A marvelous essay by Christine Rosen, People of the Screen in which she describes two different classes, people of the screen and people of the book.
As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
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The reason you can’t “screw up” a Dostoevsky novel is that you must first submit yourself to the process of reading it—which means accepting, at some level, the author’s authority to tell you the story. You enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master. The screen promotes invulnerability. Whatever setbacks occur (as in a video game) are temporary, fixable, and ultimately overcome. We expect to master the game and move on to the next challenge. This is a lesson in trial and error, and often an entertaining one at that, but it is not a lesson in richer human understanding.
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Such is the end of the tragedy we are now witness to: Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.
The Skeptical Doctor , an entire blog dedicated to the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, yields this gems from just the past month.
Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr. Anthony Daniels who was a prison doctor and psychiatrist for many years before retiring to France.
On the meaning of his pen name, Daniels said he "chose a name hat sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world."
When Good is Bad
Nowadays, when you ask people how they are, they are as likely to tell you that they are good as that they are well. It is as if you were inquiring after their moral rather than their bodily condition.
Of course, the two have seldom been more closely linked, health, diet and safety having replaced faith, hope and charity as the desiderata of the virtuous life.
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There is an asymmetry in our moral assessment of ourselves: goodness comes from within, badness from without. People, as a general rule, don't ask for an explanation of their good behaviour: only their bad is mysterious to them. In many years of medical practice, no one has ever asked me, "Do you think it could be my childhood that makes me so nice, doctor?"
Destructive Delusions
One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of "recovered memory" of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.
And this dissection of the difference between conservatives and liberals, Pot, Meet Kettle.
Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.
Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.
Polite, considerate, self-controlled, law-abiding, tolerant of all eccentricities, humble and modest are adjectives once used to describe the British not that long ago.
Today, the British are often described as loutish, violent, drunken, sluttish, boastful and brutish.
the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call “a good time.” They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence
Indictable crime has increased 900% since 1950
What happened to the British character?
Theodore Dalrymple explains from the inside what happened to The Quivering Upper Lip.
When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless.
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Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Further, once self-control becomes neither second nature nor a desired goal, but rather a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink.
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Two things are worth noting about this shift in national character: it is not the first such shift in British history; and the change is not entirely spontaneous or the result of impersonal social forces.
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The moralization of the British in the first third of the nineteenth century—their transformation from a people lacking self-control into exemplars of restraint—was the product of intellectual and legislative activity. So, too, was the reverse movement.
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Habits become character. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they do.
It's an essay with horrifying details and not to be missed.
Money is based on trust says Niall Ferguson Confidence in the free market and capitalist institutions is based on trust.
What is money after all but a promise to pay?
Without a foundation in society based on religion or religiously-based ethics, there's no reason to believe that such promises will be kept.
We're in such a mess because Congressmen and bankers abused our trust to satisfy their political agendas or their greed.
Investors' Business Daily takes note of the Pope's remarks to say
What he really said was not clairvoyant, but self-evident: Economic freedom demands ethics.
Of course, we are not without fault as Ed Morrissey writes in Has America learned a lesson about consumption?
the period between the last recession and now has been marked by the unique phenomenon of assets-based consumption. We need a return to income-based consumption, and the transition is going to sting:
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The entire precipice was built on sand, and it’s now turning into quicksand. For some, the lesson will come too late. For the rest of us, it’s a lesson we need to learn for good. Many of us have heard the advice our parents and grandparents learned in hard economic times: Don’t spend beyond your means. Many in the previous couple of generations had a well-deserved skepticism about credit, and they’ve been proven right yet again.
Niall Ferguson was prescient when he started his book to explain the current economic crisis in the span of 4000 years of financial history. (Hat tip to Cat at Brits at their Best.) He saw the liquidity crisis coming.
"The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" (Niall Ferguson)
Here is Ferguson, Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, speaking with Harry Kriesler at the University of California, Berkely on his new book.
It's wonderful to be able to hear and learn so much on the internet. The good news is that U.S. has a better chance of riding out the crisis than other countries because people around the world believe that the correct response is to put their cash into dollars
A remarkable essay by R.R. Reno, We Need Roots.
Life is better—richer, deeper, thicker—for our loyalties and loves.
I share this Chestertonian sensibility, which is why the new music from the English folk band, Show of Hands, gives me goose bumps.
“Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.”
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“Country Life” is not a polemic against free markets or Thatcherism. It thrusts against the left as well. “No one marched to subsidize and save the country way of life,” they sing. We are reminded that so-called progressive politics long ago shifted its focus toward securing lifestyle freedoms for the new-economy winners (gay-pride marches, women’s rights marches), as well as toward movements to satisfy the refined moral palates of the educated elites (animal rights, nuclear disarmament, global warming). The local guy with a high-school education and ordinary expectations from life gets pushed to the side.
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The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.
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Social capital is not a fixed asset. It requires regular reinvestment, which we do by committing resources of memory, love, and loyalty. One of the signal features of our age is the belief that we can have everything for nothing. Our multicultural therapists imagine that we can discharge the batteries of national identity, reap gains in tolerance, and pay no costs. But there are costs. As the Show of Hands sings, “We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know.” We can’t stand forever at a distance with our critical doubts and moral reservations. Love rewards only those who venture her commitments.
