Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Only to the oblivious is this not obvious

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The title is Why states with more marriages are richer states. It is thus a statement because the actuality is hardly worth disputing.

According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, also finds that the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.

In this day and age, even just freely choosing to get married puts you into a different caste. As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit observes, where this was found, Bourgeois values — they’re not just transgressive, they actually work! As he says, “we can hope that saving money, avoiding debt and treating friends and family with consideration are now edgy enough to become trendy.” For me, it remains that a happy marriage is God’s greatest gift. You can then get on with everything else without adolescent distraction.

Hunting conservatives down

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With Libertarians having defected to the Obama side of politics, there are only we few conservatives left to stand up for the traditional values of the West. It has been clear for a while that it is only in the development of technology that America is a world leader, and it anyway all gets stolen by its enemies as fast as it gets invented. As for social values, the United States has had nothing to offer the rest of us since the 1990s. What we see is the transformation of the specific Judeo-Christian values that made Western civilisation free, prosperous and ascendant into the enemy. They may only be comics, but their storylines no doubt mirror the values of the people who read them. They will yet make it illegal to deny global warming, and who knows what after that.

AND CONTINUING: This is Judge Nepolitano from Reason Mag in October 2012 – the centre of libertarian thought if such a thing can exist – who could not choose between Obama and Romney. The article is The Failures of Obama and Romney. This is how a libertarian looked at the last presidential election:

President Obama is a failure as a president, and Gov. Romney is a failure as a candidate.

When he took office, Obama told the press that if he couldn’t cure the economic mess he inherited from President George W. Bush in four years, he wouldn’t deserve a second term. I guess he didn’t anticipate making the mess worse.

When he took office, the federal government owed $11 trillion to its creditors; today it owes $16 trillion. When he took office, gasoline was running about $1.85 a gallon and today costs about $3.85 a gallon. This is price inflation that he directly caused by flooding the markets with cash, and that directly harms the middle class and the poor. Unemployment has remained north of 8 percent throughout his presidency for those still looking for a job, and about 16 percent if you count all able-bodied out-of-work adults, half of whom have stopped looking for work on his watch.

He supported radical fanatics in their takeovers of the governments of Libya and Egypt, even going so far as to help them kill Col. Gadhafi, the former Libyan strongman who was once our ally. In the process, they opened jails in Libya, and out came some of the same folks the U.S. government has been fighting against in the Middle East since 2001. Obama pushed from power Hosni Mubarak, the strongman in Cairo, and he was replaced by the head of a criminal organization that Obama’s own State Department has prohibited Americans from engaging with. (Query: If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can the government help a foreign group and at the same time prohibit Americans from doing the same?)

In his lust to build a new world order in the Middle East, a goal for which he roundly criticized President George W. Bush, Obama has unilaterally, unconstitutionally and unlawfully killed Americans there. He killed Osama bin Laden when he could have captured him, and he let a mob kill our ambassador to Libya when he could have protected him — all to justify a value-free foreign policy that has no lasting friends or enemies, just fleeting interests. And he has killed thousands in foreign lands in secret, using drones that will soon find their way here and come back to haunt him.

Perhaps the next month will prove me wrong on Romney, but so far he is putting the electorate to sleep. I believe him when he claims to favor free market approaches to the nation’s economic ills, but I don’t believe him when he rails against big government and central economic planning, because his record belies his words. He is, of course, the father of the individual mandate — a totalitarian giant leap forward for the welfare state. And he has stated that if elected and re-elected, he will borrow money every year he is in office until the last.

When he was interviewed with the president on “60 Minutes” last week, I purposely did not watch or listen to the show. The next morning, I read the transcript of the interview and thought many of Romney’s answers were articulate and rational. Then I watched the same interview on tape and was bored nearly to death. Romney cannot put a fire in people’s bellies. The only reason he gives for voting for him is that he is not Obama — a reason that appeals to just under half the country, but is not enough to seal the deal. He needs to recognize that his audience for victory is not his former neighbors in Boston, but Joe Sixpack in the heartland.

