TOP NAV
BOOK
CHAPPIES
JV CHAPPIES
CHAPTERS

American Thinker
Instapundit
NRO
RealClearPol
TCS Daily
FrontPage Mag
Civitas
Cato Institute
City Journal
Manhattan Inst
Spectator uk
Mr. Chalk
Insp Gadget
WelfareState We'reIn
School Choices
Integral Inst
Lucianne
Day by Day
Bookworm Room
vague notions
StaticNoise
ConChristian
Global Perspectv
Reform
18 Doughty St
Conserv Home
Govt Spending
Dr Crippen
TruthLaidBear
Friendly Socs
Global Guerrillas
Jackalope
Evolvg Excelnc
Cafe Hayek
Climate Audit
Antiplanner
SolarCycle24
PC Bloggs
Liberal Fascism
Daily Mash
EG West Centre
Carpe Diem
Amer Digest
Marriage Savers
BusEconCulture
WattsUpWithThat
Reform (UK)
NASA SatIm
Ctr for Freedom & Prosperity
Demographia
IntelliWeather
GenSocialSurvey
Climate Science
Prometheus
JohanNorberg
CO2 Science
Gene Expression
Mumsnet
climate4you
Money Down Drain
Measuring Worth
Canada Free Press
Greg Mankiw
Roy Spencer
BuzzMachine
Fred Turner
TO VISIT Ashland, Oregon, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is to visit a Petit Trianon of liberalism. It is to experience a perfect stage set of liberal verities.
Why, the very Playbill to the festival season outlines the liberal program. The Mission Statement talks of "cultural richness" and "our collective humanity." The Values Statement speaks of "Excellence" "Inclusion" "Learning" and "Environmental Responsibility," as well and a "safe and supportive workplace" for their company.
As you can imagine, on this stage set there are members of traditionally marginalized groups carefully included in the blocking, even to the extent of a spot of sign language here and there. All except for you-know-who.
And to top it all, here's Artistic Director Bill Rauch:
Whatever one's political perspective, it's hard to deny that there is new optimism in our country, even in these hard times.
You gotta love these liberals. But, in fairness, the Playbill must have been written in the fevered transition between a six percent victory and a triumphant inauguration. But you know that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would never have celebrated the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in such florid terms.
But to be fair (again, because we are conservatives) the festival recognizes that it has a problem. Right now it's in the middle of an American Revolutions project to commission a cycle of history plays. But project director Alison Carey has a problem.
“You cannot tell the story of the United States without including the story of conservative political and social movements,” said Alison Carey told the New York Times.
Unfortunately so far she’s come up blank: “I’ve never had a play come to me that I could say had a conservative perspective,” said Ms. Carey at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adding that if anyone hears of a playwright with one in hand, “send him my way.”
Yes, it must be a problem. The liberal moral/cultural community has just spent half a century telling itself that conservatives have nothing to say. So, not surprisingly, no conservative has imagined that anything they say would be welcome in the uber-liberal culture of the theater.
This sort of thing cuts both ways. If liberals have so "excluded" the possibility of a conservative history play at the turn of the 21st century then it also means that they have no clue about how the conservative temperament works and how it could rise and thrive, perhaps beginning in thousands of chaotic Tea Parties and ending up bringing on some new American Revolution.
Perhaps one say they will be happily repeating liberal-speak to each other as one liberal bastion after another disappears in a confusion of smoke and rubble.
|
| perm | comment(0) | 07/02/09 11:09 am ET
BACK IN THE late 19th century, the Progressives, great-grandparents of today's liberals, were all agreed in substituting a civil service system, with promotion examinations, for the evils of the spoils system. They wanted to purge the governmental apparatus of political corruption and favoritism.That was then. This is now.In 2009 we have a liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 07/01/09 11:07 am ET
THANK GOODNESS for professional atheist Richard Dawkins. Like God, if he didn't exist we'd have to invent him.According to Michael Deacon, Dawkins is helping inaugurate a kids' summer camp. For atheists.Professor Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, is helping to launch Britain's first summer camp for young atheists. At Camp Quest UK, children aged eight to 17 will be given...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 06/30/09 10:59 am ET
LET'S FACE it. The original Duke rape case, the white-boy lacrosse team raping an African-American stripper was too good to be true. Too good to be true for liberals.It hit all their liberal hot buttons: South. Whites. Frat boys. Traditionally marginalized race, gender, class, etc.The new Duke Rape Case, reported by conservative criminology prof Mike Adams, is too good to be true as well. For...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 06/29/09 9:07 am ET
WHAT'S WRONG with me, she asked in the email? I've got "increasingly angry," and it seems like in the Obama world WASPish values like "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination... have been rendered totally worthless in the blink of an eye[.]"Reading stuff like that makes me have faith in America. You see, the United States is built upon a faith, a reckless faith, in...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 06/26/09 1:09 pm ET
YOU REALLY can't blame President Obama. It's not his fault. After all, what is the leader of the Democratic Party for?His job is to implement the policy nostrums of the liberal world.Right now, liberals want, in foreign policy, to negotiate rather than fight a war on terror. In health care, they want to implement their dream of a universal health care program. In energy and environment, they...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 06/25/09 10:43 am ET
EVEN IN THESE modern days, you still want to know if you can trust someone. The trouble is that you can't tell from outward appearance. And you can't tell a dog when it's out hunting. You can only tell when it's being hunted.Of course. some people tell you all about themselves even when they are out hunting. They mistreat the servants. We've had occasion to visit this subject before.Agatha...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 06/24/09 10:45 am ET
| July blogs | June blogs |
IN THESE LATTER days parents no longer talk about children having tantrums. They talk about meltdowns, as in nuclear plants. In my day, of course, children didnt indulge in nuclear explosions. I still remember the shock of reading The Secret Garden and the tantrums of its spoiled rich-bitch heroine, Mary Lennox. No kid that I knew got to have tantrums. It was telling, of course, that the young Yorkshire lad, Dickon, Marys lower-class guide to the secrets of nature and gardening, ...
People are wondering what to do about the Sotomayor nomination. ...
And They Said Bush Was Clueless
THE GREAT EVENT of the second millennium was the rise of the world-historical middle class.... more
Dobb, C. B., Sociology: An Introduction,
Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education
Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system
James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century
F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract
John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present
James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century
David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China
Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state
David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world
Separation of Economy and State
now there's a concept...
Liberals having it both ways on unions
Megan McArdle is not sorry that big-muscle unionism is over, but she is sorry for the folks that staked their lives on it. Hmm. It was liberals that made it possible for this to happen.
Doing God's work
EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study, CEI Says
corrupt: unjust: Gee, I thought that it was just the eevil Bush administration that did that.
President Obama Questioned about Health Care
unjust: Obama won't let his family be limited by government rationed health care.
> more
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Heres how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>
The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the kings peace, the law of contract, and private property.
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
Tear down theory, poetic systems No more rules, no more models Genius conjures up
rather than learns Victor Hugo
Csar Graa, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
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
When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
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
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
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
©2008 Christopher Chantrill
mysql close 0