Author: Jacques Delacroix

Prêtez attention aux scandales (pluriel) de l’administration Obama

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, History, Politics , ,

Richard Nixon était parti en disgrâce pour bien moins que l’utilisation de la puissante administration fédérale des impôts (“IRS”) à des fins politiques. Je veux dire l’IRS d’Obama qui a délibérement persécuté ses adversaires politiques à grandeéchelle.

Ce que personne (sauf moi) n’a encore dit à haute voix: La noirceur de peau du président le protège actuellement des conséquences légales et politiques de la noirceur de ses actions autant que de ses omissions.

L’emprise du politiquement correct est tellement grande aux EU qu’on n’y considère même pas (encore) la possibilité de jeter le premier président noir pour les grotesques abus de pouvoir de son administration.

Suivez mon analyse en Anglais sur le meme blog.

Un petit baiser pour le cinéma Français

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

Au cours des longues annéees de ma vie américaine, j’ai eu l’occasion de dire des tas de choses désagréables sur la pauvreté du cinéma français pourtant surnourri de subsides publics. J’aimême publié un article méchant en Anglais sur la question.( “Can protectionism ever be respectable? A skeptic’s case for the cultural exception, with special reference to French movies.” The Independent Review 9-3:353-374. 2005.)

Malgré tout, de temps en temps, le même cinéma me procure une agréable surprise, souvent une si minuscule surprise qu’on aurait pu la rater. Je viens de regarder “Emma”, un film sorti en 2011. C’est l’histoire d’une jeune fille mal dans sa peau. Il y a une scène avec un garçon de quinze ou seize ans quelle n’avait pas vu depuis leur petite enfance. En vacances dans la même maison, ils sont assis ensemble sur un lit. Ils parlent de tout et de rien,évoquant même la peluche que le garçon aurait volé, jadis, à la fille.

Soudain, le garçon se penche et dépose un baiser sur le genou (couvert) de la fille. Il y a dans ce geste infime toute la tendresse du monde. C’est le geste juste, plus que juste. Après cela, la fille lui appartient corps et âme, bien entendu.

Malgre tout ses péchés, je pardonne beaucoup au cinéma français pour ce simple baiser au genou.

Mais bien sûr, c’est un film français où donc, le tordu, l’insolite, le gratuit remplacent l’émotion, l’imagination, et même l’érotisme. Le petit ami se revèle vite être plus précoce voyeur qu’ enthousiaste pénétrateur. Enfin, personne n’est parfait, comme on dit.

A la fin du film, aussi la fin des vacances, la jeune fille dit au revoir à son demi-frère. Elle se fait la réflexion, dans son fors intérieur, qu’elle souhaiterait être plus libre des ses paroles, pour pouvoir lui dire, “Je t’aime” – “comme dans un film américain.”

* “Instead of the eager penetrator you would expect, the boyfriend turns out to be mostly a voyeur.”

The IRS and Fascism

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law , , , ,

If I wanted to set up a secret police in the US, would I try to create a Gestapo from scratch? Would I call it “Gestapo,” or “NKVD,” or “KGB”?

Or would I rather take an existing, comparatively efficient agency, familiar though unloved by the mass of the people, and simply extend the reach of such an agency? I mean the Internal Revenue Service, of course.

Do I believe that President Obama  ordered the IRS to discriminate against Tea Party-sounding groups and others identified as conservatives? No, I do not.

I think he is responsible for the actions of low-level underlings because he created a statist, totalitarian atmosphere. He did this a lot through his non-actions regarding his old friends, in particular, including the bomber- terrorist Bill Ayres. He is responsible for allying himself with out-and-out extremist groups in his first election. The mainstream press is light-heartedly helping him erode democracy in this country.

