The Ocean State Blogger

Gone Dormant

2008-09-22T14:38:00.002-04:00

Two attempts at resuscitation have failed: so OSB will be allowed to go dormant. I'll leave her up for archival reasons, but the ol' girl has served her purpose.

"It Takes a Family to Raise a Village"

2008-05-30T11:28:00.001-04:00

Jennifer Roback Morse:

It takes a family to raise a village. Without the family, the village itself can not function. If the family breaks down, or fails to form in the first place, the “village” can not possibly provide adequate help to repair the damage. In any good society, the government must do what only the government can do: keep order internally and externally, enforce agreements and defend property rights. The market must do what only the market can do: create wealth and provide employment by combining goods and services that satisfy consumers. But only the family can create the next generation of human beings who will become citizens and consumers.

Dealing with the "Me" Generation

2008-05-30T11:09:00.003-04:00

Victor Davis Hanson:

Sociologists have correctly diagnosed the perfect storm that created the "me" generation -- sudden postwar affluence, sacrificing parents who did not wish us to suffer as they had in the Great Depression and World War II, and the rise of therapeutic education that encouraged self-indulgence.

Perhaps the greatest trademark of the 1960s cohort was self-congratulation. Baby boomers alone claimed to have brought about changes in civil rights, women's liberation and environmental awareness -- as if these were not prior concerns of earlier generations.

We apparently created all of our wealth rather than having inherited our roads, schools and bountiful infrastructure from someone else. And in our self-absorption, no one accepted that our notorious appetites created more problems than our supposed "caring" solved.

Our present problems were not really caused by an unpopular president, a spendthrift Congress, the neocon bogeymen, the greedy Saudis, shifty bankers or corporate oilmen in black hats and handlebar moustaches -- much less the anonymous "they."

The fault of this age, dear baby boomers, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

"Wii All You Can Be"?

2008-05-30T11:06:00.001-04:00

Popular Mechanics:

Some might say that all those teenagers "wasting time" on Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 are actually the warfighters of tomorrow, training themselves at zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer. In fact, when offered the choice between the traditional airplane controls and gamepad controls, many younger soldiers pick the thumbsticks that are familiar to them. "There is an absolute age difference," says Bigham. "We call it the ‘jihad of game controllers.' You get kids that are in their low 20s that are gamers, and they go right to the game paddle. And they don't know why us old timers like using the F-16 hands-on, throttle-and-stick controllers."

There is, of course, a real concern that appropriating the game interface into the military space will also bring with it an emotional and moral disassociation from the act of fighting wars, and experts say that the answer may be to experiment with even more immersive technologies that allow soldiers to feel the full impact of the battlespace. And it may well be that game system developers will lead the way to such systems. Already, Bigham says that Raytheon has been experimenting with Wii controllers to explore the possibilities for training simulators and other applications that require physical movement. Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.

The Religion of Environmentalism

2008-05-30T11:03:00.001-04:00

Freeman Dyson:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

Goldberg: Why I'm a Little Bit Libertarian

2008-03-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

Jonah Goldberg:

People ask me why I've become more libertarian because of writing this book. The simple answer is that the one thing libertarians grasp better than conservatives or liberals is the danger of the category error when it comes to the role of government. While there are certainly plenty of radical individualists swelling the ranks of libertarianism, libertarianism is not in fact an ideology of radical individualism. Or at least it need not be. The fundamental insight of libertarianism is that the government is the government. It cannot be your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience. It is the government. A big bureaucracy charged with certain responsibilities, some of which it is qualified to carry out, many of which it is not.

Now, I would invest more cultural authority in the government than a typical libertarian would (see Jim Manzi's post here for clues as to why). And generally speaking, conservatives, because of their patriotism and faith in a culturally coherent and sovereign nation, are prone to over-romanticizing the government. But libertarians are simply immune to this temptation. This immunity sometimes blinds them to the poetry — for want of a better word — inherent to politics, but it also blinds them to the totalitarian temptations hardwired into human nature. That's not a bad trade-off.

U.S. Not a "Christian Republic"

2008-01-16T09:18:00.000-05:00

Richard Reeb:

IS THE U.S. FOUNDED ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES?

Thanks for forwarding that item on this question. I agree with its sentiments, and liked its common sense approach. I certainly agree that our country has departed from our founding principles. I do not agree, however, that the foundation of our regime is "The Gospel of Jesus Christ." I believe that our founding principles are rooted in and directly derived from the natural law, not the Gospel as such except indirectly. This distinction is important because the natural law foundation allows non-Christians to be citizens of the Republic and to hold elective or appointed offices in good conscience. Ours is not a sectarian regime. The Constitution establishes no religious test either for office or for citizenship. Our regime was not founded to be a new Christendom. It forbids the establishment of religion while protecting its free exercise.
This does not mean that our Founders intended to found a secular regime, as that term is understood today. They did not mean to kick God out of the public square. They believed that self-government in the political sense is dependent on government of himself by each citizen. And they believed that individual self-government requires virtue and morality in each citizen, both of which are impossible for most humans without religion. The regime they intended was not hostile to religion, but dependent upon it if it were to long endure. Also, the Founders believed that for the most part there is no contradiction between Christianity and the natural law with respect to morality.
Did you know that the Declaration of Independence explicitly recognizes God in four places, and in four roles?
1. God as Law-Giver: "The laws of nature and nature's God" justify this act of separation (i.e. revolution) and distinguish it from mere rebellion.
2. God as Creator: "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...." (God created us and made us naturally equal [only] in that respect.)
3. God as Supreme Judge: "Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions...." (You can judge the rectitude of our action because the facts of our situation and the principles of natural law are accessible to reason. But only God can know our real intentions, so judge them and us--as indeed He will.)
4. God as Providence: "[F]or the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour." (You can also believe that our intentions are right and honorable because we stake all on this endeavor, even our sacred honor. You should support us because our just cause will be vindicated by Divine Providence, which governs all and protects men of good will.)
The theology of the Declaration is a natural theology grounded in both the laws of nature and the laws of nature's God. [The latter "laws" could be a reference to Revelation and the laws knowable only by Faith ( e.g., in "The Gospel of Jesus Christ"). But I doubt it. More probably it is a reference to the fact that the natural law is not morally obligatory if not rooted in Divine command (which is law to his creatures), or in what St. Thomas [Aquinas] called "the eternal law."] I believe that the Declaration's principles and argument refute the claims of the Secularists who would kick God out of our politics, laws, and customs. Nor do they support the claims of those Christians who proclaim that our regime is founded on the Gospel or its Christian principles. Compatibility is one thing; identity is another.
Our regime does not recognize a triune God whose essence is love. Our regime is ordered to freedom and justice, not to the advent of the Kingdom of God. Nor does our regime command either love of God or love of neighbor as does the Gospel. Finally, Christ founded a Church, not a polity. Salvation is to be found only in Christ and through Christ. It is not to be found in politics, or through politics, or through the founding or reconstitution of the political and social order. That belief is idolatry.
(I realize that the author of the item you sent did not preach that idolatry , and was not endorsing those Christians who have reduced Christianity to "The Social Gospel.")

Obama Winning Duel of Alinsky Disciples

2008-01-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

Kyle-Anne Shiver:

Obama answered a help-wanted ad for a position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumnet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to "rub raw the sores of discontent," in Alinsky's words.

One of Obama's early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who had this to say to an interviewer of The New Republic, about Obama:
"He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."
The agitator's job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the "realization" that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent "self-interest" in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

In these methods, euphemistically labeled "community organizing," Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere.

Is it any wonder, then, that Obama's Alinsky Jujitsu is making mincemeat of the woman who merely interviewed Alinsky, wrote about him, and spent the next 30 years in corporate law and in the lap of taxpayer-funded luxury in government mansions?

Public Employees and Democrats

2007-11-16T08:40:00.000-05:00

Michale Barone:

Here is my Creators Syndicate column for the week on the public employee unions and their enormous influence in the Democratic Party. I decided to write it because I think this influence is not widely understood and is certainly not much commented on. But the public employee unions exert enormous upward pressure on state and local government spending and enormous downward pressure on the accountability of public employees. Over time this will tend to increase the share of the economy devoted to state and local government spending, with significant macroeconomic effects. Nearly half of American union members are public employees—a vivid contrast with mid-century America, when only a small percentage, perhaps on the order of 10 percent (I haven't looked it up lately), of union members were public employees. And of course public employee unions are financed by the taxpayer: Their income comes from members' dues, which come from their salaries, which come from the public purse.

False Dichotomy in the Income Inequality Debate

2007-11-16T08:34:00.000-05:00

Josh Hendrickson:

...the most frequent solution to income inequality, and the one advocated by [Paul] Krugman in nearly every interview about his book, is higher taxes on those at the top of the income scale. While this may give the appearance of lessening inequality, in actuality it does very little. Essentially, it is equivalent to twisting the ankle of the fastest runner in the world in an attempt to make other runners faster. In no way does this make other runners faster.

...income inequality is a static measure of well-being. Looking at an individual's or group's share of income at a given point in time tells us very little. In fact, even looking at the trends in income inequality is futile. The fact that individual's rarely remain in the same income group throughout their lives suggests that looking that a group defined as "poor" or "middle class" or "rich" is irrelevant...income inequality is a poor measure of prosperity. In reality, economic growth and innovation will do more to help the poor and the middle class than any conceivable government policy.

Don't Oversimplify the "Cost" of War

2007-11-15T10:37:00.000-05:00

James Pethokoukis:

The Democratic study on the "real costs" of the wars in Iraq ($1.3 trillion) and Afghanistan ($300 billion) from 2002 through 2008 will almost assuredly lead to a common perceptual pitfall. An explanation: Let's assume that the numbers on Iraq are more or less accurate. And let's stipulate for a moment that when you take into account "hidden costs" such as interest payments on new debt to pay for the war, the expense of long-term healthcare for our injured warriors, and the impact of higher oil prices, the total cost of Iraq is indeed twice what the White House has requested from Congress.
Should we then assume that by not waging the war, Uncle Sam would be a trillion dollars to the better? That would be a questionable assumption, a product of a sort of "static analysis" that assumes if you change one critical factor, all the rest stay pretty much the same.

But if we didn't go to war, then we probably would have kept up the containment policy.

... a containment policy would cost anywhere from $350 billion to $700 billon. Now when you further factor in that 1) a containment policy might also have led to a higher risk premium in the oil markets if Iraq was seen to be gaining in military power despite our efforts to box it in, and 2) money not borrowed and spent on Iraq might well have been spent on something else given the White House's free-spending ways...

On Anti-Americanism

2007-10-29T09:24:00.000-04:00

Nathan Shachar:

Anti-Americanism is in its psychology more like a religion than an ideology. By this I mean that it has more to do with emotional needs than with objective reasoning. Those needs it satisfies, in particular in Lutheran cultures with a surviving doctrine of hell in its cultural baggage, are for a superior evil principle; an all-round explanation of everything, from the highest to the lowest. There are scarcely any boundaries any longer to what believers are prepared to put down to the USA’s account: from large and small events in global politics to global climate, the drugs trade and African civil wars, world trade, terrorism, the prices of raw materials, interest rates and the inherent contradictions of the Middle East.

