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Friday, January 18, 2008
Squibs And Squabbles
Apologies for the longish absence. Your Curmudgeon has been working like a draft horse; he's spent the few hours the demands of his trade have left him studying the inside of his eyelids. But this, too, shall pass away...hopefully before your Curmudgeon does.
1. Audio Files.
The Audio Files pages now contain several new items. If there are other stories, essays, poems, or devotional pieces you'd like posted, please say so, either in an E-mail or in a comment to this post.
2. Economic propaganda.
Underappreciated columnist David Strom alerts us to an ongoing calamity:
William Ross Wallace famously declared in a poem extolling the virtues of motherhood that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world."The point is clear enough: shaping the moral and intellectual beliefs of the next generation determines what kind of future we face.
In this age of near-universal government-run education, one of the most important hands that rocks the cradle is the public school. And if reports from Europe are any indication for what the future of public education holds for America, there is much to worry about.
The focus of Strom's fears is the economic propaganda being ladled out to European children in the name of "education:"
Free markets are portrayed in European textbooks as "savage, unhealthy, and immoral," and Theil describes the curriculum as a "diet of prejudice and bias" against capitalism. That prejudice is being reflected in popular attitudes, with German citizens supporting socialist ideals (47% respond favorably to socialism), and only 36% of the French supporting free markets.French and German textbooks are larded with anti-capitalist propaganda, even linking prosperity to failing health. "Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease, and, according to some, even the development of cancer" asserts one French textbook.
The United States isn't truly insulated from this trend. Socialist thinking is well established in America's government-run schools. More, our "educators" perpetually look across the Atlantic when in search of new nostrums to force-feed our spratlings. If the statists who staff our academies haven't yet succeeded in displacing classical economics from the standard curriculum, we may still be certain that they're trying -- and in a field dominated by unions and "liberals," persistence is often more powerful than truth.
Keep an eye on the government-run schools. Their masters know they're in trouble. That makes radical departures from standard curricula and honest educational practice more likely, not less.
3. "Suck-it-up" politics.
Michelle Malkin is never satisfied. She already has a husband, children, a prestigious trade, and a national following. But is that enough? No! She wants a tough guy for the GOP's presidential nominee:
I need a man. A man who can say "No." A man who rejects Big Nanny government. A man who thinks being president doesn't mean playing Santa Claus. A man who won't panic in the face of economic pain. A man who won't succumb to media-driven sob stories.A man who can look voters, the media and the Chicken Littles in Congress in the eye and say the three words no one wants to hear in Washington: Suck. It. Up.
Your Curmudgeon, himself a champion of economic freedom and foe of government intervention, could fervently echo this wish...but there's something else he wants even more: to keep the Democrats out of the White House.
It might take some pandering, in the style of George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, to keep Obama, Clinton, or who-have-you from securing the Oval Office. No sound conservative can be completely happy with President Bush's handling of economic matters, nor with his permissiveness about federal spending. But in real life, the best is sometimes the enemy of the good; in politics, it nearly always is. To prevent genuine calamity, the GOP will probably have to eschew complete fidelity to free-market principle.
In this regard as in all others, the best man on the podium remains Fred Thompson, though it's beginning to look as if it will take a miracle to gain him the nomination. Let's hope he can pull one off.
