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May 29, 2007
"Do you know of a better flag to wave?"
[John] Wayne's patriotism was of the simple, refreshing kind. "Sure I wave the American flag," Mr. Wayne told a reporter during the Vietnam War. "Do you know of a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I am not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be."
"The John Wayne Century," by John Fund, OpinionJournal's Political Diary, May 29, 2007
John Wayne - from Wikipedia
John Wayne filmography - from IMDb
The UnOfficial John Wayne website
Posted at 12:47 PM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: America
May 25, 2007
Ronald Reagan on Immigration
The fact that Reagan supported something does not by itself prove that it is right, or even that it is the right position for conservatives. Reagan certainly made his share of mistakes, such as the extremely grave error of trading arms for hostages with Iran. But as Cannon notes, Reagan's positive attitude towards immigration was not just an isolated issue position, but was integrally linked to his generally optimistic and open vision of America. I would add that it also drew on his understanding that America is not a zero-sum game between immigrants and natives - just as he also recognized that it is not a zero-sum game between the rich and the poor. Immigration could promote prosperity and advancement for both groups in much the same way that free trade benefits both Americans and foreigners.
"Ronald Reagan on Immigration," by Ilya Sominm, The Volokh Conspiracy, May 25, 2007
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May 13, 2007
"One of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification"
In fact, the Duke lacrosse case showed a number of things. Yes, there was the issue of the disgraced District Attorney Michael Nifong running amok, suppressing evidence and cynically bartering the lives of three white lacrosse players in his populist bid to win reelection in racially divided Durham. Nifong was certainly part of that “tragic rush to accuse.” As was Syracuse University, which decided not to accept as transfers any students from the Duke lacrosse team--not just the three accused chaps, mind you, but anyone contaminated by having played lacrosse for Duke.
But there are at least two other aspects of the case that deserve comment. One is the role of the media, which with few exceptions descended on the story like Lord Byron’s fabled Assyrian and his cohorts pursuing the destruction of Sennacherib. Oh, how The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other bastions of liberal self-satisfaction loved it! Race. Class. Sex. Victimhood. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white jocks at “the Harvard of the South” just had to be guilty. And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on our own superior virtue!
The editorials, the op-eds, the comments, the analyses poured forth non-stop, demonstrating that one of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification. The novelist Allan Gurganis epitomized the tone in an op-ed last April: “The children of privilege,” he thundered, “feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing.” You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the act. Selena Roberts located Duke University “at the intersection of entitlement and enablement, … virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside.” In August, as Nifong’s case was betraying worrisome fissures, the Times published a 7,000-word article arguing--“praying” might be a more apposite term—that, whatever weaknesses there might be in the prosecution’s case, “there is also a body of evidence to support [taking] the matter to a jury.” As the Times columnist David Brooks ruefully noted after the tide had turned, the campaign against the athletes had the lineaments of a “witch hunt.”
. . .
What a travesty.
"Regardless of the ‘truth’," by The New Criterion, May 2007
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May 11, 2007
Lenin and his heirs
[T]he only equality Lenin and his heirs achieved was an equality of misery and impoverishment for all but a shifting fraction of the nomenklatura. Trotsky got right to the practical nub of the issue, observing that when the state is the sole employer the old adage “he who does not work does not eat” is replaced by “he who does not obey does not eat.” Nevertheless, a long line of Western intellectuals came, saw, and were conquered: how many bien pensant writers, journalists, artists, and commentators swooned as did Lincoln Steffens: “I have been over into the future,” he said of his visit to the USSR in 1921, “and it works.”
Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of eggshells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”) I forget the sage who described hope as the last evil in Pandora’s box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not inapplicable to that adamantine “faith in a better world” that has always been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised.
"Hayek & the intellectuals," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, May 2007
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May 08, 2007
Experts .... and 12 ordinary men
I would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book, than by the Harvard faculty.
Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
"The Twelve Men," by G. K. Chesterton
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May 07, 2007
Notes from a friend
Concerning Imus...
A fine witty quote-
Between Imus and the death of the great Hawaiian singer, it was a bad week for the word "ho". Dennis Miller
A tacky thought-
The first known inappropriate use of the term "ho" was surprising enough, by Walt Disney...dwarf greetings to a young lady..."hi-ho", "hi-ho".
Posted at 10:07 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: America , Humor
May 04, 2007
Fundamentalism: a manifestation of weakness and not of strength.
