So's Your Liberal Mother

Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times are out with a poll today about a Mormon as president. In the poll, 35 percent of registered voters say they would not vote for a Mormon for president. What a bunch of bigots, you say.

So’s your liberal mother, I say. Let’s look at the numbers.

Among political groups, the highest opposition to a Mormon candidacy comes from people who describe themselves as liberal Democrats, 50 percent of whom say they wouldn't vote for a Mormon.

As they say about bigotry, you’ve got to be carefully taught. And one thing that liberal parents teach their children, it seems from the figures, is to mistrust Mormons.

Because it couldn’t be the media that is teaching liberals to be bigoted towards Mormons, surely? And it couldn’t be the schools. It couldn’t be the Democratic Party, which is committed to diversity. So who else is left but the parents?

By the way. If you prefer not to use a perjorative, the Mormons call themselves the Church of Latter Day Saints. Their church has been growing steadily since Joseph Smith had his vision back in the Burned Over District in New York State back in the nineteenth century.

Celebrating Our Nation State

As we mark another anniversary of our great Declaration of Independence in joyous celebration let us also celebrate the importance of the nation state.

It is important for conservatives to do this because for upwards of a century the fashionables have been sneering at the nation state. They look forward to a global, pan-human society, led by themselves.

The future global society, when it comes about, and assuming it can actually succeed, will doubtless be a glorious thing. But we must never forget the remarkable achievement of the nation state.

Before the nation state, people could only imagine political institutions based on blood. They could not imagine trusting people who were not of their own kin.

The nation state, on the other hand, is a political unit based on the abstract ties of language and culture. In the nation state we transcend the limits of blood and kinship and learn to associate with and trust people who share much less in common than the physical ties of clan and tribe.

The day may come when we will consign the nation state to the dust heap of history; but that day is not yet. Indeed, the likelihood is that we have many lessons to learn before we can imagine, let alone build, trans-national political institutions that actually work.

Indeed, the appetite in our educated elites for divisive national politics and for political programs that utterly ignore the lessons of the past indicate that we ought to stick pretty close to our present democratic, federal, nation state.

So let’s hear it for the last best hope of manking: The good old U. S. of A.

The Internet is Amazing

It’s the little things that matter. That is what women have been telling men for ages. And it is the little things on the Internet that matter, too.

Over the weekend, Lady Marjorie was trying to save some JPEGs emailed to her by a friend. Only the computer would get jammed up trying to save the files from her email browser. What to do?

It turned out that if you tried to browse to the affected directory with Windows Explorer it would hang too. What could be wrong?

After a day of foolishness, I finally decided to Google "windows explorer crashes jpeg" and here is what I found.

The problem is caused when you have Adobe’s Photoshop or Elements on your machine. If you have the “generate thumbnails” option set, then if you have too many JPEGs in the directory Windows Explorer will crash as it generates all the thumbnails. Writes John Inzer from Picture It!

right click on a .jpg file and choose
Properties. Click the Photoshop Image tab
and uncheck the "Generate Thumbnails" button,
then click OK.

Voila! Problem solved.

I’m sorry, but after an experience like that I just sit back in wonder. How is it possible, I ask. To have all that knowledge and technique and troubleshooting help available for free.

It is mind-boggling.

Conservatives Take Academic Freedom from Liberals

If you listen to liberals—and I do, very carefully—you sense that “academic freedom” is a concept that has high totemic value for them.

Academic freedom is something that liberals are for, and they know that their support for it defines them as a force for reason and enlightenment. It is all that is noble and decent, and it defines the courageous researcher beavering away on the frontiers of knowledge beset by the forces of darkness and superstition. He knows that, but for academic freedom, yahoos and fundamentalists would put him out of a job.

In consequence, the Academic Bill of Rights campaign of radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz makes liberals very angry. For Horowitz is speaking truth to academic power and he is saying that college professors abuse their power damnably.

Horowitz’s campaign is now three years old, and Valerie Richardson reviews the progress. Eighteen states have passed academic freedom laws, and a couple of state university systems have passed academic freedom policies to avoid legislation. Princeton university students passed “a version of the Student Bill of Rights by a vote of the entire student body.”

And that is the point of the movement. Academics have a right to academic freedom, but student have a right to an education, not an indoctrination. And that seems very hard for some professors to understand, so convinced are they of their sacred right to academic freedom.

Not that anyone should be surprised. When you give people tenure and rights then they will start to abuse it. One man’s freedom is another man’s servitude.

As kings learned to understand their powers as a Divine Right, so professors, without court jesters to bring them back to earth, have discerned in the heavens a Divine Right to academic freedom. And God forbid that any jester should make fun of college professors.

I don’t really understand all this business about academic freedom. If you can’t find someone to fund your research then you are out of luck. If you don’t do the job teaching your student then you should be out of a job.

And if you are a dedicated left-wing activist longing to bring peace and justice to the world, then surely there is some left-wing foundation that is willing to pony up the cash to keep you in business.

Of course, if you are just a run-of-the-mill lefty academic without any distinguishing talent or original work product... Sorry. Academic freedom was never intended to give you a sinecure.

