Archives

You are currently viewing archive for April 2008
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
From The Telegraph (UK) science writer George Johnson relates the stories of ten fundamental experiments that advanced science. Good stuff.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Don't miss Peggy Noonan today:

"In Lubbock, Texas – Lubbock Comma Texas, the heart of Texas conservatism – they dislike President Bush. He has lost them. I was there and saw it. Confusion has been followed by frustration has turned into resentment, and this is huge. Everyone knows the president's poll numbers are at historic lows, but if he is over in Lubbock, there is no place in this country that likes him. I made a speech and moved around and I was tough on him and no one – not one – defended or disagreed. I did the same in North Carolina recently, and again no defenders. I did the same in Fresno, Calif., and no defenders, not one.

He has left on-the-ground conservatives – the local right-winger, the town intellectual reading Burke and Kirk, the old Reagan committeewoman – feeling undefended, unrepresented and alone.

This will have impact down the road.

I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan. Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn't that way in 2000, or 1992, or 1996, or even '04.

I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear, knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world."

UPDATE: See also The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush (from 2004).
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
The newly elected Maoist government of Nepal is talking about banning Nepalese mercenaries from serving abroad. If this policy becomes law, we may see the end of the legendary Gurkha fighters in the British and Indian armies. Full story from The Times of India.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
I am the pessimist in this group. So I can't help but think that Patrick Deneen is definitely on to something when he makes the following observation:

"Every day, in one way or another, the leaders of my educational institution - like that of many others - tell us that we are driven by the imperative to prepare our students for a world of globalized commerce, a world in which they will need the skills of a vagabond or an itinerant vandal. In the throes of a dogma, they are unable to see the evidence before their eyes that suggests that their belief in historical inevitability may be at least slightly out of touch."

"If so, we are preparing our students for a future that has no future."

....

"Our elite institutions continue - in the words of Jeremy Beer - to stripmine our brightest students away from their homes to prepare them for lives as itinerant meritocrats, giving them skills that will allow them to do anything but to be prepared to live in one place and contribute to a particular community. Yet, there is growing evidence that this may be the future for which we should be preparing them, not the one that we imagine. The inability of our "leaders" to acknowledge these facts, much less to begin reconsidering our perilous course, is yet further evidence of the abject failure of education in our time. Education is doing the opposite of what it should be doing - preparing the young for a future of responsibility and gratitude in which we take in what those before us have given us as inheritance and in which we prepare to leave behind so generous a legacy."

Read the whole thing here.

19/04: Sex and Power

Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
We have a scandal here in Oklahoma involving sex and power. A male county sheriff has been charged with forcing female inmates to perform sex acts. Drudge has the link to this article. The sheriff has not yet been tried, so we'll presume innocence until proven guilty, but I do want to offer a few thoughts.

People have misused their God-given sexuality since sin entered the world. But it seems in our day we are reaching new lows. On South Park this week, the characters reacted to the internet drying up as it slowed from a river to a trickle. In a parody of Grapes of Wrath, millions of people piled belongings on their cars and headed for California, where rumor had it Silicon Valley had service available. Different people missed different things--email, instant messaging, news, and porn. (For those of you unfamiliar with South Park, it is an often brilliant satire on contemporary culture, but is usually vulgar.) Here is a clip from the official site. Living in camps along the way, Randy tries to feed his internet porn addiction. As he tells someone: once you've been able to see Japanese women vomiting into each other's mouths, you can't go back to Playboy. Some men have set up a tent to provide "virtual internet." He goes in where he is told to sit in front of a fake screen and say outloud his search terms, then say click. After he calls out each of his (disturbing and disgusting) search categories, a hand drawing is lowered into the screen. The "virtual internet" doesn't work for him. But when they get to California the Red Cross has set up a camp and provides small doses of internet by lottery. That night he breaks into the trailer where the computer is locked up, looking for his fix.

more below

» Read More

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
"There’s a certain sort of somewhat educated, yet substantially ignorant, person whose condescension toward Christianity and Christians tries my patience more than open hostility. I’m thinking of the person, often describing himself as spiritual but not religious, who believes that all “belief systems” or “faith traditions” are fundamentally the same: the same in their ultimate meaning, and the same in their origin, which is the human mind: it’s ok with him if you believe in Jesus, and it would be ok with him if you believed with equal conviction in fairies, or voodoo, or Odin, or Krishna. They’re all psychological responses to the puzzle of human existence, and one is no more true and no more false than another."

Maclin Horton explains why this view of Cristianity is profoundly disordered.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Over at Contentions, James Kirchik discusses Dr. Logan and the Act bearing his name in relation to Jimmy Carter's upcoming meeting with Hamas.
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
From the brilliant and provocative Neil Postman:

"Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely pointless. There are other reasons as well, including the difficulty of saying something inspirational without being banal. Here I try my hand at writing a graduation speech, and not merely to discover if I can conquer the form. This is precisely what I would like to say to young people if I had their attention for a few minutes."

Hat Tip -- Rod Dreher
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Armed with supportive evidence from Michael Barone, Stanley Kurtz makes the convincing case that, at its core, the Obama phenomenon is a product of elite academia.
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
Brits at Their Best links to an article in The Independent on the current archealogical excavations at Stonehenge plus current theories. It may have served as a healing center.