RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
Daily Blogs for 3/2009
by Christopher Chantrill
NYT Dips Toe in Climate Denial | 03/31/09
Suppose you were the New York Times. And suppose you decided that what with ...
How to Neutralize the Trolls(1) | 03/30/09
West-coast Drudge captain ...
Beyond Tea Parties | 03/27/09
It’s great to see the growth of the Tea Party movement, and especially to see ...
Dollar Tim Learns Another On-the-Job Lesson | 03/26/09
Yesterday Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sent the world into a tizzy when he ...
Organizing vs. "Organizing" | 03/25/09
It is, of course, an irony that a spontaneous political movement should form within a ...
Government Wants More Power | 03/24/09
I know. So what else is new? The Obama admininistration “will call ...
Bailout on the Cheap | 03/23/09
One thing is obvious. The Obama administation’s plan to bail out the banks ...
Dems on Privacy, Immigration, Mortgages | 03/20/09
Yesterday ...
O-Stone Cops Routine | 03/19/09
The problem with the AIG flap is that we know that all the big players must have ...
The Pride of the Liberals | 03/18/09
In the latest National Review Ramesh Ponnuru ...
The GOP Minority Problem | 03/17/09
It’s the perennial problem: How do Republicans recruit minorities to the ...
The Delusion at the Heart of the Left | 03/16/09
According to David Selbourne in The Spectator, Tony Blair’s rebranding of ...
President Straw Man | 03/13/09
For months conservatives have been goggling at President Obama trying to size up the ...
Five Principles for Conservatives(1) | 03/12/09
A while back I wrote an oped that ...
Don't Blame the Help | 03/11/09
Even partisan Democrats are starting to notice. All is not well with the Obama ...
Dems Start to Split | 03/10/09
Many Democratic elected officials have a problem. They run for election as moderates, ...
"Obama is Overwhelmed"(1) | 03/09/09
If you read Solzhenitzyn’s August 1917 you will recall his description of ...
Dems' Luck Running Out? | 03/06/09
How lucky are the Democrats? They came into power in 1933 after a Republican ...
Obama Blinks on Vouchers | 03/05/09
Candidate Obama was sorta low-key about school vouchers, and you could see why. ...
Let's Get Serious Mr. President | 03/04/09
Now that the president’s budget has been out for about a week, it is time to ...
The Culture of Compulsion | 03/03/09
According to President Obama, he doesn’t believe in Big Government. When he ...
Why Presidents Fail | 03/02/09
Our liberals friends are predictably annoyed by Rush Limbaugh’s hope that ...
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
mysql close 0