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Daily Blogs for 1/2006
by Christopher Chantrill
Take the Kossies Out to the Woodshed | 01/31/06
Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but what exactly was the point of the ...
God is Love says German Pope | 01/30/06
First we had a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we ...
Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart | 01/27/06
Everyone is doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The ...
Chicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs | 01/27/06
Everyone agrees that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and ...
Peggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term | 01/26/06
In her regular Thursday column, ...
Boys and Books and Marriage and Abuse | 01/25/06
In the past week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about ...
Joel Stein Doesn't Get It | 01/25/06
Everybody is having a grand old time with young ...
Not Your Father's Economy | 01/24/06
What is going on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is ...
NYT: Bush Reads Books! But... | 01/23/06
We all know that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First ...
Did Hillary Blunder on Race? | 01/23/06
Hillary Clinton made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in ...
Hybrid Tax Cuts for Rich Liberals | 01/20/06
It isn’t enough that liberals make out like bandits working for the government earning 40 ...
Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left | 01/20/06
The movement to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently ...
The Next Generation of Fatherless Boys | 01/19/06
It isn’t much fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture ...
The Index of Economic Freedom 2006(2) | 01/18/06
What’s the best way to turn a poor nation into a rich nation? ...
Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era | 01/17/06
She died on Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was ...
Abused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL | 01/17/06
Sorry about that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems ...
Abused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services(3) | 01/16/06
British barrister Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. ...
The End of the Bork Era | 01/13/06
Nineteen years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States ...
Democrats Smear Alito: What's the Point? | 01/12/06
Why do they do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer ...
The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States | 01/11/06
There is a difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi ...
Lefty Professors Don't Get It | 01/10/06
While the pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination ...
Sam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist? | 01/09/06
It is Monday morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to ...
Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong | 01/09/06
God bless Naomi ...
What is Our Mideast Strategy? | 01/06/06
Democrats have been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for ...
NYT Brides Stay Home with Babies | 01/05/06
What do women want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. ...
Evangelicals are Different: They Give More Money | 01/04/06
One of the reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a ...
Success in 2005: an Iranian View | 01/03/06
Whether or not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the ...
A New Year: Why We Fight | 01/02/06
Why not start out the new year with a good dose of Why We Fight from ...
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
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
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
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
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
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
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
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
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
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
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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