4. Gold and the dollar.
If you're over forty and have been watching the price of gold lately, you can't help but be nervous about the future purchasing power of your savings, your pension, your notional Social Security payments, and that jar of pennies you keep in your closet. In a compact and pithy disquisition, Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson reminds us why we watch:
From our everyday perspective, in which we habitually express economic value in terms of dollars, gold appears to fluctuate greatly in value. This, however, is an illusion, comparable to the illusion that the sun orbits the earth. If we change our frame of reference from the dollar to gold, we note that gold has maintained roughly the same purchasing power for centuries, and it is paper money that fluctuates wildly in value. Federal Reserve Notes, for example, have less than five percent of the purchasing power they had when introduced in 1914; yet, in not too many years, we will look back longingly on paying “only” three Federal Reserve Notes for a gallon of gas.[The price of gold] is telling us in no uncertain terms that confidence in the dollar is falling. As explained in my Dec. 27 Anatomy of a Financial Crisis,” “U.S. policymakers decided to sacrifice the dollar to keep the financial markets from grinding to a halt. Even before that crisis emerged, the demise of the Federal Reserve Note could be foretold. Americans are drowning in debt. Individuals and corporations hold record amounts of debt, but the greatest debtor of all is Uncle Sam. Only the naïve would think that Uncle Sam can indefinitely finance his $9 trillion of officially acknowledged debt, his other trillions of off-budget debt, and the tens of trillions of unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Social Security, etc. The only viable political option is to have the Fed inflate the money supply, thereby reducing the exchange value of each currency unit, and repay creditors with cheapened dollars.
Properly and powerfully said. If only Dr. Hendrickson would stick to such subjects, where he's both well-informed and well-focused, your Curmudgeon might forgive him his relentless flaunting of his academic credentials.
Incredibly, there remain persons devoted to freedom who can't see why a precious-metal standard is superior to unbacked fiat money issued and managed by a political body. But then, there are persons who think digital watches are a really neat idea. De gustibus.
5. Free speech on campus.
Anyone who keeps an eye on higher education is already aware that speech codes, heavily laced with PC sensitivities, are blanketing the majority of our colleges and universities. A few student bodies have fought back, and a few cases have become visible in the process. But most of the action so far has been at secular institutions; this next case concerns the largest Catholic university in America:
DePaul University, which bills itself as “the Largest Catholic University in America,” was described as a “basket case” on a Hannity and Colmes segment because of its questionable “commitment” to free speech. In the past couple of years DePaul has suspended, without due process, a professor who defended Israel. It has created de facto policies to prevent students from posting flyers opposing an on-campus event featuring the plagiarist professor Ward Churchill. It has also shut down a student-run Affirmative Action Bake Sale in which cookies were sold at different prices depending on the customer’s skin color because the campus left was offended. It later condemned the student group sponsoring the bake sale in a university-wide email. DePaul seemed to have no grasp of the freedoms vital to a university. To cope with the public relations problem its actions had created, last year DePaul president Rev. Dennis Holtschneider assembled a Free Speech and Expression Task Force, of which I was a student member, and charged it with creating a “policy” concerning speech on campus.The Task Force has finally produced a document: Guiding Principles of Free Speech and Expression. The Task Force chose a wise path in deciding against adopting speech codes against “hate speech,” a term which does not appear in the Principles. In fact, the language of the document seems to open the doors of the University to all ideas––as it should. It respects “open discourse and robust debate” and at the same time remains “open to a broad range of ideas and opinions” as a way to “create the best conditions for discovering the truth.” Most importantly, it’s not patronizing and it respects the “right of listeners to respond with their own expression, or choose to turn away.”
It’s also eloquent in its commitment to “ennoble the God-given dignity of each person” -- wait just a minute, I’m sorry. Scratch that whole part about dignity being “God-given.” Such a reference would alienate members of our community who do not believe in God.
“What?” a concerned friend asked me when I informed him of what had happened.
“Yes,” I said, “the Task Force voted to remove ‘God-given’ from the Guiding Principles before releasing it to the university community. That’s not all. The Task Force also voted to remove the phrase ‘create the best conditions for discovering the truth.’ ‘Truth’ was too ‘strong’ and too ‘offensive’ a word for a free speech document.”
Please read the entire article. If you're a Christian, and can't quite believe that a Catholic university would be that concerned about the feelings of atheists, moral relativists, and social-constructionists, rest assured that this sort of thing is rampant at Catholic colleges and universities all over the country. Having opened their doors to persons not of Christian inclinations -- often to improve the prospects of the football or basketball team -- such institutions find themselves required to pander to their own student bodies adversely to the principles which the institution exists to promulgate.