This loss of "more than we'll ever know" echoes in Degeneration, the number one song in Quebec for by the band called Mes Aieux (My Ancestors)
HT Ron Dreher
Dr. Helen writes about The Traits of Heroes
Stopped. Cold turkey. North Carolina authorities say a shopper clubbed an alleged carjacker with a frozen turkey as he tried to steal a woman's car in a grocery store parking lot Sunday.
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I am in the middle of reading an incredible book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why that explains why it is that some people are prepared for disaster and others are not. One of the chapters in the book is on heroism and it found that those who are heroes like the above turkey clubber have confidence in their abilities. They tend to have an "internal locus of control"--that is, a sense that they shape their own destiny rather than looking to someone else.
Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. 'They pay scant attention to other people's problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,'...
According to the book, some common traits of heroes in a study of 450 acts of heroism found a whopping 91 percent of them performed by males. The author notes that this could be a bias of the sample used.... but anyway, the heroes in the study also tended to be working class men. They tended to be truck drivers, laborers, welders, or factory workers--physical jobs that required some risk, just like rescuing. A high number of the rescues were in rural or small-town America and 80% of the rescues happened in places with less than one hundred thousand people. The author opines that this might be because in small towns, people know one another and acts of kindness are recognized and remembered. A strong sense of duty to help others was also mentioned
Paul Gregory writing in First Things on Small Towns
Small-town connectivity also ties one to a place and to the past. People are often born, grow up, marry, raise a family, work, retire, and die all within the same few miles or even acres. Birth, childhood, family, place, memory, and death are all tied tightly together. These few acres or miles are a part of daily experience. You drive by the place where you grew up every day. It is the same with the place where you went to school or played baseball or where your granddaddy used to work. The past is not past in a small town. The past is experienced viscerally and concretely every day. It is a part of today as surely as the ground upon which one walks.
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It is this sort of connectedness to place and people and the past that that makes small towns different. It is not an easy set of slogans that can be trumpeted by a political party or captured in a sound bite. It is the shape of the small town itself which has embedded itself in its people. That shape takes the form of a web that connects that person to a multitude of places and people and past experience. That web becomes the stuff of that person; it is his identity.
Mark Steyn hits it out of the park again in this Thanksgiving note, Which history?
We've taken Cromwell's advice to his portraitist to paint him "warts and all", and show our kids all but solely the warts — spreading disease to Native Americans, enslaving blacks, interning the Japanese. Any non-wart stuff is mostly invented out of whole cloth: the US Constitution has its good points but they all come from the Iroquois, and the first Thanksgiving is some kind of proto-Communist celebration of collective farming.
A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, "Guess what we learned today?" I said: "Rosa Parks." He said: "How did you know that?" I said: "Because it's always Rosa Parks." And, if you don't learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it's just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.
Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who'd been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?
But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one's cultural inheritance should be.
The year after the founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain, the war to secure that independence continued through many bleak days. Ira Stoll writes that the national holiday actually began during such dark hours.
For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.
Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."
His cousin, Samuel Adams, gave the other delegates -- their number had dwindled to a mere 20 from the 56 who had signed the Declaration of Independence -- a talk of encouragement. He predicted, "Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection."
He turned out to have been correct, at least about the good tidings. On Oct. 31, a messenger arrived with news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The American general, Horatio Gates, had accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers, and with them 27 pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition.
Saratoga turned the tide of the war -- news of the victory was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America. Congress responded to the event by appointing a committee of three that included Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Daniel Roberdeau of Pennsylvania, to draft a report and resolution. The report, adopted Nov. 1, declared Thursday, Dec. 18, as "a day of Thanksgiving" to God, so that "with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor."
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It turned out, though, that the ideas of thanking God for America's blessings -- and of praying for the spread of freedom everywhere -- would long outlast Adams's career. The concepts still meet with skepticism from time to time. But they are reason enough to pause during tomorrow's football game or family feast and raise a glass to the Founding Father who began our Thanksgiving tradition.
And if your beer bears his name, so much the better.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone
Dr. Bob is one of the best writers on the Internet and one of the most thoughtful. Here he is on Revolution of the Soul which deserves being read in its entirety.
The revolution which started in the 60s with the “me” generation is bearing its bitter fruit — though its aging proponents will never admit it. And sadly, there’s no going back: the changes which have infiltrated and infected the culture, inoculated through education, media, entertainment, scientific rationalism, and a relentless and highly successful assault on reason and tradition, are permanent, and their consequences will only grow in magnitude.
So it’s time for a counter-revolution.
There is an alternative to our current cultural narcissism with its corrosive, calloused, destructive bent. It is not a new government program, nor a political movement; no demonstrations in the street, no marches on Washington. Its core ideology is over 2000 years old, and the foot soldiers of the revolution are already widely dispersed throughout the culture.
This revolutionary force is called Christianity, and it’s long past time to raise the banner and spring into action.
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Then we must act like the counter-culturists we claim to be. Be patient with those who are difficult; be generous in time and money; express gratitude to those around us (when was the last time you wrote a thank you note to your doctor, your contractor, your attorney, to the manager of the store employee who helped you?). Lose the profanity; guard your tongue. Repair broken relationships, as best you can. Be joyful in difficult times, knowing that God is at work in your life despite your difficulties. Be compassionate rather than judgmental to those whose life choices are destructive or misguided. The tattoos and piercings we ridicule are cries of desperation from those hungering for purpose and meaning.
