The news I read today is probably much the same as it was 80 or so years ago, my lifetime. And now, as then it is not reason but unreason that seems to rule what’s happening in the world. There are endless strings of absolutely crazy events bombarding us every day.

And I find it constantly remarkable, and unfathomable how it can be that the people who report and comment on the news, at least the members of the so-called liberal and free press that I read, are mostly reasonable people themselves. Wouldn’t you think they would run away from it all, screaming?

Reviews Say Police Shooting of Boy, 12, Was ‘Reasonable’

I realize, or course, there is another press, not liberal and not free, with probably many more readers than the publications with which I’m most familiar, the Post, the Times, the WSJ, the Globe, Le Monde et al. This other press, positioned permanently at the market check-out counters and on the so-called conservative radio and television talk shows, would impose its unreasonable analyses, particular beliefs, opinions, and worst of all ideologies, not to mention a constant exploitation of sex and violence , on the news whatever that news might be, giving us their own accounts, no less crazy than the news items themselves, their own skewed and blatantly ignorant commentaries and interpretations on whatever may be the subject of the day.

Anyway, just today, in a single publication, the Times, there were these headlines:

• Explosions During Peace Rally in Ankara, Turkey’s Capital, Kill at Least 86

• Options for legal asylum shrink, temporary camps become permanent mega-ghettos.

• SIS Makes Gains in Syria Territory Bombed by Russia

• Administration Ends Pentagon Effort to Train Syrian Rebels

• Palestinians Stab Israelis in 2 Jerusalem Attacks

• Suicide Bombings at Chad Market and Refugee Camp Kill 38

• Israeli Soldiers Kill 6 Palestinians in Gaza as West Bank Unrest Grows

• Afghan Family Remembers a Loving Son Killed in Airstrike on Kunduz Hospital

• How Syrians Are Dying

• Desperate Families in Delhi as Dengue Overwhelms Hospitals

• For Families of Germanwings Victims, Anger Burns Through Grief

• Afghan Family Remembers a Loving Son Killed in Airstrike on Kunduz Hospital

These being just a few of the items from the World News. I haven’t even got to the United States, to such as:

Campus Shootings in Texas and Arizona Kill 2 Students and Wound 4

Oregon Gunman Smiled, Then Fired, Student Says…

---

Unreasonable behavior, right? But then there is much worse. Those Indians whom we also read about in the news, evidently members of a Hindu sect dedicated to love, honor and save the cow, and to that end to be ready to thoroughly brutalize a usually Muslim family suspected and then found guilty of having slaughtered one of their treasured beasts for food.

Mob Attack, Fueled by Rumors of Cow Slaughter, Has Political Overtones in India

This being an example of what that writer for the Tehran times called “the main thing,” that is, one’s religion which in this case would have them protect the cow even to the extent of murdering their fellow human beings.

---

Oh, oh, I have to stop blogging to play chess with my granddaughter who has just come in the backdoor and is headed to the TV room where I’m seated before the screen of my laptop, …and I see that she’s carrying a chess set and is headed directly for me. Maybe that’s what’s needed, more people playing chess which is, unlike the games being played in the Middle East at the present time, a thoroughly reasonable game, even when some of the most celebrated chess players were themselves highly unreasonable.

PBW, ParisTampa,