None of these important actors is fundamentally evil (not even Ayres today). The president is a man who looks so good in a suit that he is the suit itself in the end, an empty suit. The liberal press is silly in the manner intelligent people who are seldom contradicted become silly. Many of the ordinary Americans who voted for Mr Obama are keeping their eyes and ears tightly shut in an effort to keep believing that everything is alright because they elected a man of color. I mean even college professors, aside from journalists. Black voters have been trained to have low expectations. They tell themselves it’s good enough that the president is (more or less) African-American.  Another kind of supporters, unions, is as corrupt as ever. Take all the teachers’ unions, for example….or, rather, don’t!

I think Mr Obama is the non-Fascist leader of a genuine, grass-root American Fascist movement. The recent discoveries at the IRS are just one manifestation of creeping fascism.

The Second Amendment has rarely been more relevant.

L’Amérique et les armes: mise à jour.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , ,

Le taux de crimes à main armée (presque toutes avec armes a feu) a chute environ de moitié depuis 1990.

Pendant la même période, tous les chiffres liées à la possession d’armes privées ont augmenté.

D’accord, ça ne prouve rien. Il n’y a pas nécessairement cause à effet.

Quand même, si je gagnais ma vie le revolver àla main, j’y regarderais à deux fois avant de m’en prendre à un porteur de revolver de calibre plus ou moins égal.

Quand même, si je pensais évoluer dans un milieu où de nombreux citoyens sont armés àtitre privé, je songerais sérieusement à me reconvertir dans la fraude bancaire.

Climate Change Worse (No Matter How You Look At It)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Links , ,

In some places, it’s much warmer than usual. That’s so many instances of climate change, of course.

I some places, it’s much colder than usual. That’s also evidence of climate change.

Good technical article in the Wall Street Journal of  5/8/13  to remind us that  CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the more plants, and the more food for humans. It’s by NASA astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and W. Happer, a professor of Physics at Princeton.

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty , , , , ,

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing  civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is  to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed  after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason  to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them. Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate. A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as  punishment regardless of intent.  It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control  some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves  as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to  missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm.  We could try to free them  on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of  members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after  a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances.  At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point  out the hypocrisy of our critics.

Débat sur le menteur.

Jacques Delacroix Comments, Current Events, Politics , , , ,

Mon essai “Un Menteur bien français” affiché sur ce blog le 9 Avril a aussi été affiché sur le blog-copain Notes On Liberty oùil a donné lieu à cette réponse indignée:

Je ne connais pas ce type, mais avant de taper sur les Français il conviendrait de ne pas oublier les tonnes de calomnies dégueulasses racontées par une certaine presse américaine ( un grand nombre !) contre la France après 2003 et l’Irak . Au point qu’aujourd’hui tous les Américains qui n’ont pas fait d’études les croient encore . En termes de proportions, mettre en parallèle les idoties de deux ou trois journalistes et le lynchage au rouleau compresseur lancé par Fox News et autres détritus n’est pas juste .

D’autre part les tabloïds n’existent pas en France . Tout ce que balancent le Sun et ses copains en Grande-Bretagne est bien plus énorme que ce que dit ce type de TV5 .

Alors oui la presse est un problème en France, mais c’en est un bien plus honteux chez les Anglophones .

S’il n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer! (Je jure que je n’ai rien fait de semblable. Pourtant, c’ était tentant.) Continue reading →

Un Menteur bien français

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

Les Français, les habitants de mon pays natal, ne sont pas assez soucieux de vérité. Ils ont tendance à raconter un peu n’importe quoi, à ne pas corriger les mensonges , et à occulter par omission leurs crime collectifs (tel que le massacre de manifestants Algériens pacifiques à Paris, le_____ )

Par ailleurs, il y a des Europeens pour qui l’anti-Américanisme sert de philosophie politique. Il n’est plus nécessaire de s’emmerder à étudier les difficiles textes sacrés du Marxisme comme au bon vieux temps. Le “bon vieux temps”, c’était quand il n’y avait guère que deux intellectuels français qui ne se déclaraient pas – d’une façon ou d’une autre – “Marxistes”. Aujourd’hui, il suffit de hair l’Amérique. C’est cool, même si on est obligé de l’exprimer dans la langue de l’enemi car les Russes, aussi bien que les Chinois -ainsi que les Albanais d’ailleurs – usent du même mot: “cool”. (Les Albanais sont les habitants de ce grand pays communiste qui avait déclarél’Union Soviétique, puis la Chine, “déviationistes” – pas assez Marxiste-Léniniste -dans les années soixante-dix!)