He supports all of Obama’s killings in the Middle East, but claims he wants to control events there with a more muscular foreign policy. He cannot justify that view, along with the fact that it has failed and put us close to bankruptcy, to an electorate weary of wars. He rips into Obama’s borrowing, but overlooks his running mate’s voting record in Congress, which authorized all of it. At first he vowed to repeal Obamacare saying it is unconstitutional, and then he said he wants to keep the parts he likes, even if they are unconstitutional.

Can anyone get excited about Romney? Aside from a capitalistic attitude about the economy — as opposed to the president’s love of central economic planning — does anyone know what views he will embrace on Inauguration Day? Do you know anyone just aching to vote for him, the way conservatives were for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and progressives were for Obama in 2008? I do not know of such a person.

What do we do? The president’s failures are legion and have made all of us the worse for them. Gov. Romney’s failures are obvious and will give us four more years of Obama. Who says the system is not fixed?

If it was not blindingly obvious that Romney was oceans better than Obama their political judgement is empty and warped. Four years later, it would be interesting if they might just perhaps you know maybe think they might just possibly have been wrong.

The “broken people” are everywhere now

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Anywhere in American society where the left forms the majority, or even the near-majority, is a wreck. Who can analyse an entire culture, especially one as diverse as the American, but this seems generally right to me:

Once you recognize the influence of mental illness in shaping [left ideologies of all kinds], you find yourself nodding in agreement with Professor Glenn Reynolds: “I’m beginning to think that most lefty movements are just about broken people trying to manipulate the rest of us so they can feel good about their broken selves.”

Indeed, the “broken people” are everywhere now, piling up like debris scattered by a storm or a flood. Decades of societal breakdown — accompanied by a cultural decadence that celebrates divorce, bastardy, prostitution and every imaginable perversion as expressions of “diversity” — have produced a generation of young people who lack the ability to form healthy, normal relationships. The “broken people” demand that society be further re-structured to accommodate their depravity and helplessness. School children must be taught how to negotiate sexual consent, because there are no longer any moral customs to regulate sexual behavior, nor are any of these feral youth capable of romantic sentiment, having been raised in a godless carnival of cruelty devoid of anything that might plausibly be called love.

The stability of the era in which I was raised – the era of the Saturday Evening Post and its covers – is gone for all time. Being young today is a trial, whether male or female. Each has its horrors, related to each other, but impossible to avoid unless your luck really does hold out.

Their vision of our future

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You antediluvian reptile, you. You reactionary, backward neolithic barbarian, locked into your out-dated twentieth-century mindset. This is what our elites believe, and this is the world they are making for us from inside their gated communities. From The Atlantic: The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely. This is the conclusion:

Closed borders are one of the world’s greatest moral failings but the opening of borders is the world’s greatest economic opportunity. The grandest moral revolutions in history—the abolition of slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of women—yielded a world in which virtually everyone was better off. They also demonstrated that the fears that had perpetuated these injustices were unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only a world of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.

Merkel’s not insane. She, like others of her kind, just thinks that everyone should be allowed to go wherever others have been successful in creating wealth so that they too can have their fair share as well. What could possibly be wrong with that? What could be more just? A hundred years from now they will all look back at us and think how primitive we must have been.

[Via Instapundit]

Speaking of the last days of Europe

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Mark Steyn with a pointed story about our future:

When visiting foreign cities, I’ve lately made a habit of visiting their old Jewish cemeteries. For one thing, a community in such steep decline that it can no longer tend its graves is a sobering preview of the demographic eclipse Catholics and Protestants will shortly be confronting across the Continent. I also like to visit, if any are to hand, Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. And oddly enough in Malmö, Sweden the CWGC is responsible for two graves that happen to lie within the city’s Jewish cemetery.

