Posts with the tag 'Philosophy'
But not the sort of fight against poverty, perhaps, that we think of here in America:
Presiding over the celebration of Mass for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, Pope Benedict XVI re-emphasized the need to fight poverty to build a society of peace. Violence, hatred and mistrust, which he called “forms of poverty,” must be brought to an end, especially in the Holy Land, he exhorted.
The Holy Father began his homily by commemorating the Incarnation, “a light which will not go out and which offers the faithful and men of good will the possibility to construct a civilization of love and of peace.”
“The Second Vatican Council said, in this regard, that ‘by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man,’” the Pope noted.
With his birth in Bethlehem, Benedict XVI said, Jesus reveals to humanity that God chose poverty for himself in his coming among them. “The scene that the shepherds saw first and that confirmed the announcement made to them by the angel is that of the stable where Mary and Jesus looked for refuge and of the manger in which the Virgin laid the Infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.”
Turning to today’s celebration of the 42nd World Day of Peace, the Pope explained that its theme– Combating poverty. Building peace– contains two elements: “the poverty chosen and proposed by Jesus and of combating poverty to make the world more just.”
The second consideration is that “there is poverty that God does not want: a poverty that impedes individuals and families from living according to their dignity; a poverty which offends justice and equality and which threatens peaceful coexistence,” the Pontiff said. In addition, he pointed to forms of spiritual poverty: “marginalization and moral and spiritual misery.”
“To combat unjust poverty it is necessary to rediscover sobriety and solidarity, those evangelical and at the same time, universal values,” Pope Benedict asserted.
We wrap ourselves up so much in income levels and judge peoples’ wealth or poverty by the amount of things they have. Now, to be sure, there is actual, physical poverty which we must, as far as possible, end. Those who lack their daily bread, and a roof over their heads, and clothes on their back - they must be succored by a world which does not pause to count the monetary cost of such aid. But while such physical aid has its vital place in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t attack the real poverty of our modern world, which is spiritual.
Most of the people in the world today are poor. Most of the people who have ever lived were born in to poverty and never rose out of it. And yet with poverty being the normal condition of Man, it has only been in the past century or so that we’ve gone down into the depth of human degradation.
In the last century, at least 100 million people were murdered for political reasons. We abort millions of our children every year. Pornography has become mainstream and the objectivication of our fellow human beings - mostly women, but a large number of men, as well - is considered a right so important that we daren’t place even mild restrictions on it. We think people have a right to lie on our streets in their own filth. We’re teaching our children to massacre their school mates. People set off bombs to kill the innocent. These are the actions of people who are spiritually impoverished - people who may, especially in America and the larger West, live in the greatest of ease and surrounded by wealth kings of the past couldn’t dream of, but who are so morally bankrupt that they can’t bestir themselves to even so much as see evil, let alone do anything about it.
We’re given the simple solutions - just give the Palestinians some land. Just provide sex education. Just withdraw from Iraq. Just ban racial profiling at airport security. Just control guns. Just increase foreign aid. Just go through the UN. Just to this. Just to that. Just do the other thing. But almost nowhere in this world is there the leader who doesn’t merely give lip service to the concept of hope, but who seeks to make it manifest. In other words, the leaders who understand that the problems of the day are fundamentally spiritual are few and far between. You could give the Palestinians all the land you want - give them Alaska and throw in half of Canada for good measure, and it won’t change the fact that the people who strap bombs on themselves don’t really need land, they need a moral revival. Provide all the birth control and sex education you want, and it won’t cure the person who has been degraded to the point where they say, “yeah, give me some money and I’ll allow a stranger to f**k me on camera”. Triple the budget for Head Start and develope the most comprehensive anti-violence education in school and it won’t do anything to sway a kid who is learning, step by step, that its cool to take guns to school and massacre the student body. We’re bleeding to death and we keep trying to put a band aid on the societal lacerations.