Je regarde souvent TV5. Il s’agit de la chaine internationale francophone. Il y a des informations internationales en Français cinq ou six fois par jour sur TV5. J’ignore le nom du présentateur principal des informations. C’est un homme (de visage européen) alors que la plupart de ses collègues sont des femmes. D’après sa diction et son accent, je suis 96% sur qu’il est français. Il a une quarantaine d’années ou un peu moins. Ce n’est pas un jeunot. Pourtant, il dit souvent des conneries, très souvent même. Parfois, c’est pire que des conneries parce-qu’il ne s’agit pas d’ignorance ordinaire mais de préjugés bêtes et méchants. Continue reading →

Bush’s War

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics, Religion , , , , ,

“Since March 1996, Iraq has  systematically sought to deny weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special on Iraq Commission (UNSCOM) access to key facilities and documents, has on several occasions endangered the safe operation of UNSCOM helicopters transporting UNSCOM personnel in Iraq, and has persisted in a pattern of deception and concealment  regarding the history of its weapons of mass destruction programs […]

On August 14 — the President signed Public Law 105-235, which declared that “the  Government of Iraq  is in material and unacceptable breach  of its international obligations” and urged the President to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligation […]

It should be he policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of  a democratic government to replace that regime.”

The first paragraph is from the Iraq Liberation Act of ___  .

The second and third paragraphs are from  Public-Law 105-235.

The president who signed both items was ___________?

This is lifted from the Wall Street Journal of 3/19/13. The bolding is mine.

Both pieces of legislation were enacted in 1998.

The primary reason given by the Bush administration for the attack on Hussein’s Iraq was to search there for weapons of mass destruction. We now know there were no such weapons on any significant scale. I keep arguing on this blog that:

  1. There were many other reasons to destroy the Hussein regime and,
  2. There were very good reasons for any reasonable person to be misled about the existence of such weapons in Iraq.

Mostly, it was that the Hussein regime sabotaged the inspection process to which it had agreed as a condition of peace following the first Gulf War. It would be hard to understand the high risks taken to hide things by one who had in fact nothing to hide! (Read this sentence again.)

The important persons and organization who were fooled into believing in the existence of the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were numerous and varied. They included several western intelligence services and many important politicians.

In 1998, a prominent member of one of the two main American political parties (prominent then and prominent now) said the following,

“Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”

I am not faulting the politician who said this for blindness then but for irresponsible, dishonest amnesia now.

The politician in question is __________________________

(Answer below as a “Comment.”)

The quote is lifted from the Wall Street Journal editorial on 3/20/13.

Lies and Untruths – Part Two

Jacques Delacroix Law, Politics , , , , , ,

This is the second part of a two-part mini-essay. See part one here.

The first common untruthful practice I observe among liberals consists in turning factual decisions into moral ones.

The second mendacious practice I catch frequently among liberals is related to the first but it’s more egregious. It consists in shutting off debate in the name of compassion. Dorothy Rabinowitz, the wisest commentator in the Wall Street Journal, gives a wonderful and blood-curdling example on 1/15/10.