If it was, then I’m against it. Get a job, pal.

Ninety Years After the Somme

July 1, 2006 is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the Big Push that cost 60,000 casualties on its first day and ground to a halt over four months later. The total British casualties were 360,000, having advanced about 5 miles on a 10 mile front.

Typically in most battles the winning side suffers about 20 percent casualties and the losing side about 30 percent. The British started with about 13 divisions on July 1, say 130,000 men, and suffered nearly 50 percent casualties on the first day.

It is commonplace to say that the spirit was kicked out of the British by the Battle of the Somme and by the incompetence of their generals. In the London Guardian Sir Max Hastings writes:

The Somme is perceived as the great betrayal of innocents - and of the old working class in khaki - by Britain's ruling caste in breeches and glossy riding boots. It is thought to exemplify the futility of the first world war, and to represent the apogee of suffering in its campaigns.

Certainly the British did not take their soldiering as seriously as the Germans, and were much slower at learning the lessons of the Great War than the Germans, whose first military think tank was created during the Napoleonic War by then Lt-Col Scharnhorst. But whether their generals were a stupid as John Mosier insists in The Myth of the Great War the Battle of the Somme marked the end of Britain as a world power.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling class that went to ruin on the Somme. The respectable lower-middle class also bled to death. The “Pals” and “church lads” battalions were decimated on the Somme, and with them the mutual-aid world of “friendly societies” and self-help that was the glory of industrial Britain in the nineteenth century.

Today the self-help ethos of nineteenth century Britain is no more. The Pals have been replaced by the “hoodies” and crime is 2,300 percent higher than before the Great War of 1914-18.

Preserving The Trust Network

One thing is for sure. Democrats don’t trust Republicans. And conservatives don’t trust liberals. Liberals don’t trust the Pentagon. The Supreme Court doesn’t trust the executive.

That’s all right. It’s just politics. But the problem is that trust has been eroding on the personal level. Women don’t trust their husbands to stick around. And no-fault divorce has made it easy to skip out on a spouse.

That’s a problem, according to conservative writers like Jennifer Roback Morse and Carolyn Graglia, because trust the the bedrock that a loving family needs to be successful in staying together and raising children.

For instance, children that don’t have a close and trusting relationship with their mother in the first year of life find it difficult to establish trusting relationships throughout their lives. Babies are needy, and if their needs aren’t met they experience the world as a hostile world. We are not just talking about material needs here, but the need for the baby to know that its mother is there for it.

We’ve rather forgotten all that in the excitement of the baby boom and the modern emphasis on contract theory in politics.

Radio host Larry Elder recently demonstrated how trust works in human society by relating a little story about his 91-year-old father.

When his mother died, he assumed that his father would want to come and live with him. But no. As Elder’s brother explained from the porch of his father’s house, pointing to the row of houses across the street and down our side.

"You see the lady who lives over there?" said Kirk. "She brings beans that she grows for Dad. The one over here uses the lemons from Dad's backyard to make Dad lemonade. See this house over there? Well, this lady, the man who lives next-door to her and the woman two houses away are all part of a sort of 'neighborhood watch.' If somebody sees something suspicious, they'll call the cops in a hurry. Same thing about an ambulance if somebody needs help."

His father needed to stay in his neighborhood. The neighbors needed him.

That’s how face-to-face society works: in reciprocal trust between family and between neighbors.

It is something we have lost as we have given up our birthrights to experts and professionals.

Why Mexico Has an Emigration Problem

The United States has an immigration problem. Actually, of course, the US has always had an immigration problem, right from the start, as Native Americans will tell you. Sometimes the immigrants take over; sometimes they merely assimilate.

But the flip side of the US immigration problem is other countries’ emigration problem. After all, why should people want to leave the country of their birth for the inevitable struggles of finding home and work in a new and strange country?

Because the economy stinks, that’s why. And unfortunately, that applies to our neighbor to the south. That takes some doing, according to Deroy Murdock, when you consider that Mexico

is contiguous to the world’s largest market and abounds in oil, natural gas, gold, silver, beaches, seafood, water, historic treasures, museums, industrial centers, and wonderful people.

How did the Mexicans manage it? Says Alberto Saracho:

There are institutions, some established in the colonial years, that still curb people’s freedom to work, produce, and prosper.

...
In constant 2000 dollars, the World Bank reports, Mexican per-capita GDP was $7,758 in 1980. It inched upward to $8,661 in 2003. Over that period, Chile went from trailing to topping Mexico, with its figures rising from $4,620 to $9,706. Former laggard South Korea leapfrogged from $4,556 to $16,977.

...
[B]etween 1987 and 2004, manufacturing productivity grew 183.3 percent in Chile, 196.6 percent in South Korea, and 307.6 percent in China. Meanwhile, like a tequila-soaked worm, Mexico advanced 2.7 percent.

And on top of that Mexicans are apparently getting ready to elect lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a president. That is their right. The trouble is that the twentieth century demonstrated in pretty clear terms that lefties don’t have a clue when it comes to making a nation prosperous. You would think that the message would be getting through by now.

So it looks like the US is going to continue to have an immigration problem. And Mexico will continue to have an emigration problem.