As noted yesterday, Malmö is currently accepting up to a thousand “refugees” every 24 hours. Which means that a single day’s intake of Muslims now outnumbers what remains of a once strong Jewish community in the city. Their only cemetery (which opened in 1872) has had a rough few years: Mourners have been harassed, the burial chapel has been firebombed, and the overnight ritual of shmirat hamet has required police protection. The new mayor’s longtime predecessor was indifferent to the rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks, and apparently happy to see Jews leave. The cemetery sits on the Föreningsgatan in a corner of the main St Paul’s graveyard, walled off from the rest. The Christian cemetery has the air of an open city park, pedestrians and bicyclists criss-crossing from one street to the next. But its Jewish neighbor lies behind heavy solid metal gates, reinforced at the back by beams driven into the ground.

Nevertheless, it’s well-tended. Even as the Jewish community decays, it will be a while before its cemetery is reduced to the garbage-strewn scrubland of broken stones I toured in Tangiers. I walked to the back of the graveyard, where in the center of a small circle stands a memorial to concentration camp survivors brought to Malmö by Count Bernadotte, many of whom were so weak they died shortly after arrival. On the bench a yard away sat the only other persons in the cemetery – two Arab teens rocking their skateboards back and forth under their feet and eyeing me with a bored half-curiosity.

I asked if they knew where the graves of the Commonwealth airmen were. Which was a silly question on my part, because I doubt they had a clue what the “Commonwealth” was. But they were affable enough, and I explained the tombstones I was seeking looked like all the others, except, in addition to the Star of David, they’d have the badges of their services. And the lads rose, somewhat reluctantly, to assist me.

We soon found the graves, just behind the memorial to the camp victims: Henry George Popper, 19 years old, of the Royal Air Force, and SS Solomons, 32 years old, of the Royal Australian Air Force, both on a Lancaster bomber that came down over Sweden on August 30th 1944. The inscriptions read:

Han stupade i strid for fosterlandet och friheten.

Which means: He died fighting for his homeland and for freedom.

What were two Jews doing in the skies over Europe in 1944? At that time, RAF and other allied bombers were being downed by German night-fighters guided by ground controllers at radar screens. So the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern developed a method of jamming the enemies’ equipment. The only drawback was that it required an eighth member of the air crew – the “Special Duty Operator” or SO – who could recognize not only, in the cacophony of the Continent, who was speaking German, but understood the lingo well enough to pick up on the enemy’s quite sophisticated efforts at misdirection. There was no room for the SO in the heated forward section of the Lancaster bombers, so they sat in the back, dressed as best they could to weather temperatures that, at 20,000 feet over Germany, got down to minus 60 Fahrenheit.

Because of the language requirement, many of the SOs were Jews of German extraction, for whom being shot down and captured in the Third Reich meant not a PoW camp but certain torture and death. Yet they, like all the other SOs, cheerfully volunteered for the job. One such was 19-year old Henry George Popper, born Heinz George Popper.

He was a year or so older than the bigger Muslim lad in the cemetery, but he didn’t get to loaf around with his skateboard all day. I bid the boys farewell, and, as I headed back to the gate, my eye fell on another headstone: Julius Popper, Esq (1892-1957) and Dr Eugenie Popper (1894-1974). They were the parents of Henry George Popper and they lived in Barking, Essex. Yet they too wound up in Malmö. Eugenie Popper’s words on her husband’s death hint at the depths of pain with which they lived after the war:

He came the long way to rest in a Jewish spot with our only child.

Henry George Popper is not a famous war hero – just a teenager doing his duty to King and country. Today, all around the cemetery where he lies, thousands of men his age arrive every week in Malmö, supposedly “refugees” from today’s war. But, unlike Popper and Solomons, they’re not interested in fighting for their country, merely in scramming to the welfare gravy trains of Northern Europe. And if they won’t do anything for their own countries, why would Swedes expect them to do anything for theirs? A society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for, and so Henryk Broder’s last Europeans rush to embrace those who will supplant them.

It will not be “a Jewish spot” much longer – nor a European one.

