Two Different Worlds

If you watch CNN you are no doubt worried about the “escalation of violence” in the Middle East, and the divided American families who are waiting for the US to evacuate their loved ones from Lebanon.

If you are reading the conservative online media you are experiencing something quite different.

In Frontpagemag.com David Horowitz tells of Hizbollah missiles that clearly come from China via Iran and need sophisticated trained crews to operate. From Strategic Forecasting he quotes:

We are now in the period preceding major conventional operations. Israel is
in the process of sealing the Lebanese coast. They have disrupted Lebanese
telecommunications, although they have not completely collapsed the
structure. Israeli aircraft are attacking Hezbollah's infrastructure and
road system. In the meantime, Hezbollah, aware it is going to be hit hard,
is in a use-it or-lose-it scenario, firing what projectiles it can into
Israel.

CNN reports the G-8 summit as a confused waffle. But in the New York Sun Eli Lake reports a diplomatic success for President Bush at the G-8 summit.

The final G-8 summit resolution marks a diplomatic victory for the president... [T]he resolution that emerged yesterday confirmed the president's view of the conflict, that Israel was fully justified in protecting itself against terrorist actions by Hezbollah and that instead of condemning Prime Minister Olmert, the root causes of the violence should be addressed, namely the continuing terrorist actions of Hezbollah.

In the Jerusalem Post Edward N. Luttwak represents the Hizbollah/Hamas attacks on Israel as an attempt by Iran to unify the Arabs against a common foe and reject the western attempts to get it to stop its nuclearization. But Iran’s strategy has forced Hizbollah away from integration into Lebanese politics.

Hizbullah has thrown away its political position in Lebanon because it is obvious to all that it is bringing destruction upon the country.

In this view the question is how much damage Israel gets to create before Hizbollah and Hamas have to cry uncle.

In war it is very difficult for ordinary people watching the media to understand what is going on.

One thing it is not is a mindless “cycle of violence,” or “Crisis in the Middle East.” It is a war, stupid. It is a war to preserve the state of Israel.

The Flaws of the Famous, Then As Now

Hum. We think we are so modern and special, uniquely privileged and uniquely corrupt.

But back in the nineteenth century, preacher Henry Ward Beecher was both uniquely privileged as a great preacher and uniquely corrupted as a great adulterer. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and he is the subject of Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America.

Beecher’s fame could be put to good use. When the feminist Victoria Woodhull was criticized for her ideas,

Woodhull, a radical feminist and an advocate of free love, answered critics by proclaiming that her ideas on sexual freedom simply mirrored the advanced practices of Henry Ward Beecher, who, she said, preached every Sunday morning to a dozen of his mistresses.

Beecher was in at the creation of the Republican Party and a strong anti-slavery advocate. His father was Rev. Lyman Beecher, a leading light in the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century.

But what sort of a man was Beecher? That, according to George Marsden, we really do not get to find out in Applegate’s biography.

We do not get any sense of his interior life, his spirituality or his religious anxieties. What we have instead--as Ms. Applegate's title implies--is the engaging story of a celebrity.

It seems that Beecher’s humanity got submerged in his fame, much like another flawed moral leader, Martin Luther King, in the twentieth century.

How Important is a College Education?

Everybody knows that to compete in the job market these days you need a college education. Better still, get a master’s degree.

Then how come, asks Australian Mercurius Goldstein, that the most successful people in Australia come up short in the academic credentials department?

[T]hese Australians are "one in the eye" for the great middle-class myth that a university education is an essential ingredient for a fulfilling life.



Such people are living reminders that success often depends far more on hard work, inspired intuition, social skills and not a small measure of rat cunning. Whereas many anxious middle-class parents prefer to believe, and to inculcate in their children, the corrosive belief that once you have a degree, you've "got it made". Of course, none of this helps when all their middle-class mates grow up to possess identical qualifications. The reality is that when everybody has a degree, nobody has a degree; and any competitive advantage in the job market is lost.

So why do parents fork out so much money for college?

It is a bid by parents for more power, money or prestige.. It is to protect privilege and ensure that young Cassandra and Joel both get a bigger slice of the pie than their parents did.

The question is: Does it really help? The message of
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko is that parents have to be really careful doling out “economic outpatient care” to their children. They should only spend money on things that make their children more independent and motivated. Giving them cash just makes them used to supplementing their life styles with remittances.

But Stanley and Danko also suggest that it is a lot easier to live a comfortable life in a professional career than as an entrepreneur and risk taker.

Of course, maybe boys have already figured all this out. Maybe it’s why more girls go to college than boys. The boys do the math, and figure: what’s the point?

So that’s why the feminists want girls to excel and math and science.

Experts Rank Global Warming as Minor Problem

Everyone is concerned about global warming, even Republicans, writes Ryan Sager. But when it comes to prioritizing it as a major problem, “ Republicans ranked global warming 19th out of the 19 issues; Democrats ranked it 13th out of 19.”