Paul Hollander:

There is at last the historical fact that unlike most countries the United States has been founded on ideals and aspirations which are difficult to realise. Thus both abroad and at home it is judged not only by its actual policies and characteristics, failures and accomplishments, but against the background of the high expectations it has generated. In the light of these expectations its missteps and flaws are magnified and evoke far greater hostility and anger than those of other social systems of more modest aspirations. Given the widespread ambivalence about modernity, the universality of the scapegoating impulse as well as the actual mistakes of US foreign policy and the widely publicised flaws of American society, anti-Americanism will be with us in the foreseeable future.

2007-10-11T12:02:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Rauch reviews Brian C. Anderson's Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents:

Like his intellectual mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, and unlike so many of today’s red-meat, red-state right-wingers, Anderson is no triumphalist tub-thumper for capitalism or democracy. Both, he recognizes, are far better than the alternatives; but both, unchecked, can set in motion cultural forces — anomie, dependency, ruthless egalitarianism — that corrode soul and society alike. Like Jouvenel, Anderson holds with a worldly-wise anti-utopianism whose lineage goes back to the very origins of conservative thought. If more of today’s conservatives had heeded its cautions, they might not have been so surprised to see Iraq’s unstructured liberation turn sour.

Karl Popper once wrote, “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” For Anderson, conservatism’s stewardship of that truth is the source of both the movement’s indispensable strength and its intrinsic weakness. Conservatism can keep us out of trouble by warning against the fanciful idealisms of the left (communism), the right (fascism) and the ultrareligious (bin Ladenism), but it cannot scratch humanity’s perpetual itch for a Promised Land free of hunger, pain, conflict and grubby politics. “There is no ultimate solution in politics, only temporary ‘settlements,’ ” Anderson writes, affirming Jouvenel, who affirmed Aristotle (“Man is by nature a political animal”). To read Anderson at his luminous best is to be reminded of conservatism at its wisest — not least in its understanding of its own limitations.

Barone's Theory of History

2007-09-07T09:34:00.000-04:00

Michael Barone:

The natural state of America, in my theory, is decentralized toleration: We stand together because we can live apart. We are, most of the time, the nation described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of various ethnic, religious, and racial strands who believe fervently that we can live and triumph together if we allow one another to observe our local mores. We can embody David Hackett Fischer's "four British folkways" and at the same time be a united people. There's a tension in that, which threatens to come apart. In the midcentury America of the 1850s, the threat was that we would come apart: We had an explosive political conflagration over the issue of slavery in the territories and an explosive ethnic conflagration in the decade that had the largest immigrant influx, in percentage of pre-existing population, of any decade in our history. Citations: Kenneth Stampp's America in 1857; the opening chapters in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. And in fact, we produced a civil war.
We had the opposite situation in the midcentury America of the 1950s. After the shared experiences of the Depression and World War II, with universal institutions like the comprehensive high school, the military draft, and the big factory workforces represented by giant industrial unions, we were a culturally more uniform country than we have been before or since. We were a nation of conformism, of the regular guy, of the average guy who gets along with his peers. Citations: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; William H. Whyte's The Organization Man. It was a society, to take one example, far more hostile to homosexuality: The midcentury society of the 1850s could evidently tolerate Ishmael and Queequeeg sleeping together in Moby Dick and the poems of Walt Whitman, while the midcentury society of the 1950s cast its eyes away from the obvious gayness of the early Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Roy Cohn.

The Civil War, the imposition of New England Yankee mores in the way described by Morton Keller, and the creation of national business and professional organizations described by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order 1877-1910 reversed the extreme decentralization of the 1850s. The cultural rebellions, to the left and the right, described recently in neat form by Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance reversed the extreme centralization of the 1950s.

For those of us who grew up in the backwash of the 1950s, this decentralization seemed like an abandonment of American tradition. In the long line of history, I think it is more like a reversion to norm. The seeming inconsistency of currently prevailing attitudes on marriage and divorce, gambling and drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking, is part of the continuing turmoil of a decentralized society. The results don't cohere, but perhaps that is to be expected in a society like ours.

President Compares Iraq to Vietnam

2007-08-23T11:36:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg gets to the nut of why the interpretation of the President's comparison differs between right and left (and some right-leaning historians):

I was away from the news all day yesterday. But one narrow political point seems worth making about all of the hullabaloo of Bush's Vietnam comparison (I haven't read/heard the speech yet and forgive me if ten others have already made it). The mainstream media and a lot of liberal-leaning analysts seem to think it's politically foolish or reckless for Bush to compare Vietnam to Iraq because they have one very specific narrative in mind when it comes to that war: America shouldn't have gotten in, couldn't have won, and then lost. What they have long failed to grasp is that's not the moral of the story in the hearts of millions of Americans who believe that we could have won if wanted to and it was a disaster for American prestige and honor that we lost (whether we should have gone in is a murkier question for many, I think). This is a point the Democrats fail to grasp: being on the side of surrender in a war is popular enough during the war, but if you succeed lots of Americans will later get buyer's remorse and feel like it was a mistake and the next generation will see things very differently than their anti-war activist parents. Karl Rove made this point in his exit-interview with Gigot, I think, and he's right. Pulling out of Vietnam was an enormous short term victory for the Democrats and a long term curse.

List of Plagiarists

2007-08-17T11:41:00.000-04:00

Randall Hoven:

Scott Beauchamp was the last straw. I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media. I couldn't find one already made, although Wikipedia came close, so I started my own. I apologize if there is a good list already out there, but I looked and could not find.

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier. Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV. Some are more serious.

Politics of Envy

2007-08-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg:

John Edwards leads an all-star cast of liberal politicians and intellectuals (Edwards is decidedly not the latter) who worship at the altar of Invidia, praying that she will exact penance from the undeserving half of our “two Americas.”

Like the “scientific socialism” that concealed envy behind a slide rule, today’s liberals invoke social science as justification for their covetousness. In one famous study, a majority of people said they would
rather make $50,000 if others earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 if others were making $200,000.

Such studies are deeply flawed. For starters, as Arthur Brooks notes in the current edition of City Journal, they don’t address the question of whether people would be happier in a world of total equality. Rather,
they ask whether people would be happier in a world of inequality so long as they could be richer than everybody else.

Kennedy Assassination: Ideological Turning Point of Democratic Party

2007-08-02T16:23:00.001-04:00

Rich Lowry:

In his eye-opening new book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution," Jim Piereson argues The Fall was the assassination of President Kennedy. It represented more than the tragic death of a young president, but the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America's sins. Echoes of the assassination -- and the meaning attributed to it by JFK's admirers -- can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.
The real John F. Kennedy wasn't the paladin of liberal purity of myth. He was friends with Joseph McCarthy. In his 1952 campaign for Senate and his 1960 presidential campaign, he got to the right of his Republican opponents on key issues. "Kennedy did not want anyone to tag him as a liberal, which he regarded as the kiss of death in electoral politics," Piereson writes. As president, he was vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.
His kind of liberalism -- "tough and realistic," as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman -- was carried away in the riptide of his death. In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."
Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

Capitalism: It's the U.S. Game

2007-06-25T16:26:00.001-04:00

Azar Gat:

For all the criticism leveled against it, the United States -- and its alliance with Europe -- stands as the single most important hope for the future of liberal democracy. Despite its problems and weaknesses, the United States still commands a global position of strength and is likely to retain it even as the authoritarian capitalist powers grow. Not only are its GDP and productivity growth rate the highest in the developed world, but as an immigrant country with about one-fourth the population density of both the European Union and China and one-tenth of that of Japan and India, the United States still has considerable potential to grow -- both economically and in terms of population -- whereas those others are all experiencing aging and, ultimately, shrinking populations. China's economic growth rate is among the highest in the world, and given the country's huge population and still low levels of development, such growth harbors the most radical potential for change in global power relations. But even if China's superior growth rate persists and its GDP surpasses that of the United States by the 2020s, as is often forecast, China will still have just over one-third of the United States' wealth per capita and, hence, considerably less economic and military power. Closing that far more challenging gap with the developed world would take several more decades. Furthermore, GDP alone is known to be a poor measure of a country's power, and evoking it to celebrate China's ascendency is highly misleading. As it was during the twentieth century, the U.S. factor remains the greatest guarantee that liberal democracy will not be thrown on the defensive and relegated to a vulnerable position on the periphery of the international system.

Dads Really Are Important

2007-06-15T09:13:00.000-04:00

Sue Shellenbarger:

Fathers can have a distinct impact on children beyond that of mothers, and in many cases without regard to the fact that they often spend less time with their kids, researchers say. Specifically, dads' early play and the way they talk to their toddlers are emerging as special "father functions" that have a particular and lasting effect.
The findings aren't just about a parent's gender per se. Mothers and fathers stimulate children through the same psychological processes, researchers say. But mothers can only do so much; fathers have an additional impact, over and above that of mothers. Also, men have a tendency to behave differently with children. After defining good parenting for decades as what warm, nurturing mothers typically do, researchers now are also beginning to see how behaviors characteristic of fathers can shape children too.

Fathers tend to engage kids in more rough-and-tumble play, for example. Researchers say this can have a powerful positive impact on children, fostering curiosity and teaching them to regulate emotion and enjoy surprises....A 2004 study...found a link between fathers' warm, stimulating play with their 2-year-olds and better language and cognitive skills in the children a year later, independent of mothers' behavior. The effect endures into adolescence. Dads who play with toddlers in stimulating and encouraging ways tend to have children with healthier relationships at age 16, surpassing mothers' effect, says a 2002 study in the journal Social Development.
...
Fathers also tend to shape language development. Fathers typically don't "talk down to their children as much as mothers," using larger words, says Kyle Pruett, an author and clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University.
A study last year at the University of North Carolina found a link between fathers who used varied vocabulary with their 2-year-olds, and more advanced speech at age 3, even though the fathers spoke less often to the children. Mothers' vocabulary didn't have a significant impact, perhaps because there weren't enough differences in the high verbal skills of mothers in this middle-class sample, researchers found. It was talkative dads who gave the kids an edge.
Dads also tend to handle misbehavior differently, stressing real-world consequences. Where moms might say, "If you misbehave you're in trouble with me," dads more typically say, "Knock it off...nobody will like you, you'll never get a job" if you behave that way, Dr. Pruett says. Such fathering may reduce teen delinquency. In a 2006 study led by Jacinta Bronte-Tinkew of Child Trends in Washington, D.C., close, supportive fathering was linked to less teen risk-taking and delinquency.

Sayet: Liberals are Idealistic Cynics

2007-06-04T15:25:00.000-04:00

Evan Sayet, comedian and Hollywood Conservative:

What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with--none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government--have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they're convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found--can only be found--in the attempt to be right.

If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight. If we didn't fight, of course we wouldn't go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It's a utopian vision, and all that's required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency--all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.

...

What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn't right and to prove that wrong isn't wrong. You see this in John Lennon's song "Imagine": "Imagine there's no countries." Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there's nothing left to kill or die for.

