Is the time change kicking anyone elses fanny besides mine?  I've been yawning and trying to hold my eyes open trying to make it til bedtime.  I looked at the clock and it said it was only 8:30.  I thought I'd cry.  If I go to bed this early I'll be awake by 3 am.

Now it's a quarter to nine and I have about an hour and 15 minutes to go before I can safely go to bed without being up before the chickens.

Grooooannn..I hate time changes.

THE POPULATION PESSIMISTS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/...

        & nbsp;   When the population of the United States hit 200 million in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson marked the occasion with a speech at the Commerce Department, home to the US Census Bureau and its official "population clock."

        & nbsp;   In 1776, LBJ said, the American people had numbered only 1.5 million, but as the nation grew in population, so too had it grown in stature and strength. "We have seen success in America beyond all of our wildest dreams," he went on, but "mighty challenges" remained: the challenges of urban life, of race relations, of industrial pollution, of inadequate public schools. "I cannot tell you this morning that we are going to be able to meet successfully all of these challenges."

        & nbsp;   It was not a particularly upbeat speech, but at least it was a speech. When the population clock surpassed 300 million last week, President Bush offered only a two-paragraph statement calling the big round number "a testament to our country's dynamism and a reminder that America's greatest asset is our people."

        & nbsp;   If presidents seem less than thrilled about the population milestones reached on their watch, perhaps it is because they have been unable to shake off the prophecies of doom about "overpopulation" that date back at least to Thomas Malthus's prediction that starvation and misery were the inevitable consequence of population growth. That was in 1798, and we have been hearing from "Malthusian" alarmists ever since. (Ironically, Malthus himself came to realize that his pessimism was groundless, and sharply revised his famous essay in 1803.)

        & nbsp;   Within months of President Johnson's speech, for example, Paul Ehrlich published *The Population Bomb,* which opened with the grim assertion that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

        & nbsp;   But "the Great Die-Off," as Ehrlich called it, didn't arrive in the 1970s. Nor in the 1980s. Undaunted, Ehrlich wrote in 1990 that "starvation and epidemic disease will raise the death rates over most of the planet" and humanity would experience the "deaths of many hundreds of millions of people in famines." It still hasn't happened. In fact, on the whole human beings are better fed today (as well as better housed, better educated, and longer-lived) than ever before. Where starvation still occurs, it is usually the result of deliberate government policy, not agricultural failure. In many parts of the world, the fastest-growing nutritional problem is not hunger, but obesity. Yet the idea that more people means more pain and penury dies hard.

        & nbsp;   At 300 million, America's population is three times what it was in 1915. Over that span of time the quality of American life has soared. From health and wealth to technology and transportation, from leisure time and homeownership to life expectancy and productivity, from clean air and water to entertainment and travel, most Americans today enjoy conveniences and benefits that not even the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could have afforded a century ago. But to hear some experts tell it, we should be tearing our hair out in distress.

        & nbsp;   "The world does not need more people, and the US in my judgment does not need more people either," grouses Charles Westoff of Princeton's Office of Population Research. The Washington Post quotes Dowell Myers, a demography professor at the University of Southern California: "At 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."

        & nbsp;   Crushed? We're not even mildly cramped. It might not seem that way to someone stuck in a rush-hour traffic jam, but America is actually one of the world's least congested nations, with a population density far lower than that of Britain or Germany. The land area of the United States is so vast that each American could have 7 acres to himself, and there would still be 200 million acres left over. We are in no danger of running out of space.

        & nbsp;   To be sure, the United States has its problems, some of them quite serious. But a burgeoning population isn't one of them. As Europe and Japan age and shrink, America continues to grow and stay comparatively youthful. That means not just more mouths to feed and more bodies to house. It also means more brainpower and more human energy -- more problem-solvers, more entrepreneurs, more thinkers, more fighters, more leaders. The late Julian Simon famously called human beings "the ultimate resource," and the United States is blessed with more of it than any other First World nation.

        & nbsp;   "In other words, you ain't seen nothing yet," The Economist predicts. "Anyone who assumed the United States is now at the zenith of its economic or political power is making a big mistake." As good as things are, they are about to get even better. It's great to have you with us, No. 300,000,000. Welcome aboard!