As everyone knows now, the race for the seat of the late Senator Kennedy has turned into a referendum on the Democratic health care reform project. The Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, is the standing Attorney General of Massachusetts. Earlier in her career, when she became a District Attorney, she had to make a decision about an appeal by a convicted child molester, a Gerard Amirault. The man had been convicted among other beauts, of sodomizing a five-year old with the blade of a butcher knife. There was never any physical evidence. (Read this sentence again because you may have missed its stark, clean meaning.) The whole trial had been of the same ilk. Judges wanted to reverse the decision. Ms Coakley declined to help and instead, went into high gear to prevent Mr Amirault ( and his sister and his old mother) from ever going out free and clear. Continue reading →

Homosexual Marriage

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

I don’t care much if homosexuals, a small percentage of the population, gain the right to marry. (The right to marry? What kind of a right is this?) In general, I don’t like the idea that an activist minority can use the armed power of the state to force a cultural change at all, on a well identified majority. (Why no thave a court decree that lies are now included under the definition of “truth,” subject to fines and even to jail terms for recidivism?) I also don’t get all that agitated by the realization that civil union contracts can achieve the same objective, concrete ends, as marriage without hurting deeply the many.

At the same time, I think that both fear of the new and a simplistic reading of the Bible motivates many opponents of homosexual marriage. (By the way, given the California large majority vote on Proposition Eight, it has to include many Democrats, not just Republicans.) I am no theologian but I have trouble imagining a God who loses sleep over the fact that some men love men (and act upon it) or that some women love women (and act upon it). After all, that was His indifferent design that did it.

I am not much concerned either about the example it will set if the right to homosexual marriage becomes the law in the whole country as it is already in several states. I don’t think we are on the eve of seeing a woman marry her two Chihuahuas, one male, one female, for example. The spread of polygamy is a greater possibility. One form, polygeny, might turn out to be OK because there is a shortage of functioning males, I hear. I do believe in slippery slopes though. I have to because I am a three-times former smoker.

Whichever way the Supreme Court decision comes down, I will easily live with it. My friendship for the homosexuals of both sexes I have known and who care about the decision makes this acceptance even easier. (That’s the way it is: Principles regarding abstractions tend to melt a little in contact with the warmth of flesh and blood of real people.) Homosexual activists are not, however making friends with me by their insistence of having the Court (or the courts) overturn the results of a well established democratic process. I mean California Proposition Eight (against which I voted).

Deep inside my brain, there is also a vague notion that the issue does not reduce to morality or to tolerance. It has to do with some very basic structures of human thought based on dualities. I don’t have a good grasp of this. I will wait until I do to discuss the topic (unlike some visitors on this blog who will say anything twenty seconds after it comes to mind.)

Liblogic

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Again (AGAIN) the Midwest is trying to operate in spite of a major snowfall. Its’ a snowfall of extraordinary magnitude for the season according to many of those who know.  And, I have not heard or read any meteorologist arguing that, on the contrary, it’s a normal snowfall for the first week of Spring.

Snow is cold. This cold wave is yet another proof of the reality of a global warming trend that threatens civilization and, beyond it, Earth itself. Of course, this trend is the result of noxious human activities. It’s a done deal that there cannot be any other cause.

If you don’t see that the more industry and cars, the more cold, and the more cold, the more  warming, you are just uneducated or stubborn, or both.

By the same reasoning, the unseasonal cold makes fuels, including natural gas, less essential to human happiness. The president, served by the supine press, must see the current snow storm in the Midwest  as a signal to  redouble its efforts to prevent the rational utilization of America’s abundant fuel resources.

Got it?

There is a pleasant-looking guy in his forties  who often suns himself close to my coffee shop at the beach. He admires my grand-daughter. Of course, I took this to imply that he is a man of taste and discernment. We fell into casual conversation recently about a book I was holding. The conversation quickly turned casually political.

He is an Obama supporter. This being the People Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz, it would be surprising if he were not. So, I pried a little.

It took my beach acquaintance a few minutes to fold to the default option that President Obama at least looked presidential. He couldn’t name a single Obama achievement of which he was proud or satisfied. (I had unfairly deprived him of the opportunity to mention Obamacare by designating it  a Pelosi victory.) This is not the fist time I hear Obamites refer to the president’s looks. It’s not clear how you turn such people around. Update: I don’t mean that I hope to turn all, or many around, just a small percentage would do, pehraps 3%..

Suntan Joe was seething with hatred of President Bush. This is remarkable five years later. Curiously, it did not seem to be about the Iraq War. I sense that the antipathy runs deeper, that it’s akin to what some chimps feel about a designated other chimp with an unusual facial expression perhaps. That is also hard to beat.