Just what is Sandy Berger Hiding?

2007-06-04T10:24:00.000-04:00

Ronald A. Cass:

Berger had access to Archives documents that could be critical to understanding what information the Clinton Administration had, what options it considered, and what decisions it took on these sensitive subjects. In addition to primary documents, Berger had access to copies, and the only plausible reason for taking five copies of a single memo is that some had original notes on them from key officials, maybe from Berger or President Clinton.

For Berger to risk jail and disgrace, to then give up the right to practice his profession merely in order to avoid having to answer questions, he must be hiding something important. And if it is that important to him, it is also important to us.

The most likely explanation is that the material Berger destroyed points to a terrible mistake by Berger himself, by President Clinton, or by both. In dealing with al-Qaeda, did they overlook a critical piece of information or miss a chance to stop 9/11? Did the Administration's failure to take a more aggressive posture encourage al-Qaeda's later attacks?

When Fox News' Chris Wallace raised the possibility that Clinton's Administration might have done something more to prevent 9/11, Bill Clinton went into an inexplicable rage on national television. Wallace touched a nerve. So did the DC Bar.

Knowing what information Berger destroyed also might alter views of the current Bush Administration. Was the early support from both Bill and Hillary Clinton for going to war against Saddam based on something we don't know yet that was available to insiders in the Clinton Administration? Was it something that could come back to haunt Hillary and ruin her chances of winning Bill's third term?

Will: Countering Modern Liberalism

2007-05-31T10:21:00.000-04:00

George Will:

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction -- public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes -- a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living -- that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

This reasoning is congruent with conservatism's argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism's blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.

Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and the Welfare State

2007-05-21T08:49:00.000-04:00

George Will:

Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about "the cultural contradictions of capitalism" to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism's moral prerequisites.

The cultural contradictions of welfare states are comparable. Such states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits and individuals' incomes from which comes tax revenue needed to fund entitlements.

But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security and enlarged leisure.

The low pain threshold causes a ruinous flinch from the rigors, insecurities, uncertainties and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The flinch takes the form of protectionism, regulations and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.

So welfare states are, paradoxically, both enervating and energizing -- and infantilizing. They are enervating because they foster dependency; they are energizing because they aggravate an aggressive (think of burning Peugeots) sense of entitlement; they are infantilizing because it is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end, and people who desire welfare states increasingly desire relief from the rigors necessary to finance them.

Mansfield on Reforming PoliSci

2007-05-16T16:54:00.000-04:00

Harvey Mansfield:

Human greatness is the height of human importance, where the best that humans can do is tested, and it is the work of great individuals. The great Tocqueville—and I refuse to give a lecture on politics without mentioning his name—alluded to himself and his favorite readers as “the true friends of liberty and human greatness.” Somehow liberty and human greatness go together, a hint that nature cares only for the human species and leaves its greatness to be revealed by free human action, by our assertiveness prompted by thumos. To be great one must become great, requiring an effort of ambition. Not everyone has that ambition; most of us are content with modest careers in safe niches, like tenured professors. But we all feel ambition in our small ways, and, moreover, we know something of great ambition when admiring it. Now it may be hard to believe, but I must tell you that the political science of our day almost entirely ignores ambition. It is, for example, anxious over the problem of how to recover our spirit of civil engagement, but it looks mostly at what moves most people to vote, which it calls by the vague term “participation.” The trouble is that ambition smacks of greatness; it is not average enough to be the object of a science that knows nothing of individuality, hence nothing of greatness. Even the word “great” is unscientific because it is pretentious. But we human beings are animals with pretensions.

My profession needs to open its eyes and admit to its curriculum the help of literature and history. It should be unafraid to risk considering what is ignored by science and may lack the approval of science. The humanities too, whose professors often suffer from a faint heart, need to recover their faith in what is individual and their courage to defend it. Thumos is not merely theoretical. To learn of it will improve your life as well as your thinking. It is up to you to improve your life by behaving as if it were important, but let me provide a summary of the things that you will know better after reflecting on the nature of thumos: the contrast between anger and gain; the insistence on victory; the function of protectiveness; the stubbornness of partisanship; the role of assertiveness; the ever-presence of one’s own; the task of religion; the result of individuality; the ambition of greatness. Altogether thumos is one basis for a human science aware of the body but not bound to it, a science with soul and taught by poetry well interpreted.

South Under Siege--Beware of Sprawl

2007-05-04T14:08:00.000-04:00

From the NY Times:

I join Mayor Tom Stevens for coffee in Cup a Joe, his “morning office.” The Wooden Nickel bar is his afternoon office. Everybody seems to like Tom, a longtime resident who ran for office because he “had a sense that this town was on the verge,” and he wanted Hillsborough to “be successful in a way that is good for human beings.”
He touts Hillsborough’s “authenticity,” deriving from its small-town character and its strong heritage — from Occaneechi Native American roots to its Revolutionary and Civil War history, to the jazz singers, mill workers and farmers of the last century. “We’re in good shape, with a 40 percent business base and 3.3 percent unemployment rate,” and he touts our vitality, with a newly vibrant street life epitomized by the monthly “Last Friday” festival featuring barbecue, bluegrass and blues.
But the mayor wonders how to “create a sense of belongingness for everybody,” especially everybody in the big new suburbs outside town. Bulldozers are rumbling in every direction. “We are under huge development pressure,” says the mayor. “Now we have to choose our future, and we have to do it right.”

Chaput on Bernanos and Reclaiming History

2007-04-26T14:01:00.000-04:00

Charles Chaput at First Things refers to The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos:

As Bernanos explains it, big ideological systems “mechanize” history with high-sounding language like progress and dialectics. But in doing so, they wipe out the importance of both the past—which they describe as primitive, unenlightened, or counterrevolutionary—and the present, which is not yet the paradise of tomorrow. The future is where salvation is to be found for every ideology that tries to eliminate God, whether it’s explicitly atheistic or pays lip service to religious values. Of course, this future never arrives, because progress never stops and the dialectic never ends.

Christianity and Judaism see life very differently. For both of them, history is a place of human decision. At every moment of our lives, we’re asked to choose for good or for evil. Therefore, time has weight. It has meaning. The present is vitally important as the instant that will never come again; the moment where we are not determined by outside forces but self-determined by our free will. Our past actions make us who we are today. But each “today” also offers us another chance to change our developing history. The future is the fruit of our past and present choices, but it’s always unknown, because each successive moment presents us with a new possibility.

Further, "Time and freedom are the raw material of life because time is the realm of human choice." And Chaput--referring to Bernanos' thoughts on the atomic bomb--looks at technology's role:

The tidal wave of our toys, from iPods to the Internet, is equally effective in getting us to ignore history and ignore our own emptiness. The struggle for real human freedom depends upon the struggle for human history. Unlike the ideologies that deny the importance of the past and the present and focus on the illusions of a perfect future, Christianity sees the most important moments of the human story to be the past event of the Incarnation and the present moment of my individual opportunity to love.

The Christian faith is grounded in what God has done. Our love is what we choose to do now, and our hope is founded in God’s past acts of love and our present ones. Without history, there is no Christianity. So the fundamental question, for Bernanos, is “whether history is the story of mankind or merely of technology.” Modern man must be convinced again that he is free, that he can really choose in this moment of time between very different paths to very different futures. In the act of choosing, we regain history as our own.

Conservative Political Organization for the 21st Century

2007-04-24T21:12:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg discounts the theory that liberals have mastered "Web 2.0" (or even what the hell it is, for that matter) and posts a comment from an emailer that is worthy of deeper consideration:

The vast right wing conspiracy at some point seems to have decided that we'll command, if not dominate, the following:

- Think tanks
- Talk radio
- Blogs

This strategy seems to depend on persuading opinion leaders of the merits of our case, preferably using 10,000+ words to do so. The opinion leaders then hold court at family barbecues, dazzling friends and family with facts and logic and slowly converting them to our side.

That's a perfectly legitimate approach, but it has three problems that make it less than sufficient as a marketing strategy: (1) political junkies aren't necessarily opinion leaders; (2) the arguments are usually too complex to be easily distilled into something that could lead to opinion leadership; and, (3) it assumes that people's views are shaped by facts and logic, when things like the aforementioned group identity are at least as important among many people.

In other words, we need counterparts to MoveOn and its ilk that can succinctly and persuasively communicate meaningful information to largely disinterested voters, and do so using the tools and tones appropriate for our target audiences. Some of its vehicles are Web-related, but most are still traditional: TV, billboards, posters, etc.

And I firmly believe our positions can be distilled into some essential, topic-specific messages, having done this sort of commercial/political undertaking before. But that, too, is another discussion.

Noonan on Cultural Culpability After VaTech Shooting

2007-04-20T10:48:00.001-04:00

Peggy Noonan:

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Sheng-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

Lowry: Imus Latest was Nothing New

2007-04-13T09:00:00.001-04:00

Rich Lowry

The Imus saga is another sign of how we’ve degraded the importance of politeness and decorum, and how we try to make up for the loss with political correctness. Imus’ show was always boorish, but that was OK until he offended the wrong people at the wrong time with the wrong term. We shouldn’t want our public conversation to be limited to the dulcet tones of public radio — some shouting and barbs are healthy — but it should have a grounding in civility. On that score, Imus struck out long ago.

Goodhart: Progressive Dilemma

2007-04-11T14:01:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg, building on some earlier thoughts, calls attention to this by David Goodhart (2004):

It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the "progressive dilemma". Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: "The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn't do?' This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."

Goldberg: Culture Counts in Society

2007-04-10T11:15:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg:

What I find interesting about the liberal defense of European welfare states (They really work! No Really!) is how they leave culture out of the equation almost entirely. Conservatives, particularly free market types of the Kempian variety, have a similar myopia...Maybe, just maybe, France and Denmark can handle the systems they have because they have long traditions of sucking-up to the state and throne? Marty Lipset wrote stacks of books on how Canadians and Americans have different forms of government because the Royalist, throne-kissing, swine left America for Canada during the Revolutionary War and that's why they don't mind big government, switched to the metric system when ordered and will wait on line like good little subjects. Liberals constantly invoke Sweden as a governmental model without paying much heed to the fact that Sweden's government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes. And maybe, just maybe, the reason America doesn't have a sprawling European welfare state is that America isn't Europe. And, unlike some of our liberal friends, Americans don't want to be Europeans. Indeed, that's why so many Europeans move to America, so they can be Americans.
If government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one, then how come it's so damn hard bringing third world countries into the first world? There are plenty of African and Latin American welfare states that are indistinguishable on paper from their European cousins and yet we don't see Swedens and Denmarks all over the place. And of course no one can deny the salience of this point when it comes to poor benighted Iraq. What a happier place the world would be if fixing Iraq merely meant installing the most fashionable system from Europe these days, whatever that is.

Stossel: The Fear Industrial Complex

2007-04-05T19:35:00.000-04:00

John Stossel:

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn't want to hear that. "I say, 'You need a flu shot.' You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, 'Don't talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?'"
Here's another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for "20/20," I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don't know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.
Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn't help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

More here from Spiked.