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

IF WE HAD KNOWN THEN . . .

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 22, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/...

        & nbsp;   Was it a mistake to go to war in Iraq? The latest voice to say so is that of conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online's shrewd editor-at-large and, until last week, a supporter of the war.

        & nbsp;   Goldberg hasn't become a John Murtha clone; he still believes that a precipitous American withdrawal would hand the jihadis a victory, and that finishing the job is preferable to bugging out and leaving Iraq a shambles. He proposes putting the question to the Iraqis: Let them vote on whether US troops should stay or go.

        & nbsp;   But he has concluded that invading Iraq was the wrong choice, however well-intentioned. "The Iraq war was a mistake," he writes, "by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003."

        & nbsp;   Yet is that really how this war -- or any war -- should be judged?

        & nbsp;   In 1812, Congress declared war on Great Britain, in part because of Britain's crippling blockade of US ports and the forced impressment of American seamen into the Royal Navy. But if Americans had known in 1812 what they found out in 1814 -- that the enemy would capture Washington and burn the Capitol, the Treasury, and the White House -- would they have gone to war with Britain? Perhaps not. Does that mean the war was a mistake?

        & nbsp;   We know now that the War of 1812 ended not with a US defeat, but with Britain, a superpower of the day, fought to a stalemate by its former colonies. As a consequence, the young republic earned international esteem; never again would Britain challenge American independence. Indeed, never again would the two nations go to war. If Congress had known *that* in 1812, would it have voted for war? Quite likely. Maybe by an even larger majority.

        & nbsp;   Wars are routinely botched, and the Iraq war is no exception. Overconfidence, intelligence failures, poor planning -- none of it is unique to the current war or the current administration.

        & nbsp;   In 1944, the Allies were sure that Hitler was nearly beaten, that the Germans had no appetite for a counteroffensive, and that the quiet Ardennes Forest along the Belgian-German border was a good place to station rookie soldiers and exhausted units needing a breather. It took the generals utterly by surprise when Hitler hurled a quarter of a million troops against the Ardennes, launching what would come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was the bloodiest encounter of the war for US troops -- five ghastly weeks during which 19,000 American soldiers lost their lives, and another 60,000 were maimed or captured.

        & nbsp;   Today we realize that the Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's last gasp, and that the European war would be over a few months later. But at the time there were fears that the war might grind on for years. Doubtless some Americans found themselves thinking that the war with Germany had been a blunder -- one that could have been avoided "if we had known then what we know now."

        & nbsp;   Iraq is not the first war to plummet in popularity. At the start of the Civil War, many Northerners giddily anticipated a quick victory. Secretary of State William Seward "thought the war would be over in 90 days," writes historian David Herbert Donald in his biography of Abraham Lincoln. "The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days, and the New York Tribune assured its readers 'that Jeff. Davis & Co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington . . . by the 4th of July.'"

        & nbsp;   Had they had an inkling of the carnage to come, would they so lustily have cheered Lincoln's bid to save the Union? Long before the war's end, the cheers would turn to bitter censure. By 1863, the war was being denounced in Congress as "an utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure," while Lincoln and his administration were despised for their incompetence. "There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government," Senator William Pitt Fessendon of Maine said in disgust, "before or since the world began."

        & nbsp;   The point isn't that the violent mess in Iraq today is analogous to the Civil War in 1863, or to the Ardennes in 1944, or to the burning of Washington in 1814. *The point is that we don't know.* Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/news/....

Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally.

Why are Americans so united? They don't resemble one another even if you paint them! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations. Some of them are nearly extinct, others are incompatible with one another, and in matters of religious beliefs, not even God can count how many they are. Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed on the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colours of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president was passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!".

Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday once, twice, three times, on different tv channels. There were Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Silvester Stalone, James Wood, and many others whom no film or producers could ever bring together. The American's solidarity spirit turned them into a choir. Actually, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the American soul. What neither George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Colin Powell could say without facing the risk of stumbling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmistakable way in this charity concert. I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist, or ostentatious! It made you green with envy because you weren't able to sing for your country without running the risk of being considered chauvinist, ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what mean interests. I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who fought with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that would have killed other hundreds of thousands of people. How on earth were they able to bow before a fellow human? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit which nothing can buy.

