1. N.D. offers a bill that will get discussed.
2. Death penalty for Downs?
3. Anti-semitism in Europe has been noted in various quarters. It’s odd how none of those making that observation connected that to either the fall of Christianity in Europe or the rise of Islam.
4. Denominations and brand loyalty.
5. Drood? I do like Simmons writing a lot.
6. Conspiracies and pitchforks.
7. How will the left react to the new surge?
8. I don’t get the lede.
9. Fairness with another name, still stinks. Noted here too.
10. A sign of foreign relations? or what?
11. Of reason and judgement.
12. Pascal being lyrical.
13. Some remarks on the meeting of secular and Orthodoxy in psychotherapy.
14. Schools being stupid.
15. Zooom.
16. Mr Obama contradicting himself, when the shoe is on the other foot.
17. A book on apologetics recommended.
18. The economic story of the Depression and world war … bottom line -> not simple.

Chuck Colson explains that we disregard the past at our own peril.

One of the best exponents of [the role and importance of tradition] was G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, he wrote, “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” And he wrote that “tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

It’s not only respect for tradition that’s involved here—it’s prudence. These institutions and arrangements have helped to preserve the moral order, which is our first duty to maintain. They have been shaped by people who took into account the world as it is—filled with fallen human beings—instead of an imaginary utopia filled with perfectible people.

This respect is why true conservatism is a disposition, not an ideology. It doesn’t seek to reinvent man and his world—its concerns are about what T.S. Eliot called the “permanent things.”

In contrast, perverted modern liberalism, which includes many who call themselves “conservatives,” is about innovation, breaking from the past, upsetting the established order, and maximizing individual autonomy.

Colson is responding to the liberalism that is being taught in our universities, as exemplified in a quote from a Harvard faculty committee.  Read the whole thing.

Kevin Schmiesing of the Acton Institute considers the bill from another angle.

The ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] makes clear that we have not learned one great moral lesson: You can’t have something for nothing. Or, among economists, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I’m not even sure that anybody is seriously arguing that most of the items contained in this bill constitute “stimulus.” Congress can genuinely stimulate the economy in two ways: decreasing taxes and decreasing regulation. In other words, by putting fewer hindrances in the way of those who wish to produce and consume. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Government puts money into one person’s hands only by taking it out of someone else’s; or by creating it ex nihilo, which amounts to the same thing (moralists have been condemning the debasement of currency at least since the Late Scholastics).

If the bill has any positive impact, it will be psychological, making people believe that the economy will improve and therefore generating positive economic activity. This possibility seems doubtful at this point. It appears instead that the measure’s most significant effect will be to increase the cynicism with which the American people view their government. I’m undecided yet as to whether that is a favorable development.

Keep an eye on the Acton Institute PowerBlog.  This is a great group and their take on religion and economics are invaluable.  (More PowerBlog entries on this specific topic are found linked from this post.)

Which means that Hugo Chavez is free to run his country into the ground provided he can continue to finance his programs of "free" services and goods to the voters with oil money.  54% of the country have decided that they prefer the handouts.  It took 2 tries, but Chavez got his wish.

We’ll see if the Venezuelans get theirs.

1. Narrative shock and Ms Pevensie.
2. Mr Geithner’s sooper seekret plan.
3. On that “no true scotsman global warming dissenters” in science narratives thing.
4. On Vaclav Klaus.
5. Bus captions.
6. On Lent.
7. Geek chic.
8. Of names and some not so good.
9. It’s interesting how modern progressive ideas mesh with Mussolini’s list.
10. Ethics and guidance.
11. Unemployment figures.
12. Really laying the hammer down.
13. On the Twist narrative.
14. Well, I answered “no” to both questions.
15. Well, I bought the book … looks good.
16. Suggestions of consequences re Mr Obama’s inexperience (or naivete).
17. Mr Wilder’s and the UK continues.
18. And a book and a list.

All that’s left for the economic stimulus bill is for President Obama to sign it.  A round-up of reaction:

Dan Spencer at RedState notes an Obama quote from the day before the bill passed, “We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”  The accompanying graphic is the ultimate irony.

