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

The New York Times has long since ceased being a journalistic organ ("All the News That's Fit to Print"). It is a shrieking, hysterical leftist rag, for whom the end (transforming American society) justifies the means (manipulation of readers, including outright deception). See here. I read it (online) only to see what rabid progressives are thinking.

Cosmo's Factory (1970). I just learned how to play this song on my acoustic guitar. It's quite simple.

This essay is worth a few minutes of your time. It might have been filed under "Academentia," but the title I gave it was too good to pass up.

George Armstrong Custer (known to his friends and family as "Autie") was born on this date in 1839. I have been purchasing books about Custer for some time now, with the aim of reading them during my retirement. I hope to return to the Little Bighorn Battlefield soon (for the fourth time in my life). Why, you ask? To figure out what happened there. I need to know.

Here.

Here.

To the Editor:

Re “On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Dec. 3):

The Republican interest in mental illness as a cause of violence is a transparent effort to divert attention from the primary problem: guns. I certainly concur with more resources being devoted to mental health, but it will remain impossible to identify in advance the few individuals who will go on a rampage. The San Bernardino shootings are an illustrative case.

Further, Australia and Canada, for example, have not eliminated mental illness, nor for that matter evil. Yet the citizens of these societies, so much like ours, have a small fraction of the risk of being shot, randomly or otherwise, that our people face.

Guns and our insane gun culture in this nation represent a form of domestic terrorism. Until we address it as such, nothing will change.

RICHARD WILLIAMS

Davis, Calif.

Note from KBJ: The problem is not that there are too many guns in society. It is that there are too few guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Whether selecting a spouse or a president, doing so on the rebound often ends up badly. Americans were so exhausted from the scandals of the Nixon Administration, with which they also associated President Gerald Ford, that they chose the un-Nixon: squeaky clean and morally pure Jimmy Carter. Thus they exchanged a strategically vigorous foreign policy for what would turn out to be a conflicted and spineless one. Likewise, Americans were so exhausted by the protracted wars that George W. Bush had gotten the nation into that they chose the un-Bush: Barack Obama, someone openly apologetic about America’s role in the world. The result was to exchange an overly assertive foreign policy for an overly unassertive one. Prudence and moderation were sacrificed for momentary emotional satisfaction.

(Robert D. Kaplan, "Foreign Policy on the Rebound," review of The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today, by Colin Dueck, Claremont Review of Books 15 [fall 2015]: 20-1, at 20)

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