Sobriety and solidarity are, indeed, the keys to a revived human society and the restoration of an advanced civilization. Sobriety - not just not getting drunk and stoned, but a set of mental attitudes which refuses excess and which places self indulgence on a much lower plain than self sacrifice. Solidarity - an understanding that we really are our brother’s keeper and that even those who are doing the most wicked deeds must not be allowed to make hatred and despair grow in our hearts. Naturally, as a Christian, I believe I know where one can get this - tap in, that is, to the wellsprings of sobriety and solidarity. But not all my brothers and sisters are Christian. But, still, it remains something we must do - Christian or not - in order to survive as humans rather than die off as a failed experiment, or regress entirely into savagery.
Tags: Benedict XVI, Philosophy, traditional morality
January 3rd, 2009
It is one of the more fun aspects of being right-of-center, ya know? While our liberal friends wet their beds over what to say and wear, we on the right get to see things as they are - and Victor Davis Hanson has 10 un-PC things to say, this one striking me as most important:
The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.
A very large percentage of the American population is primed for slavery - to become the mere cogs in a totalitarian machine. This is because a very large percentage of Americans simply does not know what is what. I’m stunned at times at what people don’t know, and at what they do know which isn’t so…probably 9 in 10 Americans can state at least some part of one of the many bogus conspiracy theories explaining the Kennedy assassination, but I’ll bet not 1 in a 100 can identify what happened at Leyte Gulf. Too many of us know too much that didn’t happen or is irrelevant; too many of us don’t know the things necessary to make an informed decision - and thus the continuing strength of liberalism.
Part of this state of affairs is intentional, part of it the result of sheer laziness. The intentional part comes in from those elements of the left who despise, out of ignorance, the civilization they live in, the laziness part of it comes from the fact that a government employee gets paid the same regardless of whether the kids in school learn much or learn nothing…and its much easier to teach them nothing. The upshot of all this is people who think that “rights” means the right to wear strange clothes and have sex; that freedom is the ability to be irresponsible with no consequences; who believe “question authority” means “reject authority without question”; that evil doesn’t exist; who’s knowledge of history would embarrass an 8 year old of 100 years ago. Such people are easily convinced that a cartoonish, two dimensional fairy tale reflects reality - and are also people easily convinced that a particular person and/or movement has all the answers and, furthermore, that to oppose such person and/or movement is not just mistaken, but pernicious.
My view is that a majority of Americans still knows enough of what actually exists and what actually happened to control, for the moment, the ultimate destiny of the United States. I could be wrong - we could have already tipped over into majority-servile in our population. If that is the case, then the enslavement of the American population to its ultimate destruction will proceed unchecked from now until such time as an outside power raises its banner over Washington, DC and proclaims the end of the United States of America. If such is the case, then my fellow Americans will have obtained nothing more - and nothing less - than their desire. People do get the government they deserve - and usually get it good and hard, as Mencken once noted.
As for me, it is my duty to do what is right, as best as I can determine it - even if I were to end up a minority of one. There really is no reason for anyone to ever despair. Ultimately, good will triumph over evil, even if a particular nation in existence today - and which has done much good in the world - fails to survive until that ultimate victory. The torch of reason and morality is inextinguishable, no matter how obscured it can be, at times. So, into the battle I go, convinced of victory - and pitying rather than hating those who oppose me, because they have so sadly limited themselves in the enjoyment of knowledge.
Tags: conservative truth, Judeo-Christian Civilization, liberal lies, Philosophy
November 23rd, 2008
You know, so that we can, for once, tackle a non-controversial subject here at Blogs for Victory? Well, then, lets have at it with Michael Novak’s piece over at First Things:
Let’s suppose there is no God. The same evils still exist. Are atheists suggesting that the nonexistence of God and the existence of evil fit neatly together in a logical argument? That, if little children, beaten into submission, sob in the night, it is somehow a telling argument for atheism?
Christopher Hitchens has argued that before our time human beings suffered 98,000 years of disease, cataclysm, bloodshed, and famine without intervention by any Creator. If a human creator had deliberately chosen to put hundreds of millions of his fellow humans in such a parlous state, he would be regarded as a monster. It follows that if God willed that long, bleak, agonizing history, God in his omniscience and omnipotence is an even greater monster.
Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance…
…St. Thomas Aquinas posited the striking thought that for this world to be as good as it is, the existence of evil is necessary. Evil is not a “thing”—no substantial thing at all. Against the Muslims, Aquinas flatly rejected the centuries of Eastern philosophy that divided the world into good and evil, as if they were equal contestants, equally substantial and active and potent.
