The “Twilight Zone” edition of the Thursday evening round-up

Victorian posy of pansiesThis will be a short post, but it contains three things that really deserve immediate attention because they are so bizarre they could only happen in the Twilight Zone.

The first thing — and I’m deliberately using the word “thing” for reasons you will soon discover — is an overwrought, almost hysterical Slate opinion piece about an exceptional act of cruelty visited upon every child born in a Western hospital. When I started reading the article, I assumed that the exceptional act of cruelty was going to be circumcision.  This assumption made less and less sense the more I read, because the piece quite obviously included all babies born, not just boy babies. So, there went my “circumcision is a good thing” rebuttal, including new data out of Africa showing that, not only does circumcision slow the spread of deadly disease, it actually increases sexual pleasure in men.

I next thought that the horrible thing being done to children was vaccinations, but that couldn’t be right. Newborns don’t get vaccinations, and this opinion piece was quite clearly focused on newborns. That was a shame, too, because I do love waxing eloquent about how fortunate we are to live in a vaccination age. (Yes, some children do have bad responses, but they are statistically negligent when compared to the number of children dead or permanently handicapped because of infectious diseases that are almost unknown in America thanks to vaccinations. We don’t even have to look at the past to prove this assertion. It’s enough to look to Africa, where polio and measles are again becoming deadly scourges as war and ignorance further darken that already benighted continent.)

It was only as I kept on reading that I realized the real terror visited upon children unlucky enough to be born in hospitals: doctors look at their external genitalia and, based upon what they see, they assign a gender designation to the child. No fooling! That’s what they really do. And as far as one Canadian activist is concerned, this is a denial of basic human rights that must be condemned in the strongest terms and countered if at all possible:

With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby’s life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life.

I honestly don’t know what to say in the face of that insanity — and it is insanity.  One of the basic tenets of sanity is the ability to distinguish the real world from the fantastical world of one’s lunatic delusions.

Except for a few outliers, such as amoeba, almost every living species on earth is divided into male and female, with that distinction involving reproductive organs.  Penis = sperm delivery system; vagina and above = egg providing system, incubator, and baby delivery system.  That’s how the real world really works.  Only someone with a serious mental illness, brought about either by organic brain damage or by being marinated for too long in the sauce of radical gender studies, could argue otherwise.

***

It’s behind a Wall Street Journal pay wall, but this article is still worth noting:  You may have heard about California’s thirty-year drought being one of the worst ever.  Our house, I’m sorry to say, smells like a urinal, because we’ve gone back to the days of “when it’s yellow, let it mellow.”  It doesn’t mellow; it stinks.

Our inconvenience pales in comparison with what’s happen in California’s Central Valley, which has for decades provided more than half of the fruits and vegetables for the entire United States.  There, the farmers have no water whatsoever.  They’ve been forced to leave 500,000 acres fallow and, understandably, have concentrated only on crops that will provide a maximum return on their investment.

But you want to know the worst thing?  This heinous water shortage could have been ridden out much more easily had it not been for the environmentalists and their obsession with the 4″ long Delta Smelt, a tiny fish in the Sacramento Delta.  Thanks to the greenies getting the smelt designated as “endangered,” California’s agricultural interests, not to mention the interests of all Americans who want affordable food, have been subordinated to the needs of that little fish.  That’s why, after 300 smelt were found trapped in pumps releasing water to agricultural concerns, the federal government acted.

How did it act, you ask?  This is how: it “flushed 800,000 acre-feet into the San Francisco Bay last winter and an additional 445,000 acre-feet this spring to safeguard the endangered delta smelt. That’s enough for roughly three million households to live on and to irrigate 600,000 acres of land.”

Our environment is a precious thing, whether one views it as a gift from God, Gaia, or natural forces.  We have an obligation to respect the land and its inhabitants, but I do not believe that this obligation extends to destroying ourselves to increase the numbers of a single fish.

What we’ve seen in California is a form of insanity that even Rod Serling might have thought too incredible to include in a Twilight Zone episode.  And yet it really happened.

***

They say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.  Nowadays, though, it goes from tragedy to catastrophe.  Remember how Jimmy Carter made a fool of himself during a 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan by appealing to his 13-year-old daughter as an authority on nuclear disarmament?

Barack Obama has now gone Carter one better.  He’s appealing to both his daughters as authorities on climate change, which he has characterized as the greatest threat facing America.  It’s as if the Islamic-inspired atrocities around the world have never happened.

We’ve entered life on the funny farm, deep, deep in the Twilight Zone.  Logic and reality cannot hope to function when delusion and fanaticism hold sway.