CBS news reports that the President is going to convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” on February 23rd.  Again with the irony.  The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

And finally, satirist Scott Ott engages in some wishful thinking:

President Barack Obama said today that “after a restless night’s sleep” he will veto the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed by Democrats in Congress on Friday.

“I had a dream,” said a visibly shaken Mr. Obama. “that my daughters, Sasha and Malia, were trapped under the 1,100-page legislation. In the dream I saw my girls as women in their forties and they were still paying for this. I woke up, and did the math, and realized that it wasn’t just a dream. Has anybody read this thing yet?”

Read the whole thing, even if Congress won’t.

1. Two symbols examined, one a very important lady with a torch.
2. A feast day, the presentation.
3. The press and Islam.
4. The tour of California, a graphical view of what have your day job be in a saddle.
5. Lamarckian descent/inheritance revisited.
6. Chant.
7. “Move over to the side of the road” alligator version.
8. Of Apple and Microsoft.
9. So … now Mr Obama has taken up the “religion of peace” slogan. What is it with these Presidents?
10. Also, how about the religion of desecration?
11. Mr Ping and the stimulus.
12. I’m willing to bet that few, especially of his detractors, think of the Pope as cheerful (but I’ll wager he actually is such).
13. UK and “Fairness”.
14. Christ and Christianity without his death.
15. Obama and the birth certificate weirdness.
16. A lecture on an early heresy.
17. Why is that the left cannot argue for the stimulus without resorting to logical fallacies (poisoning the well and ad hominem attacks in this case)?
18. So … dollhouse, whaddya think, here’s an interview.
19. Five films.

1. The new openness in the Administration, “cannot comment on specific instances” … or not. More on the census as well.
2. Mr Reid notes a problem with the SBC.
3. Which was basically the same as the problem that St. John Chrysostom had 1500 years earlier.
4. Taking the WSJ to task.
5. If I was on the left, observations like this, “During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas” would be quite troubling.
6. Ecclesia.
7. Endurance sports and camaraderie … perhaps a Romans 5:3 thing?
8. Banach-alia.
9. One model reviewed … the sort of thing detail and discussion lacking in the beltway to support their policies.
10. Whether or not there is a right to privacy … the government certainly has reserved the right to extreme stupidity.
11. Aha! (from the left).
12. Supply, Afghanistan and the necessity for relations with Pakistan.
13. Coptic resource for the coffee table.
14. Yikes.
15. CBO and stimulus.
16. Big number found.
17. The state, morality and legislation.
18. Pippin and Obama.
19. Considering the Cylons.
20. It was remarked in a comment here that “no debate has been stifled” regarding the stimulus bill … evidence to the contrary is here.
21. A suggestion regarding the housing market problem I’ve mentioned (in conversation if not on the blog) made elsewhere.
22. So … if you think carbon offsets are an issue … how much do you use a bike for daily travel? If not, perhaps you’re just a hypocrite like Mr Gore.

This is an attempt to examine the question:

Vigilantism is justified when the government has failed to enforce the law.

In the following, two aspects of this question will be examined. One is to examine a famous example of the social custom of vigilantism in a very libertarian society in our American historical past. The second will attempt to touch on some of the foundational political aspects of this question, i.e., to look at authority and society and where force fits into that picture. Please find bulk of the essay “below the fold”. Read the rest of this entry

There is no way that we could possibly eliminate single parenthood.  It’s not an ideal environment to raise a child, but sometimes it simply can’t be helped. 

However, single parenthood by choice — mostly single motherhood — is certainly something we ought to discourage.  Dan Quayle got castigated by Hollywood when he pointed to the TV character Murphy Brown, who chose single motherhood, as a bad example.  He was right.  Obviously so to those of us who understand how important it is to be raised by a mother and a father, but not so much for those that think everything’s cool.

It took a long time to see some of the effects, but in Britain, it’s revealing itself.

A deputy head who sat on a Government taskforce aimed at improving behaviour in schools yesterday condemned a generation of modern parents as ‘uber-chavs’.

Ralph Surman said the parents of today’s pupils were themselves the children of the ‘first big generation of single mothers’ from the 1980s.

He claimed they – and in turn their children – have been left with no social skills or work ethic and may be impossible to educate.