Dalrymple On Virtue

2007-04-05T16:57:00.000-04:00

(Via Dale Light) Theodore Dalrymple:

The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.

....

One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that no one will have to be good.

Privileging Perpetual Adolescence

2007-04-05T08:25:00.000-04:00

This is an older post (by Michael at "twoblowhards") that I just stumbled on that addresses how the U.S. seems to privilege teen culture over all else.

Today, we take the importance of adolescence and teenagehood for granted. What's new these days, it seems to me, is the all-pervasiveness of teen taste and teen culture. The Boomers are probably responsible for this. The people who were once the very first generation of adolescents in all history to be a target-market -- who were made to feel special and catered-to culturally, whose narcissism ran rampant, and who learned to identify themselves as adolescent and proud of it -- are now running the country's cultural life. The culture is now being guided (to the extent it can be said to be guided at all) by people who know what it's like to be a ravished-by-commerce teen. They know what a teen wants, and how to sell to him or her.

After all, the adults who rode the teen-market wave in the '50s hadn't themselves had the experience of being a teenaged target-market. These culture entrepreneurs were pioneers, blundering their way in the dark. The people now in charge of popular culture, on the other hand, aren't pioneers. They're settlers, cultivators of an already-plowed field. Scary to think that today's teens will be even more expert at exploiting, er, serving the next generation of teens, isn't it?

These days -- what with our sentimentality about children, the PC educations we subject kids to, and the inescapability of media culture -- kids are stretching their adolescence out ever longer. Many move home to the parents' place after school; others enter into slumber-party-type living arrangments with other people their age. Few of them seem to know that there might be another phase of life (ie., "adulthood") to grow into. I find it a matter of cultural interest that many of these eternal-adolescents also have no interest in anything cultural that isn't based in the electronic media. Coincidence...?
Another consequence of these developments, it seems to me, is what's become of adulthood. Adulthood now looks sad. Having been crowded off the stage, adulthood mills about disconsolate and lost. Given that we now live in a country whose central values are adolescent, we've lost track of even the best adult values -- wit, grace, perspective, depth, suaveness, conviction, knowledge. In any sane civilization, these would all be regarded as virtues. In our country these days, such virtues often seem the marks of losers and failures. They seem kinda ... sad. Boring. Square. Adulthood? Get outta the way. Go sit quietly in the corner with your copy of Modern Maturity.

WashPost: Pelosi Pratfall

2007-04-05T08:02:00.000-04:00

Washington Post Editorial:

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that "Israel was ready to engage in peace talks" with Syria...Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message....As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

A New Vermont Republic?

2007-04-04T16:59:00.000-04:00

A couple Vermonters--one an original Green Mountain Boy-type and the other a "flatlander"--recently plead their case for the secession of Vermont:

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.

Actually, their call to the founders is interesting. At first, many didn't think that a Republic could be effective in anything other than a small state. Machiavelli and Montesquieu come to mind as two thinkers who held this view. Maybe they were right?

Meacham: Is God Real?

2007-04-04T10:42:00.000-04:00

John Meacham in NEWSWEEK:

"If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning," said Saint Augustine, "this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth but the meaning which he has wanted to give to it." Augustine's point allows Christians to take advantage of scientific and social advances without surrendering the ultimate authority of revelation. The Christian intellectual tradition, in other words, enables believers to negotiate just about anything short of the critical contention of the faith, that Jesus is Lord and salvation is on offer through belief in him. Still, there are many Christians who hew to a literal interpretation of Scripture, and say with sincerity and conviction that any one who does not accept Jesus as his personal savior will be cast into the fires of hell.
Ah, say the atheists, see, we told you exclusivist faiths like Christianity are forces for evil. So let's get rid of faith, replace it with rationality and science, and all shall be well, or at least vastly better. But the atheist solution has its own problems. In "Letter to a Christian Nation," Harris likens himself to an abolitionist and religion to slavery, but who is to say that a wholly scientific world would not itself soon produce dogma and strife over the findings, interpretations and applications of experiments and research? It is possible, even probable, that science would become a kind of religion, with creeds and convictions and arguments over the nature of reality. Labs would replace cathedrals, brain scans holy books. It would be different, but would it necessarily be better?

Herman: Losing Iraq at Home

2007-04-04T10:40:00.000-04:00

Arthur Herman in Commentary:

Unlike the French in Algeria, the United States is in Iraq not in order to retain a colony but to help create a free, open, and liberal society in a part of the world still mired in autocracy and fanaticism. Will we stay long enough to defeat the jihadists, to engage Iraqis in the process of modern nation-building, and to ease the transition to a free society? Or will we quit before the hard work is done, leaving this vital part of the world to become an al-Qaeda sanctuary, bathed in chaos, anarchy, and blood? As the polls suggest, a large constituency at home is waiting to learn the answer to this question, and so is a much larger constituency abroad. But time is running short.
“Act quickly,” Petraeus wrote in January 2006, “because every army of liberation has a half-life.” This is true not only in the field but at home. James Thurber once said that the saddest two words in the English language are “too late.” Terrible as it is to think that our surge may have come too late, it is much more terrible to think that feckless politicians, out of whatever calculation, may pull the plug before the new approach is fully tested.

Sinclair: The Political Right's Separation Anxiety

2007-04-04T10:38:00.000-04:00

Mathew Sinclair at TCS:

Thus conservatism can strengthen liberalism by defending its gains in times of plenty. In return, classical liberals can give direction to conservatism and offer it prescriptions in hard times. For this co-operation to work the right-wing movement needs to do two things. First, libertarians and conservatives need to recognise that their movements are quite compatible and be understanding when we frustrate each other. When libertarians cry "faster" or conservatives "slow down" we should understand that sometimes it is necessary that we not get what we want. Second, they need to get better at shifting the emphasis between the two movements as conditions change.

Hitchens among the Kurds

2007-03-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hitchens and his son spent Christmas among the Kurds.

Everybody knows how to snigger when you mention Jeffersonian democracy and Iraq in the same breath; try sniggering when you meet someone who is trying to express these ideas in an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas.
While I am confessing, I may as well make a clean breast of it. Thanks to the reluctant decision of the first President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, those fresh princes of "realism," the United States and Britain placed an aerial umbrella over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and detached it from the death grip of Saddam Hussein. Under the protective canopy of the no-fly zone—actually it was also called the "you-fly-you-die zone"—an embryonic free Iraq had a chance to grow. I was among those who thought and believed and argued that this example could, and should, be extended to the rest of the country; the cause became a consuming thing in my life. To describe the resulting shambles as a disappointment or a failure or even a defeat would be the weakest statement I could possibly make: it feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of betrayal from which there can be no awakening. Yet Kurdistan continues to demonstrate how things could have been different, and it isn't a place from which the West can simply walk away.

And most of that has to do with the Kurds themselves:

Within recent memory, the Kurdish population of Iraq was being subjected to genocidal cleansing. Given the chance to leave the failed state altogether, why would they not take it? Yet today, the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is a Kurd: a former guerrilla leader so genial and humane that he personally opposed the execution of Saddam Hussein. Of the very few successful or effective ministries in Baghdad, such as the Foreign Ministry, it is usually true that a Kurd, such as Hoshyar Zebari, is at the head of it. The much-respected deputy prime minister (and moving spirit of the American University in Sulaimaniya), Dr. Barham Salih, is a Kurd. He put it to me very movingly when I flew down to Baghdad to talk to him: "We are willing to fight and sacrifice for a democratic Iraq. And we were the ones to suffer the most from the opposite case. If Iraq fails, it will not be our fault."

Barone on Preacher Gore and Enviro-Religion

2007-03-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

Barone:

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth. But science tells us that the Earth and its climate have been constantly changing.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up. When temperatures dropped in the 1970s, there were warnings of an impending ice age. When they rose in the 1990s, there were predictions of disastrous global warming. This is just another example of the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the pampered and much-praised age cohort that believes the world revolves around them and that all past history has become irrelevant.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

Jonah Goldberg on Gore

2007-03-26T09:45:00.000-04:00

Read the whole thing, but I especially liked this pithy observation:

Isn’t it interesting how the same people who think “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” when it comes to the war think that dissent when it comes to global warming is evil and troglodytic?

Enlightenment Gone Mad

2007-03-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Philip Trower enlightens on the Enlightenment.

MercatorNet: Do you sense a danger of people accepting the ideas of leading Enlightenment figures as having quasi-Scriptural authority? Should students be taught a more critical and detached view of Enlightenment values, do you think?
Trower: Again my answer is a double Yes -- if by quasi-Scriptural authority you mean treating the leading figures as if they had been recipients of a divine revelation. Since they were not, and to be fair did not claim to be, it is of the highest importance that those ideas should be looked at critically, which is what I have tried to do in the first seven chapters of my recent book. Looking at them critically does not mean denying the elements of truth but freeing the elements of truth from distortions, exaggerations, or downright errors.

Let me give some examples. If there is no God, where do human rights come from? The State? But a State which gives them can withdraw them. How do we know what is right and wrong? By majority vote? Who would seriously maintain that? Through conscience? Yes, but what is conscience and how does it fit into a materialistic or crudely Darwinian picture of world history? Why do many people, even if only implicitly, believe in perpetual progress? There is no evidence for it. That history is going to come to a climax in a kingdom of justice, love and peace is simply a Judaeo-Christian idea removed from the other side of the Last Day into this.

Trower also explains:

However it would be a mistake to overlook the fact that these ideas have not come down to us with a single meaning about which everyone agrees. Collectively, they are more like a religion with different denominations. Right from the start, which we can place in the second half of the 17th century, we can see a difference between what I will call the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment and the French or Continental Enlightenment.

The former has always had a looser more pragmatic approach to ideas and situations, resembling an ethos or attitude of mind more than a creed. The chief emphasis has been on individual liberty and freedom of expression with room being made for the incorporation of Christian and other beliefs.

The French or Continental variety on the other hand, has invariably been highly dogmatic and anti-religious, with Christianity as its main target. What makes the situation particularly confusing is that since the end of the Napoleonic wars the adherents of both forms have usually referred to themselves as liberals.

Today, I would say, it is more accurate and meaningful to describe modern adherents of the French school as secularists, since they are increasingly bent on forcing other people to submit to their principles whether they agree with them or not -- a very illiberal standpoint -- and keep the name liberals for genuine adherents of the Anglo-Saxon form in so far as they survive. A notable feature of the English scene over the last ten years had been the decline of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and the growth of the French secularist form. Today, one can fairly, I believe, describe secularism and political correctness as "liberal fundamentalism".

Post-Modernism and The Bible

2007-03-17T16:33:00.000-04:00

James Arlandson:

Postmodernism is leveling multiple challenges at longstanding interpretations of the Bible and at the sacred text itself. There is nothing wrong with reinterpreting a text. But here are some questions that postmodern practitioners and theorists ask about the Bible. Are there such things as facts, specifically historical ones? Can we distinguish between the historical and the fictional? Are there any objective interpretations? How do we decide? Does that even matter? What would happen to the plain meaning of a passage if a psychoanalytical reading were applied? Would God the Father come out like a tyrannical father of a Freudian nightmare? Is God abusive?

