Godspeed President Obama

President Obama issued a strong call to service in his inaugural speech today. Recognizing the crisis he spoke firmly about the need for all Americans to participate in the effort of recovery. First he spoke about the problems:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

He remembered the previous generations, who toiled that we might enjoy our present prosperity. He celebrated our mongrel heritage.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.

Then he urged America to come together to solve the problems.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies...


Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true... What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

All this is true, and glorious. And in these words we can see in President Obama’s words the opportunity for greatness.

As a conservative, what comes through to me clearly today is that the whole liberal project has come down to this great moment, the day when an African American became president. All over the United States our liberal friends are fulfilled. Today the risks and the courage of the early civil rights movement, when it was dangerous to advocate for civil rights, are redeemed.

For that we say to our liberal friends: well done thou good and faithful servant.

But we reminid our liberal friends of the costs they have burdened on our nation as they pursued this vision. These include the devastation of the low-income family, the gigantic size and weight of government, the truculence of liberals in their government sinecures, and the flight from responsibliity to “rights.”

When President Obama invokes the old things: “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” conservatives shake their heads. Where have you been all this while, Mr President? And what chance do you have in turning your political base, which advocates for people who don’t work much, which doesn’t believe in manly courage, which calls its adversaries haters and worse, and which sneers at patriotism when it’s not accusing people of questioning its patriotism?

When I look at America, I see liberals in the schoolhouse door, liberals making health care cumbersome and expensive, liberals mucking up the housing market, liberals devastating families, liberals discouraging thrift and good husbandry. In January 2009, more than ever, the word must go forth: physician, heal thyself.

If President Obama can turn liberals from hate and the worship of political power to love and the old things, then he will truly take his place as a great President of the United States.

MLK Vision Fulfilled, say Blacks

On the first Martin Luther King holiday since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, most blacks say the King vision is fulfilled, according to a CNN Poll.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

So, you can say that the election of Barack Obama has about doubled the faith of blacks in America.

But then there are whites, and whites are less inclined to believe that King’s legacy has been fulfilled.

"Whites don’t feel the same way — a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King’s vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.

What does it all mean, anyway? To ask whether King’s vision has been fulfilled is a “feelings” question. It really asks whether the respondent feels good about race relations.

When blacks are asked about King’s vision, what to they think it means? When whites are asked about King’s vision, what do they think it means?

The truth is: whatever people feel, the objective facts are that blatant racism, expressed in laws that limit the rights of non-white races in the public square, is a very small problem today.

And that’s a good thing.

Bush Farewell Address

Last night President Bush, with one weekend left of his term as President of the United States, addressed the nation in a final speech.

It was, as you would expect, almost all about the war on terror. As the president said:

As the years passed [since 9/11], most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

We all tussle and argue about how to direct the firehose of government programs in our direction. But for the president, the reality of his job is omnipresent: to protect the nation from enemies, foreign and domestic.

And so the president laid down a marker, a marker that will be sitting on the desk of the new president.

There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.

Democrats were insistent that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and therefore Bush was to blame. Well, on January 20th, the watch changes, and the new officer of the watch knows that anything that happens after that date happened on his watch.

Conservatives can be glad that President Bush also laid down the gauntlet on good and evil.

America must maintain our moral clarity. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.

Some things are wrong, like “murdering the innocent.” Some things are right, like “freeing people from oppression and despair.” It is intriguing that the president uses left-of-center language to speak to his critics on the left.

President Bush, the fair-minded can agree, came to the presidency at a tough time. He served at the end of a time of conservative resurgence, and inherited a bunch of foolishness, from the “wall of separation” between foreign and domestic intelligence that the Clinton adminstration erected in the interests of civil liberties to the follies of Fannie and Freddie that Congress refused to see until the mortgage giants collapsed into a smoking ruin.

President Bush lacked the ability and the desire to dominate the national conversation from the president’s bully pulpit. Some have complained of this almost as a betrayal.