Loneliness is a signal like hunger, thirst and pain that something important is missing - connection with other people - that all humans need says John Cacioppo, author of Loneliness.
"Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection" (John T. Cacioppo, William Patrick)
The best guarantee of a long, healthy and happy life may be the connections you have with other people.
From an interview with the author in US News and World Report, Why loneliness is bad for your health
The painful feeling known as loneliness is a prompt to reconnect to others.
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Humans have a need to be affirmed up close and personal; we see this most often in marriage. But people who don't marry may find meaning elsewhere. We also have a need for a wider circle of friends and family, but we all know that close family connections can be a mixed blessing. And there's a need to feel that we belong to a larger group. Many of us tend to ignore the collective part of social connection until there is an insult or threat. An example is how, right after 9/11, Americans felt very close to one another. There was a harmony and helpfulness that was really quite surprising. Being an Obama-ite during the campaign would be another example of having a collective identity, feeling like you're part of something grand and wonderful.
People who go to church regularly live longer than nonchurchgoers. Why is that?
Churches can be very beneficial—one can feel connected to the group, the church, and to God. Those are actually different things, but both seem to have beneficial effect. God is like a supercharged friend.
Nicolas Gelinas finds comfort in Treasury Secretary Paulson's decision not to use any of the $700 billion financial bailout money to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions in Paulson Bails Out the Bailout
Marano is not an aberration. He’s a representative of a dangerous way of thinking. Much of the financial industry still refuses to acknowledge that its business-model failure is permanent. Far too many people seem to consider that failure the result of temporary, extraordinary market conditions that are—to use a phrase that’s now become an unintentionally humorous cliché—worse than anticipated. But the notion that complex financial engineering could make any long-term security always instantly salable and nearly risk-free was one of the roots of this crisis. Acknowledging its absurdity isn’t a matter of punishment or demonization; it’s a matter of making sure that failed ideas stay dead, so that they don’t come back stronger than before.
But the government has been doing just the opposite. Further, by promising to buy mortgage-related assets, it has given companies like Rescap an incentive to hang on to their bad debt for as long as possible, rather than sell it to those annoying investors offering prices that are too low. And that has delayed what is already likely to be a long, painful recovery.
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To learn why, consider what got us out of our last major banking debacle, the savings and loan crisis of the late eighties and early nineties. William Seidman headed the FDIC in the eighties and later, as head of the federal Resolution Trust Corporation, handled the S&L aftermath. During that crisis, the U.S. government closed down failed S&L institutions and had to sell off their holdings. These holdings consisted of $600 billion in diverse assets, including office buildings, hotels, golf courses, and apartment complexes. “There was no real market” for such assets, Seidman said at Monday’s conference. “We decided we had to create a market. We said, we’re going to start selling these properties at whatever price we could get.”
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What Seidman sensibly dismissed back then—holding on to assets to “get prices up”—was, until Paulson’s announcement today, a key part of the government’s working plan to fix the current crisis. But it’s only when holdouts and their creditors capitulate and start selling assets to private investors at distressed values that the market can begin to find its way to recovery, just as happened in the early nineties.
A remarkable article by Michael Lewis called The End in Portfolio.
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
photoillustration by Ji Lee
When he wrote Liar's Poker, he thought that there would come a Great Reckoning
when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
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In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
One of the true wise men was Steve Eisman
It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.
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Eisman wasn’t, in short, an analyst with a sunny disposition who expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he created. “You have to understand,” Eisman says in his defense, “I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a shit what it sold.”
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The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA. --
“We have a simple thesis,” Eisman explained. “There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.” When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman’s logic—the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.
Dark energy is that hypothetical energy that permeates all space, increases the rate of expansion of the universe, and accounts for about 74% of the total mass energy of the universe.
Dark matter is hypothetical matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter.
Being a lay person with just a tenuous grasp of science, what this means to me is that nobody knows what the universe is made of. We are in the same place as the mapmakers of earlier times who wrote Terra Incognita for the unknown regions of the earth or "Here be Dragons"
With the addition of "Dark Flow" named to explain the Unknown "Structures" Tugging at the Universe, a discovery that rewrite the laws of physics because it posits structures outside our universe, I now know why my socks go missing.
After the election where I was moved as always by the peaceful transition of power as well as by the notable achievement of Barack Obama, the new president-elect, I turned to more pressing personal matters which partially explains the lack of blogging.
I do want to point to this Time review Search for Civitas about a book written by Daniel Bell almost thirty years ago
"The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Daniel Bell)
The more that Sociologist Daniel Bell peers into the future, the more he seems to respect the past. It would be hard to find anyone more at home in such a variety of contemporary disciplines—economics, politics, the arts, popular culture. Yet Bell is not happy with the trends in any of them. Something precious has gone out of life, he feels. The deficiency makes people harsher, more inward, more aggrandizing. Bell yearns for a restoration of civitas: "The spontaneous willingness to obey the law, to respect the rights of others, to forgo the temptations of private enrichment at the expense of the public weal—in short, to honor the 'city' of which one is a member."
Bell is no mere nostalgia peddler sighing for antique worlds. With acerbic but civil scholarship, he blames today's honorless condition on what he calls "modernism": the cultural movement that started in the latter half of the 19th century and has gathered momentum ever since. Modernism rejects the old, the traditional, the bourgeois in favor of the new, the sensational, the revolutionary. As such, it has dissolved many conventions, and discredited most institutions and values. Today, says Bell, its victory is complete. There is a perpetual, unwholesome rage for the new. Instead of affirming a "moral-philosophical tradition against which the new could be measured," contemporary culture has an "unprecedented mission: an official, ceaseless search for a new sensibility."