It's bad enough to have barbarians battering at your gates. It's utter madness to open the gates and invite them in.
6. "Cheating" BS.
Every now and then, your Curmudgeon will hear someone -- usually a married someone -- claim that "everyone cheats on his spouse." This is an easily translated phrase; it means "I cheat on my spouse." According to the most trustworthy surveys, which, admittedly, aren't all that trustworthy, about 25% of married women and about 35% of married men admit to having had adulterous affairs. If these figures aren't too far off the objective truth, then the majority of married persons are faithful to their wedding vows: a far cry from the "Desperate Housewives"-style portrayal of marriage as a form of torture from which adultery is the only escape.
If we retreat from marriage and look instead at intimately involved couples who haven't yet tied the knot, we get a different picture of the prevailing attitudes: cheating on your "steady" is regarded as worse than cheating on a spouse! At least, that's what your Curmudgeon infers from the tone of this harridan's diatribe:
Who is ultimately responsible for cheating? And are there ways to prevent your partner from going astray?Personally, I can’t relate to cheating. I’ve never done it nor plan to. After all, dishonesty and lying are two of my biggest pet peeves. They’re inexcusable. To cheat on a lover is cowardly, selfish, and just plain wrong.
Hm. "To cheat on a lover." Not a husband or wife; merely someone whose physical favors one has enjoyed. Perhaps Dr. Fulbright means to include spouses of the legally and morally committed sort, but it's not exactly obvious from her choice of words. What's more obvious is that she wants to validate feelings of betrayal held by unmarried persons who have no reasonable expectation of exclusivity from their "lovers."
Hot Flash To American Singles: You're single. That means you're committed to no one, and no one is committed to you. If you want commitment, you have to be willing to give it as well. There's one and only one state of entanglement that includes a legal and moral promise of exclusive use of your "lover's" fun bits: marriage.
If you allow Dr. Fulbright to encourage you to feel that you're owed something you've never been promised, you'll only hurt yourself. In our time, singles are absolutely unbound, except by whatever personal codes they happen to hold. If your "lover" has implied exclusivity but has behaved otherwise, the odds are about nine to one that you were a fool to believe him. Until you're properly married, you'll get no sympathy from your Curmudgeon.
Or, as Michelle Malkin might say: Suck it up.
7. "For the children" dept.
Have you been wondering along with your Curmudgeon why Congress is holding hearings about steroid use in major league baseball? Considering that there are two armed conflicts to which our troops have been committed, a structural budget deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and serious questions about our strategic posture in a world of $100 oil, you'd think Congress's agenda would be quite full. Well, now it can be told:
‘‘I don’t worry about the players; they’re millionaires,’’ Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, said.But he should because whether they want to be role models or not, the athletes are emulated by younger fans. A study by the Center for Disease Control found that 1 in 16 junior high and high school athletes uses performance enhancing drugs, mostly steroids and amphetamines.
ADD is largely associated with children and teens and with this new information, we may see an upsurge in ADD and ADHD diagnoses with student-athletes.
‘‘It is not a coincidence I began my remarks with the dangers of steroids to young people,’’ Mitchell said, giving ample reason why Congress clearly has a place in the debate over performance enhancing drugs.
So it's all for the children! No wonder a former Democrat Senator and a current Democrat Congressman are leading the charge. Your Curmudgeon didn't realize there were so many children in the major leagues. One does live and learn.
Major League Baseball, long called "the national pastime," was granted exemption from the anti-trust laws long ago, under a rationale unknown to your Curmudgeon. It appears that it was a devil's bargain, for a brimstone-redolent note has now come due.
8. A Coulter misfire.
Your Curmudgeon admires Ann Coulter for several reasons, chief among them that she's never been one to fuzz her message just to placate her adversaries, as too many nominal conservative commentators do. Which made this disquisition on Mitt Romney's "electability" quite a surprise:
I've been casually taking swipes at Mitt Romney for the past year based on the assumption that, in the end, Republicans would choose him as our nominee. My thinking was that Romney would be our nominee because he is manifestly the best candidate.I had no idea that Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire planned to do absolutely zero research on the candidates and vote on the basis of random impulses.