Wilson, Plame and all that

2007-03-17T10:02:00.000-04:00

Valerie Plame finally testified before the house that she was "covert" and didn't initiate or push for sending her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger. Tom Maguire offers a broad corrective, Byron York reminds us what the Senate Intelligence Committee found, Andy McCarthy deals with "covert" and recalls that the MSM had argued she wasn't before reporting that she was:

Specifically, she was exposed by a Russian spy in the early 1990s. Thereafter, the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, "the documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."
As I wrote here nearly two years ago, this is not my claim. It is the contention made in a 2005 brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by the Times along with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch). The mainstream media made the contention in an attempt to quash subpoenas issued to journalists — the argument being that if Mrs. Wilson's cover had already been blown, there could have been no crime when an administration official (who we now know to be Richard Armitage, not Scooter Libby) leaked her identity to journalist Robert Novak, and thus there was no need to compel reporters to reveal their sources.
Amazing how, when its own interests are at stake, the media manages to be very forceful in reporting relevant facts. But now, when those facts are even more relevant because Mrs. Wilson and congressional Democrats are bloviating about ruined intelligence networks and threatened lives, the media won't mention them. How can it be possible that a leak in 2002 "jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents" associated with Mrs. Wilson's covert assignment when, by the media's own account to a federal court, those networks had to have been blown for years?

And, don't forget, Joe Wilson was the real creep in this whole mess.

American Idol Feeds "hunger for realistic evaluation"

2007-03-17T09:57:00.000-04:00

Christopher Ames:

We might think that Americans are eager to celebrate talented young people who can thumb their noses at the older generation and thus exorcise the lingering resentment so many harbor from being graded and evaluated in the classroom. But what American Idol reveals instead is a veritable hunger for realistic evaluation. Time and time again, contestants in the early episodes of this year's season whine obviously off key and then insist they are highly talented — in spite of the judges' protestations. Most of those kids have not learned how to sing, but they have mastered the self-esteem and "attitude" so valued in our culture. The persistent dynamic of these episodes is expertise putting down untalented braggadocio.

If your baby is gay, will you want to know?

2007-03-16T20:47:00.000-04:00

Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, new ethical and moral dilemmas will emerge:

Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy (assuming the stigma on homosexuality survives the scientific refutation of the Right's treasured belief that it's a "lifestyle choice"). Pro-choice activists won't be spared, either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?

Then there's the question of whether some gay parents will use genetic testing or hormonal treatments to intentionally produce gay offspring. It's hard to imagine the conservative culture warriors (who accused PBS of using a cartoon bunny to infect young minds with the gay agenda) sitting idly by as actual gays—even just a handful of them—use science to pass their sexuality on to the next generation. Will the surrogate mom replace the pervy Boy Scout leader as the anti-gay bugbear of choice?

Intellectual Opposition to the Military

2007-03-16T20:39:00.000-04:00

James Holmes updates Robert Nozick's decade-old essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" by asking if--and why--they oppose the military. Good question:

Do intellectuals' attitudes even matter, given their predilection for the abstract over the concrete and for ideas over action? Yes, says Nozick. While wordsmiths cannot dictate the outcome of national discourse, they do set the terms of debate.
"They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly on the explicit formulation and dissemination of information."
Nozick left his inquiry open-ended, commending it to the study of social scientists, and so will I. Some enterprising social scientist ought to examine these matters in a sustained, rigorous manner. If wordsmith intellectuals indeed frame debates on affairs of state-in particular war and peace-then their views and prejudices must be taken into account in public discourse. Our system of civil-military relations could depend on it.

Power and the Printed Page

2007-03-15T12:03:00.000-04:00

Edward Achorn explains why losing "print on paper" is bad for our rapidly digitizing society:

Printed papers offer something of incalculable value: context. It is easier to see how important something is by its placement on a page, something even a newspaper Web site cannot easily duplicate. Often, by means of turning a page, I stumble onto an important story about some topic I might never have clicked onto, or “called up” on a Web site’s search engine.
The elites will continue to read print, including history and fiction, because intelligence often translates to power and money. Books will survive, as will specialty periodicals. But, if our culture continues in its rapid flight from print to digitized information, many citizens will lose the ability to ponder seriously, to vote intelligently, or to understand the world around them.

Giulianni's Appeal to Conservatives

2007-03-15T11:58:00.000-04:00

Michael Brandon McClellan:

Giuliani's enduring image is more conservative than McCain's. At the risk of oversimplifying, it is perhaps fair to say that Giuliani's image is loudly conservative and quietly moderate, whereas McCain's image is loudly moderate and quietly conservative.

Michael Barone also examines how Rudy compares favorably to Hillary:

Rudy's electoral vote position against Hillary is much stronger than Bush's against Kerry. Rudy puts almost the whole East into play and is significantly stronger in several target states in the Midwest and West. Hillary puts some states into play in the South but with many fewer electoral votes than Rudy does elsewhere. Even if you assume that Hillary is stronger against Rudy today than she was in July, the pairing does place the Republicans in a stronger position than Bush was in '04.

Father Thomas D. Williams and the Catholic Ideology of Progress

2007-03-15T11:39:00.000-04:00

Fr. Thomas D. Williams:

The Enlightenment had taken the idea of progress as its leitmotiv, preaching a secular humanism that would usher in an age of reason, where religion would be replaced by science...the Enlightenment...also had a marked materialistic and anti-religious dimension as well. Man became his own savior, able to resolve his own problems, and no longer needful of a transcendent and personal God.

Nineteenth-century ideologies built on many of the aspects of the Enlightenment, and came to see progress as a necessary and inexorable phenomenon, an expression of Darwinian evolutionism...Add to the mix Hegel's philosophy of dialectical progress, whereby society necessarily progresses through conflict -- thesis, antithesis and synthesis -- and we had the perfect setup for the tragic totalitarian experiments of the 20th century...

....as Paul VI taught in "Populorum Progressio," the Christian idea of progress is not merely material or technological....If a society doesn't advance in goodness, in justice and in love, it doesn't truly advance....Christians do not see human progress as a necessary phenomenon....Moving forward in time doesn't guarantee that we are moving forward in virtue....because progress isn't automatic, all of us must take responsibility for the direction our society takes. We are not simply swept along by the winds of change; each of us also influences the direction our culture takes....As Christians we believe that each of us has a specific vocation and a mission to fulfill. In this context, progress means doing our part to bring about the Kingdom of Christ in human society.

Finally, the progress of the earthly city does not exhaust the human condition. No matter how much human society progresses, our temporal existence will come to an end. We are called to eternal life in Christ. True progress must take into account man's spiritual dimension and transcendent vocation as a child of God destined for heaven.

Kling: Human Behavior is More than Self-Interest

2007-03-15T11:06:00.000-04:00

Arnold Kling:

Economics should be subsumed under the general study of human behavior, not the other way around....I have no sympathy for the economic imperialists who insist that every action must be explained in terms of the rational, self-interested calculator. Instead, I would start with the presumption that every action can be explained in terms of habits, customs, and the like. Making rational economic decisions is just one of many habits. Rational, economic behavior is like a hat. Sometimes we wear the hat, and sometimes we do not.

I also have no sympathy for behavioral economics. All it does is take the rational, individualistic model and extend it to include common biases and mistakes. It generally ignores the larger context of behavioral influences, particularly the social ones...Finally, I should emphasize that I have no sympathy with those who view self-interested economic calculation as a bad habit. On the contrary, I believe it is a very good habit, particularly when it is combined with other habits and ethics for commercial behavior.

Ben Franklin Balanced Reason and Religion

2007-03-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

Jerry Weinberger writes that Franklin strove for an "artful balance" between reason and religion. But what did he believe?:

Franklin concluded that rationalistic science could never prove the believers wrong. He also concluded that the rationalists were unlikely to admit to this fact. They turned out to believe in their rationalism as fervently as the believers believed in their miracles, especially the miracle of conscience, or of the voice and spirit of God moving within. Moreover, if one were to push this fact in the rationalists’ faces, they could get just as angry as believers about challenges to their faith. Franklin, it turns out, was a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking.
The conventional and current take on Franklin—that he was a pragmatic moralist and serious Enlightenment Deist and eventually an American patriot—is flat wrong...Franklin was no Deist. He was no pragmatic moralist. And he wasn’t really “The First American.” Franklin was, rather, the first American Baconian. He was also a profound philosopher, deeply skeptical of religion (especially the metaphysical conceits of Deists) and of our everyday moral intuitions. He was also profoundly skeptical of the intellectual foundations of rationalism and the Enlightenment. And he was, to put his politics in a nutshell, a political constructivist and libertarian. Franklin was not as American as apple pie, but he was as American as the corndog.

The Symbiosis of History and Politics: Review of Constantin Fasolt's The Limits of History

2007-03-15T10:55:00.000-04:00

Susanne Rau:

The fact that historiography can be influenced by politics, evidence of which can be found in histories written during the nineteenth century and under totalitarian regimes, is not a foregone conclusion, but due to changes in academic culture this connection has slowly slipped into the practice of history. To understand the place of Fasolt's argument, one must consider the differences between two views of the way politics has influenced history. One view focuses upon a work's perspective, the value judgments it makes and sometimes even the content of historiography that comes across in contract works or historical eulogies. The second, the focus of this book, concerns the principles of historical thought. Here, human actions are no longer considered to be governed by divine providence, and the study or writing of history is thus considered a form of political activity.

VDH: Mexifornia 5 Years Later

2007-03-15T10:53:00.000-04:00

Victor Davis Hanson: "The flood of illegal immigrants into California has made things worse than I foresaw."

Gingrich Has Priorities over Running for Presidency

2007-03-15T10:48:00.000-04:00

Newt Gingrich:

[American Solutions] will spend the next seven months developing an entire new generation of solutions, making sure they are understandable to the American people and that they are supportable by the American people.
Then, on September 27, we will use the power of the Internet to start to make these solutions available to every candidate from both parties in every elected office in the country....Our hope is to reach out across the country and create such a wave of change on a nonpartisan basis that anybody of any background who wants to use science, who wants to use the power of productivity, who wants to revitalize American virtues that work, has the tools to do so and to help others realize their potential as well....The liberated energies of 300 million Americans are a dramatically more potent force for good then anyone's force for evil. And I can't think of a more important way to spend the next seven months than helping unleashing that potential. I hope you'll join our effort at where you can make a difference.

Kling: Why Be a Conservative Libertarian

2007-03-15T10:28:00.000-04:00

Arnold Kling at TCS:

The typical libertarian shorthand is that we are with the Democrats on social issues and with the Republicans on economic issues. In recent years, the Republicans betrayed us on economic issues. However, my sense is that many in the conservative movement are anxious to repent. On foreign policy, I think that we can gradually persuade more of them to come to their senses on the challenges of the Natural State.

Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be completely dug in to hard-left positions on economics. They lack any vision for foreign policy. I think we should stick with our marriage to conservatives, and try to make it work.

