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Daily Blogs for 9/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
Teenagers Getting Drunk(1) | 09/28/07
Back in the good old day kids used to drink a little here and there, you know, back ...
Thomas: Confirmation Was All About Abortion | 09/27/07
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is appearing on 60 Minutes this Sunday ...
Why Some Cultures Don't Die | 09/27/07
What with the decline of the west—particularly the demographic collapse in ...
Fifty Years After Little Rock(1) | 09/26/07
The confrontation at Little Rock, Arkansas, fifty years ago, was the moment where the ...
Race Commission Out in UK | 09/25/07
Those of you who believe that in the modern world we should judge people by the ...
Then Why Are We Arguing?(1) | 09/24/07
Everyone agrees that President George W. Bush is determined to “win” in ...
'I'm a Supply-Sider' says Bush | 09/21/07
Thanks goodness we can finally report that Bush is not in denial. Yes, before a ...
Conservatives Jumped to Support Chemerinsky | 09/20/07
Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinksy is about as left as you can get. ...
Dueling Health Plans | 09/19/07
This week Senator Clinton (D-NY) announced her new approach to health care, ...
Fed Cuts by 0.5 Point | 09/18/07
Today the Federal Reserve Board cut its federal funds rate by 0.5 point reports ...
Raise Taxes Why Don't You(1) | 09/17/07
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) is now chairman of the House Ways and Means ...
Politics and the Classroom | 09/17/07
Good news from Iran, reported by ...
Call Me Mary not Maricruz(1) | 09/14/07
What is happening out there, with respect to the mortgage meltdown and ...
Putting the MoveOn.orgers on the Couch | 09/14/07
All animals live by killing. That’s the awful truth that we spend our lives ...
Fighting for Kids in Utah | 09/13/07
The Utah Education Association has got $3 million from the National Education ...
How Economic Crackpots Devoured American Politics | 09/12/07
Conservatives and Republicans keep hoping that liberals will actually admit that ...
Bush Prepares the Domestic Battlefield | 09/12/07
We’ve said here repeatedly that the one thing that the Bush administration needs ...
Could Bush Have Brought Dems Aboard? | 09/11/07
Six years after ...
Americans Get the Big Picture | 09/10/07
Today as Gen. Petraeus reports to Congress on the limited results of the ...
Being Unserious about Don Rumsfeld | 09/10/07
If you were given the opportunity to interview former Secretary of Defense Donald ...
Mortgage Mess Hits Real Economy | 09/07/07
Stocks are in broad retreat today on the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly ...
Pavarotti: Singers on The Voice | 09/06/07
Luciano Pavarotti, primo tenore assoluto of our times, died September 6 ...
Chuck Schumer Doesn't Get It | 09/06/07
Many conservatives have reacted with outrage to the remarks by Sen. Chuck Schumer ...
DeLay Hammers Lauer(1) | 09/05/07
You have to hand it to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. He believes that ...
Yet There's a Welder Shortage(1) | 09/04/07
Everybody knows that the industrial sector is shrinking leaving behind a creaking Rust ...
Conservatives on Horn of Dilemma | 09/03/07
Hey, this isn’t hard, insists ...
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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