Mr Surman spoke out in response to figures unearthed by the Conservative Party, which show that the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training – known as NEETs – is rising across Britain.

‘We must talk about a class of uber-chavs,’ he said.

‘They are not doing anything productive and are costing taxpayers a fortune.

When everything is provided to you at other’s cost, you have no appreciation for it.  Government wanted to show it cared by providing care for these children and their mothers.  It took much of the worry out of being a single mother by choice, and it took much of the guilt away from men who abandoned their children ("Hey, they’ll be taken care of by the nanny state."). 

Yes, the Bible tells us to take care of the widows and orphans, but personally.  When we abrogate that function to the impersonal government, don’t be surprise when people start to take it for granted and expect it.  And the results, it seems, are worse for those who give and those who receive.

Another interesting story that came out about California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, and the effort to make public the names of donors who supported it, was this article from NPR showing how the Teacher’s Union and its own teachers were on different sides of the question.

As California’s legal and cultural conflict over same-sex marriage played out this fall, the state’s teachers union put up $1.25 million to advocate against the gay marriage ban.

But at the same time, individual public school teachers in the state were giving more money to enact the ban than to defeat it, according to an NPR analysis of Proposition 8 contribution data recently released by the California secretary of state.

Teachers, aides and counselors in California public school systems gave about $2 to support the marriage ban for every $1 they gave to oppose it. The educators gave some $450,000 in individual contributions to advocates supporting the ban and about $210,000 to those opposing it, according to the NPR analysis.

So the union went against the very people it purports to represent, and spent the dues money teachers are obligated to pay in a political cause that the majority of dues-payers opposed.  What a scam!  If you want to educate our upcoming generation, you must donate to political causes that you disagree with.  No wonder liberals love unions; it’s a cash cow for their pet causes.

Never mind the fact that an organization who’s purpose is to supposedly look out for the rights of teachers is giving money to a political cause completely unrelated to their charter.  Not only are teachers forced to underwrite this, it has nothing at all to do with their welfare as teachers. 

I say again; what a scam.

From Michael Ramirez (click for a larger version):

Henceforth, should any Congressman tack on anything to any bill ever, he or she can just say, “Hey, it’s economic stimulus for my district!”  Obama and the Democrats have redefined the word “earmark” into oblivion.

1. A book recommended.
2. Transparency or not, perhaps Mr Twain’s little saying might be amended to “lies, damned lies, statistics, and anything said by a politician”.
3. Just a trip to the UK.
4. Some kids living where winter doesn’t come.
5. Well, you’ll have to pay for that … and the other.
6. The Pope on the ladder.
7. A heroic lady noted, Stanislawa Leszczynksa.
8. A hill … and a bike … and another rider noted here.
9. The difference between Mr Obama and the Dems stimulus bill and Tenaha … the size of their theft.
10. They are.
11. Who. Are. You.
12. A question.
13. Another.
14. Mr Obama standing firm against the economy and recover and its effects. Ah. It’s all part of a super duper secret plan.
15. Why Wednesday and Friday (and Monday for the monastics I think) for fasting?
16. Salary caps and a comparison.
17. Religion and nation.
18. Some economic hypothesis tested.
19. Yet another Democratic tax cheat close to the President.

The legal defense of abortion rests on a claim of a right to privacy. Alas, following the argument below, it seems this right is used as a legal proxy and is not consistently applied. By legal proxy, I mean that it is the legal argument/excuse used to justify the legalization of abortion (for other reasons unstated) and is not a right which is given in other comparable or parallel circumstances. Consider the following three somewhat related cases involving immunization. Immunization is fundamentally a private thing involving the manipulation of your immune system, which is clearly a private part of your person. If the state feels it can adjust and order your immune system programming for its purposes, logically it can also do so in the case of pregnancy.