What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases which risk of sounding like commonplaces. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion.

Only freedom can work such miracles!

I thought this was pretty interesting.  I'm old enough to remember DDT and how effective it was. 

A LIFESAVING KILLER RETURNS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 15, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/...

        & nbsp;   The 2006 Nobel laureates are in the spotlight, but a recent piece of news -- an announcement from the World Health Organization -- calls to mind a Nobel laureate of an earlier era.

        & nbsp;   When the Swiss chemist Paul Muller was awarded the prize in medicine in 1948, he was hailed "as a benefactor of mankind of such stature" that he would require "the humility of a saint" to inoculate himself against hubris. Fortunately, Muller was not given to arrogance. He described his great discovery as merely "a first foundation stone" in the "puzzling and apparently endless domain" of pest-borne plague. It had come as a surprise to him, he said modestly, to have discovered a chemical formula "so useful in the fight against diseases in human beings."

        & nbsp;   "Useful" hardly began to describe it. As Time magazine noted, Muller's chemical "kills the mosquitoes that carry malaria, the flies that carry cholera, the lice that carry typhus, the fleas that carry the plague, the sand flies that carry kalaazar and other tropical disease." Thanks to his discovery, "the tropics are becoming safer places to live; because of it, typhus" -- a deadly scourge long associated with wars and disaster -- "was no serious threat in World War II." 

        & nbsp;   The name of this miracle formula? Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane -- better known as DDT.

        & nbsp;   To anyone who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s, the notion that DDT was ever celebrated as a lifesaver might come as a shock. The very initials now seem sinister. Ever since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was published in 1962, DDT has been stigmatized as a terrible environmental poison, more curse than cure.

        & nbsp;   In Carson's telling, DDT caused cancer and genetic damage in humans, and wreaked havoc not only on the insects it was intended to kill but on birds and other animals too. It was a poison that grew in concentration as it passed up the food chain, ultimately contaminating everything from eagles' eggs to mothers' milk. Carson recounted frightful tales of DDT's demonic power. "A housewife who abhorred spiders" sprayed her basement with DDT in August and September -- and was dead of "acute leukemia" by October. "A professional man who had his office in an old building" sprayed with DDT to get rid of cockroaches -- and landed in the hospital, hemorrhaging uncontrollably; eventually he too was dead of leukemia.

        & nbsp;   But in retrospect, such alarming anecdotes seem little more than urban legends. In the words of immunologist Amir Attaran, a fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, "The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome" in human beings. Yet if Carson's science was shaky, her influence was undeniable. "Silent Spring" galvanized the emerging environmental movement and fed a rising hysteria about pesticides and other chemicals. Within a decade, DDT had been banned in the United States. Eventually every industrialized nation stopped using it. Under pressure from Western environmentalists and governments, DDT was widely suppressed in the Third World as well.

        & nbsp;   The results were catastrophic. As the most effective weapon ever deployed against mosquitoes and malaria was taken out of service, the mosquitoes and malaria returned. In Sri Lanka, for example, the spraying of houses with DDT had all but wiped out malaria, which shrank over a decade from 2.8 million cases and 7,300 deaths to 17 cases and no deaths. But when American funds to pay for DDT-based mosquito eradication dried up, malaria surged back, to half a million cases by 1969.

        & nbsp;   Today, the global malaria caseload stands at more than 300 million. The disease kills well over 1 million victims yearly -- some estimates run as high as 2.7 million -- and the vast majority of its victims are children in Africa. "Such a toll is scarcely comprehensible," Attaran and several colleagues have written. "To visualize it, imagine filling seven Boeing 747s with children, and then crashing them -- every day."

        & nbsp;   The demonizing of DDT, albeit with the best of motives, ended up causing tens of millions of deaths from malaria. Rarely has the law of unintended consequences operated with such lethality.

