Oh Good. Michelle Malkin Is "Not a Shill"

Our liberal friends seem unable to deal with people like Michelle Malkin.  Never have, never will.  So Howard Kurtz’s profile in the Washington Post is just par for the course in liberal condescension.  He goes to Andrew Sullivan for a quote:

She may be shrill, but she’s not a shill.

Well, you can certainly say that Andrew Sullivan knows “shrill.”

Actually we should not be offended.  So long as liberals just don’t get people like Michelle Malkin then so long do they just not get it, period.

Imagine, if you will, the Washington Post profiling a young, attractive, passionate liberal activist.  Suppose they quoted her saying:

"They’ll ridicule my looks, ridicule my ethnicity, go after my family," the 36-year-old blogger says of her critics. "They’ve attacked my husband relentlessly. There’s a strong sexist strain among my liberal critics, who think it isn’t possible I could have gotten anywhere without my Svengali husband, or some white man, embedding ideas in my head."

 Why, it would be the central quote on an article all about the nobility and the selflessness of the activist and bristling with outrage towards the cruel bigotry of her critics.

But not when the subject is a female, minority, Catholic, conservative woman.

But we should be understanding.  Our liberal friends just cannot understand such a person.  Their whole scientific, evolutionary world view says it could not happen.

Obviously it is not the liberal world-view that is the problem. So it must be the Svengali husband.  Or something.

Did America Overreact to 9/11?

David A. Bell wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times that the United States overreacted to 9/11.

The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we’re overreacting.

Oh really, writes philosopher Lee Harris?

Now if by this Bell means that they cannot kill us all, or even more than a few thousand at a time, then history seems to have proven him right

But that’s not quite how the world works.

The inmates of any jailhouse know that even mildest acts of aggression must be instantly and firmly challenged. If you are a newcomer and another inmate demands that you give him your candy bar, the worst thing you could possibly do would be to try to put the incident into perspective.

So the question about 9/11 is whether the Islamist terrorists represent any kind of possible threat.  If they do, then we are right to overreact, because underreacting just encourages them. 

If they will never have a chance of bringing power to bear on the United States, then we should do as Bell recommends, and ignore them.

One thing seems fairly certain.  The Islamists firmly believe that they are going to take over the world.

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War on Terror and Cousin Marriage

What in the world has cousin marriage to do with the War on Terror?

Good question senator.  I just so happens that there is one particular part of the world that goes in for men marrying their father’s brother’s daughter.

That is significant because “in-marriage” of this kind promotes very strong clan loyalty.  Whereas “out-marriage,” that is marrying mother’s brother’s daughter or any less close kin all the way out to marrying people unrelated at all, promotes social and cultural adaption and peaceful relations between families.

It is Islam that is the only society in the world that practices “in-marriage.”  That means, of course, that Islam has very strong kinship ties, but also cultural stasis and resistance to change.

Why is this important?  Stanley Kurtz connects the dots.

This means that any a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror will have to undercut, counter-balance, or reverse the functional “advantages” (cultural stasis and isolation) accruing to Muslim society through the ongoing practice of parallel-cousin marriage.

Of course, Kurtz assumes that the cousin marriage of the Muslims really is an advantage.

Arguably, the cultural advantage of “in-marriage” went out with the industrial revolution.  In the agricultural era rigid conservatism was universal, and for a good reason.  If you failed to follow the time-tested ways for food production you were probably going to starve.  But the market revolution of the last two centuries has put a premium on adaptation.

And the pickle in which the Islamic societies find themselves in is presumably related to their cultural resistance to adaptation.

Newt's Full of Ideas

Newt Gingrich is not announced as a candidate for the presidency, but he’s certainly busy doing what he does best—churning out political ideas.

First of all, he’s issued a 21st Century Contract With America, a ten point program like the old 1994 Contract.  As Newt writes: 

In a rapidly changing world with new threats and new competitors, we must implement policies that will ensure America’s leadership, safety, and prosperity. And we must reinvigorate the core values that have made an exceptional civilization.

A quick scan of the ten articles in the Contract show that Newt’s got his heart and his mind in the right place.  It is every conservative’s dream agenda and it even has a nod for the ageing baby boom generation with a proposal for facilitating active retirement.

But Newt is also ready with ideas for improving health care.  He’s proposing a 21st Century Intelligent Health System.  First of all, he writes, let’s go paperless. Yes, but wouldn’t that be kind of expensive?  Actually, no. For you doubters out there, Newt has a suggestion.

I will urge you to contact the North Fulton Family Clinic [in Alpharetta, Ga.], which in 1998 went paperless with a workflow-organized ambulatory electronic health record.
And in the first year, to their shock, they discovered that they were saving $33 per patient visit. Not costing ! saving.

And then, of course, we are all going to go wireless.

But we have to be careful.  We want the federal government to help get this intelligent system off the ground but not dictate its exact form.  That would freeze it in place and stop further development, because, he writes,

whatever standards we set this year will be wrong five years from now, because the technology is going to keep evolving dramatically.

A big challenge for the future is to train people to look after their own health care. Already, in diabetes, the patient is essential in long-term well-being.

If we find out as soon as you become diabetic and learn how to teach you to be able to take care of yourself so that you don’t end up in the emergency room, you don’t end up hospitalized, you don’t end up losing your limbs or going blind or losing your kidneys and needing dialysis or having heart disease.

Doctors can’t do it.  When you get to the emergency room, it is already too late.