Since the Republican defeat last November, I have been perplexed by the post-mortem analyses of people I usually trust. I feel that they are off the mark because they are too obvious perhaps, too logical. I am not doing better myself.

Lies and Untruths

Jacques Delacroix Philosophy , , , , , ,

Big lies are pretty much the same on all ends of the political starfish. I am more interested in persistent white lies and in the mechanisms of collective self-delusion. I think they are more common on the Left. In fact, I believe they underlie liberal thinking to a large extent.

Although I have been living most of my adult life with these kinds of untruths, in academia, I am only now trying to gain a precise understanding of the relevant psychology. It takes leisure time and some perspective, I suppose. I have spotted two big sources of half-involuntary mendacity, so far .

I have frequent conversations with a young liberal I chose deliberately because he is thoughtful, curious and he seems intellectually honest. (I don’t waste time on older people and I don’t waste time with liars; they are almost always boring.) We have had several exchanges on the reality of global warming. He sent me a long email explaining why he believed it was real while admitting he did not understand the science behind the claim and did not try to. I don’t try either; I don’t understand it either; I don’t have to. I know a liar and a fabricator when I see one. If your cause or your theory is good, you never have to lie about it. The last sentence of his last email stated that he had to go, on this issue, with the “majority” of scientists. I heard a click go off in my brain. This sounds oddly familiar though I have not heard it said so clearly. Continue reading →

Afghanistan, Conservatives and Libertarians. Telling off the King.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

There is an upsurge of hostility to the war in Afghanistan in conservative circles. Thus, the Independent Institute, an organization I have been supporting modestly but faithfully for years has a spate of statements against our anti-Taliban operations there. It’s understandable but disappointing.

Part of the reason for some conservative reserve is simply childish tit-for-tat: “You libs berated Bush about his war, in Iraq; the shoe is on the other foot and we will berate you about Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” It matters not to this mindset that it’s only Obama’s war in the trivial sense that he is not using his powers to withdraw.

The main cause of the upsurge of hostility comes from the strong libertarian component in our midst. Libertarians, by definition, dislike big government. They observe, correctly, that every war enlarges the importance and the power of government in relation to civil society, to society in general. They assert further that the taxation capability governments acquires in war time – largely with the help of the suspension of criticality occasioned by patriotism – is seldom rolled back. Thus, war means irreversible growth of the state and a corresponding shrinking of individual liberties. Hence, libertarians tend to be reflexively isolationists.

Of course, I think this is all true. However, this is only part of the story. It’s futile to ignore the concrete, short-term questions facing this country with respect to its involvement in Afghanistan. Here are three: Continue reading →

A Wide Net; Cyprus Lesson; Conversations with my Ghost; Unfeminism; the Blooming Sequoia

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

I am too busy, because I am completing my memoirs and because I am refinancing ( a real bitch!), to do proper postings. So, here are pellmell thoughts  to stay in your minds and in your hearts during this dry spell. (That goes for my enemies too. I love being in their hearts, festering.)

Yesterday and today, I had hits from India, Mauritania, Ecuador, Yemen, and Estonia among others on this blog. I don’t  know many actually read my stuff. I hope all the hits correspond to actual readers although I cannot be sure, obviously. That is the miracle of the Internet. In spite of all the garbage it carries, like a large river, it’s good for development, the development of knowledge, in this case, and of rationality. There is a special spot in my heart for forthright, brave, tiny Estonia. Read up on it.

Once in a while, I even  have a spirited discussion on the Internet with people I would not meet in the other life, the life many persist in calling “real.” I am glad I cast a wide net on the Internet.

This week  the Cypriots gave the world a lesson. Hardly anyone  noticed because our commentators keep spreading boring cliches instead of looking for that which is both unusual and meaningful. Their government tried to make palatable the prospect of taxing bank deposit by promising to do it only to the rich. Ordinary Cypriots did not take the corrupting bait. They still said “No!”

