RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
Daily Blogs for 11/2006
by Christopher Chantrill
James Webb's Class War(2) | 11/30/06
In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Democratic Senator-elect ...
Baby-Boomers Break the Budget | 11/30/06
What will happen as the baby boom generation retires? Will they break the budget and ...
The Boxed-in Democrats | 11/29/06
When they were in opposition in Congress the Democrats opposed, ferociously. Now they ...
Are The French Toast Yet? | 11/28/06
Is Europe toast, or merely warming up the toaster? Mark Steyn has advanced the theory ...
RMC Third World Index | 11/27/06
As you travel around the world how do you tell if you are in a Third World country or ...
Clamber over Angkor Wat, While You Still Can | 11/25/06
SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA —
You haven’t lived until you have seen the gigantic rush hours ...
Back From The Thai Jungle | 11/23/06
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND —
Out on the marches between Thailand and Myanmar the terrain ...
At The Royal Flora Expo | 11/21/06
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND — The Royal Flora Expo opened here November 1 in Thailand’s ...
First Impressions of Thailand | 11/20/06
ON THE ROAD IN THAILAND — It’s the roads, stupid. You drive for mile after mile, ...
Milton Friedman Dead at 94 | 11/17/06
Back in the 1960s and 1970s there were three high-profile economists in the United ...
Language Does Matter | 11/16/06
Language, we are taught, is an innate human ability. We have, according to Noam Chomsky, ...
Tsunami Lays Down 600 Ft High Deposit | 11/15/06
Here’s another reason to stop worrying about global warming, courtesy of The New York ...
A Cure for Health Woes | 11/15/06
OK, so we know that we can fix the education system with a dose of private enterprise. ...
Rudy's Leadership and Newt's Ideas | 11/14/06
The grave of Republican hopes in 2006 is scarcely filled in, but the hopefuls are lining ...
Pelosi's New Direction for America | 11/14/06
If you want to know what life will be like under a Democratic Congress, here is an ...
Clinton's Analysis of the Thumpin' | 11/13/06
Here is how Jeff Jacoby ...
Is Islam Strong or Just Brittle? | 11/13/06
Some people think that Islam is taking over the world. In America Alone, Mark ...
Let's Get Serious, Say Spy, Blair, and Noonan | 11/10/06
Now that the Democrats are back it’s Happy Days Are Here Again, right?
But yesterday ...
Looking Forward | 11/10/06
It’s too late now, but suppose that Congressional Republicans had followed President ...
Young People Support Civil Rights in Michigan | 11/09/06
Listen to the people, they say. As they reelected Democrat Governor Granholm and Senator ...
About Those Tough-guy Freshman Democrats | 11/09/06
What happens when all those freshman Democrats get to Washington. You know, the ones ...
Build An Agenda of Hope(1) | 11/08/06
Some Republicans are out blaming President Bush, Congressional Republicans, immigration ...
The Day After | 11/08/06
With at least a gain of 30 seats in the House of Representatives and a gain of 4 to 6 ...
Disaffected Reagan Democrats Call The Tune | 11/07/06
Remember the old Clinton campaign song? “Don’t Stop Thinking About ...
On Election Day | 11/07/06
It’s Election Day and pundit ...
Until Conservatives Can Influence Upper-Middle Class Opinion... | 11/06/06
During the Vietnam War, relates ...
Saddam Gets The Death Penalty | 11/06/06
You can say that Bush’s War is a disaster. You can say that it has roiled the Middle ...
Who Knew Rick Santorum Was a Nice Guy? | 11/03/06
Why do I get a feeling of déjà vu about ...
Get Real, America(1) | 11/03/06
Mad at the Republicans because they haven’t “done enough during their 12 years in control ...
Liberals Like Race-based Politics | 11/02/06
In the State of Michigan Jennifer Gratz and “wealthy black Republican” Ward Connerly are ...
"Call For Action" or "Dodgy Numbers" on Climate Change? | 11/02/06
Reading the British papers you’d think that it was all over bar shouting. The ...
SUV Sales Up at Ford | 11/01/06
Earlier this year the media reported that sales of the big truck-based SUVs were going ...
Should We Know How Journalists Vote? | 11/01/06
Talk show host Hugh Hewitt is making a career of asking MSM journalists the Question. ...
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”
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
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
mysql close 0