Under these conditions, an avant-garde can hardly be said to exist. The most outrageous or destructive idea or art form becomes accepted overnight. "In fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government services and more protection against adversity. Inflation results, savings diminish, and capitalism is undermined. The only solution is a restraint on private appetite and a return to a public philosophy—a tall order, as Bell acknowledges, in these roiled times.
Usually we think of history as the product of either politics (the struggle for power) or economics (the production of wealth) George Weigel writes but history is better seen through culture in Is Europe Dying?
Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened? And, perhaps more to the point, why had what happened happened? Political and economic analyses do not offer satisfactory answers to those urgent questions. Cultural-which is to say spiritual, even theological-answers might help.
Weigel calls for a return to pietas, an ancient Roman virtue that teaches us reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand, a fitting subject for this Veteran's Day.
To be patriotic is to acknowledge the patrimony, the legacy, we have been given and which we are duty bound to pass on to future generations. In America, it is not so much the land as the ideas of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. John Schaar explores The Case for Patriotism.
Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and niquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.
He quotes Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia on the way to Washington for his first inauguration.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live... I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence...I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was.something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.
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Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle--I was about to I say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.
I think this is the best political video I've viewed during the interminable campaign.
And this is the best cartoon.
After Heath Ledger's death, Jack Nicholson was quoted as saying "I warned him."
Ledger recently told reporters he "slept an average of two hours a night" while playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy ...
"I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.
I wondered what happens to any actor with great talent who can pour himself so completely into the persona of a sociopath. Does the permeability of his psyche leave him especially vulnerable?
Can a person become contaminated by a preoccupation with evil?
Maria Hsia Chang explores that question in Peering into the Abyss in the New Oxford Review.
"I think the Joker killed Heath Ledger." So writes licensed attorney and former public defender Jay Gaskill in his review of The Dark Knight. Gaskill is not being melodramatic; he is simply stating what other reviewers only hint at.
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." This famous but cryptic quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is understood to be a warning against too close a contact with evil. As one interpretation has it, if a person gazes too long at evil, it will become a part of him. Did Ledger fall prey to this mysterious phenomenon?
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To begin with, who are the potential victims? It appears that "looking into the abyss" refers to anyone whose work or interests brings him into a close proximity with evil. It can be an actor, such as Heath Ledger, who immerses himself too deeply into portraying evil and, in so doing, invites malefic forces into himself. It can be a writer, such as Iris Chang, whose subject is a historical account of man's inhumanity toward man. It can be FBI agents, soldiers, and policemen who enter the arena to directly confront and fight evildoers.
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But how exactly does evil exert its nefarious influence on a person? Evil's baneful effects may be likened to the invisible, odorless, and deadly radiation emitted by uranium. While it is wholly conceivable that writers such as Iris Chang would become disheartened by their research, why should it trigger such an acute depression that life becomes unbearable and relief is sought only in suicide? All of which leads one to wonder just what is this evil that lurks in the abyss.
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It is oft said that the greatest achievement of the Devil is to convince us that he does not exist. Catholic priest and scholar Malachi Martin called this "the ultimate camouflage." As he explained, "If your will does not accept the existence of evil, you are rendered incapable of resisting evil. Those with no capacity of resistance become prime targets for Possession."
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The clergy's reluctance to speak of the Devil and of Hell is all the more ironic because available evidence points to the laity's belief in both. Gallup polls of American adults found that in 2001, 71 percent believed in Hell. Increasing numbers also believed in a personal entity of evil called the Devil, from 55 percent of U.S. adults in 1990 to 70 percent in 2004.
via Chronicles of Atlantis
Forget climate change, the most good can be done by installing toilets and ensuring safe water supplies
Installing toilets and ensuring safe water supplies where needed throughout the world would do more to end poverty and improve world health than any other possible measure, according to a new UN study
Almost 900 million people around the world lack access to safe water supplies, and 2.5 billion people live without access to improved sanitation, according to UN figures.
Says Abe Greenwald
Governments worldwide spend 6 to 16 percent of GDP on healthcare, while a solid showing of plumbers in the private sector could prevent millions of yearly deaths around the globe. It turns out plumbers can save more lives than spread-the-wealth politicians
Because the report was so embarrassing, the government tried to hide the results. This time it's diapers.
But as any parent knows, Pampers rule
Blow to image of 'green' reusable nappy.
When the government doesn't like the results of a study
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions.
The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them.
Kevin Kelly says the fastest growing entity today is information, growing at a rate of 66% a year in The Expansion of Ignorance.
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn’t know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance.
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Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentialy. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology and tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, controlled fusion, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of thousands of new huge questions – questions we could have never even thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.
Or, to put it another way, we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance.
No matter what your politics or candidate, no one wants the integrity of the electoral process itself violated with voter fraud.
That's why the actions of ACORN are so pernicious. One person using fraudulent voter registrations could vote over a hundred times on November 4th.
So I am all in favor of the simple, low-tech solution suggested by Mark Steyn, proposed by Jim Geraghty and seconded by Miss Kelly: Purple Finger Legislation.
He sees what we are witnessing as "as unfolding chaotic system" with our institutions "firing into the dark".