Lee Edwards on Conservative Fusionism

2007-03-15T10:16:00.000-04:00

From Heritage:

But fusionism requires more than a consensus as to goals: It needs a foe common to all conservatives. Militant communism served as a unifying threat from the late 1940s through the late 1980s...Leviathan's lengthening shadow across America did not suffice to bring conservatives together until Newt Gingrich and his merry band of congressional revolutionaries offered America a Contract...The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the jihad proclaimed by Islamic fundamentalists temporarily united the nation and the conservative movement...The impasse can be broken with a renewed fusionism based on limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, and a commitment to moral order and to virtue, both private and public. These are the core beliefs, bounded by the Constitution, on which American conservatism rests and by which its leaders have always sought to govern.

McClay: Is Conservatism Finished?

2007-03-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

Aaahhh...no:

The fissures and conflicts within conservatism are getting so much attention now because conservatism is still, intellectually speaking, where the principal action remains. So long as the Democratic party continues down the road it has been following, led by its aging left-wing lions and lionesses, funded and directed by the most extreme and irresponsible elements in its ranks, and finding clarity only in discrediting George W. Bush and regaining office, conservatives will always have plenty to unify around. For their own part, so long as conservatives are able to remember Ronald Reagan as a leader who not only embodied the distinctive characteristics of American conservatism but who finessed its antinomies and persevered against the contempt and condescension of his own era—including among some of his allies—they can yet regain their bearings and prevail.

Mansfield: "Democracy and Greatness"

2007-03-14T23:54:00.001-04:00

Harvey Mansfield:

The desire for distinction in a great man represents a threat to the established institutions of a democratic republic. Yet it is not likely that a democracy is going to express its gratitude to such a person for not overthrowing it--any more than a man will thank his guest for not raping his wife. Thus the great man in a democracy must show his modesty in noble condescension to his fellow citizens, as he must consider them. Lincoln did this, and so did George Washington, whose name Lincoln recommended to be revered "to the last."

Goldberg Explains: What is a Conservative

2007-03-14T23:50:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg answers: "Comfort with contradiction."

A New New Deal to Rebuild the Middle Class?

2007-03-14T23:45:00.000-04:00

Joel Kotkin and David Friedman propose a new New Deal to help the slowly shrinking (as they contend) middle-class:

Is there any way to restore the prospects of middle- and working-class Americans? A comprehensive program to rebuild the nation's highways and bridges, upgrade its ports, construct and expand its energy lifelines and enlarge its public transportation systems could generate hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs. Admittedly, this back-to-basics strategy is not glamorous. But it has helped narrow economic inequality in the past by producing more balanced economic growth.

MacDonald: Hispanic Family Values Argument is a Myth

2007-03-14T23:42:00.000-04:00

Heather MacDonald: Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking 'Hispanic family values' as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of them is the importance of having children early and often...The most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended family—facilitates unwed child rearing.

Heritage - Container Port Security

2007-03-14T23:40:00.000-04:00

Heritage Foundation issued a policy paper that includes various links to multiple studies on the current state of container port security.

Post-Post Modern = Pseudomodern

2007-03-14T23:33:00.000-04:00

Alan Kirby at Philosophy Now buries post-modernism and replaces it with pseudo-modernism. For instance:

pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity" and "the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless.

Here's the deal....

2007-03-14T23:29:00.000-04:00

Originally, OSB was my solo blog in which I posted about things in much the same way I do now over at Anchor Rising. The new OSB is going to be a web-based suppository--a live-blog--of my own topic-based research library. Simple as that.

The Lights are Flickering...

2007-03-14T17:02:00.000-04:00

More to come...I've decided--after 10 months--that the ol' girl has some life in her after all.

The Music's Over, Turn Out the Lights

2006-05-10T11:04:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been just over three years since I started The Ocean State Blogger and now it's time to say goodbye. I've simply expanded my personal "blogprint" too thin. Between my Rhode Island political musings at Anchor Rising and my history-related stuff at Spinning Clio, there just isn't much else that I care to blog about. Sure, I could keep posting other people's stuff with minimal commentary, but that's kind of pointless, really. So, it's time to pack it up. I'll keep the site up, but active posting is done. Thanks for the (occasional) comments and feedback and please come visit me at the aforementioned blogs. Bonjour!

Rhode Island's vanishing farms

2006-05-02T07:48:00.000-04:00

Mark Patinkin writes about one of the few farms left in Rhode Island:

It's early enough that Route 95 is still uncrowded. The drivers I pass seem mostly to be commuters, dressed for the office. It's that kind of state, but on this one morning, I'm looking for a different part of Rhode Island.

I continue south, leaving the city's sprawl behind. At last, I turn off Exit 2, and less than a mile into the countryside of Hopkinton, I see the sign for Brook Knoll Farm.

I had recently learned there are fewer dairy farms in Rhode Island than any other state. Thirty years ago, there were hundreds. Now, there are only 18. I decided to pick one of them.

I arrive a few minutes before 7 a.m., and inside the gray shingled barn, George Reynolds has already been working for an hour.

George Reynolds and his sister Dot run the farm, which pays for itself and nothing more. As George says, "The younger generation doesn't want to work these kind of hours."

"Unions' Advice Is Failing Teachers"

2006-04-28T11:24:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles Times:

Some of the nation's largest teachers unions have joined forces with investment companies to steer their members into retirement plans with high expenses that eat away at returns.

In what might seem an unlikely partnership, the unions endorse investment providers, even specific products, and the companies reciprocate with financial support. They sponsor union conferences, advertise in union publications or make direct payments to union treasuries.

The investment firms more than recoup their money through sales of annuities and other high-fee products to teachers for their 403(b) plans — personal retirement accounts similar to 401(k)s.

New York State United Teachers, for instance, receives $3 million a year from ING Group for encouraging its 525,000 members to invest in an annuity sold by the Dutch insurance giant.

The National Education Assn., the largest teachers union in the country with 2.7 million members, collected nearly $50 million in royalties in 2004 on the sale of annuities, life insurance and other financial products it endorses.

Teachers unions across the country — including those in Las Vegas and San Diego and statewide teacher associations in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Oregon — have struck their own endorsement deals.

Unions in Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle and Atlanta, among others, refer members to products approved by the NEA and typically receive a share of endorsement revenue in return.

Many teachers say they presume an endorsement means their union has used its clout to get the best price, as unions do on products from eyeglasses to automobiles. But when it comes to retirement accounts, union backing is often a sign that the product will cost more, not less.

Buyers of an NEA-endorsed annuity sold by Security Benefit Life Insurance Co. pay annual fees totaling at least 1.73% of their savings. That is about 10 times as much as they would pay in 403(b) plans available from Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price and other low-cost mutual fund providers.

The costliest option in the NEA-endorsed plan charges 4.85% a year. That means an investor would have to earn a return of nearly 5% just to break even.

Union leaders defend the endorsement deals and the prevalence of high-fee annuities. They say that teachers get valuable advice from brokers and financial advisors in return for the fees, and that the companies' contributions to union coffers help pay employee salaries and other union expenses.

Yet no one disputes that this money ultimately comes out of teachers' pockets.

Angry Atheists

2006-04-27T09:23:00.000-04:00

Rabbi Marc Gellman:

I think I need to understand atheists better. I bear them no ill will. I don't think they need to be religious to be good, kind and charitable people, and I have no desire to debate or convert them. I do think they are wrong about the biggest question, “Are we alone?” and I will admit to occasionally viewing atheists with the kind of patient sympathy often shown to me by Christians who can't quite understand why the Good News of Jesus' death and resurrection has not reached me or my people. However, there is something I am missing about atheists: what I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry.

So we disagree about God. I'm sometimes at odds with Yankee fans, people who like rap music and people who don't like animals, but I try to be civil. I don't know many religious folk who wake up thinking of new ways to aggravate atheists, but many people who do not believe in God seem to find the religion of their neighbors terribly offensive or oppressive, particularly if the folks next door are evangelical Christians. I just don't get it.

Marching with the Immigrants

2006-04-14T08:38:00.000-04:00

Peggy Noonan marched with the immigrants who rallied in New York City earlier this week. She had fun and liked the people. But it still didn't change her opinion:

Does my feeling for immigrants, and my afternoon at the march, leave me supporting open borders, or illegal immigration? No. Why should it? To love immigrants is not to believe America has no right to decide who can come to America and become a citizen. America has always decided who comes here. That's why it all worked.

While the marchers seemed to be good people, and were very likable, the march itself, I think, violated the old immigrant politesse--the general understanding that you're not supposed to get here and immediately start making demands. It would never have occurred to my grandparents to demand respect. They thought they had to earn it. It would never have occurred to them to air mass grievances, assert rights, issue a list of legislative demands. Especially if they were here unlawfully.

I happen to think America in general has deep affection for immigrants, knows they are part of the dynamic, a part of our growth and our endless coming-into-being. But when your heart is soft, and America's is, your head must be hard.

We are a sovereign nation operating under the rule of law. That, in fact, is why many immigrants come here. They come from places where the law, such as it is, is corrupt, malleable, limiting. Does it make sense to subvert our own laws to facilitate the entrance of those in pursuit of government by law? Whatever our sentiments and sympathies as individuals, America has the right, and the responsibility, to protect the integrity of its borders, to make the laws by which immigrants are granted entrance, and to enforce those laws.

I think open-borders proponents are, simply, wrong. I think those who call good people like members of the voluntary border patrols "yahoos" are snobs. I think those whose primary concern is preserving the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party, or not losing the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party, are being cynical, selfish, and stupid, too. It's not all about who gets what vote, it's about continuing a system of laws that has allowed America to become, among many other things, a place immigrants want to come to. And it's about admitting immigrants in a coherent, orderly, legal manner, with an eye first to what America needs. That's how you continue a good thing, which is what we've had. That's how you leave Americans who've been here for a while grateful for immigration, and immigrants, and loving them, and even wanting, sometimes, to kiss their hands.

Jobs

2006-04-12T16:21:00.001-04:00

Mark Levin:

The unemployment rate is 4.7%. The liberals tell us that's because Americans are having to do low-skilled jobs. Are these the same Americans who we're also told won't do low-skilled jobs?

Fundamentals of the Gay Marriage debate

2006-04-06T11:28:00.000-04:00

This illustrates the fundamental argument in the gay marriage debate:

Jenn Steinfeld, co-chair of Marriage Equality Rhode Island, told committee members that marriage is essential. She said there are 435 state laws that relate to marriage -- covering everything from transferring a fishing license upon death to being able to sue for wrongful death.

'Nothing else -- not wills and powers-of-attorney, not private contracts, not even civil unions -- measures up,' Steinfeld said. 'Marriage discrimination hurts families. It hurts those of us who ache to celebrate our commitment to our partners by legally entwining our lives.'

Steinfeld's partner, Lauren S. Nocera, talked about growing up in East Providence and dreaming of being married at the Crescent Park carousel.

But instead of conjuring up 'images of wedding cake smeared on Jenn's face with the Wurlitzer playing in the background' Nocera decided to tell the committee how it feels to testify before them.