Not so, Aquinas reasoned. Everything that the Greatest of all Goods has created is suffused with good up to the brim of its capacity. But for the world as a whole to be good, it must be populated by the most beautiful and god-like creatures of all—creatures capable of insight and deliberate choice. It requires the liberty of human minds and wills. Only at this peak of nature can human creation be considered made in the “image of God.”
The Jewish Creator offered every woman and man in his creation his friendship, and in this way treated each as a free person, not as a slave. Such human liberty required God to create a world in which human beings can of their own deliberate choice turn away from the good. This is how Aquinas defined human sin: a considered and willful deviation from the good, an absence of the good, a deficiency.
“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. The leaders of the Anglo-American Enlightenment believed that liberty was God’s underlying purpose in creating human beings, and in shaping the rest of creation accordingly. They believed that in the war between the Americans and the British in 1776, though both worshiped the same God, the God of liberty would favor those who fought for freedom, not against it.
A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion.”
Even the “angelic” light of advanced mathematics (so highly abstract and removed from corporeality) must in a world of liberty be constituted not only by arithmetic, geometry, and deductive reasoning, but also by the statistically random.
In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good.
C.S. Lewis observed that God made a world in which the wood from a tree could be used to build a house - or to make a club. Now, God could have set things up so that as soon as someone made a club the material would transform into something which could do no harm…but that, of course, would be to deny us our choice. If we can’t choose to do wrong, then we have no choice at all, and God wants our choice to be voluntary. He’ll take us in if we choose him, and he’ll ratify our choice if we reject him. To say that because there is evil in the world there must be no God is to presume that the only good world is a world in which we’re all automatons doing what we’re programmed to do. As to why God made us this way rather than another way - well, he says it is good, and I’m not going to gainsay God.
To me, the logic of there being a God (outside of the unanswerable argument of there necessarily being a First Cause) rests upon the fact that I can think - that I can reason. No amount of materialist evolution would ever come up with an evolutionary product which could refuse its office. We can choose - we can decide to this, or decide to do that. And while we know what our brain is and a great deal of how it works, we haven’t the foggiest notion or what our mind is or how a thought is generated. You can tell what parts of my brain are working when I think of, say, the football game - but you can’t in the trial of a thousand years figure out why I think the Chargers are better than the Patriots, last year’s records be darned. Itis mind which doesn’t fit into the natural world - and so, in my view, mind must come from outside the natural world (as a side note, I recently read an interesting question: The Universe is expanding. What is it expanding in to?…if the universe is complete and yet growing larger, there must be something outside the universe, greater than it, which allows the universe to grow larger).
Take a First Cause and add a Mind, and what you get is a God who not only creates, but who can act in his creation..alter it and move it towards the goals he designed from the start. While such a belief does not, in and of itself, verify my Christian faith, it does leave aside any thought that we are either the result of random chance, or the result of an uncaring Creator.
Tags: creation, Evolution/Intelligent Design, Philosophy
July 30th, 2008
You’d think that with Obama’s success at obtaining a low-cost mansion for himself that he’d have been more effective on housing for the poor:
The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
But it’s not safe to live here.
About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.
Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama’s former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.
Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
When we first started building public housing it became a complete disaster - the government ponied up the money to have them built and then managed the housing with a maze of bureaucratic rules which made it impossible to get rid of bad elements and dead certain that the housing would become blighted in short order. The phrase “public housing” by the early 1980’s immediately brought to mind images of crime and filth. And so reforms were proposed - the crowning effort to actually fix the problem was initiated by “bleeding heart” conservative Jack Kemp who initiated the Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program while he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Elder Bush Administration…unfortunately, budget battles in cabinet and unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to spend money on a GOP-inspired anti-poverty scheme which would disempower Democratic-donating bureaucrats essentially killed the very promising program - it does linger on to this day, but it never was able to accomplish its primary purpose of making poor people into home owners so that they would be empowered and have the incentive to keep their neighborhoods up to snuff.