Richard Fernandez on Taleb's Warning.
There was a time when people explicitly understood their ignorance. And they defended against uncertainty by relying on simpler, less interdependent systems for survival. In case snow blocked the roads they had hams, canned goods, dried beans and sacks of flour in the storeroom. In the event 911 didn’t answer they had a shotgun in back. Family was the insurance against unforeseen crisis. Nation was the refuge against enemies. Culture provided a standard operating procedure which everyone was expected to know.
We have abolished much of that because in our foolish pride, it became an article of faith that we no longer needed them. Canned food is now shunned for the preservatives that it contains. Bacon is bad because it has salt. Allah forbid that there’s a gun in the house. And who could be less ‘with it’ than a woman with five children and a husband who drives a snowmobile. Sarah Palin is hated by sophisticates because she is almost a cliched example of this kind of simplicity. Ha ha ha. Today really cool people live in big cities, dependent on power grids, power circles and power lunches. They imagine there’s no heaven, no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Today the truly cultured person is expected to know nothing of his own culture and smattering of everyone else’s. Because they’re certain in their epistemological arrogance they’ll never need any of the things they’ve safely abandoned. Who needs a family when you’ve got a retirement fund?
Lenin once described Communism as “socialism plus electricity”. The modern version of Nirvana is “socialism plus Google”. When will we learn? Never, I fear, while pride and the desire for power rule the human breast
ACORN. First they intimidated banks, then they went after Congress with a combination of bullying, smooth talking lobbyists and campaign contributions to change the regulations at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
Stanley Kurtz outlines how ACORN planted the seeds of disaster.
Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”
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This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.
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Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
The image is from NASA, a Chandra X-ray photograph showing Cassiopeia A, the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way.
Dark energy is the name given to the hypothetical force that could be drawing all the stuff in the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Current thinking is that 74% of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21% being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5%.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
But there's a problem with this void idea. It means we live in a special place.
it negates a principle that has reigned in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special.
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"This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place," Clifton told SPACE.com. "The regular cosmological model is based on the idea that where we live is a typical place in the universe. This would be a contradiction to the Copernican principle."
Kevin Kelly, co-founder and Editor-at-Large of Wired, takes a look at the Narrow Gates of Inevitability
I am a child of science fiction, so I have not come to these heretical notions easily. But I changed my mind looking at our results so fare. The more we investigate the conditions for life --- any life – to spontaneously organize itself, the more remarkably narrow those conditions appear. Life requires a goldilocks’ touch – not too hot not too cold; not too ordered, not too chaotic; not too strong, not too weak. Up and down the scale of reality, from cosmic constants like force of gravity, to the exact size of our planet, to the temperature that ice molecules melt – all these values and hundreds more turn out to hover around sweet spots that permit the dynamic balance of life as we know it to thrive. In fact the dynamic balance of life, persistently hovering between order and disorder requires sweet spots.
Outside of this very thin corridor of parameters, life-as-we-know-it is denied. The more science investigates extropic systems via models and simulations, the more sweet spots it discovers life depends on. When all these alignments are exposed and listed, the confinement of life becomes quite clear.
A lot of people don't quite understand what the charge of elitism means.
Victor Davis Hanson explains that elitism is a state of mind and not to be confused with anti-intellectualism.
It is a world view in which one’s refinements from the commons—whether they are natural or acquired tastes and interests, whether they be intellectual, musical, artistic, architectural, or simply social—are seen as exclusive rather than inclusive.
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Second, elitism is the deliberate deprecation, in active or passive fashion, of the other world of physicality and pragmatism. The true elitist values his books, his music, his refined taste in furniture, food, and fashion to the neglect of how one makes a book, to the absolute uninterest in the construction of a violin, a chair, a fig, or a pair of pants
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Third, the elitist, by his very nature, proves overreaching. That is, he seems in anti-Platonic fashion, to think his expertise in one field is instantly transferable to another. ..the elitist seems to think that his Harvard Law Degree or Stanford PhD, or Victorian on Pacific Heights instantly makes him a far better guide to human nature, diplomacy, warmaking, and governance—almost anything—than does the sheet-rocker or crane operator.
What gets my goat are the people who sneer at those who believe in and pray to God, you know the Christian bible-thumpers.
Doctor Bob said it best:
The secular mindset cannot grasp that in a morally corrupt world filled with evil, that some might be called to seek the wisdom and power of God to resist evil and defend the good, and through such prayers seek the hope and character to transform the world in some small way to a place where good overcomes evil.
Sippican reminds me once again that bedrock knowledge is practical knowledge about how to do things, make things, repair things and generally make life livable for the rest of us. The older I get the more I appreciate the practical wisdom of working men and women.
The End in the Middle or how to move heavy things.
If I told you you had to move that 439 pound box down a flight of stairs, could you do it? Here's what's at your disposal: A thirteen year old boy, his mom, and whatever you have laying around. Easy. By the way; you're in a hurry, because the item is made from cast iron, and it's going to rain. And you can't drop it -- it's precision machinery.
In my mind knowing how to make, install and repair plumbing is far more important to the human race than finding new ways to package and sell sub prime mortgage loans made to people who couldn't or wouldn't pay them back.
Plumbers, after all, know how to segregate waste and send it away to be treated so we don't ever have to touch it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the CRA regulations, required every bank Issuing mortgages to take on bad credit risks in the name of 'fairness'. I learned as a girl "One bad apple spoils the bunch". I could use more vivid metaphors but this one works too.
