Nothing particularly worthwile on the Dennis Prager show today. Charles Krauthammer was on railing against the United Nations. Prager predicted asserted that this war is as important an event as World War II. I agree with Krauthammer -- the US should have long ago withdrawn from the UN. I also agree with Prager, this is a seminal event.

The highlight of Prager's show today was the amusing spectacle of the Professor of Law who hung up on Prager after he would not consider Prager's hypothetical question about when it would be legal to go to war against Iraq. This was at the begining of the third hour. The second hour was spent talking about the state of the airline industry with Edward Hudgins, an adjunct scholar of the Cato institute and Director of the Washington Office of the misnamed "Objectivist" Center. In the first hour Prager talked about an article by a self-proclaimed atheistic BBC journalist who described the average American as being quite religious and believing in such things as Good and Evil, heaven and hell, God and satan. The journalist was not sneering but seemed to be somewhat incredulous that this country is still permeated with such beliefs.

Today is March 18, 2003 and war is imminent. It is expected to be no more than about a day away. Prager's show today started out by talking about the coming war and reviewing the justifications for it and the inadequacy of the arguments against it. He also talked about Rachel Corrie, the "American" "protestor" who died when she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer trying to destroy a terrorist's home. In the second hour he talked about the New York Times finally acknowledging that Paul Ehrlich had been wrong all those years when he predicted a population explosion and asked callers if they had fewer children as a result of listening to zero population group arguments. Prager concluded in the third hour with a discussion of what children should be told about the war. He thought children should be told that there are some bad guys in the world but we're about to take care of them. The Lone Ranger was used as an example of the kind of fiction that children could draw important lessons from.

On today's Prager Show, Dennis Prager talked mostly about the coming war and about what was left to say about the anti-war side. Much of the first hour was spent railing against the "it's not moral if we go it alone" argument. Prager quite correctly pointed out that whether or not a war is moral is not determined by the number of supporters we have. Much of this sort of talk continued into the second hour. In the third hour, Prager quoted from a history textbook his son is using at his college, and demonstrated the bankruptcy of university text with some examples of the coverage of the Korean War in the 1950s. Prager mentioned for example that the book accuses the US of holding up the armistice talks by refusing to enforce a provision of the Geneva Convention for Prisoners of War. The provision was that prisoners of war were to be returned to the home country whereas the US wanted to give the prisoners a choice as to whether they might prefer to stay in (presumably) South Korea rather than going back to Communist North Korea or China. He further recalled what happened the last time prisoners of war were returned to a communist country, namely the Soviet prisoners of war during World War II, which upon being returned to the USSR were murdered by Stalin's regime. But, as Prager points out, the text seems to mention none of that but rather chooses to focus on the apparent irrational stubborness of the United States in preferring to follow its own ideals rather than "international law."

Virtually all of my knowledge of history, particularly US history, came from my own reading. In High School I had the required year of U.S. History though I don't really remember too much of it. I only took one history course at UCLA and that was Japanese history which I actually did enjoy. The Professor was clearly Liberal, though he seemed mostly fair. It was clear from the way he talked that his personal view was that we should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though he allowed some discussion of this and did not press the point to the best of my knowledge.

Well, I'm back from a relaxing weekend. Some personal notes: My wife and I watched Gladiator Saturday night, a truly great if somewhat tragic movie. Also I had enough time to reread Craig Biddle's Loving Life, a book that can be said to very effectively and concretely cover the essential argument for the Objectivist ethics. I'm also beginning to reread the J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, starting with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.