At a Back To School Night about five or six years ago, Berkeley High’s Advanced Placement Chemistry teacher dejectedly explained to a classroom full of parents that the school’s renowned science program had been pared to the bone, forcing labs to be held outside of regular school hours if the quality of instruction were to have any hope of being maintained. His wife had recently given birth to their second child, and I hoped his depression was due to sleep deprivation piled on top of having to work longer hours for no pay increase. The good news is that he’s still at the job (having little mouths to feed will do that). The bad news, according to this recent article from the LA Times, is that a situation that seemed at crisis proportions back then hasn’t improved in the intervening years.

If I were to wade onto the minefield of this subject for a more in-depth look, here are some hot spots I would examine: Read more…

Sure, a case could be made for some of them, but I’ve been around the Berkeley Left for a long time and I’ll pit my crazies against the other side’s crazies any day. Every individual is a unique and complex blend of tribal affiliation, life experience, reasoning powers, emotional blinders, etc. For a diverse system like ours to function in a healthy fashion, differing clusters of interest groups need to act in good faith to form issues-based coalitions that shepherd constructive action through the minefield of American politics. I think Obama is spot on for holding to this ground.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the renowned artist John Howe for many years, through our mutual involvement with the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. Earlier this year, I had the honor of posting a guest newsletter on his web site. It was a delightful opportunity to contemplate famliar themes through a broader lens.

MAGICAL BORDERS

“The basic freedom of the world is a woman’s freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

N.B. From Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race, published in 1920. Sanger was an activist for women’s rights to birth control, but her point rings true in a general sense as well.

Abortion presents a microcosm of the modern-day American dialectic. From a female standpoint, it’s the sine qua non of non-negotiable issues: “U.S. out of my uterus.” It’s that simple. There’s 50% of the population, right there. Republican women may not be as in-your-face about it as Democrats and others, but I doubt a majority of them would choose to cede control of such a complex, personal and painful issue to an outside entity.

That said, there’s no black-and-white simplicity to the matter. The further along a pregnancy goes, the more the boundary of what constitutes a separate, viable life becomes blurred. Separation of church and state being a bedrock principle of our society, the law deals with this by setting different parameters for the different trimesters of pregnancy. My line in the sand is that a woman who accidentally gets pregnant and knows she’s not in a position to responsibly bear and raise a child should be free to decide what to do without public interference. It’s her body and her life: the fetus is just a cluster of cells in the early stages. Read more…

8/11/99 — “On the flight from Osaka I met a very interesting mushroom-munching Arab gentleman who, even though I am a heathen and an infidel, was kind enough to show me a part of Bangkok that I had not seen on previous trips. Bangkok actually has an equivalent to Telegraph Ave., although it is not nearly as influenced by the Christian right wing conservatives.

“I am going to spend a couple of days here absorbing the local culture before I move on to Calcutta to skinny dip in the Ganges and hopefully get a motorcycle. I think I have a scheme where I can get a bike there for very little cost, and dirt bike climbing Mt. Everest will be the ride of a lifetime, if I can pull it off.

“…don’t worry, I brought my lucky rabbit’s foot and a four leaf clover, and just to be safe have bought a charm blessed by Lord Bushnahara.

“I’ll write again soon.”

Bill

King of the Jungle