After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made sure that bad apples were in every mortgage portfolio, shaky mortgages from every they promised that the good faith and credit of the U.S. government was guarantee every loan. That's why the federal government had to come in and take over and why taxpayers have to pay for all the bad apples. The crisis and insolvency Alan Greenspan warned about has come to pass.
Who is responsible?
I want to see Fannie and Freddie examined for fraud.
Plumbers would never have gotten us into this mess.
Edge also has up the much-talked-about video of Clay Shirky on Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer.
From the Edge, Jonathan Haidt on What Makes People Vote Republican
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Of all the things I read today on 9/11, these are the best.
The Anchoress knows that 9/11 is Remembrance and Prayers that begins with praying the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours. Listen to her podcast of the prayer and then follow her links.
Sissy remembers the prayers of Pope Benedict at Ground Zero "Our hearts are one with theirs."
Gerard Vanderleun reposts The Wind in the Heights, a remembrance of his days watching the fires at Ground Zero from Brooklyn. Beautiful, moving, pure gold.
Sujo John tells his incredible survivor's story about being buried alive when the towers collapsed
Today, still etched in Sujo's memory are the people who perished while he survived and the call on his life to tell others about the name that will take them to heaven.
"I see lost people around me," he said. "Watching people die on 9/11 has totally changed my life."
Neo looks back at seven years at things she never could imagine on 9/11.
From 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center comes the USS New York and its motto, 'Never Forget!'
When it was poured into the molds on September 9, 2003, 'those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence,' recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. 'It was a spiritual moment for everybody there.'
Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the 'hair on my neck stood up.' 'It had a big meaning to it for all of us,' he said. 'They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back.'
Hat tip the Deacon
The inimitable Camille Paglia on Palin
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars."...This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
A very interesting article and back story on the pregnancy and delivery of Sarah Palin's infant Trig Paxson Van Palin in the New York Times and just how she balances work and family.
Fusing Politics and Motherhood in New Way
Sarah Palin’s baby shower included a surprise guest: her own baby.
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Most had learned that Ms. Palin was pregnant only a few weeks before. Struggling to accept that her child would be born with Down syndrome and fearful of public criticism of a governor’s pregnancy, Ms. Palin had concealed the news that she was expecting even from her parents and children until her third trimester.
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Ms. Palin’s three-day maternity leave has now become legend among mothers. But aides say she eased back into work, first stopping by her office in Anchorage for a meeting, bringing not only the baby but also her husband to look after him.
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Many high-powered parents separate work and children; Ms. Palin takes a wholly different approach. “She’s the mom and the governor, and they’re not separate,” Ms. Cole said. Around the governor’s offices, it was not uncommon to get on the elevator and discover Piper, smothering her puppy with kisses.
“She’ll be with Piper or Trig, then she’s got a press conference or negotiations about the natural gas pipeline or a bill to sign, and it’s all business,” Ms. Burney, who works across the hall, said. “She just says, ‘Mommy’s got to do this press conference.’ ”
Ms. Palin installed a travel crib in her Anchorage office and a baby swing in her Juneau one. For much of the summer, she carried Trig in a sling as she signed bills and sat through hearings, even nursing him unseen during conference calls.
Todd Palin took a leave from his job as an oil field production operator, and campaign aides said he was doing the same now.
At her baby shower, Ms. Palin joked about her months of secrecy, Ms. Lane said. “About the seventh month I thought I’d better let people know,” Ms. Palin said.
“So it was really great,” she continued. “I was only pregnant a month.”
I bet her husband has been a really big help since he has been on leave from work since the birth.
Never in my lifetime have I seen such a shameful display of piling on as that demonstrated by the mainstream media this week as they picked up and amplified the most disgraceful and lurid rumors about Sarah Palin and her family without any fact-checking or proof. When contrasted with their non-existent reporting on John Edwards affair, a partisan bias was clear.
What was most shocking to me was the outright sexism on display by other women who call themselves feminists. They greeted the surprising but historic selection of Palin, a self made and accomplished woman by any standard, with disparagement and scorn and charges of tokenism, a cynical ploy even that Palin was 'not a real woman' because she is pro-life.
Victor Hanson captures it best. Target Palin
A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America
It was a relief to read the British press.
Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism
The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.
“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.
“The other kills her own food.”
Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.
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It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.
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No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.
One British reporter flies to Alaska and drives to Wasilla .
Sarah Palin: she came from nowhere
At the age of 10, Sarah Palin got her very own bunny rabbit. Which means to say that she crouched down in the grass outside her family home, aimed her shotgun and blew its furry little head off. That's how things work in Alaska. You kill stuff. You freeze it. You turn it into stew.
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Could all the astonishing details I had read about this 44-year-old woman's life possibly be true? Basketball prodigy. Wife of a half-Inuit named Todd who races snowmobiles and calls himself the First Dude. Part-time commercial fisherwoman. Talented moose-killer. Beautiful - former runner-up Miss Alaska. Mother of five (one of whom is named Piper Indy, after the Polaris Indy snowmobile). And, of course, governor - with an Eliot Ness agenda that has seen her take on the members of her own Republican Party, calling out corruption and wasteful government spending, going as far as to auction her predecessor's private jet on eBay.