Dear Republicans: Please do one-tenth as much research before casting a vote in a presidential election as you do before buying a new car.
One clue that Romney is our strongest candidate is the fact that Democrats keep viciously attacking him while expressing their deep respect for Mike Huckabee and John McCain.
This point was already extensively covered in Chapter 1 of "How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)": Never take advice from your political enemies.
Turn on any cable news show right now, and you will see Democratic pundits attacking Romney, calling him a "flip-flopper," and heaping praise on McCain and Huckleberry -- almost as if they were reading some sort of "talking points."
Doesn't that raise the tiniest suspicions in any of you? Are you too busy boning up on Consumer Reports' reviews of microwave ovens to spend one day thinking about who should be the next leader of the free world? Are you familiar with our "no exchange/no return" policy on presidential candidates? Voting for McCain because he was a POW a quarter-century ago or Huckabee because he was a Baptist preacher is like buying a new car because you like the color.
The candidate Republicans should be clamoring for is the one liberals are feverishly denouncing. That is Mitt Romney by a landslide.
But Ann, dear, disdaining advice from your political enemies doesn't preclude judging a man on his record of words and deeds. Considering how strongly pro-life you are, this should be of particular concern to you. And that's to say nothing of Romney's having imposed socialized medicine on the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Or his blatant pandering to the auto workers' unions before the Michigan primary.
Miss Coulter seems to think flip-flopping is just dandy if it wins us the Oval Office:
Even when Romney was claiming to support Roe v. Wade, he won the endorsement of Massachusetts Citizens for Life -- a group I trust more than the editorial board of The New York Times. Romney's Democratic opponents always won the endorsements of the very same pro-choice groups now attacking him as a "flip-flopper."After his term as governor, NARAL Pro-Choice America assailed Romney, saying: "(A)s governor he initially expressed pro-choice beliefs but had a generally anti-choice record. His position on choice has changed. His position is now anti-choice."
Pro-abortion groups like the Republican Majority for Choice -- the evil doppelganger to my own group, Democratic Majority for Life -- are now running videos attacking Romney for "flip-flopping" on abortion.
So here we have a man determined to win high office -- first try Senator, second try Governor, third try President -- who trims the sails of his convictions to whatever constituency he needs to please to gain that office, and who reacts to questions about his Mormonism with irritation at best, genuine anger at worst. If this is electability, your Curmudgeon wants no part of it.
Fred Thompson has more years of public service than Romney, a better overall record of conservatism, a proper federalist attitude toward the abortion controversy, and is more forthcoming about his convictions in every way. Why is he not "electable?" Because he has less hair?
9. Race and humor.
If there's any aspect of political correctness that simply has to go, it's oversensitivity about race:
William R. Farr was pretending to read telegrams congratulating this year's award recipient, University of Colorado President Hank Brown, when he pulled out a piece of paper and said, "I have a telegram from the White House."Then he added, "They're going to have to change the name of that building if Obama's elected."
Witnesses said they could hear people gasp in the ballroom of the Adam's Mark Hotel.
"I gasped," said Gov. Bill Ritter, who was sitting at the table with Farr.
Mayor John Hickenlooper said, "I don't think he (Farr) intended any mischief or malice, but it was inappropriate."
Afterward, Farr said he regretted making the remark and apologized to anyone offended.
"I apologize for that," Farr told a reporter as soon as the banquet ended.
"I mistook it to be humorous, but it was something I shouldn't have said."
There's no fooling around about race anymore? Too touchy? Too dangerous? If it were so, your Curmudgeon would have to dump about thirty of his best jokes...but it isn't, and it need not ever be, if we'll just grow our skins back to the proper thickness:
It's candied apples and ponies with dapples,
You can ride all day,
It's girls with pimples and cripples with dimples
That just won't go away,
It's spics and wops and niggers and kikes
With noses as long as your arm!
