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Daily Blogs for 1/2005
by Christopher Chantrill
A Bold Tax Reform Plan | 01/31/05
Stephen Moore proposes a startlingly ...
Steyn: Let's Worry About the Euro Quagmire | 01/31/05
Now that the Iraqis have decided to give the terrorists the finger, sensitive Mark
Steyn ...
Turner: The Iraq Election in Verse | 01/30/05
Frederick Turner thinks that the Iraq election should be ...
Iraq Election: Handing Out Medals | 01/30/05
After the spectacular turnout in Sundayīs Iraq election, itīs time to name names, as they ...
Steyn: Four More Wars | 01/27/05
While many conservatives are tiring of the War on Terror, Mark Steyn rings down Full ...
More on the New England Vapors | 01/26/05
While Larry Summers completes his re-education course somewhere in New England, George ...
Spengler: Americans Can't Do Tragedy | 01/26/05
You canīt put one over on Spengler. Heīs right there in the front rank complaining that ...
Forming and Breaking Relationships Easily | 01/25/05
No, this is not about divorce. It is about the nature of social relationships generally. ...
Ken Mehlman Lays Down a Marker | 01/24/05
You canīt make it any clearer than this. Ken Mehlman ...
Ankle Biters Get Teeth into Inaugural Speech | 01/24/05
Loyal liberal E.J. Dionne ...
Brit Bobbies Lost Key to Gun Cupboard | 01/22/05
Donīt cancel your British vaction, it was nearly a century ago when London bobbies ...
Brit Pundit Says Don't Count US Out | 01/20/05
A writer from the London Times ...
Bush Supporters Wonder What It Means | 01/20/05
Reagan/Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan worries that the President has ...
Inaugural Sour Grapes | 01/19/05
For the last couple of weeks Democrats have been complaining about the cost of the Bush ...
Brits on Bush: It ain't over yet | 01/19/05
A Brit at the London Times does a think piece on the Bush inauguration. The U.S. ...
Spengler: Two Cheers for Hypocrisy | 01/18/05
Spenglerīs been taking the odd week off over the holiday season, enraging his world-wide ...
Scorched Earth Won't Work For Democrats | 01/17/05
David Brooks advises Democrats ...
President Bush: "I Assume I'm Right" | 01/17/05
When will the Democrats stop misunderestimating President Bush? Here is the ...
Uncle Ted, The Face of the Democrats | 01/16/05
Boston columnist Don Feder takes apart Ted Kennedy and the Democrats. This is a good ...
The Political Math for Social Security Reform | 01/16/05
Fred Barnes discards the conventional wisdom and tries to figure out how President Bush ...
Sshh! The Deficit is Shrinking! | 01/13/05
While we are all attentively watching Dan Ratherīs rather outré retirement party, ...
Peggy Noonan at Her Finest | 01/12/05
Peggy Noonan—who used to write Dan Ratherīs radio ...
Steyn: Brits are to Blame for Black Homophobia? | 01/10/05
No, Mark Steyn hasnīt gone bonkers. But the earnest Decca Aitkenhead in
The ...
Steyn: Last Week's Boxer Rebellion Means Dems are Losers | 01/09/05
Speaking as a Canadian and resumably entitled to vote in California,
Mark Steyn ...
NYT Trendspotters: Religion is Reviving Worldwide! | 01/09/05
All the Upper West Side is agog this week after the New York Timesīs Laurie ...
What Happened to the Reasonable Man? | 01/06/05
This is a muddy article about ...
What Should Democrats Do? | 01/05/05
Now Peggy Noonan is giving them advice. “The Bush administration has stood for ...
Steyn: Message from Col. Shrapnell | 01/04/05
The men of Battery M send up a barrage of shot and shell against the ...
Spengler: Neocon Gelernter Writes "Utter and Complete Rubbish" | 01/03/05
David Gelernter in Commentary thinks the Puritanism of the founders shaded into modern ...
CEO Deepthink from Drucker | 01/02/05
What is the ...
Steyn: Americans Are Different | 01/01/05
Americans are different; they work more than kindler, gentler Euros. For instance, Mark ...
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 300301, 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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