Alaska's Margaret Thatcher
Oh boy. I don't know what is going to happen next in the Sarah Palin story, but one thing is now for sure: John McCain has picked an Alaskan Margaret Thatcher to be his running mate.
She spoke for 36 pugnacious, stilleto-heeled, in your face, Barack Obama is a limp-wristed cover boy minutes. She blew the roof off. Sarah Palin has now shaken up a presidential race like no other nominee in modern times.
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Having put to rest any doubts that she is a very tough lady not afraid of a fight, many males in the audience - when not giving her a standing ovation - were instinctively crossing their legs--
o an almost primal roar from the Republican delegates, who had just been treated to a barnstorming attack on the Washington media, Barack Obama, and eloquent defence of what it takes to be a mayor and governor, Mrs Palin greeted on stage her 17-year-old pregnant daughter, the father of their baby, Levi Johnston the high school ice hockey hunk who arrived in Minnesota yesterday, her snow-mobiling champion husband Todd, their son Trig born with Down's Syndrome in April, their two other daughters, and eldest son Track, who is to be deployed to Iraq in a week's time.
We are in interesting times.
"She's like a moose going after a cabbage
How perfect is Sarah Palin's First Dude?
It would, after all, take an icy heart not to warm to an oil rig worker and commercial fisherman from the far reaches of Alaska’s North Slope: a man’s man; a beer drinker; a salt-of-the-earth type. ... Adding to the charm were the stories about the 44-year-old sourdough (slang for an Alaskan native) being a stay-at-home dad who cooked for their five children and put them to bed every night.
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When asked what he saw in his future wife, he said: “She was the best-looking girl on the basketball team.”
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The couple were inseparable. They lived five miles apart but talked every night on two-way radios. They fished together in Bristol Bay. When Mrs Palin broke her hand during one particularly brutal trawl, she went straight back out to sea for the next catch. “I couldn’t disappoint [Todd],” she said. “No matter how cold or nauseous, you just didn’t complain.”
WHY, why, why can't WE have a Sarah Palin
The moose-huntin' mom is the most talked-about woman in the world.
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She was an electrifying mix of passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking. The exact opposite of the slippery, two-faced, depressing bunch of third-raters who parade on our Westminster stage.
How life for men has changed.
Newsweek looks at Why young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland." The never-ending party of delayed adulthood does not bode well.
Tony Dokoupil, 28, engaged to be married, examines the 20 something scene and reads the new book Guyland by the sociologist Michael Kimmel.
the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.
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he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility.
Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.
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The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd.
"Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men" (Michael Kimmel)
What came to my mind was Kathleen Parker whose book Save the Males is causing a furor.
From the London Times, Where have all the real men gone?
The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.
While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves.
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NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.
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By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.
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As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.
His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so...
But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.
Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex.
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In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.
Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.
"Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care" (Kathleen Parker)
I don't write about politics on this blog because so many other people do it so much better and also because I don't want to be defined by politics or my political beliefs. It's a sad fact that too many demonize the other side and make instant decisions on a person based on their political beliefs. Neither party has an exclusive option on truth, goodness or patriotism. Both parties have their loons, radicals and all out crazy nuts.
Politics is important but it's a small part of life.
I used to think it was almost everything. So when I graduated from college, I worked at one of the first campaign consulting firms in the country and worked on several senatorial, a gubernatorial campaign and two presidential campaigns before I went to law school. It was fast-paced, exciting and hard work that can burn you out.
Still, I'm a secret political junkie and when conventions roll around, I fall off the wagon. I inhale political coverage, all the strategy and tactics, the subplots, the speeches, the commentary and the analysts.
Beyond all the appeal to a political junkie, this is truly an historic election. Come November 4th, we'll either have the first African-American president or the first woman vice-president.
The nomination of Barack Obama demonstrates just how far we have come as a nation in putting race behind us. A great part of his appeal is his transcending the old racial divisions that beset us. Some will still say we are an irremediably racist nation but they choose to forget a bloody civil war fought to end slavery, the Civil Rights Act enactedin 1964 outlawing racial segregation in schools, public places and employment and two generations later the nomination the son of a black Kenyan and a white woman from Kansas to be president of the United States. Speaking as one who appreciates political strategy and tactics, Obama has run a brilliant well-organized campaign and inspired countless millions with his rhetoric.
McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate is a WOW. A beautiful mother of five, with one child headed off to Iraq and a new born baby, married to her high-school sweetheart, part-time commercial fisherman, part-time oil worker and world champion snowmobiler, Palin entered politics by way of the PTA, then was elected mayor of her home town, who fought the corruption of the Republican political establishment and won to become governor of the largest state in the union. A self-made woman, she is the mirror image of what we have been led to believe is a feminist. How could she be pro-life, pro-NRA, pro hunting and fishing, for drilling in ANWR, anti-Big-Oil and pro-environment, a tax-cutter and a corruption buster?
She's fresh, real and authentic. As spectacular as her political ascent is, she lives an ordinary Alaskan outdoor life which seems extraordinary to most in the lower 48. She's an ordinary citizen and just as capable to run the government as any ivy-league lawyer from the political class.
I'm become weary of the political class and the professional politicians who have little life experience outside the halls of Congress or a law firm. I like what the Anchoress wrote
I am more and more pleased that she is not another Ivy League lawyer who planned and plotted a political career, but rather a concerned and active, intelligent woman who simply followed her own interests and concerns, and walked through the doors and opportunities as they were placed before her. That’s refreshing - it is also so very “can-do American.”