What has happened since then has mostly been a boondoggle, as we can see from the quoted article - favored contractors getting government swag to build low-cost housing and as these contractors are protected by their bought-and-paid-for political patrons, there isn’t much incentive for the contractors to actually build something useful. The problem isn’t just in Chicago, to be completely fair to Obama here - we have a low cost housing development here in Las Vegas which was built on toxic soil and was useless from the get-go. But the problem for Obama is that with a rather thin resume’, he can’t afford to have any of this corrupt business-as-usual political backscratching going on - and it appears that he was very happy to be hip deep in it. Now the connections to the corrupt Rezko and his shady mansion deal become more stark…coupled with the revelations that Obama’s supporters profited off Obama-backed slum construction, it shows that Obama is deeply involved - indeed, owes his rise to - the hopelessly corrupt Chicago-area Democratic politics.
So, good people, if you want a President who will ensure that well-connected contractors make money by building unlivable slums for the poor, Obama is your man…if you want something different that warmed-over liberal politics of the past, then McCain would have to by your choice.
Tags: government spending, housing, liberal lies, Philosophy
June 28th, 2008
From G K Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
Thus our liberals - who started with an ideal of liberty and equality, and are now on an ideal of sexual license and socialism. Its easier, you see?
Discuss.
Tags: Philosophy
June 7th, 2008
A news story to get the ball rolling:
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima, Peru, has warned against a proliferation of supposed human rights that are “invented” by international organizations, the ACI-Prensa news agency reports.
In his weekly radio address, Cardinal Cipriani observed that genuine human rights are “based on natural law, a law that is etched on men’s hearts.” These rights, he added, are not created by a mandate from the UN or any other human organization.
The cardinal went on to put his listeners on guard against political organizations that push for recognition of new forms of “human rights,” including alleged rights to abortion or to define one’s own gender preference.
Citing the speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the UN in April, the Peruvian cardinal emphasized the human rights must be defended on the basis of a secure and unchanging appeal to natural law, which endures across the boundaries of times and places. He added the observation that human rights imply corresponding human duties, and those duties, as well as the rights, should be properly understood and defined.
In my view, something can only be called a human right if it is something which is at least potentially inherent to an individual human being - I can at least potentially talk on my own, so I have a right to free speech. I can at least potentially defend my own life, so I have a right to self defense. On the other hand, I cannot perform surgery on myself, so I have no right to health care. I cannot marry myself, so I have no right to marry. And so on.
There is a lot of nonsense spoken these days about human rights - a right to marry, a right to health care, a right to education, a right to housing…if I have a right to housing, what sort of house? Where located? Containing what household goods? Once you start asking these rather basic questions, the whole concept of a right to housing is immediately shown to be asinine. Unfortunately, our leftists never ask such questions (intellectual curiosity has never been encouraged on the left), but by packaging the desire for these things in the guise of Judeo-Christian morality, the left has successfully convinced a very large number - and some times a majority - that their spurious rights are real, and must be accorded legal status.
It is useful that Benedict XVI, Cardinal Cipriani - as well as many others - are now pointing out that human rights are precious things, and must not be cheapened by making every political desire a campaign for a mythical human right. If everything is a human right, then nothing is a human right - and so by insisting I have a right to health care, I’ve been stripped of my right to life, as the government-run health care (designed to secure my supposed right to health care) comes at the cost - as we see more and more often - in a government bureacrat deciding if I’ll obtain life-saving care or, even, if I’ll be killed (”assisted suicide” and euthanasia, eg) because my continued living is inconvenient and/or expensive.
Our rights are granted to us - without charge and, indeed, without deserving it - by God on high, and are only to be taken away by Him, as He sees fit. Without this fundamental principle, all government becomes a tyranny - and all attempts at justice a sick fraud. But God didn’t grant us a right to everything our little hearts desire - he granted us those rights we need to be the creatures he wanted us to be, and health care and pre-K education aren’t among the vital things a human needs in order to be a child of God. I am a staunch defender of human rights - but only of real human rights, not the mythical human rights created by people to justify their varied desires for power, fame or simple relief for the guilt they feel over their undeserved good fortune in life.