I am like them: I don’t want to tax more the rich, the very rich, the billionaires,  the crooks, the mafias, the zebras, the giraffes, anyone! I just want the  federal government to shrink radically. I don’t know a single liberal who is aware of this principled position, not one.  Listen to them on this blog’s “comments” section. Their heads are full of silly stereotypes about conservatism as a political philosophy. I think they are not evil but lazy.

A couple of days ago, a high-school buddy recognized me through the excerpts of my memoirs on this blog (“I Used to be French: An Immature Autobiography“). Frankly, I had not thought of him for fifty years. His name  acted like a key that unlocked a door I had not entered in decades. It’s not that the door was double-locked or anything like this. The door was closed and I had no reason to bother to look for a key. I just ignored it. It contained no treasure in fact, just a few objects of interesting memory. But inside, there was also a ghost, the ghost of me when I was a teenager.

I don’t know if the French have high-school reunions. They might because they imitate eventually everything that America does.  If they had reunions and I knew it, I would probably not go. First, I failed there. I would sound stupid saying one hundred times in one evening, “No, I did not get it.”  Or I would have stopped going after ten years, when the  prospect of scoring with the girls you secretly lusted for as a teenager begins to  turn into a nightmare. I have no wish to see my own aging in others’ waistlines. I would think unkindly both of those who looked worse and of those who looked better than I. Does this make sense?

My high-school buddy reminded me of an episode of which I have nearly no memory. He recalled a time when he and two girls and I were waiting for admission to an expensive swimming pool . (That was the same  central Paris swimming pool. “Piscine Molitor,” that figures into the great movie “Life of Pi ” and that gave  its hero his name.) My classmate must have expressed admiration for the light gray flannel pants I was wearing. (That part must be true; I was already a flea market super-champion then, a superman picker.) He says I gave him the pants. I think he means then and there; I am not sure. I love the  story, of course. It depicts me, the young unformed me, as a generous person. Or was it only the love of the grand gesture?

URGENT UPDATE THE NEXT DAY: I did not give him the pants, I sold them to him. It means that I made up in my own mind by myself a story of generosity. That’s awful! Too bad, it was a good story.

I don’t know about you but I really enjoy this kind of adventure that comprises tiny, bearable elements of disorder. The Internet does not replace reading books though. It’s different but equally attractive.

Random pearls of wisdom: I overhear parts of a conversation while treating myself to  a rare greasy breakfast at my local diner:

“You have to kill them with silence.”

I stop the waitress who said this to ask,

“Is that what women do to men when they are angry?’ She never skips a beat, “No – she says – that’s unscientific.; women can’t do this, I mean stay silent.”

Smart women like this are dismantling stone by stone the phony monument put up by feminists over thirty years. It’s good that there are women equal to the task because feminists have been partly successful in  emasculating American men. (Many of the poor saps actually think showing sensitivity will get them laid!) How can I be sure? I am old enough that young women actually confide in me on the topic.

There is a completely incongruous redwood tree in my front yard about which I bitch periodically. It’s breaking up my portion of the sidewalk. It’s already cost me over $10,000 in sewer  repairs. One of these days, in a big wind, it will fall on my house, I fear. It gives us unwanted shade.

I like redwood trees but there are tens of thousands in the forest a mile away. This is not New Jersey or New Mexico; it’s not a rare tree around here. The city of Santa Cruz forbids me from cutting it. (Yes, it’s on my property.) The city has the criminal stupidity to demand a fee before it will even hear my appeal!

Well, several years ago, my wife planted a  bush bearing small yellow roses not far from the redwood. There was not foresight, no planning, no knowledge involved, maybe not even a green thumb. For some reason, the rosebush loves it there. It spread to everything. It’s a good climber. Right now, it has climbed about fifty feet up the redwood tree trunk and branches. The redwood looks like it’s in bloom with many yellow flowers. A deep part of me loves this display of joyous anarchy. I wonder if it violates some city ordinance I have not heard of though.