As many of you are aware, a young lady and seemingly a first-rate female athlete got on the same field as Vanderbilt’s men’s football team and proceeded to kick a rather unexceptional 35-yard squib.

I have nothing to add to this spectacle. I would like to query if any of you know the answer to the following. There has been much debate here in Connecticut (which is really just a thinking man’s Vermont) directed to whether biological males that identify as women should be permitted to compete against biological females, most notably in track and field events. It seems a given that biological males that identify as male cannot compete against women. In short, no one argues that men should be allowed to compete with women – only men that are women (or is it women that are men?) are afforded such an opportunity.

Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. Other dubious scientific achievements have cut thousands upon thousands of lives short: dynamite, poison gas, atomic bombs. But Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation. Only guns and gunpowder, the collective product of many researchers over several centuries, can match such carnage.

…

Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his “law of the life of species”, plants from the same “class” never compete with one another.[14] Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages.[14] The People’s Republic of China under Mao Tse-Tung adopted his methods starting in 1958, with calamitous results, culminating in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962. At least 30 million died of starvation.[14]

The fighting retreat to preserve the First Amendment seems hopeless at times, but things have actually been much worse in America in the past. Under the dark days of the presidency of Woodrow Mussolini Wilson, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, under which any criticism of any government figure or policy became a felony. Fortunately, Woodrow Wilson was an overt racist so it did not occur to him to also invent a pretext to prosecute “hate crimes” on top of the other legal atrocities he perpetrated.

Among the most noteworthy abuses of that period was the ironically named case United States v. Spirit of ’76 in which a silent film about the American Revolution was seized by authorities and its producer/director Robert Goldstein sentenced to a prison term of ten years. The film was overly pro-American (the good guys won the Revolutionary War in the movie) but the federal crime was to depict British troops committing atrocities in the 1778 Wyoming Valley Massacre thus potentially undermining the audience’s commitment to our alliance with the British in WWI. (Historical note: The British usually delegated atrocities to Iroquois allies and/or loyalist colonial militia (the name Banastre Tarleton comes to mind) while looking the other way and being duly appalled afterward. So the one scene of a redcoat bayonetting a baby was unquestionably inaccurate and over the top–but ten years in the slammer for that?)

The NFL ran a “We may be filthy rich but we’re nice Democrats, not evil Republicans!” ad during one of their Thanksgiving day games. It featured Michael Thomas, an NFL player who is qualified to speak on the complex social problems which face our nation because he is black, an exceptional athlete, and with a prominent beard. In the ad, Mr. Thomas was touring police stations, jails, and other law enforcement facilities while appearing to be nice to white police officers. Even though black police officers are ubiquitous in America, they were conspicuously absent in this commercial, for some reason. Mr. Thomas made the following statement in the ad, which I found fascinating:

“We talked to judges, and community leaders, to offer solutions, to make our system more just, which included advocating for reduced arrests, and policies, that reflected where we are as a society today.”

There’s just so much here. But what really struck me was that he wanted to reduce arrests, so he went to the police department. That would be like trying to reduce car crashes by going to the auto body shop.

The word “Jew” comes from the name given to the patriarch Judah: “[Leah] conceived again and bore a son, and declared, ‘This time I will thank the LORD.’ Therefore, she named him Judah.” (Gen. 29:35)

So an entire people is named after this one verb: to thank. Saying “thank you” is a definitional part of Judaism. Indeed, we understand that while we can delegate just about any job or task to someone else, “thank you” always has to be done in person, not through an intermediary.

I got some shocking news the other day: a childhood friend had died. I found out through a direct message on Facebook. His wife messaged me and sought out my physical address. She is putting together a memory book and soliciting entries from his friends.

I say the news was shocking, and it was. And yet it shouldn’t have been, I guess. I forget I am a septuagenarian now, locked in my head as a younger, more fit man. My friend was a year older, and he suffered from Multiple Sclerosis — a diagnosis he got as a young fairly newly married man. Although I am not intimately familiar with the disease, it clearly is not a diagnosis that is indicative of an extended life. So I am imagining that by sheer length, my friend had a pretty good run. But how is longevity to be regarded when suffering a debilitating disease — either for the sufferer or their caregiver?