Tags: Judeo-Christian Civilization, liberal lies, Philosophy
May 7th, 2008
There is a lot of good in McCain’s plan to reform our government:
John McCain Will Stop Earmarks, Pork-Barrel Spending, And Waste. He will veto every pork-laden spending bill and make their authors famous. As President, he will seek the line-item veto to reduce waste and eliminate earmarks that have led to corruption. Unlike Senators Clinton and Obama who have sought a nearly combined $3 billion in earmarks, John McCain has a clear record of not asking for earmarks. Earmarks restrict America’s ability to address genuine national priorities and interfere with fair, competitive markets.
John McCain Proposes A One-Year Spending Pause To Evaluate Programs. He believes that outside of essential military and veterans programs there should be a one-year pause in discretionary spending growth that should be used for a top-to-bottom review of the effectiveness of federal programs.
John McCain Has The Leadership And Courage To Make The Right Spending Choices. Reduced spending means making choices. John McCain will not leave office without balancing the federal budget. He will not do it with smoke and mirrors. When he leaves office, he wants to leave a budget that stays balanced after he is gone, and can weather the occasional downturn and unexpected contingency. John McCain will provide the courageous leadership necessary to control spending, including:
Eliminate Broken Government Programs. The federal government itself admits that one in five programs do not perform.
Reform Our Civil Service System To Promote Accountability And Good Performance In Our Federal Workforce.
Eliminating Earmarks, Wasteful Subsidies And Pork-Barrel Spending.
Reform Procurement Programs And Cut Wasteful Spending In Defense And Non-Defense Programs.
There is more to McCain’s plan, but what I’ve quote here is, all by itself, a very ambitious agenda - and one which will make a difference. While Obama and Hillary talk of change, they really don’t propose any change other than changing money in your wallet into money in the Treasury. Obama and Hillary are too beholden to the largest and most powerful special interest group in the country - something which makes Big Oil, Big Pharmacutical and Big Tobacco, combined, look like pikers: Big Government. Most people don’t think too often about it, but the millions of government employees have money to spend, lots of free time and a vested interest in keeping government growing. Working through their union - Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) - they bring vast amounts of campaign cash, vast numbers of volunteers and vast numbers of votes to the political table - and their influence on the Democratic party is second only to the pro-abortion lobby. There is no way that Obama or Hillary will cross this group, and thus all their talk of “change” will amount to nothing more than yet another round of liberal Democrat tax-and-spend.
Given that McCain won’t get the time of day from AFSCME - let alone any campaign help - there is no reason he will care at all what they think about his plans…and, so, when McCain says that he wants a full review of government programs with a mind towards elminating those which don’t work, we can rely on it that he means it…and the AFSCME people are probably shaking with fear over it. But, it does need to be done - over the decades, mounds of flapdoodle have been piled on to our government, and no one really knows where all the money goes, or what it is going for…a one year freeze for an audit will be a useful means of figuring out what has to go, and I’ll bet the money savings will be in the tens of billions of dollars, at the least.
All conservatives have at least some problem with McCain - some on immigration, some on CFR, some on this, that or the other thing…but all conservatives are united in the need for serious reform of government, and while McCain will not be able to slay the beast of Big Government, his genuine zeal for accountability and honesty will do wonders towards fixing the governmental mess.
Tags: Philosophy
April 17th, 2008
Bobby Jindal leading the way in Louisiana:
Jindal ‘bats a thousand’ at session
BATON ROUGE — The state Legislature on Friday wrapped up its second special session during the 2-month-old administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal by completing a full sweep of the governor’s proposed package of business tax cuts and $1.1 billion in surplus spending priorities.
Jindal and his legislative allies won all the initiatives they set out to accomplish during the six-day session, including a controversial bill to grant a partial tax deduction for private school tuition.
Flanked by many members of his supporting team of lawmakers at an evening news conference, the governor framed the results as a positive statement on Louisiana’s national image.
“This group should be proud of batting a thousand,” Jindal said. “The country’s watching us … we know they’ll like what they see.”
The session followed a February lawmaking period in which the governor passed a slate of new ethics laws. A regular spring session of the Legislature will begin March 31.
