"Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilization." – Churchill

POLITICS! The juxtaposition of opposites. Defying description, sanity, and analogies. Stretching the limits of plausibility, impossibility, and fantasy. Blurring the image from the actuality. Speaking of word-pictures, there's nothing "crazier" than a nervous house fly. Sure he's paranoid, but he should be! You there with swatter in hand; he crouched down like a sprinter waiting for the gun to go off. And then – strike! Another swing and a miss.

As an aside, my mother used to laugh when she heard "a swing and a miss"; she pictured a "miss" swinging on a swing. Women are from Venus, but she would have made a good White House correspondent; she was the master of The Dumb Question. And she would be surprised that no one calls a miss a "Miss" anymore (that's been a verboten word since about the time Nixon left the White House). Girls are now called a "child" – to age 26 – or a "Ms.," a term I'm still not used to.

By the way, I'm so old-fashioned that as a kid I used to drive horses to spread manure that I had pitched by hand. How's that for a word-picture? Sitting downwind from two gas-emitting horses – and sitting over cow manure. In defense of cows, I must say that cow gas is nothing compared to horse gas, quantity-wise. Those enviro-mentals must be on methane themselves. Juiced. They blame cow gas for everything that goes wrong in the world, but there are probably more deer and antelope, more moose, elk, and caribou in the world than cows, right? Not to mention seven billion people breathing out carbon dioxide (it's good for plants), not to mention gas.

I'm so old I can remember when Mc Donald's had only sold "Hundreds" of hamburgers, not billions, and I can't fathom a trillion, let alone 18 trillion in debt [that was just 6 years ago, about half of our 2021 debt.] Modern studies about food were a pet peeve for my mother. One Dumb Question: "Who says that butter is bad for your health?" Turns out she was spot-on as usual. Science now has to eat crow along with the buttered popcorn. Eggs, and salt on your eggs, won't hurt you either, but don't make a habit of crow. It's bad for your gizzard and credibility, new studies claim. As someone said, most scientific progress was achieved by dissenters from conventional wisdom. Keep those dumb questions coming.

*Well, that's my column for today. I was distracted by a house fly, but there must be some lessons in there somewhere. As the Boy Scouts now say: "Be prepared. For anything!" The title of this column was inspired by Roger Pond's book "It's hard to look cool when your car's full of sheep; tales from the back 40." I figured it would "catch your eye."

P.S. Seriously folks, Winston Churchill had a point about "the future of Christian civilization." My parents were born in 1900 and 1901 and saw a lot of history. My mother was intrigued by the prophecy "They shall speak lies at one table." If she came back today, she would probably be asking:

• Isn't carbon dioxide good for plants?

• WHO SAYS that climate is our biggest challenge?

• We're promising the Arabs 1967 borders, and we made a deal with Iran?

• Why in the world would we help pay for their bomb? Such a deal!

• Islamist terror? How many "lone wolves" does it take to make a pack?

• Are Sunnis and Shiites killing each other "peacefully"?

• Borders? Why should we be the only country in the world with an open border?

• If we went to Mexico, would they leave the light on for US?

• If the invasion came from the north, would opponents still be called xenophobes?

• Our national debt is HOW MUCH??

• WHO SAYS the seas are rising?

• And, why did Al Gore buy a home on the beach?

PPS: A recent news item said that the Park Service is predicting that the seas are going to rise THREE FEET. "'Every little bit helps,' said the mosquito when he peed in the ocean," my grandmother used to say. But REALLY, how many gallons of water would it take to raise sea level even one INCH? Has anyone ever done the math? Only a fraction of the earth is land mass, and only a fraction of that has ice or snow on it. The ice floating on the seas is a moot point, since its mass is the same, solid or liquid (melting icebergs don't raise water levels).

The Alar scare was a scam. The ozone hole "problem" got managed. How do you know global warming isn't a scam? We know so little for sure that a bit of warming might be a good thing! What's so hard to understand? Someone go fetch a child of five.