Be careful what you wish for.

It's Election Day! If Democrats win an overwhelming mandate, controlling the Executive Branch and both chambers of the Legislature, they will then have to govern--they will no longer be able to credibly blame the Republicans for their failures.

Lumpers and Splitters

When it comes to reaping the benefits of Affirmative Action, advocates want to group Blacks, stressing their similarities; when it comes to crime or teen pregnancy, advocates shun "stereotypes," emphasizing Blacks' differences.

One minority student argued, "I don't want a handout, I just want an opportunity." But an opportunity undeserved is a handout. The only opportunity she should be guaranteed is the opportunity to compete under a uniform set of rules that neither favor nor discriminate against any group.

Clarence Thomas is criticized because he was a beneficiary of Affirmative Action but now opposes it. Many Germans benefited under National Socialism but later renounced it. One need not remain slavishly devoted to any credo from which one gained some personal advantage.

I watched a tribute to Black Art (as best I could tell, any work produced by a Black artist). Would it be politically and taxonomically correct to classify American Gothic, the Sistine Chapel, and Andy Warhol's soup cans as White Art? Art is transcendent--let's leave it that way.

Final Days

Homo sapiens may simply be another evolutionary dead-end that will be shrugged off for failure to adapt.

Man will be succeeded by a fitter species--one that can control its fecundity and accept its mortality.

The extinction of humankind will be a boon to every living thing save humankind.

Man's self-extermination will usher in a Golden Age for the few remaining creatures for whom we have not by then rendered the planet uninhabitable.

For Man, a doomsday comet is "Lucifer's Hammer"; for the Earth, it's a celestial enema!

How many "wake-up calls" do we need before we wake up?

I clearly remember, at age nine or ten, being stunned to learn in school that there were two billion inhabitants on Earth. Within my lifetime, that number has more than tripled. But we need not fret about the consequences for posterity of our indifference toward population control--our children's children can always rely on Famine, Pestilence, and War to restore balance.

We possess the know-how to create an Eden; that we lack the will and are, instead, producing a cesspool is testament to Man's depravity.

A few contrarians still dispute the impending reality of apocalyptic global warming and claim, instead, that we are actually at the dawn of the next Ice Age--while the debate festers, a medium-weight worsted should do nicely.

I no longer despair for the future of our species; we will get exactly what we deserve.