Lawmakers passed bills to eliminate a 1 percent sales tax that businesses pay on utilities, an estimated annual savings to Louisiana companies — as well as a loss of state revenue — of $69 million. They also passed an expedited phaseout of taxes on corporate debt and on manufacturing machinery and equipment. Those taxes were widely seen as burdens on companies that expand their operations, therefore placing Louisiana at a competitive disadvantage with other states.
What have you Democrats got as your “breath of fresh air”? Barack Obama - an ultra-liberal product of the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine…you can keep him; we GOPers have genuine change we can believe in. Bobby Jindal is just starting out, and he’s already done more real things for people than Barack Obama could ever dream of doing - it is in this youthful, idealistic conservatism where we’ll finally win all down the line, crushing the life out of that leftwing thought which has been desrtoying our nation for decades.
You can’t win, lefties - your worldview is built on lies and thus it never, ever works when put into practice. Sure, you’ll be able to win an election or two, from time to time, but not by running on what you are; only by hiding it…but we’re out there, telling people what we believe, and then putting it into place…and it works, every time we try.
Tags: Bobby Jindal, conservative truth, Louisiana, Philosophy
March 15th, 2008
The Congressional GOP’s spending binge 2001-2006 played a large role in the GOP losing its majority status - and John McCain pledges to return the GOP to its fiscal conservative roots:
Year after year, powerful members of Congress divert taxpayer dollars to special interest pet projects with little or no national value. This practice is especially egregious during wartime, when any federal spending wasted on parochial programs to satisfy special interests represents a failure by the federal government to properly steward tax dollars. John McCain has steadfastly fought to reform this broken system and end the self-serving largesse that defines the current budget process.
As president, John McCain will oppose spending money on projects that siphon away tax dollars collected to fund these important commitments. Setting priorities, and keeping them, is a crucial step toward fiscal restraint and an important priority for a McCain presidency. Every dollar irresponsibly spent by Congress is a dollar diverted from pressing national priorities including lowering the tax burden on working Americans, supporting the men and women fighting the war on terror, making good on the nation’s financial commitments at home, including to senior citizens, and paying down the national debt.
With Obama and Hillary promising to spend whatever it takes to buy the loyalty of the American electorate, McCain’s stance for fiscal discipline is a tonic, and I think it might actually go over very well in fall debates. The Democrats are going to “feel our pain” and prescribe an endless series of spending initiatives to take care of all our ills - and this might have worked at other times, but right now I sense that the American people are going to tune out the promises, and tune in the man who takes a realistic approach to our finances and clearly states to the American people that there is no free lunch, and we have to get our financial house in order, and this means the government won’t be able to wave a magic wand and make everything all better. Democrats are essentially hoping that the American people are willing to fall back asleep and return them to power on the promise to not disturb the people with tricky issues of government - McCain and the GOP are promising the American people that realities will be lived up to, and desires measured against resources.
A lot of worry has been invested over the theory that smooth-talking Obama will glide past grumpy-old-man McCain - and this could end up being the case; but my bet is on the American people turning to the man who tells them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about our finances and what we need to do to clean them up.
Tags: Earmarks, Philosophy
February 25th, 2008
It occurs to me that there is a great deal of nonsense current in our modern society. I’ve decided to start a series of entries on the folly of so much of what is considered rock-solid in our modern world, and we’ll start of with:
“You must find someone who will love you for what you are.”
The concept here is that deep inside us there is a real “self”; indestructible and who we really are and we must remain true to this self. The romantic expression of this is the artist who simply must do his art, regardless of what others think of it and regardless of wether he can make a living at it - he’s in touch with his real self and he is expressing it, and if you can’t love him for what he is, then the problem lies with you. Bunch of nonsense, that is.
The ability of human beings to rationalise their behaviour is endless - a man who is a lazy slob might very well, and with gratitude, explain to his complaining wife that this is just who he is, and that he shouldn’t even so much as be asked to modify his behaviour. The slob’s disrespect for others and laziness is raised to be on par with the virtues of being respectful and diligent. When we say that a person is just to be true to their “self” and that no one has a right to judge another “self” all we do is provide an opening for creeps to justify their creepiness. “I gotta be me” is translated as “I gotta be allowed to do whatever I please”.