Nobody knows what will happen in the presidential race.  But New Gingrich is ready, as always, with ideas.  Lots of them.

Evolution: Not Just God vs. Darwin

Our good freinds in the mainstream media like us vs. them conflict.  It makes for good punchy copy.  That’s why the media like to report the evolution debate as God vs. Darwin, progressives vs. fundamentalists, science vs. religion.  

Not exactly says What Is Enlightenment? magazine.

Between the Neo-Darwinists on one side and the Intelligent Designers on the other are at least ten more "schools" of evolutionary thought.

What are all these schools, and who are their people?  OK, quickly:

• Neo-Darwinists — Richard Dawkins
• Progressive Darwinists — Jablonka/Lamb
• Collectivists — Lynn Margulis
• Complexity Theorists — Stewart Kauffman
• Directionalists — James Gardner
• Transhumanists — Ray Kurzweil
• Intelligent Designers — Michael Behe
• Theistic Evolutionists — Freeman Dyson
• Esoteric Evolutionists — Richard Tarnas
• Process Philosophers — Alfred North Whitehead
• Conscious Evolutionists — Teilhard de Chardin
• Integralists — Ken Wilber 

But really, you should read the whole thing.

Of course, the WIE guys are probably more interested in RMC chappie and Integral theorist Ken Wilber than any other school.  That’s why they have put him in the last slot.

But the list does take us beyond the black-and-white obsession of the media.  For everyone of us is concerned about the meaning of it all.  And that means trying to penetrate the veil of the present to understand what is really going on.

It is more than just a shouting match between Darwin fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists.

Parents Flock to Supplementary Schools

The government schools suck.  That’s true whether you live in the United States or Britain.  And if you are poor, the schools really suck.  So what do you do?

In its December 2006 edition of Civitas Review the British civil society think tank Civitas (pdf) describes its effort to help parents with children trapped in dysfunctional schools.  It is opening “supplementary schools”  A supplementary school is an after-hours school that provides basic 3R instruction.  In fact there are over 5,000 supplementary schools in Britain. 

These families are forced to rely on the resources available within their communities. And these communities are proving innovative and responsive... Civil society has come into its own. So it is social pressure, arising out of the unmet need for better educational opportunities, that has fuelled the burgeoning sector of supplementary schooling.

Civitas first got into the supplementary school business helping Bengali children in London.  But then, according to the Civitas press release, they branched out.

The first two Civitas supplementary schools were thus started for children from ethnic minorities who belong to very strong community groups. However, we would see other youngsters, almost all white, hanging around on the King’s Cross estate, often behaving in an anti-social manner. We were keen to reach out to all these children, regardless of race or religion.

But would their white working-class (British equivalent of white trash) parents be interested?

We were concerned that we might get a poor response from the white working-class parents, but we were amazed by the positive reaction. At the start of the first open evening in October there was a crowd of parents at the community centre gates eager to talk to us. Nearly all expressed great anxieties about their children’s education and were very enthusiastic about the prospect of extra lessons at a low cost.

But now the government is starting to take an interest in supplementary schools.  A charity “ContinYou, a charity that receives most of its funding from the government” has issued recommendations for regulation of supplementary schools.

Civitas wonders: Why does the government have to control everything?

This government, like most governments, regards the voluntary and charitable sector as something to be, if not absorbed or incorporated, at least organised. Governments look out over chaos and wish to regularise and bring order. They do not like the random, transient, associative nature of civil society... Government regulation would bring a premature end to a new and exciting development in civil society. We should do all that we can to make sure this does not happen.

That really is the issue.

But why do we need supplementary schools?  Give us back our schools, government, and we will make them work.

Liberals Trivialize Evil

A constant theme of conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager is clarity.  Let’s agree to disagree, he’ll say, but let’s try to understand exactly why we disagree.

This week Prager is trying to achieve clarity on the meaning of two liberals (or maybe lefties) who have compared their opponents to Nazis.

First, there was Ellen Goodman who in a now famous article compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers.  She writes:

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

As thousands of conservatives have already noted, to question the authority of a UN panel of experts is not quite the same thing as denying the evil genocide of six million Jews.  Whatever happened to the liberal injunction to “Question Authority?”

Also, there is the little problem that everything with regard to the future is uncertain.  But it is easy to appreciate that a union journalist with lifetime tenure would not understand that.

But Ellen Goodman’s tiresome use of words was mere bagatelle compared to George Soros’s comment up at Davos.  Lefty billionaire Soros said at the World Economic Forum that it was going to be necessary to “de-nazify” the United States.  As reported in the New York Times, he said:

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

More recently he has backed off, writing in The New Republic of a “bad choice of words.”

For clarity, we have to go to Dennis Prager.

[T]he equation of global warming denial to Holocaust denial trivializes Holocaust denial. If questioning global warming is on "a par" with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be? The same holds true with regard to Nazism and the George Soros statement. Claiming that America in the Iraq War is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany in World War II trivializes the unparalleled evil of the Nazis.

 The left has enjoyed remarkable access to the public print ever since the middle of the nineteenth century.  It has abused that access in many ways, not the least in its reflexive habit of calling its enemies evil capitalists and evil fascists.

But now with the internet it has become easier to fight back.

But thoughtful counterattack and exposure of everyday calumny is the least of our project. 

What we really intend is to smash the injustice and the cruelty of the progressive project, to give ordinary people the power and the freedom to run their own lives once again.  We wish to restore to them the power and the freedom taken so ruthlessly by the progressive elite—people like Ellen Goodman and George Soros.