        & nbsp;   Now, at long last, that may change. In a historic shift, the WHO last month reversed its 30-year-old ban, and strongly endorsed the indoor use of DDT to control the mosquitoes that spread malaria. (The use of DDT on crops, which Carson had linked to the thinning of bird eggs, remains prohibited.) The WHO emphasized that DDT presents no health risk when sparingly applied to the inside walls of homes. And it urged environmentalist diehards to abandon their opposition to a proven lifesaver.

        & nbsp;   "I am here today to ask you, please help save African babies as you are helping to save the environment,” implored Arata Kochi, director of the WHO’s global malaria program. "African babies do not have a powerful movement ... to champion their well-being."

        & nbsp;   Sixty years after Paul Muller's great achievement was honored with a Nobel Prize, its potential may at long last be realized. A "silent spring" more hellish than anything Carson envisioned -- a million children dying needlessly every year -- may finally be coming to an end.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) 

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UNDESERVED FORGIVENESS
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 8, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/...

“There was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere -- everywhere.”

That description is from Janice Ballenger, a deputy coroner in Lancaster County, Pa. She was among the first to enter the West Nickel Mines Amish School after Charles Roberts murdered five girls and severely wounded five others there last week. One of the bodies she examined was that of Naomi Rose Ebersol , a 7-year-old who had been shot more than 20 times. "Kneeling next to the body and counting all the bullet holes," a shaken Ballinger said, "was the worst part." 

How do civilized human beings react to such an atrocity? With horror? Anger? Hatred?

Not the Amish.

Asked by a reporter if the community was angry about the killings, one Amish grandmother, Lizzie Fisher, was adamant. “Oh, no, no, definitely not,” she said. “People don't feel that around here. We just don't.”

Roberts planned his attack meticulously, making a list of supplies he would need, then gradually buying them over a six-day period. It makes the skin crawl just to read the inventory: nails, bolts, wrenches, bullets, guns, earplugs, wooden planks, rope. Roberts brought plastic ties to bind his victims' feet, chains and clamps for restraint, and tubes of K-Y Jelly, a sexual lubricant. He had a change of clothes, toilet paper, and a bucket. Apparently he “planned to dig in for the long siege,” a Pennsylvania State Police colonel surmised, and “intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them.” Instead, rattled perhaps by the arrival of the police, Roberts opened fire on his young hostages.

Confronted with such premeditated malevolence, what decent person wouldn't seethe with fury and revulsion? What parent or grandparent wouldn't regard such a massacre as not only unspeakable, but well nigh unforgivable?

The Amish wouldn't.

“I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive,” one Lancaster County resident was quoted as saying. “We don't need to think about judgment; we need to think about forgiveness and going on.” Many townspeople announced their forgiveness of Roberts directly to his wife and children .

On CNN, a local pastor recounted how the grandfather of Marian Fisher, one of the murdered girls, told younger relatives not to hate Roberts for killing her.

“As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was . . . saying to the family, ‘We must not think evil of this man,’ “ said the Rev. Robert Schenck. “It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry.”

I can't deny that it is deeply affecting to see how seriously the Amish strive to heed Jesus' admonition to return good for evil and turn the other cheek. For many Christians, the Amish determination to forgive their daughters' murder is awe-inspiring. In his Beliefnet blog, the always eloquent Rod Dreher marvels at CNN's story of the Amish grandfather. “Could you do that?” he writes. “Could you stand over the body of a dead child and tell the young not to hate her killer? I could not. Please, God, make me into the sort of man who could.”

But hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. I admire the Amish villagers' resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love *and* a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.

To voluntarily forgive those who have hurt you is beautiful and praiseworthy. That is what Jesus did on the cross, what Christians do when they say the Lord's Prayer, what observant Jews do when they recite the bedtime Kriat Sh'ma. But to forgive those who have hurt -- who have murdered -- someone else? I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse.

There are indications that the killer in this case may have been in the grip of depression or delusion -- he left suicide notes that spoke of unrelenting grief over his infant daughter's death, and of being tormented by dreams of molesting girls. Perhaps it was madness more than evil that drove him to commit this horror, in which case forgiveness might be more understandable.

