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Take the Kossies Out to the Woodshed
by Christopher Chantrill
LOOK, I DON’T have a dog in this fight, but what exactly was the point of the bad-tempered Democratic filibuster over the Alito nomination?
Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kerry could remind us that he was very importantly attending a very important World Economic Forum in Davos? Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kennedy could make another stemwinder on the floor of the United States Senate so that he could remind us that he is not exactly the liberal lion of his prime?
Presumably the idea was to throw a bone to the Kossites unfold
| 01/31/06 3:25 am ETGod is Love says German Pope
by Christopher Chantrill
FIRST WE HAD a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we have a German pope, and the first words out of his mouth, in a papal encyclical, is “Deus Caritas Est” or God is Love.
And it is telling that the first thing he does, as he renews the Christian message for a new generation, is deal with the challenge of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who accused Christianity of having unfold
| 01/30/06 4:26 am ETMozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart
by Christopher Chantrill
EVERYONE IS doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.
As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:
“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”
“It is, strange to say, unfold
| 01/27/06 9:52 am ETChicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs
by Christopher Chantrill
EVERYONE AGREES that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and their programs, why, people would starve, children would not go to school, and old people would lack health care.
That’s why the Chicago City Council voted against giving Wal-Mart a zoning change so they could build a store on the South Side. The local alderman, Howard Brookins Jr., tried.
Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart unfold
| 01/27/06 2:58 am ETPeggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term
by Christopher Chantrill
IN HER REGULAR Thursday column, Peggy Noonan reviews Bush’s speech at Kansas State University. She approves of his strategic, even romantic vision, but worries about the short term.
We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find unfold
| 01/26/06 3:14 am ETBoys and Books and Marriage and Abuse
by Christopher Chantrill
IN THE PAST week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about Boys and Books, how boys just aren’t doing well in school, and how colleges are conducting an informal affirmative action program to favor unqualified boys because otherwise their male student percentage would go below 40 percent.
Then we have City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz observing how the only women who are sticking to marriage unfold
| 01/25/06 9:07 am ETJoel Stein Doesn't Get It
by Christopher Chantrill
EVERYBODY IS having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times.
“I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:
All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.
But please, no parades.
But Joel, you unfold
| 01/25/06 3:20 am ETNot Your Father's Economy
by Christopher Chantrill
WHAT IS GOING on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?
This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 unfold
| 01/24/06 3:36 am ETNYT: Bush Reads Books! But...
by Christopher Chantrill
WE ALL KNOW that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?
Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.
Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s unfold
| 01/23/06 11:36 am ETDid Hillary Blunder on Race?
by Christopher Chantrill
HILLARY CLINTON made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in flames in 1994 and helped elect a Republican Congress. Is she trying to do it again?
Shelby Steele thinks that maybe her “plantation” speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day could rank right up there in the blunder department. He writes that pandering is not just a question of going to a black church and playing the race card. It requires a certain finesse, of the unfold
| 01/23/06 3:40 am ETHybrid Tax Cuts for Rich Liberals
by Christopher Chantrill
IT ISN’T ENOUGH that liberals make out like bandits working for the government earning 40 percent more than ordinary working stiffs earn in the private sector.
They also make out like bandits when it comes to buying cars.
When the Seattle liberal buys a new Toyota Prius hybrid, the federal government will kick in with $3,400 in tax credits.
Nothing quite like tax cuts for the rich, eh? According to Richard Burr,
The unfold
| 01/20/06 11:13 am ETDo Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left
by Christopher Chantrill
THE MOVEMENT to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently with the decision of the Florida State Supreme Court, reported by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, that voucher programs are unconstitutional because they violate the requirement that the state provide
by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality unfold
| 01/20/06 3:52 am ETThe Next Generation of Fatherless Boys
by Christopher Chantrill
IT ISN’T MUCH fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.
Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered.
| 01/19/06 3:06 am ETThe Index of Economic Freedom 2006
by Christopher Chantrill
WHAT’S THE best way to turn a poor nation into a rich nation? Richard W. Rahn asks this rhetorical question. Is it:
(A) Insist the world’s rich nations transfer substantial wealth though massive foreign aid to the poor nations?
(B) Insist all nations adopt policies that would make them as economically free as the top 10 freest economies today?
We sexist, racist, classist, homophobic conservatives know the answer to that. The answer unfold
| 01/18/06 3:31 am ETBirgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era
by Christopher Chantrill
SHE DIED ON Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.
Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.
She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, unfold
| 01/17/06 5:04 am ETAbused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL
by Christopher Chantrill
SORRY ABOUT that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.
Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John unfold
| 01/17/06 3:18 am ETAbused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services
by Christopher Chantrill
BRITISH BARRISTER Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. Daughter of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s she went to college and became a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, a level in the British legal hierarchy that poor old Rumpole of the Bailey could never quite rise to.
Only there is a little more to her story than that. One of six children, she was brutally abused by her mother, who did everything she could to abort her desire for education and advancement. The story is told by Briscoe in
| 01/16/06 3:28 am ETThe End of the Bork Era
by Christopher Chantrill
NINETEEN YEARS ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of unfold
| 01/13/06 3:52 am ETDemocrats Smear Alito: What's the Point?
by Christopher Chantrill
WHY DO THEY do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?
It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.
But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like unfold
| 01/12/06 3:09 am ETThe Global Problem of the Natural Resource States
by Christopher Chantrill
THERE IS A difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.
In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.
But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the unfold
| 01/11/06 3:52 am ETLefty Professors Don't Get It
by Christopher Chantrill
WHILE THE pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?
And of course to back him up
| 01/10/06 3:24 am ETSam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist?
by Christopher Chantrill
IT IS MONDAY morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to Charles Hurt. Says Senator Charles Schumer about Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito:
"If he continuously, given his previous record, refused to answer questions and hid behind ’I can’t answer this because it might come before me,’ it would increase the chances of a filibuster."
Notice the use of the passive voice here.
On the other hand, Alito supporter
| 01/09/06 3:28 am ETNaomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong
by Christopher Chantrill
GOD BLESS Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.
Sphere: Related Content | | perm | comment | | 01/09/06 2:57 am ETWhat is Our Mideast Strategy?
by Christopher Chantrill
DEMOCRATS HAVE been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.
Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its
| 01/06/06 3:36 am ETNYT Brides Stay Home with Babies
by Christopher Chantrill
WHAT DO WOMEN want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.
Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick unfold
| 01/05/06 3:14 am ETEvangelicals are Different: They Give More Money
by Christopher Chantrill
ONE OF THE reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a lot of Americans go to church and the ones that do give to their churches. The same thing applies in Britain. American evangelicals give away about 10 percent of their income, but British evangelicals are even more generous. They give away 12 percent of their income, according to Ruth Gledhill and Joanna Sugden. They give “nine times as much to charity as the average householder” in unfold
Sphere: Related Content | | perm | comment | | 01/04/06 3:17 am ETSuccess in 2005: an Iranian View
by Christopher Chantrill
WHETHER OR not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the eye of the hurricane we call the War on Terror, you always want to keep an eye on Iranian writer Amir Taheri. He probably represents the voice of the suffering city people of Iran, the ones who want to come into the world, the democratic capitalist world that we Anglospherists have spread across the planet. Only they live under a regime that is at war with the democratic unfold
Sphere: Related Content | | perm | comment | | 01/03/06 3:06 am ETA New Year: Why We Fight
by Christopher Chantrill
WHY NOT START out the new year with a good dose of Why We Fight from Roger Kimball at
The New Criterion. In his article, he returns to the theme of James Burnham and his 1964 book The Suicide of the West.
Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.
Our modern Cassandra is the brilliant Mark Steyn. He has pointed out that Europe is on a path to suicide with its population crash.
| 01/02/06 3:42 pm ET
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
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
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
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
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
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
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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