Liberals and Diversity: A Cautionary Tale

Conservatives have always distrusted the liberal line on diversity and inclusion.
Because it has always seemed to be about empowering liberals and
silencing conservatives. But Gandhi and Martin Luther King taught us long
ago that we can use our distrust about our opponents to test their
sincerity. Invite them to honor their noble principles and see what they
do.
David Horowitz
has been inviting liberal professors to live up to their avowal of free speech
and academic freedom in a campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights that
attempts to extend the idea of academic freedom from professors and academic
leftists to student and conservatives. Would the
liberal professors honor their noble principles, or would they betray their
principles in accordance with the dictates of the postmodernists that
law and rights are meaningless: the only thing that matters is power?

Unlike the British in India, and the Americans in the 1960s, it
looks like the only thing that matters to the liberal professors is their
power. They are attacking, as McCarthyism, an Academic Bill of Rights that
merely repeats what liberal icons like John Dewey advocated at the
beginning of the twentieth century. They are advocating
against the principles they claim to believe in.

That, of course, is exactly where
controversialist David Horowitz wants them.

"Lifestage" Conservatism

We already knew that President Bush led by 20 points in the last election
among married parents with children. Now we have an explanation. It’s
the concept of “lifestage” conservatism, people that started out
liberal but grew up fast when they became parents and no longer wanted a
public square that pandered solely to the interests of twentysomething
singles.
Suzanne Fields
delivers the news.
Details at the Progressive Policy Institute

The Katie Crisis

Conservatives have waited a long time for the day that Katie Couric
would start to get into trouble. Now it has happened, and, in accordance
with the media Blood in the Water theory, the sharks are rushing in to take
a chunk out of pretty Katie’s shapely legs. It’s funny how power corrupts, isn’t
it? Give someone a chunk o’ cash and a modicum of power, and watch
the inner beast come out to play.
Myrna Blyth
dishes the details.

Steyn Week: Tories Too Strident and Too Timid

This week it’s all Steyn, all the time. And today Mark Steyn
takes
after Britain’s Tories for being too strident on immigration when anyone could have known that a
whisper on immigration would have been magnified by the lefty media into a trumpet blast. And
any Tory Party worth its salt would have come out with some
“Thatcher-sized themes,” you know, smaller government and lower taxes.

It's The Culture Stupid

Thomas Sowell trots out the basic finding of his Race and Culture trilogy for the benefit of
Opinion Journal readers. The reason that blacks (and also Southern red-neck whites) have
fared
poorly in the United States is their violent, illiterate culture.

“The culture of the people who were called `rednecks’ and `crackers’ before
they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was
a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement,
as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. ”

Sowell’s great finding is that if you want to predict the speed at which an immigrant to the United
States will assimilate, you should look at his/her education and tradition of living under law. Groups like
Jews and East Asians that have revered education and have an experience of living under law have
thrived immediately. Groups like the Irish, the Scots-Irish, and the blacks have struggled because they lived under the
boot of oppression or knew only a culture of force and feud before they came to the land of self-government.
Michael Barone’s The New Americans makes the same point.

Conclave or Congress: Which Gets the Job Done?

Mark Steyn
chooses
the College of Cardinals as the more serious institution. Why, it took them only
a couple of days to elect a new pope, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee takes all month just
to worry about John Bolton yelling at a bureaucrat in a hallway in central Asia ten years ago? You’d
think that they would applaud him for encouraging better performance. You’d think the Democratic Party
was more serious. You’d think the Republican Senators would have more cojones.

Not What They Had In Mind

A roundup of comment on the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in the
Weekly Standard gives us a flavor of fashionable opinion on the new pontiff.
There’s no doubt about it. People don’t like their ox being gored, and a traditional Catholic Church
is a threat to their peacefully grazing cattle. But one man’s peacefully grazing ox is another man’s
rampaging bull. The Church and its traditionalist allies think that their traditional Christian ox is sorely
threatened by the rampaging progressivist bull.

Not What They Had In Mind

A roundup of comment on the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in the
Weekly Standard gives us a flavor of fashionable opinion on the new pontiff.
There’s no doubt about it. People don’t like their ox being gored, and a traditional Catholic Church
is a threat to their peacefully grazing cattle. But one man’s peacefully grazing ox is another man’s
rampaging bull. For the Church and its traditionalist allies think that their ox is sorely
threatened by the rampaging progressivist bull.

British Election: Tories Should Lose

The Sunday Times’
Minette Marrin
thinks that the Conservative Party needs a few more years in the
political wilderness to allow the New Labour project to come to fruition.

“And until the new Labour project has discredited itself thoroughly the Conservative party will never have the political
courage — or rather the political chance — to declare what it truly stands for,”

which is, or which ought to be
“that less central government, less local government, less regulation,
less tax and less surveillance would be better for everyone.”

No kidding.

Steyn: Westerners are All Teenagers

Joke-a-graf Mark Steyn gets serious for a moment and
reflects
that we westerners are all
grown-up teenagers:

“Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the
world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions
and we spend our pocket money on our record collection,” our cars, and our porn site
subscriptions. And that’s the way we like it.

Ancient Scrolls Deciphered. Philologists Go To Heaven

The ancient Oxyrhynchus Papyri, discovered years ago in Egypt have
succumbed to modern technology, and are being rapidly
deciphered, according to a
report in The Independent.

“In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing
discoveries, including writing by
Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.
They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which
were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.”

