Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

I’ve found that home birth, like birth without drugs, is usually more about the mother than the baby. Most of the women I have met who have had one or both of those experiences preach about it like a revivalist minister. Good for them, but I wish they’d shut up. Just because it’s O.K. for them doesn’t mean that every woman should do it, or even want to do it. It’s like the breast-feeding tyrants who nurse until their children are practically teenagers. If that’s what you want, do it. But please stop denigrating women who choose something else. Bottle feeding doesn’t make for a bad mother, any more than hospital birth does. Choose what you want, do it and keep it to yourself, please.

LINDA PORTER

Seattle

Note from KBJ: Tell us how you really feel, Linda.

Gamma 1 (1979).

Chomsky's message to his disciples—the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices—is also a message of action. To those susceptible to his words of hate, Chomsky has this instruction: "The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here." This is the voice of the fifth-column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky will want to give them. Of course, Chomsky himself, a Cambridge millionaire, is too important to the struggle to take such risks personally; his role is to incite others.

(David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz, vol. II, Progressives [Los Angeles: Second Thoughts Books, 2013], 230-1 [footnote omitted])

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To the editor:

There's no denying that in a state as large as California, where our cars drive more than 300 billion miles each year, petroleum is a necessity—even with the growing popularity and affordability of hybrid vehicles. ("Bill McKibben: How to drive a stake through the heart of zombie fossil fuel," Opinion, Jan. 19)

Bill McKibben's call to eliminate oil production shows he is out of touch with American families, who rely on petroleum to affordably get through their day. Granting McKibben's wish would decimate our standard of living.

Nearly 40% of the oil used in California is produced here, under the strictest environmental regulations in the country. Every gallon of oil that isn't produced locally must be imported by rail or by ship, mostly from foreign countries.

Californians should support more local oil production. Not only is it better for our economy to create jobs and generate revenue locally, but we also reduce our carbon footprint by reducing oil imports.

Stuart Waldman, Van Nuys

The writer is president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.

Why is it that, when Republican elites choose the presidential candidate, as they did in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, they expect ordinary Republicans to donate and vote, but when ordinary Republicans choose the presidential candidate, as they are this year, the elites protest, howl, and threaten desertion? Sorry, elites, but you no longer run the show. We expect you to support our choice for president.

[T]he multiculturalist’s real interest is not pedagogy but power, not teaching but advocacy, not the history of the past but the politics of the present, and not qualification for the job but occupational preference for her crowd. The multiculturalist has no desire to improve the teaching of black history. What she wants is to reserve jobs for people who will support her cause. Feminists and homosexuals who endorse multiculturalism have similar motives. They want courses about women and homosexuals to be taught by feminists and homosexuals, not because they want these courses to be taught more objectively and dispassionately, but because they want to enlist more women and homosexuals in their party. Despite a widespread impression to the contrary, multiculturalism is not a plea for less bias in teaching; it is a plea for a different, more pronounced, and more doctrinaire bias. Professors are to be made into ministers of propaganda; instruction is to become indoctrination.

(Max Hocutt, "Black Teachers for Black Studies? A Philosophical Critique of Multiculturalist Pedagogy," The Independent Review 9 [summer 2004]: 127-135, at 130)

Aerosmith (1973). This is the first song on the first Aerosmith album, which was released 43 years ago. The band is still active!

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