• Cracks in the ranks in Israel.
• An interesting meditation on Melchizedek.
• Very cute.
• Shocking report on a government panel … they didn’t get it wrong.
• Obama and McCain … cricket races and the youth vote.
• Combinatorics on the seven deadly sins … As an exercise for the reader, add the 8th sin (self-esteem) and the 7 (or is it 8) theological virtues.

Two noted, “cricket race” is my term for opinion polls as I think the results are just about as useful. Also, these links are culled from my daily “highlights” that I post on my personal blog, for example here.

• Hostility toward individualism on the left coast.
• Dawn notes that GKC’s Orthodoxy is available for free on mp3. Also, GKC again, in which it is noted by Carl Olson (no relation) “I first read it in 1993 as an Evangelical Protestant; it played a significant role in my journey to the Catholic Church, which my wife and I entered in 1997.” For myself, Orthodoxy was the catalytic book propelling me back into Christianity.
• On the cult of Ms Rand. (HT: Swap Blog). For my part, anybody who has ever read (suffered through?) Atlas Shrugged should also read Matt Ruff’s absolutely hysterical romp Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy.
• The Christian Carnival is here.
• Helping street girls in India.

These are tough times to be a Democrat. After months of battling through primaries and caucuses, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are practically deadlocked in the race for their party’s presidential nomination. Even though several states are still slated to hold their primaries they aren’t going to ultimately decide who the nominee will be. That decision will be made by 796 “superdelegates” who are party officials who will ultimately select the nominee. Never before has the Democratic party had to rely on these unelected delegates to decide a nomination. This was the year the Democrats were supposed to win back the White House. Now, it looks like the party may implode before they can select a nominee.

To make matters worse, Senator John McCain has already wrapped up the Republican nomination which means he can focus on the general election and raise a boatload of campaign cash.

The question now facing Democrats in how to bring their nomination process to a peaceful end. Unfortunately for them, no one has a good solution.

Read the rest of this entry

The conversation with Mr Sandefur of Freespace has continued. He answered, and then I replied (at my blog). He then replied again and here is my response.

Mr Sandefur seems to use only one method of argument, deliberate misconstrual. In his latest sally before I respond, it might be instructive to count both his rhetorical points and his misconstruals and see which wins out [note: score is 0 arguments, 4 misconstruals]. Again, to save space, find the rest below the fold. Read the rest of this entry

Actor Chuck Norris weighs in on last week’s court ruling in California with his own thoughts on homeschooling. An excerpt:

The reason government courts are cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than improving educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely, if ever, stated. If one wants to control the future ebbs and flows of a country, one must have command over future generations. This is done by seizing parental and educational power, legislating preferred educational materials, and limiting private educational options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Josef Stalin once stated: “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Read the whole thing.

Scott Ott, writer at the fantastically funny Scrappleface, also has a more serious blog at the Townhall website.  Today’s entry is a sobering look at the situation with Eliot Spitzer and the prostitute.  The money quote: "The difference between me and Eliot Spitzer is largely this: I have never been elected governor of New York."

Please read the whole thing before you, Republican or Democrat, pass judgement.

[tags]Eliot Spitzer,Scott Ott,politics[/tags]

• I’m curious about this meme, Mr Obama “on top” because Ms Clinton can’t “mathematically” win without superdelagates. Neither can Mr Obama in any real world sense. Why is there a sense that there is a difference there?
• Jehu and the casual cruelty of the ancient world.
• Kill your sister, get one year … in some countries. The country is Islamic. Why is that not a surprise?
• Three myths on poverty and abortion punctured by reality. The link is to the myths where there is a link to reality.
• Beauty in nature via NASA.
• Wise words from Chuck Norris (I’m not kidding).

When Maureen Dowd finally sees the problems brought on by identity politics, and calls it like it is, you can just see the chickens coming home to roost.  However, in the entire article, there’s something missing.  We’ll get to that, but first…

Dowd lays it on the line as to the choice that Democrats have to make.

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

My question to this is; in spite of all the common cause the Democrats have made with Martin Luther King, whatever happened to "the content of their character"?  Or their policies, given that this is the highest office in the land?  Instead, Democrats are fixated on race and gender.

Oh, and age, too.

But Hillary — carried on the padded shoulders of the older women in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island who loved her “I Will Survive” rallying cry that “I am a little older and I have earned every wrinkle on my face” — has been saved to fight another day.

And so we wind up with the very thing Democrats accuse Republicans of doing; voting (or not voting) for someone based on their gender or race or age or some other external characteristic rather than their positions.  This leaves Democrats in the unenviable position,and one of their own making, of seeming racist or sexist even if their true motives have nothing to do with either.

Welcome to our world, folks, where Republicans get accused by the Democrats, the media and the blogs of being racists and bigots regardless of how we explain our positions and our votes.  Stinks, doesn’t it?  So here’s what I see as missing from the article; can we possibly hope that this will be the end of identity politics?

I’m not so sure.  Dowd’s article, while noting the disaster awaiting Democrats…

Just as Michelle Obama urged blacks to support her husband, many shoulder-pad feminists are growing more fierce in charging that women who let Obama leapfrog over Hillary are traitors.

Julie Acevedo, a precinct captain for Obama in Austin, noticed that things were getting uglier on Friday, during the early voting, when she “saw some very angry women just stomping by us to go vote for Hillary. They cut us off when we tried to talk about Barack.

