Is Bushs Troop Surge All For Mcnaught - Road to the Middle Class

LAST NIGHT President Bush announced a troop surge for Iraq, and all Americans wish him well. But everyone is bound to ask: Is the moment auspicious for a change in strategy? Is victory in the stars?

I’m glad you asked. It just so happens that Comet McNaught is in the evening sky right now. In fact the best time to see it is this weekend, according to Britain’s Daily Mail. Says astronomer Nick James:

“You will need a clear western horizon and should start looking as soon as the sun sets. The comet should be obvious and the tail will be pointing almost straight up from the horizon.”

But that doesn’t really tell us what to expect in Iraq. And the trouble is that even if the troop surge succeeds in pacifying Baghdad, what then? Do the Iraqis feel enough of a sense of “Iraqiness” to unite under their unity government?

Anyway, according to the mainstream media it’s all doomed to failure. “Most Americans oppose President Bush’s call to send additional U.S. military forces to Iraq,” reports Jon Cohen in the Washington Post.

Most worrying of all is the name of the comet. It’s called “NcNaught” after the Scot Robert McNaught who discovered the comet, his 31st, from a telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Does that mean that Bush’s new policy will amount to “NcNaught?”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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