We forget, sometimes, that Harry Truman was just a haberdasher,
If you're smart, willing to study and have good instincts, you can learn fast what you need to know. Life experience is harder to come by.
Change is already happening.
Boomer narcissism, ageism debunked.
Harris Interactive surveyed 3868 adults between 21 and 83.
Between "the Greatest Generation" and "Gen Y" - five generations of Americans now populate the nation, each distinct and boasting opinions about themselves and one another that often run counter to persistent cultural myths.
Like ageism.
Americans don't hate old people. Americans love old people.
And the Boomers aren't half as fake, annoying and self-absorbed as their collective public image might indicate.
Orson Scott Card is The Ornery American and writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Nobody Was Listening.
Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.
"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life."
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. For the last thirty years of his life he was almost unheard-of. He was dismissed by our media elite as a has-been, a grumpy old man who dared to criticize them as scathingly as he criticized the Communists. They declared him No Longer Interesting.
But he is as important as he ever was. He was mostly right about the Soviet Union; he was mostly right about us.
In the Soviet Union, he was seen as dangerous.
In America, he was rendered powerless by sheer inattention.
Responding to consumer demand, Hallmark offers "coming out" cards for homosexuals and now same-sex marriage cards.
The language inside, "Two hearts. One promise" is neutral enough so the card can also work for commitment ceremonies.
Battling the growing phenomenon of anti-Americanism, a British group has organized a website called America in the World. Good for them.
AmericaInTheWorld is a London-based international alliance opposed to anti-Americanism as well as American isolationism. Via our briefings, we aim to provide the number one factual resource for those who wish to hear the case against anti-Americanism. Our goal is to increase understanding of America, to debunk some of the leading myths about the United States, and to make a positive case for a continuing leading role for America in the world.
AmericaInTheWorld is launched and funded by supporters of America in London and around the world. AmericaInTheWorld receives no American government or corporate funding.
Here's a video A World Without The American Soldier
For their launch, they commissioned a poll of 2000 U.K. citizens to find that Large numbers of British citizens consistently and inaccurately think the worst of America.
The first part of our survey would suggest that large numbers of Britons think America is a land where polygamy is legal, where you don't get emergency medical care if you are poor and where there is more racism than in Europe. Britons also think that America provided Saddam Hussein with a large share of his weapons when, in reality, Russia, China and France were responsible for most of the arms exports to his Iraq. On all of these questions Britons are wrong.
Best of all, they are associated with no party and offer fact-filled briefings that can settle many arguments.
California has thousands upon thousands of medical practitioners. The doctors in this case were not seeking to ban in-vitro fertilization for gay couples. They were simply saying, “Don’t make me do it.”
What they want is freedom: freedom to hold their convictions just as gay couples are free to hold theirs. Freedom to depart from a secular-belief system tyrannically imposed by government — governments having been known to impose any number of beliefs deemed de rigueur at the time . . . and remembered now only for their close-minded noxiousness.
In modern America, plenty of room has been made for gay couples and their life choices. We needn’t vanquish religious believers to make those accommodations. Trying to do so, as California is, will not result in harmony and societal progress. It will add to the campaign of political correctness slowly and needlessly tearing the nation asunder.
Andrew McCarthy's Tyranny in the Name of Progress on the decision of a California court to ban religious objections of doctors when it comes to in vitro fertilization for same-sex pregnancies. In North Coast Women's Care v. Benitez, the California Supreme Court
runs roughshod over the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, seeking to supplant Judeo-Christian principles with the state-imposed religion of secularism. This is a false choice under the federal Constitution, which makes room for both.
I predict that we will see many more such court decisions in a struggle to accommodate both religious freedom and laws banning discrimination against homosexuals.
Forget James Bond, this is what British spies look like. And yes, they had a license to kill
The two peers look like innocent old ladies, but in fact they were two of the Cold War's most formidable spies. They drink tea, stirred not shaken, rather than Martinis, shaken not stirred, and they wouldn't be seen dead in an Aston Martin
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Lady Park, 88, ran agents in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, smuggled defectors out of the Congo in the boot of her Citroën 2CV and was posted to Moscow when the KGB was at the height of its powers. Lady Ramsay, 72, was on the MI6 Iraq desk during the Gulf War and worked in Helsinki when Finland was an intelligence crossroads. She also helped to persuade Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel in the KGB, to defect.
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I always looked just like a fat missionary, which was very useful. Missionaries get around, you know,” Lady Park says.
More Miss Marple than 007: The True Face of British Espionage.
I go away for a few days and war breaks out with Russia invading its next-door neighbor the newly democratic state of Georgia.
Did the balance of power just tip? According to Donald Sensing in Russia's the hare, the UN's the tortoise, yes.
Russia will have its way, whatever its way actually is, and the US and the West will do exactly nothing. The US will not go to war to turn Russia back (nor would the US be able to do so even if it wanted), and Europe can't go to war without the US. Absent a credible threat of force, the protestations of diplomats mean precisely zilch because there are no sanctions that are remotely possible that Vladimir Putin et. al. will think more painful than the benefits of enforcing their will against Georgia.
The balance of power just tipped, folks, and there is not one darn thing we can do about it.
Via American Digest
This makes a lot of sense, certification as an alternative to college.
For Most People, College is a Waste of Time
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.
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The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.
Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an o