I don't know when the term "March Madness" regarding the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship came into usage, but it was well after my college days in the 1960s.  This year's madness is focused on the sympathetic favorite, George Mason, and the nostalgic favorite, UCLA.  It certainly has caused me to recall a March Madness of my very own.

The nostalgia is for the greatest achievement in the history of college athletics, Coach John Wooden's 10 NCAA championships in 11 years (1964-75), including seven in a row (1966-73), the NCAA winning-streak record of 88 consecutive victories and 38 straight NCAA tournament victories.

But none of that had happened by Thursday, March 19, 1964.  The Bruins, led by center Fred Slaughter and guards Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, were undefeated in the regular season, 30-0, had won the regionals the previous weekend at Corvallis, Oregon, and for the first time in UCLA history, were in the Final Four.  UCLA was to play Kansas State in the semi-finals at Kansas City, Missouri tomorrow, Friday, March 20.

And I was bummed.

Read more...

The way I look at things, the best news of the week is the story of Abdul Rahman being on trial and facing the death penalty in Afghanistan for converting from Islam to Christianity. 

What a fantastic opportunity to put Sharia Islam on the defensive, make it once again the laughingstock of the world, and start forcing it out of the Dark Ages.  The case of Abdul Rahman shines a spotlight on the moral inferiority of Sharia Islam compared to the world's other major religions.

Once again, like the Cartoon Jihad, Islam has demonstrated a mortal vulnerability.  The lesson to be learned here is that the key to victory in the War on Islamofascism is to be on the constant search for its vulnerabilities.

Read more...

On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus departed the Spanish port of Palos at the mouth of the Rio Tinto.  After discovering islands he named San Salvador (in the Bahamas), Juana (Cuba), and Hispaniola on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, he returned from his epochal voyage, reaching Palos on March 15, 1493.  According to the journal of Spanish physician Ruy Diaz de l'Isla, the pilot of Columbus's ship had contracted a previously unknown disease marked by severe fever and frightful skin eruptions.

The pilot wasn't the only one.  By the time Columbus reached Barcelona, several of his sailors had come down with this strange new disease and were treated by the mystified Dr. de l'Isla.  Unbeknownst to them, the sailors had acquired the disease through cohabitation with infected native "Indian" women on the discovered islands.

Europe had finally begun to recover from the Black Death of the bubonic plague in the middle 1300's, which had killed fully half of all Europeans.  Once again, Europe was ravaged by a plague to become known as morbus gallicus, the French Disease.  It would kill one third of the entire population of Europe.

Today we are witnessing the effects of another French Disease on the streets of Paris and on the campuses of dozens of universities throughout France.  The social disease of the French Anti-Capitalist Welfare State has obviously caused severe brain damage among French students.

Read more...

This Monday (3/6), the Wall Street Journal had a front page article about Moslems rioting in France over the staging of a play in a small village in the French Alps called Saint-Genis-Pouilly.  The play was written in 1741 by Voltaire (1694-1778), and hasn't been staged for centuries.  The title of the play is Mahomet, which is an older way to spell Mohammed.

The article provided very little information about the play's content.  The author of the WSJ article clearly did not see the performance himself.  An internet search turns up a French edition of the play but none in English.  It's far out of print, so to actually read the play, you'd have to go a large public or university library.

It just so happens, however, that I have the English translation of the complete works of Voltaire - all 42 volumes - in my personal library.  So I immediately sat down and read the entire play.  It is a drop dead, stone cold, mind blow.  It is fantastic.  And it couldn't be more perfectly written for our day than if Voltaire was a clairvoyant.

Here's the play's synopsis. 

Read more...

Ever since George W. Bush won the presidency by preventing Al Gore's hanging-chad attempt to steal it, liberal Democrats have become progressively infected with BDS - Bush Derangement Syndrome. 

Here's how I think that the contagion of BDS is now infecting a number of conservative Republicans.

If you're a guy, perhaps you have endured this unpleasant and bewildering experience.  You're in a relationship and you and the lady have had some disagreements but nothing major.  From your perspective things are pretty ok.  Then one day you and she disagree on some minor trivial issue - and suddenly, inexplicably, it escalates as she unloads on you. 

It seems like the love of your life has had a personality transplant, you're facing a virago disgorging a torrent of anger, and all you can think is, "Where did this come from?"

If you're a guy, you're nodding your head in understanding.  If you're a gal, you're muttering, "Men are so clueless.  We give them all these hints for so long that things are bugging us, they never get the message, then when we finally can't take it any more and snap, they're mystified."

I think you get the analogy.

Read more...

Let's see, what shall I do this Sunday night - watch the Academy Awards or rearrange my sock drawer?  That's a no-brainer:  it's the sock drawer hands down.  I'll pass on ridiculously-costumed America-hating egomaniacs spewing praise of homosexuality, tolerance for terrorists, and ridicule of everything normal Americans hold dear.

Hollywood thinks it is so avant-garde, courageously blazing new cultural trails, when the reality is that it is so behind the cultural curve.  It will spend most of Oscar night praising itself for making a movie about homosexual sheepherders and pretend it's about happy cowboys.

Cowboys herd cattle, not sheep.  "Gay" means happily carefree, as in the 1934 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie, The Gay Divorcee.  That homosexuals have hijacked the term in an act of linguistic thievery does not mean we should let them get away with it.

It turns out they haven't. 

Read more...

Finally, finally, finally, at last.  Christians are fighting back against rioting rampaging Moslem violence and oppression.

In Egypt back in the 7^th century AD, most all Egyptians were Christians.  Then Arabs swarmed out of the eastern deserts like human locusts to conquer Egypt and impose Islam.  The native Egyptians were not Arab, and a few of them held on to Christianity in the face of enormous intolerance for centuries.  These are the Copts.

Copts often have to hold their church services in secret, given all the government restrictions on building a church (there are no such restrictions on building a mosque).  So when Moslems found out that an "unlicensed" building was being used as a Coptic Church in Odayssat, a village near Luxor on the Nile, a mob of them rioted, set fires, and tried to burn the building down.

The Moslems expected the Copts to just passively take it as always.  But this time, January 18, 2006, the Copts fought back.

Read more...