was prescient: the technique is widely in use today.

“My Brother’s Keeper”

by John Stevenson
(published April 2014)

On February 27, President Obama launched “My Brother’s Keeper,” an initiative to help young black men to realize their potential.  I applaud the president for taking this step, and I wish for the success of this initiative.

The Re-education of Don Jones

by John Stevenson
(published May 2014)

In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell wrote of a totalitarian state that prosecuted “thoughtcrimes.”  Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, committed intellectual treason and was imprisoned and tortured for his crime.  As a result, he rejected his lover and soul mate, as well as his quest for truth and intellectual freedom.  In the end, he truly loved Big Brother; his re-education was complete.

In real life, re-education was an instrument of control applied by the Communist Chinese regime during the Cultural Revolution.  Millions of suspected counter-revolutionaries were imprisoned and underwent socialist “re-education through labor.”  In post-war Vietnam, similar methods were used against those who had sided with the South Vietnamese and American governments.

Defensive end Michael Sam had “come out” to his University of Missouri teammates last August, and found them supportive.  As the NFL draft loomed, he came out publicly in an interview on ESPN.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Eat Your Heart Out, Karl Marx

by Chris James

Recently, I attended a rather Progressively-oriented presentation on Global Warming (GW). The speaker had spent 15 years as a GW activist, conscientiously beavering away at GW whoop-de-do's all over the world.

The Proud-of-America Gap

by John Stevenson
(published in July 2014)

A Pew Research Center poll released June 26 reveals a deep divide between liberals and conservatives in their attitudes about America.  Not about policy (although there’s that, too) but about America itself.

A word or two about Pew’s methodology.  You can find the entire report by searching Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology---but be prepared for a long, arduous read.  Pew divided respondents into eight categories along a spectrum from conservative to liberal.  “Three are strongly ideological, highly politically engaged, and overwhelmingly partisan---two on the right and one on the left.”  The remaining “groups are less partisan…less engaged politically” than the three on the right and left.  More on that in a moment.

Bleacher Envy

by John Stevenson
(published in May 2014)

At the Plymouth High School in Canton, Michigan, the boys’ varsity baseball diamond and the girls’ softball diamond are adjacent.  The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has forced the school to tear down the bleachers at the boys’ field because they provide better seating than do the bleachers at the girls’ field.

Impossible?  Read on….