In this, you might be surprised, the American people agree with the experts. Danish economist Bjorn Lomberg got 50 politicians to review monographs prepared by economists on major world problems. Then he asked them to rate the problems in order of importance. Wait a minute, they said. These are all No.1!

That’s the point, Lomberg told them. This exercise is intended to force you to choose. The result? Global warming rated way down the list.

Lomberg’s initiative is called the Copenhagen Consensus. The prioritized list is here.

Here are the highlights of the prioritized list of global initiatives rated in order of importance by the participants in the Copenhagen Consensus:

Challenge Opportunity 1 Communicable Diseases Scaled-up basic health services 2 Sanitation and Water Community-managed water supply and sanitation 3 Education Physical Expansion   ... ... 27 Climate Change Kyoto Protocol

What about global warming? You can see for yourself: Climate change: Kyoto, down at 27 out of 40.

So it seems that the experts and the people agree about global warming. Where does that leave Al Gore and his “Inconvenient Truth?”

When the Missiles Start to THAAD

The short road from the current border clashes between Israel and its Hamas and Hizbollah enemies leads to Damascus, according to Yossi Klein Halevi. The long road leads to Iran, the Iran that is working to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to project them.

That is why it is important that today down at the White Sands Missile Range they conducted a successful test of the THAAD missile, as reported by Jason Gibbs.

THAAD is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile. It’s the missile you would want if you were living in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem and the Iranians had operational nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Actually, the military folks weren’t just pleased with the successful test. They seemed euphoric.

"This was phenomenal," said U.S. Army Col. Charles Driessnack, the project manager for the Missile Defense Agency's THAAD program. "It performed as expected."

They have spent about $4 billion on THAAD thus far, and are $48 million over budget. They could get the missile ready for “emergency deployment” about a year from now.

It sounds like the eevil Republicans, despite twenty years of non-stop opposition from you-know-who, are finally getting missile defense deployed and, all things considered, not a moment too soon.

Feminists Against Choice

In Michigan the state legislature recently passed a bill to permit single-sex programs in the public schools. “No child would be required to attend a single-sex classroom,” writes Carrie Lukas, but parents would be allowed to choose. Those parents who believe that children learn better without the distraction of the other sex in the classroom could have their way. And those parents who believe that co-education “breeds healthy social interaction” could have their way too.

It is a radical concept, of course. The very idea that parents ought to direct their children’s education!

But the feminists object. Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women:

We strongly oppose these bills because the separation of boys and girls, and the underlying (and false) assumption that girls and boys are so different that they shouldn't even be educated together, introduces harmful gender stereotypes into public education. This could lead to, among other possible outcomes, emphasizing math and science for boys, and for girls, less rigorous course work.

Ah yes. The King Charles’s head for feminists. Off in a secret male-only classroom, there is a danger that boys will be gaining an unfair advantage over girls in math and science. We must stamp that out!

I recently spoke with a young women who delightedly told me that she was working as a genetics counselor. She had a degree in microbiology and had worked for a few years in a lab. But then she quit and went to Japan to teach English for a couple of years. Now she’s back and she much prefers her job as a counselor, helping people with genetic screening and associated life decisions, to working in a lab.

You can math-and-science girls all you like, but in the end most women will choose to do people work rather than numbers-and-things work. And why not?

But that is all by the way, and a distraction. Let us get this straight.

It is wrong and it is a gross injustice to maintain a public school system at taxpayers’ expense that impose a one-size-fits-all policy on the education of children.

It is wrong to submit the education of children to the centralizing power of political pressure groups.

It is the right of every parent to direct the education of their children.

And it is wrong for political activists to interfere with that right.

A Republican Brawl in 2008?

After President Bush is goes “a Republican Party known for ideological solidarity is on the cusp of a far more searching philosophical battle than are the Democrats, historically accustomed to bruising fights over the finer points of political theory.”

That is what liberal columnist E.J. Dionne thinks is coming up. “A Republican brawl.”

Why do I as a thoroughly Republican voter think that this is a load of hot air?

Correct that. I expect that John McCain will be as intemperate and out of touch with the Republican base as he was in 2000. Call that a brawl if you want.

Call it a brawl when the bloggers in pajamas take McCain apart. Oops, they are doing it already.

But as for the other candidates, men like Rudi Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, I expect a spirited contest with a lot of ideas spilling around. Call that a brawl if you want.

The fact is that the MSM just doesn’t have a clue about the Republican Party, and doesn’t have a clue about Republicans. It doesn’t know how Republicans think, or how they feel.

And anyway, when was the last time that Democrats has a fight “over the finer points of political theory?”

For one thing, parties don’t have fights over fine points. They argue about big ideas and little gaffes.

It is quite likely that the Republicans will be doing some serious thinking about where they go after Bush. But a brawl? In your dreams, E.J.