'It feels degrading. It feels like begging,' Nocera said. 'It's a burden. It is exhausting. I am tired of it. I am tired of coming here year after year, full of compelling stories, politeness and patience.'

'After 10 years, it's time for the democratic process to move forward,' Nocera said. 'This is a bill that should be voted on its merits. Both sides of this issue deserve it.'

The Rev. Bernard A. Healey, lobbyist for the Diocese of Providence, said 'the Catholic vision' of marriage is simple.

'Marriage is a partnership of one man and one woman who are joined together for their own mutual good and for the procreation and education of children,' Healey said. 'The institution of marriage, as the union of one man and one woman, must be preserved, protected and promoted in private and public realms.'

'Often those who call same-sex unions marriage suggest that such laws are needed for the protection of social benefits,' Healey added. 'Such a view reduces marriage to a mere bundle of state benefits and loses sight of the deeper meaning of marriage.

I've said before that I think a lot of the debate is about semantics. Jonathan Turley at least partially agrees. Though looking at the gay marriage debate through the political lens, his solution is:

For state purposes, couples would simply sign a civil union agreement that confirms their legal obligations to each other and any progeny. Whether they are married in religious ceremonies would be left entirely to them and their faith. The government's interest and role would be confined to enforcing the civil contract, as it would any other civil agreement.

Consenting adults should be able to assume the obligations of a civil union regardless of how their neighbors view their morality. As in other areas, adults should be able to follow the dictates of their own faith so long as they do not endanger or harm others, particularly minors.

On the face of it, I can agree to the "Turley plan," but the problem remains: what or who defines that which can "endanger or harm others, particularly minors"? Tradition and biology have pretty much established that the ideal family is composed of Mom, Dad and kids. Obviously, we don't live in an ideal world, but we should still be reluctant to put civil union on equal footing with "traditional" marriage when it comes to raising kids (adoption, for example). My argument is just about gay adoption. It also encompasses those single women (or men) who seek to have kids on their own. Insofar as it is possible, I would prefer that we as a society prioritize the old fashioned family structure. However, I also recognize that there aren't enough of what I would define as an ideal family around to take care of all of the children out there.

In "The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage," Susan Shell wrote:

As for the having and raising of children--this, too, can be provided for and supported short of marriage. If two siblings need not "marry" in order to adopt a child together, neither need two friends, whether or not they are sexually intimate. Civil unions might be formed in ways that especially address the needs of such children. The cases of gay men who inseminate a willing surrogate mother, or lesbians who naturally conceive and wish to designate their partner as the child's other parent, can also be legally accommodated short of marriage, strictly understood, on the analogy of adoption by step-parents and/or other relatives. As in all cases of adoption (as opposed to natural parenthood, where the fitness of the parent is assumed until proven otherwise), the primary question is the welfare of the child, not the psychic needs and wants of its would-be parents. [Emphasis mine.-MAC]

There is a difference between regular marriage and civil unions. As Shell also explained:

Restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples gives reasonable recognition to the peculiar importance and solemnity of generation and a related complex of human experiences. It does not, in itself, constitute unjust discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The liberal case against gay marriage becomes even stronger if the category of civil union is expanded to permit gay couples and others to enjoy certain privileges from which they may in the past have been needlessly excluded. Unlike some more radical proposals, however, it would do so without doing needless violence to the peculiar character of marriage as it has heretofore been understood and practiced with good reason. That such privileges can be provided for outside of marriage is both a potential boon to gay couples and a sign that marriage in a strict sense is not in most cases what is essentially being sought.

Which Comes First: Singularity or The Rapture?

2006-04-05T08:10:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds asks: "So is the Singularity just a new religion? Or is religion just the pre-marketing department for the Singularity?"

The Difference Between Guest Workers and Immigrants

2006-04-04T15:24:00.000-04:00

Herbert Meyer at the American Thinker explains that immigrants aren't bothering Americans, it's the people coming just for jobs and not to be "Americans."

Air Guard Deployment

2006-04-04T14:09:00.000-04:00

This is just a little "shout out" to my cousin SSGT Allison Comtois who will be in Iraq for a couple months with the Vermont Air Guard.

"The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve"

2006-04-04T09:55:00.000-04:00

Peter Wehner responds to conservative criticisms (From the likes of William F. Buckley and Francis Fukuyama) on the War in Iraq in today's Wall Street Journal.

Critics of the Iraq war have offered no serious strategic alternative to the president's freedom agenda, which is anchored in the belief that democracy and liberal institutions are the best antidote to the pathologies plaguing the Middle East. The region has generated deep resentments and lethal anti-Americanism. In the past, Western nations tolerated oppression for the sake of "stability." But this policy created its own unintended consequences, including attacks that hit America with deadly fury on Sept. 11. President Bush struck back, both militarily and by promoting liberty.

In Iraq, we are witnessing advancements and some heartening achievements. We are also experiencing the hardships and setbacks that accompany epic transitions. There will be others. But there is no other way to fundamentally change the Arab Middle East. Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world--and because the work is difficult doesn't mean it can be ignored. The cycle has to be broken. The process of democratic reform has begun, and now would be precisely the wrong time to lose our nerve and turn our back on the freedom agenda. It would be a geopolitical disaster and a moral calamity--and President Bush, like President Reagan before him, will persist in his efforts to shape a more hopeful world.

How Culture Happens

2006-03-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

Maggie Gallagher explains how Hawk/Dove game theory applies to the marriage debate and culture in general.

A New Consensus on Immigration?

2006-03-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

James C. Bennett think there may be a new consensus on immigration forming and points to an article by Glenn Reynolds. Bennett writes:

There is a good deal of sympathy with the idea that Mexicans and others should be welcome to come here, as have other immigrants throughout our history, and join the American community. It's quite another for them to demand that they have a right to do so regardless of the wishes of the citizenry, or that they should not have to learn English or adopt the broad framwork of laws and assumptions that make America. It's not even a matter of assumptions of superiority: there's no implied superiority or moral imperative that, for example, favors driving on the right or the left side of the road, but it is vitally important that everybody keep to the same side.

"Jobs Americans Won't Do?"

2006-03-27T10:58:00.000-05:00

Rich Lowry applies his scalpel to one of the central talking points of the pro-illegal side--that only illegals will do some jobs:

"According to a new survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, illegals make up 24 percent of workers in agriculture, 17 percent in cleaning, 14 percent in construction, and 12 percent in food production. So 86 percent of construction workers, for instance, are either legal immigrants or Americans, despite the fact that this is one of the alleged categories of untouchable jobs.

Oddly, the people who warn that without millions of cheap, unskilled Mexican laborers, this country would face economic disaster are pro-business libertarians. They believe in the power of the market to handle anything — except a slightly tighter labor market for unskilled workers. But the free market would inevitably adjust, with higher wages or technological innovation.

Take agriculture. Phillip Martin, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has demolished the argument that a crackdown on illegals would ruin it, or be a hardship to consumers. Most farming — livestock, grains, etc. — doesn't heavily rely on hired workers. Only about 20 percent of the farm sector does, chiefly those areas involving fresh fruit and vegetables.

The average 'consumer unit' in the U.S. spends $7 a week on fresh fruit and vegetables, less than is spent on alcohol, according to Martin. On a $1 head of lettuce, the farm worker gets about 6 or 7 cents, roughly 1/15th of the retail price. Even a big run-up in the cost of labor can't hit the consumer very hard."

Time to end "don't ask, don't tell"

2006-03-23T16:57:00.000-05:00

Michael Barone and Ed Morrissey think it may be time to re-evaluate (and ultimately end) the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy towards homosexuals in the service. I agree given that attitudes have changed and it's just not a pragmatic approach when we need all that are willing to serve in a time of war. For the record, I was never particulary gung-ho about the idea anyway. If a person can do the same job (as defined by the same standards) then let them.

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

2006-03-22T09:42:00.000-05:00

Aahhhh, were that I was a bit younger......

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

The SCI FI Channel, Nash Entertainment (Meet My Folks, For Love or Money, Who Wants to Marry My Dad?), and legendary comic book creator Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Hulk, The Fantastic Four, X-Men) will produce a six-episode, one-hour weekly competition reality series that will challenge a lucky few to create their very own Superhero and reward the winner with the best reality competition prize yet: immortality! All you’ll need is an original idea for a Superhero, a killer costume, and some real Superhero mojo. The winner of this six-week competition will walk away with their Superhero immortalized in a new comic book created by Stan Lee himself. It gets better! The winning character will also appear in an original Sci Fi Channel movie!
In nationwide open casting calls, potential heroes will arrive in costume to prove their mettle – revealing the true nature of their superhuman abilities and invoking the noble credos by which they live. Make no mistake, you don’t have to love comic books to be the Superhero we’re looking for. If you have a great imagination, love adventure, and have a hero hiding inside of you, we want you on this show. Students, teachers, firemen, soccer moms, you’re all invited to try out to see if you’ve got what it takes. From thousands of hopefuls, Stan Lee will choose 11 lucky finalists to move into a secret lair and compete for the opportunity to become a real-life Superhero!

Finalists will leave their former lives behind and live as their brainchild heroes 24/7, all under Stan Lee’s watchful eye. Each week, our aspiring heroes will be challenged with competitions designed to test their true Superhero abilities. Don’t worry, no one will be leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. Our Superheroes will be tested for courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, compassion, and resourcefulness, all traits that every Superhero must possess. In the end, only one aspiring Superhero will have the inner strength and nobility to open the gates to comic book immortality forever!

Sounds like a real-life Mystery Men meets Survivor. (via Elisabeth Carnell)

Me and the Sci Fi Channel

2006-03-16T15:43:00.000-05:00

Now that my studies are done and it's all over but getting the degree, I've enjoyed reacquanting myself with the SciFi Channel. Now, I never totally left it, the ressurection of Battlestar Galactica successfully played on my nostalgia for the classic series of my boyhood and got me hooked with it's excellent writing and plot. And then I got TiVo. Since then, I've been able to record those shows I regrettably missed. (For instance, I'm way late to the Firefly phenomenom, but agree that it's a good show and Andromeda is also pretty good....but by the same token, I can't get into the 57 varieties of Stargate that are out there). And now I see that SciFi is resurrecting another favorite from my youth: Dr. Who. I remember watching the good Doctor on my local PBS affiliate on Saturday afternoons. It was weird and had bad special effects, but it had that dry Brit "humour" and, heck, it was science fiction and there just wasn't much of that on the tube in those days. Finally, SciFi has been promoting the heck out of something called Dark Kingdom. Guess what? It appears from the promo that it is at least tangentially related to my Master's thesis topic. I'll just have to watch to find out.

Inconsistent Careful Consideration

2006-03-16T09:35:00.000-05:00

While Senator Chafee toyed with the idea of censuring the President--based on the alleged illegality of the NSA wire-tapping program--he has since stated he's against the idea. Nonetheless, he's still convinced that the program is illegal...even though the Senate hearings on it have not yet concluded:

When Chafee was interviewed in January about the wiretaps program, he criticized it but said he would draw no conclusions about its legality or constitutionality until the Senate Judiciary Committee completed its inquiry.