As with philosophy, I am not sure whether my efforts to understand Marxism were a complete waste of time, which I could and should have employed better. At any rate, when the Soviet Union collapsed, no thanks to my efforts to understand Marxism, I thought, ‘Well, at least I shall never have to struggle through any ideological nonsense again if I want to understand what is going on.’
How wrong I was! In short order, I found myself reading about Islam, a subject of great interest to scholars, no doubt, for nothing human fails to interest them, and of course also because Islam was the basis of great civilisations in the past, but not a subject (in my opinion) worth studying for any internal or new truths that it might be expected to yield me. No; I found myself reading about Islam because it had suddenly emerged as the next potential totalitarianism.
During my reading, I found myself swinging like a pendulum between taking Islam as a threat very seriously indeed, and not taking it seriously at all. The reasons for taking it seriously were that a large proportion of humanity was Muslim, that an aggressive and violent minority had emerged within that population with apparently very widespread, if largely passive, approval, and that the leadership of western countries was very weak and vacillating in the face of this, or any other, challenge. The reasons for not taking Islam seriously were that, in the modern world, it was intellectually nugatory, that the disproportion in power between the rest of the world and the Islamic world appeared to be growing rather than contracting, and that behind all the bluster about the certain possession of the unique, universal and divinely ordained truth for man was an anxiety that the whole edifice of Islam, while strong, was extremely brittle, which explained why free enquiry was so limited in Islamic countries. There was a subliminal awareness - and perhaps not always subliminal - that free philosophical and historical debate could quickly and fatally undermine the hold of Islam on various societies. Fundamentalism was therefore a manifestation of weakness and not of strength.
. . .
In both Marx and Qutb, the idea is expressed that, under the new dispensation, man will become more human, less animal. Personally, I have always found this kind of thought an appallingly arrogant slur on all the people who have lived before the thinker of it: does humanity really have to wait for Marx and Qutb before it becomes truly human?
. . .
The violent imposition of a socialist and Islamic society is justified in the same way in Marx and Qutb: if people were really free, that is to say suffering from neither false consciousness not jahilliyah (ignorance of divine guidance), they would accept the socialist or Islamic state not merely without demur, but joyously, as being for their own good freely chosen. True freedom in both Marx and Qutb is the recognition of necessity. Everything that prevents people from seeing the truth of their messages is an enemy of real, as against merely apparent, freedom.
. . .
Qutb insists that the triumph of Islam is the only way that what he calls the lordship of man over man will be abolished, just as Marx and Marxists insist that the triumph of Marxism is the only way that the exploitation of man by man will cease.
Marx believed that man once lived in a state of primitive communism which ended with the division of labour. Qutb believes (much less excusably or plausibly) that the first generations after Mohammed lived in a perfectly functioning Islamic society. He doesn’t ask himself, at least not in this book, why it was, then, that three of the four supposedly rightly-guided caliphs were brutally murdered. This is a very odd kind of perfection, to say the least. But, just as the division of labour came and spoiled primitive communism, so did Greek philosophy and other innovations come and spoil the perfect Islamic society. Why perfection should fall apart because of outside influences - could perfection be as imperfect as that? - is a question Qutb does not ask himself.
"There Is No God but Politics," by Theodore Dalrymple, New English Review, May 2007
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May 03, 2007
C. S. Lewis - How to Avoid God, and how He will find you.
How to Avoid God
Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.
C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167 (from Maverick Philosopher)
Looking for God
I never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way round; He was the hunter (or so it seemed to me) and I was the deer. He stalked me like a redskin, took unerring aim, and fired.
From "Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: the gift of friendship," by Colin Duriez
And see the video for Johnny Cash's song, "God's Gonna Cut You Down"
Posted at 11:17 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: C.S. Lewis , Spirit
May 02, 2007
Dog Pack Attacks Gator In Florida
From an email forwarded by a friend
At times nature can be cruel, but there is also a raw beauty, and even a certain justice manifested within that cruelty.The alligator, one of the oldest and ultimate predators, normally considered the "apex predator", can still fall victim to implemented "team work" strategy, made possible due to the tight knit social structure and "survival of the pack mentality" bred into the canines.
See the remarkable photograph below courtesy of Nature Magazine. Note that the Alpha dog has a muzzle hold on the gator preventing it from breathing, while another dog has a hold on the tail to keep it from thrashing. The third dog attacks the soft underbelly of the gator.
NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!
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NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!
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You were warned....
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Posted at 08:37 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Humor