Introverted learning

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Boy, do I get this:

The way in which certain instructional trends—education buzzwords like “collaborative learning” and “project-based learning” and “flipped classrooms”—are applied often neglect the needs of introverts. In fact, these trends could mean that classroom environments that embrace extroverted behavior—through dynamic and social learning activities—are being promoted now more than ever. These can be appealing qualities in the classroom, of course, but overemphasizing them can undermine the learning of students who are inward-thinking and easily drained by constant interactions with others.

The “learning environments” they describe would be a nightmare for me. Extroverts often seem like idiots to me. Unserious and generally incapable of really concentrated work. Group projects are also great for the lazy. Fantastically useful habits of getting others to do the work can be the foundation for a lifetime of managerial work in the public service.

This growing emphasis in classrooms on group projects and other interactive arrangements can be challenging for introverted students who tend to perform better when they’re working independently and in more subdued environments. Comprising anywhere from one third to about half of the population, introverts sometimes appear shy, depressed, or antisocial, when that’s not always the case. As Susan Cain put it in her famous TED Talk, introverts simply “feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they’re in quieter, more low-key environments.”

And do I see this:

Many of my own high-school students regularly request extended sessions of silent reading. Some prefer learning with the fluorescent classroom lights off, instead relying on the softer sunlight coming in through the window. Some admit to enjoying the opportunity to work in a quiet room and are eager to write about certain prompts for as long as I let them.

Talking about what you are doing with others is a genuine benefit. It brings out what is latent and listening to more than one voice trying to explain things adds dimension. But it has to be in an environment when it is possible to withdraw into oneself. I have been very fortunate all of my career that I have been employed to work on my own to produce whatever my workplace required. Collaborative is good sometimes, but it hardly needs to be taught.

The stupidest generation in history that has brought down the Western world, that’s who they are

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st sophia

There is an article posted at Powerline from National Review in 1967 with the title, Who are the Hippies? Having been one amongst them, I know only too well who they are. They are the same people, now all grown up, who have opened up Europe to a barbarian horde that Europeans had been able to keep out for 1500 years. They are the idiot last generation of a Europe of Europeans. Next time you go to Europe, drop by St Sophia in Constantinople Istanbul to see the future of Notre Dame.

As to the article, I was personally more New Left than Hippy but I was both. If anyone has ever repudiated an earlier incarnation of themselves, that person is me. But I have also always thought that if there had to be such a time and place, I was glad to have been part of it, for no other reason than just because. The article – and you must keep in mind that this is from the famously right-wing National Review – compared these people to a second century small Christian sect known as the “Adamites”. This really is how they were portrayed, and this is not intended to show what a dangerous and unworldly crew of dimwits they were, but to criticise them for their misunderstanding of the proper ethos of love. If you don’t believe me, read the article from which these come.

1. A sense of primal innocence, without “knowledge of good and evil.”
2. Antinomianism, rejection, in principle, if not always in practice, of all restrictive law imposed from the “outside.”
3. Hostility to all authority, as in fringing upon their paradisal freedom.
4. Pacifism, since there can be no hurt in Paradise.
5. Sexual freedom, and no sense of shame, like Adam and Eve in Paradise.
6. Community of goods.
7. Free-floating fantasy-thinking: impatience with critical thinking as the product of man’s fall.
8. Emotional self-indulgence: resentment at demands for inner restraint and emotional self-discipline.
9. A comprehensive cult of love, as appropriate to the sinless life in Paradise.

For myself, I was there because I was genuinely unsure how I should lead my life. I was not prepared to embark on a career unless I felt those early steps were in the direction I truly wished to travel. If you were there then, the one thing that was open to all was a marriage, job and family, more or less as a carbon copy of the generation that came before. I now know that there is little else to life, but it looked too easy for those of us there at the time. The result has been that every possible obstacle has been placed in the way of each of these by a society that seems to have a death wish. What looked easy in 1967 now feels difficult beyond imagination.