…doesn’t really seem to renounce it.  The sooner Democrats get rid of it, the sooner Spelman students will be able to make an informed decision as to whom to vote for.

[tags]Maureen Down,New York Times,Democrats,identity politics[/tags]

Cross-posted at New Covenant

My cousin asked me, a while back, if I could post some reviews of the various books I’ve read. I’ve wanted to do that for some time, but the task has always seemed a bit daunting (okay… I’ll admit it, I have always thought that it would take too long to write book reviews). After reading Greg Koukl’s Solid Ground article on How to Read Less More (PDF), though, I think I’ve come across a method to both read a book, provide a review, and give my humble opinion about it.

That said, here is my review of Mark Steyn’s America Alone.

The subtitle of Steyn’s book is The end of the world as we know it. On the cover we see a globe, dotted with flags of Islam, and one lonely American flag. The front cover recommendation quote is, “The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds.” – Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Ambassador to the United States.

Those three items alone should give a clear indication of the direction that Steyn is heading: America (as he will define it), alone, stands in opposition to the rest of the world (again, as defined by him). And, the rest of the world is, by all accounts, looking decidedly Islamic.

From Steyn, “Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.”

Read the rest of this entry

• Guitar hero Iraq riff by Mr Yon.
• On Obama and his Biblical commentary (and how it doesn’t really compute).
• Not stopping to pee.
• On Tradition and traditionalism.
• Galileo.

Mr Sandefur claims in response to my allegation that he completely misconstrued my first essay, with an essay in which he thinks that a state has “no rights.” And to be honest, I agree with him on that point … it’s just that neither do people. However in the context of his own question:

This is interesting because this really is the very center of the dispute between libertarians and conservatives. Does the state itself have rights valid against its own citizens, to act for its own preservation at their expense?

On this question, Mr Sandefur has five “objections” to that notion that the “state has rights”. So does a state have a right to craft laws which it believes will lead to its continuance? Clearly virtually every state does so and believes it is right in doing so. Clearly as well, that some states craft laws which belie an incorrect assumption about what will allow them to continue … and they ceased to exist. But, it might be interesting to examine Mr Sandefur’s arguments in the light of those I’d propose. Mr Sandefur’s arguments are, I think, derived from classical Libertarian positions … mine are not classical anything, conservative or liberal. Mine largely derive from recent digestion and assimilation of Jouvenel and Solzhenitsyn viewed in the context of modern and ancient historical events.

I’ll examine those five and attempt a response … below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry

Jason Kuznicki has responded to my reply to a post of his on marriage. Timothy Sandefur has noted that exchange, and it seems can’t have misunderstood or misconstrued what I’ve said any more than he did. I’ll start by remarking on Mr Sandefur’s disappointing remarks and then attempt to reply to Mr Kuznicki.

To recap, in Mr Kuznicki’s original piece, he had noted that the marriage, as a state recognized institution, is more about protecting the married couple against the state than the reverse. In my original piece I tried to establish that, while this is true that is compounded by the following difficulties:

1. Marriage is an institution which has been almost universally regarded to have sacred elements. In a “separation” of church and state there are bound to be difficulties.
2. The state has some reasons to need or defend marriage and that those reasons are not shared equally with same sex and traditional marriages.

Now, while I think the state has reasons to strengthen marriage and hold to any number of various laws regulating conduct, I don’t think the organ of government that does that should be the federal or state government. I think that our current state is in peril, in fact will not continue many more generations, because of the increased concentration of power at the highest (state and federal levels). At the very least this has enfeebled our own individual democratic “muscles”, or instincts and practices of a democratic nature are have been and are being replaced with notions which will in the near future (on a historical time-scale) destroy our polis. What is needed is both a strengthening of the state’s ability to regulate our society but that strengthening needs to be local. Decision that highly fractious and divisive which are today made and discussed at the federal level should be regulated instead at the local, village/precinct level. Each village, township, or precinct should be making for itself the decisions that vex us today, such as marriage, abortion, immigration, and so on.

My response and further thoughts on the two essays linked above can be found … below the fold. Read the rest of this entry

A gunman walks into a seminary library and murders 8 people.

The act is celebrated (photo per FoxNews).

The victims were Jewish. The gunman is claimed by Hamas. And the celebrants are Palestinians.

You do the math.

In, what locals refer to as the “southland”, otherwise known as southern California, we have our fair share of commuter traffic. Actually, I think we have more than our fair share. It’s said, and more often hoped, that the commute on Friday mornings is lighter than the other work days, hence the term “Friday-morning-light”. As is often the case, though, reality bites back harder than you’d like.

Here are some Friday-morning-light tidbits for your perusal:

• Please Convince Me offers some free resources (HT: STR) including a three-part video on the existence of God.
• From Crunchy Con, The Bride’s a slut. They call it progress. A link to a NYT article titled, The Bride Wore Very Little.
• Humans wearing blinders – well-to-do couples discovering that children are not decor.
• From MereComments, a story of a youth-pastor advocating, of all things, that age-specific ministry (e.g., youth groups) should be dropped, in favor of worshiping being done together as a family.

• Good news noted.
• The Middle East and the golden rule.
• Homeschooling under attack in the most liberal of states, which it seems is also wants to be the most totalitarian.
• Fun with chlorine trifluoride.
• Home power plants.
• Finally an intriguing quote.