A SATURDAY MORNING TOUCH AND GO !

It's a beautiful December morning and time again for Dr. Sanity to do a flyover of the psychosphere and do a few touch and go's to see what all that psychological talent out there has been blogging about!

Assistant Village Idiot (who surely has been promoted to "Associate" by now!) has an extraordinary piece that asks readers to "Change One Thing" in World War II to improve the outcome:

There are few rules, only that it has to be one thing. Intervene militarily when Japan attacks Manchuria is actually many things. We cannot replay history, of course, and the cascade of events you posit would result from the small action is highly speculative. But make a case for it anyway. What cascade of events could flow from your small change?

Example: Britain declares war on Germany over Czechoslovakia looks at first as if it would imply many actions. But we know in hindsight that a declaration of war was the signal that would have activated the German military revolting against Hitler. The Germans might then have solved the whole thing themselves. What would have resulted might have been no better; hard to see how it would have been worse, however. The most likely outcome is less war. It is also only a small change. Britain came very near to a declaration of war at that point, but drew back.

Think about it, all you armchair generals out there....

Next, Dr. Helen along with hubby Instapundit have an excellent podcast up discussing Male Suicide with Dr. Eric Caine, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, and an expert consultant to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, Caine is one of the nation’s foremost researchers in the field of suicide prevention and an expert on mental illness and suicide among the elderly. Check it out.

Siggy has posted "An Idiot's Guide to Zionism: What it is and why it really matters" over at SC&A:

As the ‘Holocaust Conference‘ in Tehran continues (”It is for public consumption in Arab countries…It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran”), it is clear that even the pretense of civilized thought and behavior are not part on the Iranian mullahs ‘Islamic Republic’ agenda.

By embracing David Duke, et al, the Iranian regime, led by that gaggle of corrupt mullahs and their houseboy, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, have made clear by association not only their feelings about the Holocaust, but of their attitudes towards Jews (they claim they are not anti Semitic), Blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants.

He goes on to explain what Zionism really is; and more importantly, what it isn't. An must-read post in this time of rising antisemitism around the world.

Meanwhile, ShrinkWrapped considers "Change and Stasis" on his blog and notes that, "True creativity is a rare trait. The number of people who have discovered truly new insights into the nature of reality are so few as to be memorialized as giants." Shrink can't help noticing that:

...societies that are structured to reward change can evolve and are now doing so at a rapidly accelerating rate. Societies that are structured so as to resist change are at risk of massive, catastrophic, disruption.

Now we head west through the skies of the blogsphere to visit Gagdad Bob and his various horizontal and vertical alter egos at One Cosmos, where the boys discuss the Founding Avatars of our nation and note that there was not an atheist among them. In fact, they understood that mankind possessed both a genetic blueprint (the horizontal) and a divine blueprint (the vertical). "This is a distinction," Bob says, "of which the founders were fully aware."

This hostility to atheism “was nearly universal in America, on the ground that where there is no omniscient Judge, political power knows no moral check.” Atheism is the exterior philosophy par excellence, completely denying even the possibility of interior evolution.

The founders categorically rejected atheism because it violated all common sense -- and America’s founders were nothing if not common-sensical. As Washington wrote, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”

GM Roper confesses over at GM's Corner that he is a warmonger:

I am a war monger, there, I've said it and I make no apologies for it. I support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I support going to war against the Sons-of-Bitches that rule Iran and Syria and I support a takedown of the hypocrites that are the Royal Family of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I take this stance because I know full well the dangers of islamofascists and their ilk. I have seen the nature of the beast and I am worried that a majority of Americans and Europeans do not. I have seen the scourge of islamofascism in the hole in the ground once occupied by twin towers of stunning architecture and commerce, in the torn up landscape of a field in Pennsylvania and in the hole through offices in the Pentagon. I have seen it in the delusional and psychotic meanderings of leftists that purport to "prove" that Bush was behind the attacks. I have seen it in the cries of airline passengers blythfully going about their business, only to have their day disrupted in fire and death. In the agonized faces of their family members posting pictures of missing family members wondering if they were safe, or God forbid, murdered.

One final stop at Neo-neocon's blog, where she too has a shocking confession to make!

I hereby join two other blogger, Michelle Malkin and Tammy Bruce, in officially declaring myself to be a woman of the Left.

Of the dominant left hand, that is. I'm not only a lefty, I'm very strongly left-handed, from an unusually left-handed family. Of the four of us--mother, father, brother, and myself--only my father was right-handed.Although my politics have shifted my handedness has not.

Time to head back to Dr. Sanity Internetional Airport! I have just had enough time for a few touch and go's--but you can spend as much time as you like at these excellent blogs. You might even learn a few new things and expand your psychological vistas!