1. Pubic schools demand immunization of children attending. While it might be said that public education is not a right, education is a requirement placed by the state on parents. You cannot legally raise your child and deny him or her an education. However that is not relevant to the question. The point is, immunization being private should not be a question asked or required to be answered by the state regarding education or any other purpose.
2. When you travel abroad certain immunizations and proof of the same are required for exit and re-entry into the country. One cannot claim a right to privacy to waive this requirement. Again, if this is private how can the state justify this in the face of their stated alliance to a right of privacy. Should one not logically be able, akin to “claiming a fourth Amendment right” be able to stake a claim to one’s right to privacy and refuse to provide information regarding your immunization status?
3. Consider the case of a modern carrier, a Typhoid Mary, if you will. That is to say, ,she/he is a person, symptom free, who is an active vector for a disease. I claim that this person if identified, would be given treatment and by court order if she refused. When this was suggested earlier in a comment, Boonton suggested she might be exiled. However this suggestion clearly fails under examination as the public/foreign relations problem of knowingly sending an active disease vector to another state is, well, just a little problematic. Perhaps we might also, in those states where there is no capital punishment, exile serial killers as well. The only realistic solution, once discovered, is that this person would be treated, willingly or not.

How is that from a legal standpoint are immunizations required? The logical reason is of course the health and safety of the people. Yet over a million are killed per year by abortion. That is clearly a health and safety issue for quite a number of human lives, in fact a quite terminal question for those. And, if you argue the non-personhood of a early term fetus, one still faces the 45 late term abortions performed per day … and after that a small number of executions of infants for whom that late term abortion was intended but botched (botched in that the infant was failed to be murdered at the appropriate moment in the delivery process). It is in this latter case that our current President (in)famously argued that those failed executions should be carried out at any rate.

So there is a logical inconsistency here. Abortion is claimed as a privacy right. Yet analogous privacy rights are waived every day in circumstance not related to abortion and the reason that right is waived is exactly the same claim made by the abortion opponents why abortion should be regulated if not prevented. So perhaps dropping the rights talk regarding privacy in the legal and ethical discussions might be helpful, for that’s really just a smoke screen for something else.

The election in Israel, the outcome of which makes parliamentary government very entertaining to watch, gave more votes to right-leaning parties than to left-leaning ones.  Meryl Yourish with the analysis:

The vote in Israel shows that a majority of Israelis voted for right-leaning parties. Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party, loathed by many for issues like wanting Arab Israelis to swear a loyalty oath, won fifteen seats in the Knesset. Labor, the party that gave us the worst Defense Minister ever (but the best Stalin lookalike, Amir Peretz) won only thirteen. The “peace” parties—the parties that the world most expected to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians—were shoved aside. Why is that? Why is Labor doomed to the opposition, and Meretz even more marginalized than before?

Her answer is basically that the rockets voted. That’s actually a phrase I read in an opinion piece in the Atlantic, though it does convey her meaning. 

But the thing is, the rocket fire hasn’t traumatized the Israelis so much as it has woken them up.

Israelis want peace. But the policies of the last decade have failed. So Israelis are voting for the strong horse, as they say, but only just. The right-leaning parties have a bare majority in a 120-seat Knesset. The majority of Israelis no longer trust the peace process, because they’ve tried it for decades, and every time Israel gives up land, in return, they get terror.

The Gaza Strip was not blockaded when Israel first pulled out. Instead of working on building Gaza up economically, Gazans destroyed every last vestige of Israel, including the greenhouses, and then installed Hamas firmly into the government. The message to Israel was clear: We’re still going to destroy you. The thousands of missiles carried that message to southern Israel on a regular basis. Even now, Hamas refuses to stop the rockets, refuses to put aside “resistance,” and still calls for an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Israelis aren’t stupid. They were hopeful. They were optimistic. They were willing to believe that the Palestinians wanted peace just as much as they did.

They were wrong.

And that’s why the Israeli vote went to the right. Not because of the drivel that you read in the AP that says Israelis have a “self image as a besieged nation surrounded by enemies.” Not because “many Israelis are still traumatized by the Palestinian uprising.”

Sorry, John Lennon.  They gave peace a chance, for decades, frankly, and through the barrage of thousands of terrorist attacks in just the last 7 years.  Every effort and concession has been made and still their adversaries will simply not abide by their agreements. 

So now, Israel has spoken, and softly at that.  This was not an overwhelming change in political power, but it was significant.  Israel’s attackers have been put on notice.  Once more.