Uncommon Commentary #518: Is Hillary [sic] All Right? No; She's All Left

In the mid-1980's, the Soviet people didn't know whether Premier Konstantin Chernenko had a cold or was dead; that, however, was the USSR.  I'm glad that we, in the USA, live in a country where no one would try to conceal the truth about the health of a politician!

Uncommon Commentary #517: I'm Only Now Replying to Something that Was Said a Year Ago

(I didn't remember having heard anything of Tim Kaine prior to Dunghillary's selection of him to be her running-mate, and so I searched his name in my information files; this quest revealed only that he ranked among those Democrats who pointedly skipped the address mentioned below, and so I got to thinking about the subject of this u.c.  Incidentally: This lack of distinguishment may make Kaine an ideal choice to fill a largely superfluous office like the vice-presidency!)
This past year, CNN's Christiane Amanpour reported editorialized about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu's address to the US Congress regarding the threat from Iran's ongoing efforts to develop nuclear weapons, opining that fear of her native land is overwrought:

It was a very dark Strangelove-ian speech painting a picture of a really dystopian world.  Raising the specter of a genocidal nation, a genocidal regime spraying nuclear weapons to annihilate the whole world and the whole region.  Now obviously many people are very concerned about Iran and there is a deep lack of trust.  But surely the same was said of the Soviet Union all those years ago.

In other words, she seems to be telling us, we learned to live with a nuclear-armed USSR, and so we can learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran; if her words were intended to reassure, they really need work.  The prospect of atomic attack by the Soviet Union upon the West terrified mankind, and on several occasions the "Cold War" nearly became a hot World War III, even though Marxist-Leninist theory holds that the capitalist countries will come to an end all by themselves--this is one point of Red ideology that may prove correct--and that military conflict versus these states is therefore unnecessary.  No such doctrine, moreover, is adhered to by Iran (or by post-Communist Russia, which possesses an atomic arsenal superior to that of the USA); indeed, many Muslims, including, reportedly, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believe that the coming of the Mahdi (Islam's messiah) can be hastened by annihilating the "Great Satan" (the USA) and the "Little Satan" (Israel), and some mullahs have predicted that this eschatological figure will appear only as the consequence of a nuclear apocalypse.
Now, wasn't this u.c. worth waiting for?

Uncommon Commentary #516: I Wish that I Were Civilized Enough to Think up a Title for This Posting

Any people living at the level of civilization that anthropologists have named "savagery" qualify as savages, and so it's not necessarily an insult to refer to Nineteenth-Century American Indians by that term.  This is another example of why one ought to take the time to consult a dictionary before getting indignant over words.  (See UC #145.)

Uncommon Commentary #515: Is Our Navy Led by Milquetoasts--Or Would That Be "Milktoasts"?

When the US Navy has named vessels for men, it has traditionally done so to honor US presidents or other war leaders and heroes.  The most recent person to be so honored is: Harvey Milk, whom "Gay rights" agitators consider to be a martyr for their cause.  The Navy has contracted to a size unseen since an era when the USA was far from being a superpower, but this matters not to the Obama regime, which apparently does not intend for it to fight any war except that over US culture.

Miscellaneous Musing (with a trace of uncommon commentary) #85: Baring (What's Within) My Breast

The French judiciary has overturned bans on the "burkini", a swimsuit designed to cover the bodies of female Muslims.  The purpose of this posting is neither to laud nor to lament the ruling but to note the sad irony that, previously, it was illegal for a woman to thus evince modesty on the same beaches where others went topless with impunity!

Miscellaneous Musing #84

I consider socialism, at least as presently practiced [v.i.], to be inferior to capitalism—others have said and written enough about this subject so that there’s no need for me to elaborate for a well-informed reader—; this inferiority is, however, practical rather than moral. (In fact, one could argue that, since Galatians 6:2 tells us to bear one another’s burdens, a government that commits itself to socialism on Christian principles, and which makes it known to the governed that Christianity is the motivation for the adoption of that system (since, in lieu of this cognizance, people will place their trust in the government rather than in God), would more truly approach the Christian ideal than any other regime that has yet existed. (There have been Christian Socialist parties in Europe, but I don’t know whether any of them have ever held power.) Burdens can be borne by charities, of course, but not everyone who is able to contribute to charity does so, and so the burden is not shared by all.  “Christian Socialism” (or, to be alliterative, Sacred Socialism) might prove less effective economically than (pure) capitalism, but this drawback could be deemed acceptable for the sake of rescuing those who fall into the cracks in the free-market sidewalk.  Anyway, this hypothetical socialist brand could probably be modified from the current bureaucratic model.  Why, for example, couldn’t a government provide the people with services only indirectly, by contracting with charitable organizations (which operate less expensively than government departments and agencies), just as it does with arms manufacturers?

Uncommon Commentary #514: UC #513 Follow-Up

It’s also noteworthy that President Lincoln in the Gettysburg address made no overt reference to slavery, possibly alluding to it once when he expressed anticipation of “a new birth of freedom”, even though he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation a year earlier.  Had he abandoned his presentation of the Union’s war upon the Confederacy, which actually was a hypocritical effort to quell the secession of those 11 Southern States, as a crusade against slavery? (Yes, hypocritical.  It’s only logical that those 11, or any other States, had a right to secede from a country which had itself been founded by a unilateral declaration of independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.  What the Union ought to have done was to simply allow the Confederate States to leave the Union in peace.)