Why, Chafee was asked Tuesday, has he come to the conclusion that the program is illegal, with the committee's inquiry still under way?

Chafee answered by reiterating his initial criticism of the program. "From what I've seen," he said, the wiretap program "is outside the parameters" of the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and existing law governing such programs.

I recall that also back in January, Senator Chafee refrained from making another decision until he "heard all the facts" and considered them carefully. In that case, it was whether or not he was going to support now-Justice Alito and he stated that he wanted to wait until after the Senate Judiciary hearings were finished before making a (finger in the wind) decision. Apparently, he doesn't feel the need apply the same careful consideration here, does he? Maybe it was a January thing?

Cross-posted at Anchor Rising.

I'm Back

2006-03-12T17:51:00.000-05:00

Ocean State Blogger is back. I've decided to keep the ol' girl going as a blogging clearinghouse. If it piques my interest, no matter what it is, it'll be here. Any lengthy bloviation will be done at either Anchor Rising or Spinning Clio, but OSB will be my virtual notebook for nascent ideas and passing thoughts. More to come shortly.

On Hiatus

2006-01-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

As the lack of recent posts has probably indicated, the OSB is on hiatus until at least the end of February. If I do blog, it'll either be at Anchor Rising or Spinning Clio. The reason? The final push for the History MA is on. (For more of an explanation, go here). Once I'm free of my academic burdens, I'll be reassessing my blogging load and may discontinue this site. It's served me well, but I'm not sure if being spread so thin across the blogosphere is worthwhile. If you care, stop by at the end of February to find out.

Thanks,
Marc

Lefty Latin America

2005-12-20T09:29:00.000-05:00

I've railed against Hugo Chavez's leftward power grab in South America. In the wake of one of his proteges being elected in Bolivia, Ralph Peters (subscription req'd) says not to fear, let 'em fail and be there to pick up.

Looks like the voters of Bolivia have chosen Evo Morales as their next presidente. Evo's a pro-narco pal of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. His campaign included a pledge to become "America's nightmare."

What on earth should we do?

Nothing. The dumbest thing Washington could do would be to overreact and make yet another populist demagogue a hero. Bluster and threats only help our enemies.

Anti-Americanism is dying — it just happens to be a loud, slow death. The old blame-America excuses are growing thin. Left alone, the latest wave of Yanqui-go-homers will fade after they fail to live up to their promises. But with enough attention from Washington, they could hang on indefinitely. We made Fidel Castro a giant through our clumsiness. And we didn't learn. We did the same thing with Hugo Chavez, threatening to huff and puff and blow his casa down. The effect was to give him a hemispheric stage on which to strut.

Now there's a third amigo. Let's not do this one any favors by calling him names.

In Washington, it's tough to do nothing, since there's a lobby for everything. But sometimes nothing is exactly what we should do. Any signs of administration hysteria will play into Morales' hands.

Interesting point.

Roundup

2005-12-19T09:55:00.000-05:00

Is the idea of multiculturalism finally undermining mass media.

The Weekly Standard's Robert Kagan and William Kristol offer one explanation for why the Iraqi elections could be a turning point.

Meanwhile, their colleague Stephen Barbara looks at the world's enmity toward's U.S. .....soccer.

Pope Benedict XVI is going to "reinterpret" Vatican II according to some, though he would say he's going to finally tell the real story. Meanwhile, is the U.S. Supreme Court too Catholic?

Here are the 10 Most Conservative colleges in the U.S., according to the Young America Foundation.

With a War on Terror, what is the future of the U.S. Navy?

A little Roundup

2005-12-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

Arnold Kling writes that Americans don't like real health insurance--say a $10,000 deductible before any insurance kicks in--because they think what they're getting now is "free."

An Israeli general believes Saddam moved his WMD to Syria, and so do many Iraqis.

Lee Harris turns to Thomas Hobbes to supply an answer to the question of "What next?" in Iraq.

Can Europe become a melting pot?

About the Economy

2005-12-09T09:08:00.000-05:00

Brian Wesbury's comments last week about the ominipresent pessimism that seems to surround any and all economic news was a "Gee, I thought that too" moment for me. Here is what he said:

During a quarter century of analyzing and forecasting the economy, I have never seen anything like this. No matter what happens, no matter what data are released, no matter which way markets move, a pall of pessimism hangs over the economy.

It is amazing. Everything is negative. When bond yields rise, it is considered bad for the housing market and the consumer. But if bond yields fall and the yield curve narrows toward inversion, that is bad too, because an inverted yield curve could signal a recession.

If housing data weaken, as they did on Monday when existing home sales fell, well that is a sign of a bursting housing bubble. If housing data strengthen, as they did on Tuesday when new home sales rose, that is negative because the Fed may raise rates further. If foreigners buy our bonds, we are not saving for ourselves. If foreigners do not buy our bonds, interest rates could rise. If wages go up, inflation is coming. If wages go down, the economy is in trouble.

Read the rest of his essay for just one list of the good economic news.

Against illegal immigration

2005-12-08T08:25:00.000-05:00

explains that Americans aren't against immigration, but illegal immigration. She offers this personal anecdote:

I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)

Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, "I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.

In two generations. Two.

What a country.

She also explains here philosophical opposition to illegal immigration.

The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.

What does it mean that your first act on entering a country--your first act on that soil--is the breaking of that country's laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?

If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?

When you don't earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of above-board effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?

These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.

Walk the Line

2005-11-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

I hope to catch "Walk the Line" sometime, if nothing else than because one of my favorite cult-musicians has a starring role. More about him here and, further back, here (or here for a real flavor). And, by the way, he had a hand in helping this guy's career. (Yes, I'm being purposefully "mysterious," he likes it that way.)

Homework Assignment

2005-11-14T11:27:00.000-05:00

Homework Assignment: Google "Clinton Iraq 1998" and see what you find.

President Bush's Veterans Day Speech '05

2005-11-11T15:24:00.000-05:00

The President on Iraq:

This progress is not easy, but it is steady. And no fair-minded person should ignore, deny or dismiss the achievements of the Iraqi people.

And our debate at home must also be fair-minded. One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war.

When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support. I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq, and that is their right, and I respect it. As president and commander in chief, I (accept ?) the responsibilities and the criticisms and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision. While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security."

That's why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send to them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that when -- whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less then victory.

The Absolute Final Post About Why Bush Didn't Lie About Iraq

2005-11-10T21:42:00.000-05:00

Well, probably not. Anyway, Norman Podhoretz wraps it all up rather nicely by explaining how everyone thought Saddam Hussein was a threat, though even the President didn't think it was an imminent one (my, how that got all turned around, huh?). But Kevin Drum thinks Podhoretz wraps it up too soon and conveniently glosses over the few intelligence agencies that refuted the spook CW. However, Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics reminds us all that President Bush put the onus on Saddam to prove his compliance--heck, even Hans Blix kept offering South Africa as a model--and Saddam failed to spill the beans. (And now we know why, what, with Oil for Food and all) .Only then did we "rush to war" after a couple years worth of warnings.

'Evangelical Pruning' Ahead?

2005-11-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

Imagine. The Pope actually thinks that traditionally Catholic universities and colleges should get back to their roots:

Ever since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, educators at Roman Catholic colleges in the United States have been trying to figure out what his agenda would be for their institutions.

In a speech at the University of Notre Dame Monday, a senior Vatican official offered some predictions about what to expect: a strong emphasis on Catholic identity on their campuses and an increased role in reaching out to Catholic institutions in other countries. Archbishop Michael Miller, secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, told a packed audience at Notre Dame that the pope might favor “evangelical pruning,” rather than maintaining ties to institutions that have become too secular. . .

Michael J. James, executive vice president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. . .[believed] that the Vatican is taking a broad view of the ideals of Catholic higher education, and not focusing on any one single question. James said that this was appropriate, but he acknowledged that there could be controversies ahead. Many Catholic colleges are embroiled in debates over whether to recognize gay student groups or to allow speakers on campus who disagree with Catholic teachings. College presidents dealing with such situations tend to face criticism on all sides — with students and many faculty members pushing for greater tolerance, especially on issues of sexuality, while traditionalist groups attack colleges that appear to deviate in any way from official teachings.

One “possible negative outcome” of the archbishop’s talk, James said, was that “it could bolster conservative groups that are relatively small and isolated, but they will take this and say, ‘we think you are not living up to your Catholic identity.’

. . .Rev. Charles L. Currie, president of the Association of Jesuit College and Universities, agreed. “He’s making the point that these schools should be serious about their Catholic identity and the folks I work with — Jesuit and non-Jesuit — are serious. So we accept that challenge, and our schools are very actively pursuing their Catholic identity.”

Inspired Genius

2005-11-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

Ian McEwan writes of how some examples of genius is merely "inspired guesswork" and give Einstein's theory of relativity as such an example. Interestingly, the Big Bang is another instance of such inspired guesswork. Did you know it was first proposed by a Catholic priest? Bet you thought all religious people went for that Intelligent Design stuff, huh?

Instapundit Setting the Record on Iraq Straight...again

2005-11-01T16:10:00.000-05:00

I'll let him do it so I don't have to, again! Instapundit writes:

One of the things I've noticed in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that's very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs -- that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

He also points to earlier posts here, here and here. He also adds:

Democratic politicians who supported the war want an excuse to tack closer to their antiwar base. Shouting "It's not my fault --I'm easily fooled!" would seem a substandard response, but it is a way of changing position while pretending it's not politically motivated. Meanwhile, journalists, most of whom were reporting the same kind of WMD stories that Miller did (because that's what pretty much everyone thought -- including the antiwar folks who were arguing that an invasion was a bad idea because it would provoke Saddam into using his weapons of mass destruction), now want to focus on her so that people won't pay much attention to what they were reporting themselves. This makes Judy Miller a handy scapegoat.

But, as I say, the biggest problem with this revisionism is that it's not true. I guess we'll just have to keep pointing that out.

And then he continues:

J.D. Johannes notes that what people were saying in the 1990s seems to raise problems with the revisionist history. "The final authorization for use of force in 2002 cited the legislation from 1998. But what was conventional wisdom and uncontroversial in 1998, became hotly debated in 2002 and beyond." Especially "beyond."

And he links to this from Dean Esmay:

Having been part of those debates when they were happening, I am utterly appalled at people I used to think of as intelligent and well-informed who keep repeating falsehood after falsehood after falsehood about it. And I am utterly exhausted with having to, at least once a month or so, go back and rehash the same arguments because some people are not simply honest enough, diligent enough, or caring enough to go back and look at the historical record and just be honest about it.

I find having to rehash it all about as pleasant and satisfying as chewing on aluminum foil. It's not disagreement I can't stand, it's the constant repetition of falsehoods that makes me want to scream.

Like I said, I reposted most of it so I wouldn't have too dig it all up myself.

UPDATE: Glenn has also posted on how the Democrats under Bill Clinton were more than willing to proceed under the assumption that Saddam did indeed have WMD.