To expect someone to love you as you are is the height of arrogance - the reality is that if one is to find true love in this life, it will be a matter of someone deciding to love you in spite of your flaws. Just as God loves all even though all are sinners, so in our personal relations we must love others even though all are just as loused up as we are. Our job as the receivers of love is to thank those who love us, and ask if there’s anything we can do to make things easier. In other words, we have to show a willingness to modify ourselves to please those whom we profess to love. This doesn’t mean we have to become automatons in the hands of our spouses, but it does mean that the last thing we should do is remain true to some mythical “self” - our job is to remain true to our word; and that, in marriage, means we might, indeed, have to change ourselves into something we never imagined at the start.
So, out with this foolish concept of demanding that someone love us for what we are - and in with a humble understanding that someone will love us, and we should be willing to assist them in so doing.
Tags: Philosophy
February 4th, 2008
From the Wall Street Journal:
As every reformed addict knows, the road to recovery is long and hard. So it is for Republicans who became addicted to spending “earmarks” while running Congress, lost their majority in large part because of it, and are now struggling with mixed results to dry out.
Their latest halting effort in what appears to be at least a 12-step recovery plan will come tonight, when President Bush uses his State of the Union address to lay down his toughest anti-earmarking pledge to date. We’re told he will tell Congress that he will veto any fiscal 2009 spending bill that doesn’t cut earmarks in half from 2008 levels. He will also report that he is issuing a Presidential order informing executive departments that from now on they should refuse to fund earmarks that aren’t explicitly mentioned in statutory language.
Excellent - good government, excellent reform…and it jams Democrats up against a wall on this issue they pretended to care about in 2006 and 2007. They either have to go along with President Bush - and anger their narrow special interests - or oppose him, and anger everyone else. This is the sort of thing we’ll have to do all through 2008 - keep forcing Democrats to choose between the high-sounding rhetoric and their disgraceful reality.
Tags: Earmarks, government spending, Philosophy, State of the Union
January 28th, 2008
Its a word we use here in Nevada - the process whereby Californians flee the high taxes, onerous regulations and intrusions into private life of the State of California, and then try to implement those very things here in Nevada. They are trying to “californicate” us. It’d be nice if they’d at least let us have a smoke afterwards, but they are trying to ban smoking here. Anyways, California is pretty messed up right now - they’ve “californicated” themselves pretty well, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:
But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.
We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks, etc. will be threatened with cut-backs and closure, while the state-funded “Center for this” and the “Department of that” will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace — and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation’s largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
Hanson has a point - heck, it is the point: whenever there’s a budget crunch in any government, the government simply will not make the necessary cuts to bring expenditure in line with revenues. We had the same thing out here in Nevada a couple years back and, as you might have guessed, we were saddled with the largest tax increase in State history…rammed through because the MSM kept trumpting the government line that if we didn’t increase taxes, kids would die, or some such. I decided to take a look at the California government directory, and here is a sample of places rational people would seek budget cuts:
California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority; Center for Analytical Chemistry; California Constitution Revision Commission; California Council for the Humanities; California Indoor Air Quality Program; Acupuncture Board; Board of Barbering and Cosmetology; Cemetary and Funeral Bureau; Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair; Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation; Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine; Film Commission; Horse Racing Board; California State Railroad Museum; Commission on Status of Women
And that doesn’t even begin to cover wasteful spending in more vital departments, nor departments which seem important, but also seem to have several redundant agencies looking after the same issues. All of those in my list could probably be shut down tomorrow, and not a single Californian would die as a result…or even be slightly injured. I’ll bet that a complete audit of California government and an elimination of anything which didn’t deliver police, fire, education or health services (even most broadly defined) would result in at least a 25% reduction in State spending. But that won’t happen - because government will never cooperate in eliminating part of itself.
As Hanson points out, as some point Californians will simply have to take charge of this and conduct a political revolution - overturning decades of liberal/left flapdoodle in one fell swoop of constitutional change. And, one day, we the people of the United States of American might just have to do that with our federal government, just to bring it back into line.
Tags: government spending, Philosophy
January 19th, 2008
