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Daily Blogs for 7/2008
by Christopher Chantrill
Beware the Hip Urbanites, Mr. Obama | 07/31/08
That’s what Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill recommend in ...
L'Esprit d'Escalier at KPLU | 07/30/08
Last night I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the ...
What Ails Education? | 07/29/08
What’s wrong with education in the United States? It used to be that Americans ...
Who Cares About Inner City Schools? | 07/28/08
According to Sen. Barack Obama, the conservative solution to pervasive school failure ...
President Bush and Blacks | 07/25/08
President Bush’s domestic signature in 2000 was “compassionate ...
Obama's Secret Mission | 07/24/08
It can now be told. The reason for Barack Obama is simple. He has been sent down to ...
The Mess in the Academe | 07/23/08
In her latest article marriage advocate ...
What the NYT Wouldn't Print | 07/22/08
The flap over The New York Times refusing to print an oped by John McCain is a ...
Obama and Berlin | 07/21/08
Politicians are creatures of their staff. And this becomes even more so as we climb ...
A Good Denier Day | 07/18/08
First a note to our readers. The American Physical Society wants you to know that the ...
Liberals' Race Crutch | 07/17/08
Affirmative action opponent ...
Everyone Doesn't Do it | 07/16/08
Everyone agrees, don’t they, that candidates appeal to the base in their primary ...
The Business of Government Isn't Business | 07/15/08
President Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed that “the business of America is ...
What About the Real Problem with Obama? | 07/14/08
The oh so sophisticated New Yorker has ...
Who Are the Top One Percent? | 07/11/08
Yesterday we looked at the IRS’s most revealing ...
Only the Rich Pay Taxes (update) | 07/10/08
The IRS keeps a handy-dandy spreadsheet on the federal income tax. The latest ...
Vanity of Vanities | 07/09/08
Jane Austen’s last complete novel, ...
More Capital Needed at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac | 07/08/08
Yesterday, shares in Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored Federal National Mortgage ...
The Trouble With Faith-based Initiatives | 07/07/08
Back when President Bush was pushing his idea for faith-based organizations to have ...
Clark's McCain Put-down | 07/03/08
You and I can only guess at the tactical political calculations of presidential ...
New Hope for Global Warming Deniers | 07/02/08
There are some of us, and we are few, who reflexively recoil from the latest liberal ...
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
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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