But the truth is that the national conversation is our job, the job of conservative thinkers and commenters. It is up to us to plant and water the seeds that someday a conservative president will display as dazzling blooms in the White House. President Bush served in a time when the old Reagan blooms were fading, with no new ones ready for display.

But we must not despair. We can see, even as we celebrate and honor the historic accession of President-elect Obama, that our Democratic friends have nothing to offer the American people except same-old-same-old.

Our Democratic friends will find out soon enough that the American people demand more than happy talk about Hope and Change. The American people know that something is wrong, and that reform is needed to sweep away the encrusted corruptions and decay of the past. It is a fact that most of those accretions are Democratic and liberal.

We conservatives know that the answer to the concerns of dispirited Americans does not lie in another expansion of government power but in a reduction in the power and the span of the political sector.

A great nation like the United States of America needs a careful balance between the three sectors of society. It needs a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

Our liberal friends have built up, over the last century, a society in which everything issues out of the hegemony of the political sector, the sector of force and compulsion. They do not see, and cannot understand, that you cannot have a society of freedom, trust, care, and compassion if everything is decided in the cockpit of political power.

But we conservatives do understand this. It is our duty, and our destiny, as President Bush leaves office, to once more raise high the banner of freedom—political, economic, and moral/cultural—against the tired culture of compulsion that that our liberal friends continue to offer the American people.

China's Cultural Wrench

If you are willing to read just one thing on China, try China’s Massive Wrench by Francesco Sisci over at Asia Times. It is the best thing I have seen that tells just how massive the change is, day to day, in China.

First of all there is the simple notion that China is changing in 30 years, from rural agricultural to urban industrial, what took 200 years in Europe and the US. But China has been undergoing a parallel cultural change.

But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China’s complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision.

Take the Chinese family.

The change started with the family, the cell and basis for society and the state. The ideal family in the 19th century was unchanged from the times of Confucius, some 2,000 years before: three generations under one roof. The older man had many wives and even more children. Each male heir also had many wives and children, all living together in a large courtyard, resembling a small village of dozens of people.

Now, with the single child policy, Chinese society has been turned upside down. Now there are four grandparents and one grandchild.

In the old system, you could hope for one of the many children to distinguish themselves and enter the mandarinate by passing the state examinations. Today, that hope is focused impossibly into a single child.

Then there’s the end of the emperor system. For over 2,000 years the emperor has embodied the state and its people, down even to Mao, the Communist emperor. Even today parents bring their children to Tienanmen Square for a photo dressed as an emperor. But now the state is run by small men who do not embody the state.

For 2,000 years China had, as a religion, a combination of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist notions. That was overthrown during the Communist era, to the extent that, in 1979 when Deng took over, China had no religion. Now the Communist Party is discussing the importance of returning China to religion. The Falungong demonstrations taught the party that if religions with sensible ideas were banned then religions with crazy ideas would fill the gap.

Yet, it also revealed that Chinese people wanted religious values, and the government had to be open to them. Buddhism was favored: it was a religion that had been in China for hundreds of years, Chinese people were very familiar with it, and Buddhist monks had been among the first to denounce the dangers of the Falungong in 1998.



Furthermore, the Chinese leaders realized that the much-feared Christian faiths were not so dangerous after all. In 50 years of communist rule, despite ruthless oppression, Christian Protestants and Catholics had never staged demonstrations in Tiananmen, as Falungong followers had...



Religion is no longer an issue of public security that can be handed over to the police - it is a top social and political issue involving all aspects of society, and therefore all politburo members must be aware of it.

China is changing, more rapidly, perhaps, than any great people has changed in history. Right now, about 15 million people are moving to the city every year. The outcome of the wrenching change in China, economic, political, and cultural, will affect the whole world.

Muslims Return to Sacrifice

What is the meaning of sacrifice? Frederick Turner defines it this way.

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor.

But sacrifice, like anything else, can be abused. In particular, rulers have a way of making their people sacrifice for their own acts of impurity. In the story of Iphigenia in Tauris the king of Tauris (in the Crimea), agonized by his crimes, decides to sacrifice to the gods the next stranger that arrives in Tauris.

