Our Pals in India

It has taken too long, but now at last the United States and India are getting it on. Since
Indians are taking over the tech industry and the motel industry in the US, why not?
Bruce Fein makes the argument for closer ties as Indian Prime Minister Singh makes
a visit to Washington DC.

But the real measure of alignment between India and the United States is highways. And here there
is real progress. India is getting serious about building a world-class limited access highway system, as
this article reports. First up are limited
access highways linking the Golden Quadrilateral: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkota.

Religion in Britain. It's There If You Look

The British are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church
experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as
Danny Kruger reports from
Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending
“the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings.
In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation
of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye,
who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central
London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].

In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy
but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches
of Britain’s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There’s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most
cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and
steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.

As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the
churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles
Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face
to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire
for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first
place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of
Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago
the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and
fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you
can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.

Kenyan: Stop the Aid to Africa!

Think for a minute about what aid does to Africa. If you send them free grain then
you put African farmers out of business. If you send them free clothes then you put
African garment workers out of work. That’s why the Kenyan economist
James Shikwati says: “For God’s sake, please just stop the aid.” Here is
how the distribution of free corn devastates Africa.

He cites the distribution of corn and clothes as examples
of “do-goodism” gone wrong, hurting those it sets out to help in an
endless circle of vicious venality. Corn arrives from highly subsidized
European and American farmers. African politicians take portions of it
to distribute to their constituents. What isn’t given away is dumped on
the black market, and sold at such bargain prices that an African
farmer can’t compete, so he puts down his hoe.

So it makes complete sense that empty-headed pop star celebrities and venal
welfare state politicians should be ganging up to double aid to Africa. It’s
a marriage made in heaven.

From the
viewpoint of the twenty-first century, we know now that the “well-meaning” welfare state politicians
utterly destroyed the little platoons of charity and self-help that sustained Europe
and the United States in the nineteenth century. They turned proud independence
into muling dependency. And rock music has never
pretended to be anything other than a direct attack on society as we know it.

Go on. Read the whole thing.

Guess What? Lefties Need More Campus Speakers

And you thought that the only way you could get to speak to America’s college students was
if you had impeccable left-wing credientials?

No. Wrong Again. Apparently the left really has a problem on campus countering the Young Americans for Freedom and so George Soros has launched a new speaker’s bureau. Writes Jason Mattera:

Campus Progress, a project of billionaire George Soros’s Center for American Progress (CAP), seeks to “empower a new generation of progressive leaders.”

Oh. Who would have thought it. Imagine that! Students at our nation’s universities are not getting
the straight story on progressive ideas, and so a new outreach effort is needed.

So Campus Progress had a national student conference at which the progressive Thomas Frank opined:

“They [Republicans] didn’t have any problem with Hitler, other than the fact that they thought he rocked.”

Oh good. Really advanced thinking here: the good old argument ad Hitlerum! Here’s another gem:

One young progressive asked how to campaign in the suburbs. He was not given an answer, but a specious sound bite. It’s difficult to campaign in those areas, said Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. “They are not our base — the white married couples who moved away from the cities to get away from minorities and smog.”

Wrong again, pal. David Brooks has written that white married couples move away from the cities
to get away from the poor and liberals. Now why would they do that? Is it because the liberals are impossible bossy-boots that cannot be happy unless they are using the poor as cats-paws to bully
the long-suffering middle class?

Slackers at the Office

American workers are slackers. We goof off to the tune of
“$759 billion a year in salaries for which [employers] receive no apparent benefit.”

Why do employers put up with it? Lawrence Henry thinks he knows.

I spent a year in an advertising agency where we worked very hard, especially hard on those four occasions a year when the company’s nationwide sales force got together and we had to create displays, training programs, and media material for the meetings. The creative director, a good guy, asked me what I thought would be the best reward for people who had put in long extra hours.

“Time off,” I said.

It was the one thing he couldn’t do. The company didn’t have the time to give. They could only take. And companies take a lot of people’s time.

Why is this? Why do companies have to have their people at the office all the time?

They do it because the alternative is too hard. Managers have only
so much management in them, and keeping track of a herd of people coming in and out at all times would
be too hard on them. So they keep people sitting around who don’t do too much work.

Remembering Dorothy Fields

Today is July 15, 2005, the centenary of Dorothy Fields. You know her, of course. She
wrote some of the greatest songs of the greatest song era in history. As in the Louis Armstrong
favorite:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worries on the doorstep

Life can be so sweet

On the Sunny Side of the Street

Or if you prefer there is the incomparable:

Someday, when I’m awfully low,

When the world is cold,

I will feel a glow just thinking of you

And The Way You Look Tonight.

They don’t make ’em like that any more and we know why. We don’t have innocent girls
with romance swirling in their heads any more. Instead we have Sex and the City
females who are welded to their cellphones and have a vocabulary anchored in “like” and “whatever.”

They are not women who fall in love; they are women who are “sexually
active.” What does that mean, you ask? It is liberal-speak for women
imagining they can live like men, treating their sexuality as a matter of getting laid. Sorry sisters, girls
have never felt like that. They can’t. That’s because sex is much bigger than the modern
concept of “an active sex life”. Sex is about generation, the next generation, and
the further you get from that truth, the less you will appreciate the songs
of Dorothy Fields.

Instead you will become the liberal who has made it a point never to have seen The Sound of Music.
There must be a lot of sophisticated liberals who have never seen The Sound of Music. Again
the reason is pretty simple. Liberals can’t deal with the hopelessly naïve Maria, the young girl that
just loves children and ends up snagging the fabulously rich guy just like a Jane Austen heroine. They want
irony.

They can have it. The rest of us want Dorothy Fields and “Big Spender.”

There is lots of stuff around about Dorothy Fields. You can start with
Mark Steyn’s article. Then there is a site in the UK
here. Then you can Google up more.

Thank You Mr. President

If you haven’t completely surrendered to the Plame Game, you’ll know that the feds just lowered
their
deficit estimate
for this year by $94 billion to $333 billion. Why did this happen? There were several
one-time-only factors, but the big reason is that non-payroll deduction tax collections have soared this
year. In other words, businesses and individuals are racking up higher profits and capital gains and
the federal government is collecting its share.

We conservatives know why this is happening. In 2003 the Congress passed the President’s program to
lower income tax rates and sharply lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains. The economy
immediately kicked into high gear and it hasn’t looked back since, even with sharply higher
energy prices. This effect is called
supply-side economics and it works every time it is tried.

Let us give thanks where it is due, to President Bush for pushing through the tax cut plan in the
face of implacable opposition from the Democrats.

We cannot know what would have happened to the economy if Vice-President Al Gore had been elected
in November 2000, but we can guess. The policies he would have chosen would have looked a lot more
like the macroeconomic policies of Old Europe, France and Germany. That means a swollen public sector, high
tax rates, high unemployment and very little economic growth.
Thank you Mr. President for sparing us from all of that.

Back in November 2000 we could not know whether the market crash of 2000 was another 1929 or not. But
we know now that it didn’t end up that way. And the best way to evaluate why we didn’t have a Great Depression
is to look at the mistakes
the government made in the years after 1929 and didn’t make after 2000. It didn’t bail out lots of
insolvent businesses. It didn’t enact a National Recovery Act to keep wages and prices above the market.
It didn’t allow banks to collapse and shrink the money supply. It didn’t pass a swingeing Smoot Hawley
tariff increase although it did pass a foolish tariff on steel imports. And it didn’t raise income tax rates
like Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt did.

We cannot know what a President Gore would have done, but we can guess.

Like I said, thank you Mr. President.