America was FOUNDED to be the ALTERNATIVE to the Rest of the World
July 29th, 2010 by ELCore
“Down With Doom”
July 28th, 2010 by ELCore
An essay by Matt Ridley from, of all places, Huffington Post, June 30th:
When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had – that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.
I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me – in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar – about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain….
I began to pay attention and a few years ago I started to research a book on the subject. I was astounded by what I discovered. Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds, the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a second.
Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature’, the `coming anarchy’, a `stolen future’, our `final century’ and a climate catastrophe. Why, I began to wonder did the failure of previous predictions have so little impact on this litany?…
____________________
“In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” (Eisenhower)
People who aren’t free to be rich, or free to be poor, are not free people.
July 27th, 2010 by ELCore
“Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’”
July 22nd, 2010 by ELCore
A rambling essay by somebody named David Mamet.
I gather he is a playwright… as if I pay attention to any such things. Here is his interesting piece from the Village Voice, a couple of years ago:
…. I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it….
____________________
“I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us.” (Washington)
Meeting Next Tuesday; Dance Event Next Friday
July 22nd, 2010 by ELCore
We’re having a 9.12 Project meeting next Tuesday evening, July 27th, at 6:30 at the Galis residence, 630 South Ridge Road, in rural Coal Center.
(See 9 Principles, 12 Values.)
Here’s a reminder about our Dance Event for the whole family!
Friday, July 30, 2010, 6:30pm – 11:00pm
Richeyville Fire Dept Social Hall, 14 Firehall Rd, Richeyville, PA 15358. (Just across from the Friendship Lounge & behind Getgo in Richeyville.) For directions that day: 724-344-1595.
***DJ “Johnny D” will spin tunes from current hits to our good old favorites!
***Located on Rte. 40, 20 minutes SE of Washington PA.
***Food, Beverages, Kids Corner, meet Tea Party and 9/12 preferred candidates in a relaxed and fun environment…
*** BYOB for adult beverages ***
And They Wonder Why We Think They’re Biased (Updated)
July 20th, 2010 by ELCore
From The Daily Caller today:
…. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” ….
This is just another reminder of Mainstream Media’s Number Two Rule:
Help the Democrats, Hurt the Republicans
Update (7/22/2010): The Daily Caller is following up with additional articles, like Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News and When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack. This seems to be an index: “JournoList” on The Daily Caller.
“America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution”
July 20th, 2010 by ELCore
A remarkable analysis by Angelo M. Codevilla.
It’s long, and in some places not especially well-written, but very worth reading:
Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes
its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by
one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and
promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere,
it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards
to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file
activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper
levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties
might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring
money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to
the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally,
is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling
class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to
any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government
— meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit
those who pay with political support for privileged jobs,
contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been
our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and
social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling
and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether
enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make
Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather.
But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes
Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it….While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the
image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to
His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that we are
products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the
will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the
antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective
judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason,
the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are
subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted
with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people
will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science
is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right
people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only
insofar as proper authority acknowledges them….As bureaucrats and teachers’ unions disempowered neighborhood
school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and
states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling
class reduced the number and importance of things that American
communities could decide for themselves, America’s thirst for
self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are
almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the
private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the
sense among many in the country class that they now work for
public employees rather than the other way around. But how to
reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government?
Restoring localities’ traditional powers over schools, including
standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two
generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of
traditional “police” powers over behavior in public places.
Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a
matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped
primarily by the powers of government personified in its
employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any
number of functions now performed and the professional
specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are
superfluous or worse. Explaining to one’s self and neighbors why
such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the
ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a
very revolutionary thing to do….
Continue reading ‘“America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution”’
Forced Altruism Is Slavery
July 17th, 2010 by ELCore
Anyone’s individual moral obligation to be unselfish and help the needy simply does not equate to a governmental power to take from the individual, by force of law and threat of punishment, and be unselfish in his stead.
Video “I Fought For You”
July 15th, 2010 by lhough
In honor of our veterans, please pass on this video. If you have children, share with them. A sign of our times….
All Men Are Created Equal
July 4th, 2010 by ELCore
“A standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all.”
234 years ago today, Thursday, July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, having appointed a committee of five — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — on June 11th, to prepare the document.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, prominent Democrats argued that “all men are created equal” did not actually mean all men, but only white men. Lincoln propounded his own idea of the statement’s meaning and purpose (emphasis in original):
…. I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal — equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.
The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be — thank God, it is now proving itself — a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack….
Here are Jefferson’s original draft, the “report” of the Committee of Five, and the final version of the Declaration side-by-side for comparison.
____________________
“Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.” (Lincoln)