Long ago, which is to say 50+ years ago or so, a drone was a male bee which hung around the hive for a while and didn’t do much. Then he had the decency to die off, along with all the other drones, in a kind of mass suicide pact. Apparently it is an apiary necessity. Later, drones became pilot-less planes operated by radio signals which the Air Force or Navy shot down with piloted planes or guides missiles to practice their technological marksmanship...

When I was a student in college, I had a part-time job feeding IBM cards into a computer at the University of Wisconsin. The cards were about 3 inches wide and 6 inches long, and they had a bunch of mysterious perforations in them. I had no idea what the holes meant, or what the computer would do with them, but I dutifully fed them into the enormous piece of equipment, which filled a very large room...

If we, the people, continue to affirm and to accept the world’s most dangerous and egregious gun culture, we deserve all the carnage which such a society inevitably produces. But if we concluded that for the health and well being of our country, we must seriously start to cut back on the number of guns we possess, we would also begin to have far fewer gun-related homicides and suicides.

There is an enormous problem with a one-state solution. If it were constituted immediately inside any proposed set of borders, there would be almost as many Palestinians as there are Jews. Furthermore, because of a much higher birthrate among Palestinians, very soon there would be more Palestinians in this newly formed nation. So the question naturally arises, would such a state be a Jewish nation, or would it be a secular democracy in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, and secular citizens all have equal status? And if there were more Muslims than Jews, would Muslims control the government? And because Israel was established precisely because it was to be a Jewish state, how could it be Jewish with a minority of Jews living within its borders? In 2013, what does it mean that Israel exists as a Jewish state?

In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, live oaks typically lose replace their leaves in a two-week period in late February or early March - - - except that this year it began happening in early January. Pine trees deposit their patina of bilious green dust on our cars in March - - - except that this year they are doing it in mid-January. Azaleas are popping everywhere, but they unpredictable in the best of circumstances. Roses that should have gone dormant continue to lift their faces to the warm sun. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British writer Caitlin Moran told what it was like in October in England. “At the bottom of my garden is a wrongness, a brightness – a patch of milky-green yellow that shouldn’t be there. The primroses are out; confused. They should be underground until March. Under the apple tree, the narcissi and daffodils are coming up – expecting April; finding October. The tree itself has pink blossoms next to red fruit; as joltingly wrong as a pregnant child, or a plane falling to earth. The earth is still fidgety and mild, when it should, by now, be silent, under frost. It still feels loud out there….We’ve jumped straight from summer to spring. All that greenness is…shouting.”

Why do some people feel sports, and others do not? Why do some people live sports, and others do not? Why do some people live and die by sports, and others do not? Without question, this lecture shall be of far greater interest to some of you than to others. That is because of psychology, and viscera, and extra-rationality, and mystery.

Had there been no 9/11, I would not be delivering this lecture. Islamic, or more appropriately, Islamist terrorism, is not a serious problem in the United States of America. It is not a huge problem in Europe or Britain, though it a much bigger issue there than here. It is a bigger matter in countries such as Nigeria, Egypt, or Iraq, where there are fairly large communities of both Muslims and Christians. It obviously has been of grave concern in the state of Israel since its founding in 1948, but especially after the Six Day War in 1967. However, Islamist terrorism is far more lethal in countries in the Muslim world than anywhere else. Far, far, far more Muslims, hundreds of times more, have been killed or injured in Muslim countries than anywhere else.