Wow. The papyri were discovered over a century ago and constitute 400,000 fragments. It is
reckoned that their deciphering will increase the available ancient texts by over
a fifth. And it’s a transatlantic project. “Oxford academics have been working alongside
infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. ”

Steyn: Don't Put Your Hands on Hips Around Me Young Man

Mark has had it with this anger management thing. So John Bolton in not qualified to be Ambassador
to the United Nations because he once spoke to an underling with his hands on his hips.
Pu-leez!
Democrats like Barbara Boxer are starting to parody themselves. And anyway, growls Mark, does this
mean that government underlings can underperform as much as they want and not deserve a reprimand? Is
that what the Democratic Party has come to?

Steyn: Don't Get Flushed Down the Eurinal

Is nothing sacred? Now they are outsourcing tax returns to India! And that’s not all. Even Steyn Global
Enterprises is outsourcing.
Mark Steyn
is outsourcing “certain administrative and managerial functions” of Steyn Global Enterprises
across the world, and
he’s willing to forgo the chance to hit on the help at the office Christmas party. He’d rather likes
the help to be working hard while CEO Mark is
sleeping it off. Better wake up Europe/Canada, before you get flushed down the EUrinal.

Spot the Fascist

On Wednesday, conservative advocate David Horowitz took his campaign for the Academic Bill of Rights
to the University of Texas.
Here
is the report on the event in The Daily Texan, and
here is the report from
conservative bloggers. But let us let our minds wander a little. How would such a disturbance have
been reported if conservative students were screaming, holding up signs, and tooting air horns at a speech of
some icon of the left?

Cheerleading Hits Britain

Have the Evil Bush Neocons no shame? They are taking over Britain by exporting cheerleading to the
land of Edmund Burke and punk rock.
Michele Kirsch reports
on a sport that is growing by 30 percent a year in the UK. And yes, the cheerleaders are on the
sidelines cheerleading for their college rugger teams.

The Tax Code Foments Conflict

As we all rail about the tax code and snigger as we take our special tax deduction, let us not
forget that the politicians are laughing all the way to the bank. When Americans are
fighting each other, they are leading the troops. As
Edward Hudgins
reminds us, the complexity of the tax code is the result of hundreds of special interest battles to
use some of your tax money for their special subsidy. The only way out is to refuse to benefit
at the expense of a fellow American and support broad based, low rate taxes.

If Liberals Hate Wal-Mart...

Then it stands to reason that there must be something good and noble about Wal-Mart that
they are trying to destroy. The funny thing about liberals is that, as often as not, their idealistic
campaigns to help the little guy turn out to be cynical attempts to bolster the status quo and the
established interests—pure power plays. Here’s one writer’s
look at the Wal-Mart effect.

Republicans in Better Shape Than You Think

Michael Barone
runs the numbers,
the hard numbers from the last election. He finds that electorally,
Republicans are in good shape. Many Democrats represent districts that voted for the president last
November. And voters agree that “something” should be done about Social Security.

Parents Pushing Back on Wacko Colleges

Parents aren’t too pleased about college tuition and wacko left-wing politics. This college consultant
warns the colleges that there are
unhappy clients out there and that they had better get their act together or face the consequences.

NYT on Einstein in 1905

At its best The New York Times can be really good, as this oped recapping the annus
mirabilis of
Einstein in 1905 reminds us. In four papers, Einstein remade physics, and no more so
than in the paper that proposed that light was “stream of tiny packets or bundles of
energy that have since come to be known as photons.” It was that discovery that led twenty years
later to quantum mechanics.

Campus Bias by "Anonymous"

So you didn’t really believe all that conservative whining about liberal bias in the university, eh?
Thought that it reflected more on the paranoia of conservatives rather than the transgressions of
tenured professors? Here is the story of a
European professor
who came to teach in the United States and was shocked
by what he found on campus. It makes rather exciting reading. Of course, he could be lying, but the
telling theme is how conservative students sniffed him out and came to him just to tell their stories.
The exciting thing is the feeling that the radical left wing culture on campus is not just wrong, it
is a blunder.

Steyn: JPII, The Scourge of the Secularists

It’s odd, opines the oracular Mark Steyn, that Jim Callaghan, a former British prime minister who, held all four great political
offices in Britain—and failed at all four—should get a better send off on his death than
the remarkable John Paul II. But then, it’s not odd, is it? John Paul II
stood like a bulwark
against
the entire secular world view and all its works, like, oh, socialism and fascism, both of which, like Edward
Teller, he had experienced personally, on the receiving end, so to speak.

Of course John Paul II tried to make life difficult for the modernising elites. The
New York Times complains that
“Among liberal Catholics,
he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and
contraception.”
No doubt. In the pope’s view, when you reduce sex to an
“instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction
of personal desires and instincts,” you diminish its real meaning.
“Thus the original import of human sexuality is
distorted and falsified, and the two meanings, unitive and procreative, inherent
in the very nature of the conjugal act, are artificially separated.”
The whole point of the modern project, as understood by the liberal media and the liberal academy, is
precisely against the pope’s view.

Steyn: The Importance of a Cracked-up Name

Do you wonder what Princeton Lyman, Monteagle Stearns, and Spurgeon Keeny Jr. have to
do with Norman Lear and the Republican crack-up, then Mark Steyn is your man. He’ll
explain
it all to you. Having fun with people whose first names sound like
last names always used to be a Democratic parlor game. Now that Republicans are doing the
sneering, it has to mean something, no?

Saddam WMDs Down, But Saddam WMD Budget Up

So we didn’t find WMDs in Iraq, according to the
latest report on
WMD intelligence.
But in the years before
the Iraq War, Saddam’s budget for WMD research and development was up, big time. So what does that mean? Bush Lied? Saddam Lied?
We should fire the entire intelligence community? We should double its budget?
We should impeach Bush for acting on mistaken
intelligence? It depends on whose ox you want to gore.