In its extreme abuse, sacrifice becomes a blood frenzy. You can see this in the Ghost Shirt movement in the US among the young warriors of the Native American tribes on the western plains, and you can see it in the young men of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century in China.

So when Ralph Peters talks about the orgy of self-sacrifice among Muslim terrorists, you can get some perspective on what he is talking about.

The big thing about the three Abrahamic religions is that they stopped the blood sacrifice. It starts with Abraham, about to sacrifice his son Isaac when God tells him to sacrifice a ram instead. Then in Christianity, God sacrifices his Son so human fathers don’t have to sacrifice their sons. The same thing happened in Islam, according to Peters.

The Prophet sought to purify the idolatrous devotions of his people, to do away with heartless desert cults...

But now the young men of the Muslim faith are returning to the barbarities of the days before the Prophet.

What’s the meaning of those beheading videos and suicide bombings, the slaughter of fellow Muslims and the exploitation by pagan cults, such as Hamas, of masses of the faithful as human shields? Why stone 13-year-old girls to death? What’s this celebration of blood lust all about?



It’s about the threatened collapse of the Middle East back into an age of human sacrifice - the precise sort of gruesome travesty the Prophet inveighed against.

The thing is: this is not unexpected. When a culture is failing, when everything is going wrong, that is when a society reaches back into the past for the old ways.

After the defeat of World War I, the people of Germany, “the most advanced country in the world,” felt utterly humiliated. It seemed that the new ways that had been developed in the 19th century had failed them. So they found it easy to return to the old ways of Blood and Soil offered to them by Hitler. They were willing to sacrifice in order to find the right way forward.

One of the old ways is human sacrifice. And the greatest sacrifice of all is for a young man to sacrifice his own life. So it’s not surprising in the tumultuous Middle East, reeling from centuries-long humiliations, should turn to the ancient way of human sacrifice.

WattsUp, Pharyngula and Robbers Cave

It’s a nip and tuck battle today between Watts Up With That, run by independent businessman Anthony Watts and Pharyngula, run by P.Z. Myers. They are finalists in the 2008 Weblogs Awards for Best Science Blog that ends today. But it looks as though WUWT will win.

There’s a big difference between the two blogs. Let Pharyngula proprietor P.Z. Myers tell why:

"I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion.”

Myers, by the way, advertises himself as “a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.”

One commenter on WUWT had this to say about Pharyngula:

I used to subscribe to Pharyngula, but unsubscribed from it due to the excessive frequency of posts and excessive percentage of political and anti-religious posts.

There’s a reason why WUWT is the “nice” site and Pharyngula is the “naughty” site. You can read all about the phenomenon at The Robber’s Cave Experiment performed on a group of boys back in 1954. The concept is simple. When you have two groups of guys in proximity they immediately form into warring gangs, and they immediately differentiate themselves to sharpen their differences. If one group likes to swear, the other group will decide not to swear.

If you want them to stop warring you have to get them to cooperate on a common project. That’s what they did with the two warring tribes at Robber’s Cave, and it worked.

Joe the Plumber Asks a Question

Joe the Plumber goes to Israel and insists to a flock of media that he is not the story.

Ask this chap (pointing to his handler), if you want a story, says he, as the Pajamas Media camera rolls.

Then Joe the Plumber asks a Reuters guy whether he thinks that Israel has a right to defend itself. The reporter responds, yes.

“Have you said it on air,” asks Joe the Plumber?

I’m just a reporter, is the reply.

It’s the liberal way. Don’t look at me, I’m just a reporter. Nothing I can do about it, old chum.

Yeah, you won’t want to do anything to risk your career in media would you?

It’s easy to be a liberal media guy and file sob stories about the latest fashionable victim. It’s easy to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted when you are runninga story using the standard liberal template on a certified liberal protected class.

But when the subject is the hypocrisy of liberalim, then our brave liberal media guy runs for the exit.

That means that our liberal media friends, day by day, miss the great story of our time: the cruelty, the corruption, and the injustice of our liberal political power.