When I was a youngster, I had this odd notion that Earth served as a loony bin for the entire galaxy -- the place where Martians and Venusians sent their crazies. Now that I’m an oldster, I’m convinced I was right.

For instance, here in California where, in the best of times, murderers are rarely executed for their vicious crimes, executions have come to a complete standstill because so-called medical experts could not rule out the possibility that lethal injections might cause the killers to experience the sensation of drowning or strangulation. The reaction of most sane people would be to hope they’d experience both, and that the deaths of these assorted brutes and butchers wouldn’t be nearly as painless as previously announced.

Which reminds me, speaking of prisoners, I wish John McCain, who uses his own heroic stature as a model P.O.W. to influence America’s policy towards Islamic terrorists, would just shut up on the subject. To suggest that combatants who fight without a flag or a uniform; who wipe their feet on the Geneva Convention; who disguise themselves as women; who hide in mosques and marketplaces; who slice off the heads of their prisoners; and who use children as shields; are entitled to the same safeguards as soldiers is sheer lunacy.

In the old days, when the Cold War was at its most frigid, I honestly thought the one thing that could unite the so-called civilized world would be the threat of invasion by evil aliens from outer space. I now realize how naïve I was. One merely has to see how accommodating most nations are towards the very worst elements of Islam to recognize that Neville Chamberlain was simply a man 70 years ahead of his time. These days, when most of Europe and half of America is only too happy to appease the neo-Nazis who heil Allah instead of Hitler, Chamberlain would be in his glory, and, regrettably, without a Churchill anywhere in sight.

Finally, let us consider same-sex marriages. The argument in their favor seems to be the same simple-minded one used to promote illegal immigration; namely, that people are entitled to do whatever they feel like doing. And, for good measure, anyone opposed to the first is homophobic, and anyone opposed to the second is racist.

However, I have yet to hear a homosexual explain to my satisfaction why his group should be the single exception to the one man-one woman arrangement that’s worked just fine for several millennia. I mean, on what basis could the state restrict, say, incestuous unions or polygamy? If whatever consenting adults choose to do is the rule, what’s to prevent your next wedding invitation from announcing the joining of Harry, Jerry, Mary, Barry, Cary, Perry, Sherry, Gary, Terri, Larry, and their dog Spot, in holy matrimony?