It's micks and chinks and gooks and geeks --
And honkies...who've never left the farm!That's America, buddy!
[Firesign Theater: How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?]
10. How much should he?
Well, how much?
I don't talk about sex as much as I should.For someone who'd probably be lumped in with the "hedonist" group because of my opinions, I'm surprisingly square. To the extent that I appear hedonistic, it's mostly because I defend hedonists. Occasionally I'll get into sexual issues, but my approach is usually rather clinical.
But I'd better get on the ball, because before you know it, sex with robots will be the rage, and unless I change with the times, I'll still be asking heated rhetorical questions about why people care what people do with each other in the privacy of their bedroom.
Eric, one of the great benefits of sex with robots will assuredly be that talk, of any sort and on any subject, will be unnecessary! And of course, you'll never have to sleep in a wet spot again. Assuming good design and quality control, of course.
And that had better be enough for a Friday in January!
Comments
Great post! Anytime one can work in a FIresign Theater quote, AND the prevention of robotic wet spots!! Well, who could ask for more.
And I wait to see how SC turns out IRT Senator Thompson. I hope he pulls it off, so that:
A) The media will almost be forced to start taking him seriously and provide coverage.
B) McCain and or Huckabee will finally see the light, and pull out.
Keep your powder dry,
Guy
Posted by Guy on 01/18/2008 at 09:25 PMAck! Look out! Text wall! *splankt*
(Although what post here hasn’t been a text wall, I can’t remember...)
But this, too, shall pass away...hopefully before your Curmudgeon does.
As long as you grow out that mustache before you go, no problems here.
It’s bad enough to have barbarians battering at your gates. It’s utter madness to open the gates and invite them in.
Well, now, that depends on what the priorities are. Maybe the barbarians are in possession of something that’s really… something.
This kind of thing helps sort the wheat and chaff.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 01/19/2008 at 12:44 AMExcellent roundup of the current news. I’m with you all the way on Fred Thompson, Francis. He’s far and away the best candidate. However, if it comes down to a choice between Romney and McCain, I’m going with Miss Coulter as I dislike McCain almost as much as I can’t stand Giuliani. He’s the second most unlike the GOP platform out of all the candidates when you look at all the conservative issues.
That said, I would say that we need to line up behind Fred Thompson and go for it as hard as we can whether or not the MSM is going with us.
As far as sex with robots, it says a lot about the pathetic and miserably lonely existence that creeping Gramsci anti-family agendas have brought about in our society. Tragic.Posted by Aurora on 01/19/2008 at 07:22 PMTell there is a way to fund the Thompson campaign which doesn’t ultimately enrich MSM and aid their Pravda-esque influence on how others will choose to vote? I bet I am not alone in pondering this dichotomy.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 01/20/2008 at 02:58 PM...dilemma.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 01/20/2008 at 04:21 PMIn fact, were you to provide me with a tenable answer to this dilemma, I’d be willing to match 50¢ on the $1, up to the legal limit, all contributions to the Thompson campaign that evolved from your tenable solution to that dilemma.
Are you up to the Challenge Fran?
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 01/20/2008 at 04:38 PMOops. Too late! For Fred.
But not for us.
My old friend, “Old media” ain’t so dead after all, is it? Don’t we need to be doing more than just wishing it so?
Like my pleading at Fundraising Challenge Not Only for Our Curmudgeon Regarding MSM,
The very idea that the MSM and its punditocracy, at the behest of many of its most influential customers, is trying to foist Leftist McCain, the dishonest Huckabee, and the questionable Romney or unpredictable Giuliani – in that order – on the conservatives, on the everyday ever more marginalized, decently living, life-loving conservatives of the Republican party, is simply beyond disgusting. It is tyranny. It is far better to come up with a response to little tyranny than to wait for bigger tyranny.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 01/22/2008 at 05:05 PM
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