But the Amish make it clear that their reaction would be the same either way. I wish them well, but I would not want to be like them, reacting to terrible crimes with dispassion and absolution. “Let those who love the Lord hate evil,” the Psalmist writes. The murder of the Amish girls was a deeply hateful evil. There is nothing godly about pretending it wasn't.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
_________________________________________________ _______
I may be breaking copyright laws by posting this column in it's entirety but in my defense, I did leave all the titles and credits on it.  I thought it was an interesting piece and I most likely would feel the same way Jacoby does about this.....Nancy

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DUMBING DOWN DEMOCRACY

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 1, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/...

The "For Dummies" series of self-improvement books, which began with "DOS for Dummies" in 1991, comprises more than 1,000 titles. You name it, John Wiley & Sons publishes it -- Mutual Funds for Dummies," Breastfeeding for Dummies, Formula One Racing for Dummies, John Paul II for Dummies, even Parrots for Dummies. And more are always on the way. The publisher "cranks out 200 new Dummies titles a year," reports Rachel Donadio in The New York Times Book Review. "At that rate there may soon be more Dummies books out there than dummies to read them."

If only. Unfortunately, the national stockpile of dummies appears to be in no danger of running dry.

The latest evidence of the dummification of American life comes from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a venerable organization that promotes classical values in higher education. As part of a program to strengthen the understanding of America's history and political institutions -- what it calls "civic literacy" -- ISI commissioned a survey of more than 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. The students were given 60 multiple-choice questions, testing their knowledge of US history, government, foreign affairs, and economics. The results were atrocious.

The average freshman flunked the test, correctly answering only 51.7 percent of the questions. The average score among seniors was equally pathetic: 53.2 percent. On a traditional grading scale, scores like those would get an F. Even at the colleges whose students scored highest, the average senior score was below 70 percent -- a D+ at best.

This wasn't a test of historical arcana or abstruse political theory. It focused on what should be a core of common American knowledge. For example, one question asked for the source of the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." There were five choices -- the Federalist, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Communist Manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, or the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. More than half the college seniors didn't know the correct answer: the Declaration of Independence.

Another question: "Which of the following was an alliance to resist Soviet expansion -- United Nations, League of Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Warsaw Pact, or Asian Tigers?" The answer, of course, is NATO. More than half got that one wrong, too.

Incredibly, 51 percent of seniors didn't know that the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the establishment of a national religion. An even higher proportion, 55 percent, didn't know that the battle that ended the American Revolution was fought at Yorktown (28 percent picked Gettysburg). Eight out of 10 couldn't identify Social Security as the federal government's largest expense. Even with an ongoing war in Iraq, fewer than half recognized the Ba'ath Party as the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's political support.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "it expects what never was and never will be." If he was right, American freedom is headed for a cliff. ISI was startled to find that at almost one-third of the schools surveyed, seniors actually scored lower than freshmen. Either the seniors forgot what they had known when they entered as freshmen, the report concludes, "or -- more ominously -- were mistaught by their professors." And where was this civic dumbing-down concentrated? Overwhelmingly at the most selective universities among the 50 surveyed, including Yale, Duke, Georgetown, Brown, and Berkeley.

For as much as $40,000 a year, students enrolled at such schools can count on a lavish exposure to every reigning value of politically-correct liberalism, from diversity to secularism to gay rights to global warming. But they stand an excellent chance of leaving at the end of four years knowing even less about America's history and civic institutions than they did when they arrived.

As Jefferson observed, the survival of democratic liberty requires an educated public. Has the United States still got one? "We . . . take as axiomatic," the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Civic Education warned in 1998, "that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics in the United States." Civic apathy, especially among the young, is now the norm. Most college students don't vote, don't involve themselves in political campaigns, and don't follow public affairs.

As American blood and treasure are sacrificed to nurture freedom and democracy abroad, the civic skills on which our own freedom and democracy depend are slowly withering away. Perhaps John Wiley & Sons should add one more title to its extensive list: "Democratic Survival for Dummies."

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/news/....

Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally.