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Daily Blogs for 10/2006
by Christopher Chantrill
What's a Kerry? | 10/31/06
A political gaffe, we know, is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.
So ...
Bureaucracy Comes Before Kids' Reading | 10/31/06
For over a century the education establishment has pushed the idea of “whole language” ...
Why Won't They Tell Us? | 10/30/06
Week in and week out Hugh Hewitt has MSM types on his program and he asks them about ...
The Party of the Rich | 10/30/06
We all know that the Democratic Party is the party of privilege. That is to say, ...
The Stem Cell Flap | 10/27/06
Ever since they ginned up Ron Reagan to make a speech on stem cell research at the 2004 ...
The Paglia Interview | 10/27/06
She thinks the Foley trick was a disaster; she listens to talk radio; and she thinks the ...
The Decline of the Public Library | 10/26/06
Here in Seattle we have just finished spending hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding ...
What is Going On in Iraq? Part II | 10/26/06
What is going on in Iraq? President Bush isn’t saying.
That has to be the takeaway ...
What is Going On in Iraq? | 10/25/06
Just what exactly is going on in Iraq? Is it civil war? If not, just what is ...
The Real Culture of Corruption | 10/24/06
Conservatives have wonderful ideas—for education, for health care, and for income ...
The Ebb and Flow of Politics | 10/24/06
At two weeks to go before the 2006 mid-term elections everyone is agreed that... well it ...
Mark Steyn and the 300 Millionth American | 10/23/06
Maybe we conservatives are living in a dream world. While we are worrying about the ...
Rees-Mogg on Ralph Harris | 10/23/06
The talent of a great journalist is to bring together all the detritus of the world, like ...
Don't Blame MSM For Gloom and Doom | 10/20/06
If you wonder why the mainstream media isn’t shooting off the fireworks about a record ...
Ralph Harris, Architect of Thatcherism | 10/20/06
They are dying off, one by one. The great lions of the conservative renaissance, the men ...
A Horror Story from the Affirmative Action Front(1) | 10/19/06
Our friends in the mainstream media love a human interest story. They love to put up a ...
The Gathering Storm of Extremism in Europe | 10/19/06
As Mark Steyn’s new ...
They Fined Newt Gingrich For Teaching a College Course | 10/18/06
Yeah! Remember when they gang-tackled Newt for—get this—teaching a college ...
How About That Precautionary Principle Now? | 10/18/06
Some years ago environmentalists set up the Precautionary Principle as a dodge to stop ...
Sunnis Worry About Shi'ite Power | 10/17/06
Back in the first Bush Administration I remember a Bush administration official ...
Racial Discrimination at the University of Michigan | 10/17/06
In Michigan this November the voters are deciding whether to pass the ...
The Long Tail in Education | 10/16/06
Back in the nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann promised that centralized, ...
A Tale of Two States | 10/16/06
In Florida, it is the best of times for Republicans. In Ohio, it is the worst of ...
Conservatives Must Hang Together | 10/16/06
At the end of the Bush administration and after 12 years of Republican Congresses the ...
What It Means to be a Liberal | 10/13/06
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone laments that the word “liberal” has ...
Peggy Noonan: Left Lacks Grace | 10/13/06
Today, on Friday 13th, America’s Mom ...
Progessives Tire of White Working Class | 10/12/06
In Britain as in the United States the progressives have gone sour on the white working ...
Federal Deficit Cut in Half | 10/12/06
Of course Democrats are not impressed, according to ...
Dems Deathbed Conversion to Missile Defense | 10/11/06
Twenty years ago Democrats poured scorn on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense ...
Has Bush "Squandered the Political Authority of a Great Country?" | 10/11/06
It used to be, writes ...
Put North Korea on China's Back | 10/10/06
So the North Koreans either did or did not successfully explode a nuclear device last ...
How To Make Our Schools Safe | 10/10/06
What do we do about the school shootings? Ban handguns? Make schools into secure zones ...
$20 Tickets at the Met | 10/09/06
Earth to Metropolitan Opera! Your audience is dying off!
Seriously though, the new ...
Big Families: Here They Come | 10/09/06
Give this trend another year, and it will be on the cover of Time.
You know ...
Kudlow on Hastert | 10/06/06
Never mind about Denny Hastert’s handling of the Foley incident, writes ...
Feeding the Underclass in Britain | 10/05/06
Last week in Brixton, an eternally rough section of London, two teenagers were shot as ...
It's All About Iran | 10/05/06
I’ve said again and again that if you want to understand what the United States is doing ...
How About the 2008 Election? | 10/04/06
Enough of the Foley kerfuffle. Let’s talk presidential politics for 2008 and the book ...
Do The Right Thing | 10/04/06
I agree with ...
Rumsfeld vs. Rice on Iraq(1) | 10/03/06
We’re going to win in Iraq, says President Bush. But what does that mean?
Secretary ...
Page Storm Reaches Hurricane Force | 10/03/06
Could Republicans lose control of Congress over an instant message? If they do, it would ...
Why Democrats Prefer Scandal to SoSec Reform | 10/02/06
You gotta admit it. The Democrats know how to expose and coordinate embarrassing ...
Fox News: Libs Still Don't Get It | 10/02/06
Fox News is ten years old this week, and the liberals still don’t get it. Don’t agree? ...
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
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
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
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”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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
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
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
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”
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