May 15 2009

Reagan’s Notre Dame Commencement Speech

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 10:09 pm

Notre Dame commencement speeches, then and now


May 15 2009

Conflicted Christians

Category: abortion,church,higher education,Obama,religionharmonicminer @ 9:39 am

As previously observed, President Obama will receive an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame in a few days, and address a commencement exercise. And although there is a considerable amount of Outrage Over Obama Speaking at Notre Dame, the plain fact is that 53% of Catholics voted for him, in direct contravention of their bishops’ advice and admonition.

One graduating senior, Matt Degnan, is selling T-shirts he designed that say “Obama? Fine By Me.” When I asked him whether the shirts represented enthusiastic support of the president or merely tacit ambivalence, he simply responded, “I think that the shirts speak for themselves.”

But he told the paper that faculty members have been the most frequent buyers, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s ever met a college professor.

Furthermore, Catholics themselves helped put Obama in office, after voting for him 53 percent. Obama secured the largest advantage among Catholics for a Democrat since Bill Clinton.

So although I’m empathetic toward the outrage, and a Catholic school honoring a pro-choice activist like Obama is nothing short of outrageous, the numbers tell a different picture. The state of Indiana, St. Joseph’s County, South Bend, and the University of Notre Dame all supported candidate Obama, with alacrity, as did Catholic America.

Right-to-life issues are important, but this supposed scandal is muddied by the inconvenient underlying facts: Obama has huge support here, and some of the groups that are railing against his visit are the very groups that helped put him in office, in a position to then be invited.

But voting him into office was apparently one thing, and allowing him to speak at a college commencement, another. Catholics should get their message straight if they want to regain the kind of influence that makes them a credible voice of reason, compassion, clarity, and morality. Right now they just seem tongue-tied.

Christians should not be tongue tied.   Ever.   They should be willing to speak out on straight-up moral issues, especially those involving life and death of the most innocent.  Shame on us.  And count me as one evangelical who feels more in common with the other 47% of Roman Catholics than with all too many protestants.

In the meantime, here’s a protestant to admire, for his conviction, and his willingness to tell simple, unobstructed, unconflicted truth:

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May 14 2009

Terrorists lying about casualties to a media that wants to be fooled

Category: terrorismharmonicminer @ 4:06 pm

THE CASUALTY CON

Lying about civilian casualties is the one sure way to impede or even halt US (or Israeli) operations, to force such tight restrictions on our troops that they can’t win.

The casualty con’s so effective as both propaganda and tactic that terrorists everywhere have adopted the technique. It’s been so successful that our enemies long ago transitioned to the next phase: creating civilian casualties and blaming us.

It works. The media love the charge. Our troops and pilots are always guilty — even if proven innocent. Because so many on the left want us to be guilty.

Read it all. And approach future civilian casualty counts with appropriate skepticism.


May 14 2009

Thomas Sowell on the The Blame Game

Category: Congress,governmentharmonicminer @ 12:01 pm

Read it all

After virtually every disaster created by Beltway politicians you can hear the sound of feet scurrying for cover in Washington, see fingers pointing in every direction away from Washington, and watch all sorts of scapegoats hauled up before Congressional committees to be denounced on television for the disasters created by members of the committee who are lecturing them.

Do you REALLY want these people running your health care?


May 14 2009

Potpouri… again

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 9:19 am

The Essence of the Christian Message is…

(at the link above)

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Following is a great read, keeping in mind that it was essentially a propaganda move by Stalin to get the world to see “fascism” (national socialism) as the opposite of “communism” (ideologically, at least, international socialism), when both were socialist, and both were totalitarian, and far more alike than different.

the Quintessential Liberal Fascist

While most modern Americans remember well Hitler’s Holocaust and the Cold War waged by a solid U.S.S.R., many of these same Americans have swallowed some false history regarding the movements that spawned such widespread, horrendous results. In what may be regarded as the most triumphant propaganda victory of our time, fascism has been scrubbed of all its Marxist roots, while communism has been scrubbed of its millions of callous murders.

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In reporting that California wants a piece of TARP, Michelle Malkin wants the feds to let California sink into the ocean.

Message from taxpayers to Washington: Let California fail.

Which might have been OK with me, except that I LIVE here.    So I can’t agree with this adivce.   After all, we Californians paid lots of the tax money in that would be used to bail us out. (Oops, I mean, we Californians WILL PAY a lot of the tax money that will be used to repay the debt from federal borrowing for TARP.) Now, if it was, say, West Virginia that Michelle wanted to dump, that would be OK. They could recoup the difference just selling all the public monuments named after the oldest Senator.

By the way, California, vote NO on Prop 1A and 1B.  When in doubt, always vote no on propositions, especially the ones that spend money.  Trust me, we’ll still have cops and firefighters.

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Muslims Against Sharia Blog

Ignoring the Real Causes of Christian Exodus  (well worth the read)

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New Weapon Turns Fire Ants Into Headless Zombies

Admit it…  you wouldn’t have been able to resist this headline either.


May 13 2009

Is the real problem “White Male Privilege,” lack of “Diversity,” and discrimination against “people of color”?

It has become common to berate institutions of all kinds that are deemed to be insufficiently “diverse,” as if there is automatically some institutional barrier preventing “people of color” from associating with them, and is if some kind of unfair “white male privilege” is the problem.   While there were significant institutional barriers in previous decades, those barriers are now largely gone, and civil-rights activists are busily fighting a war they’ve already won, almost in a manner reminiscent of Civil War re-enactments.   Nevertheless, the removal of those barriers isn’t enough for diversity activists, who now insist that institutions pursue essentially quota-based strategies to “diversify.”  The latest set of institutions engaged in self-flagellation for perceived failures of diversity are Christian colleges and universities, many of whom are scrambling just as fast as they can to “get diverse.” It is as if these institutions believe that if only they are more diverse, then the problems of minorities in American society will go away, or at least be ameliorated.  Or perhaps, if they are more diverse, they can at least feel less guilty about it.

The two biggest problems of injustice in black — and, increasingly, Hispanic — America are abortion and the epidemic of fatherless children.
Blacks abort their babies at a rate five times that of whites.  Nearly 70% of black children are born into fatherless households.  The first of these issues is directly traceable to the national legalization of abortion in 1973, an act of a left-leaning, activist court.   The second of these issues is directly traceable to the creation of LBJ’s Great Society programs in 1965, the act of a left-leaning congress and president.  These two problems cannot be primarily attributed to racism, for the historical reason that abortions were far less common before it was legalized, and the “illegitimacy rate” of blacks in 1960 was about 25%, not 70%.  What changed was government policy, in legalizing the murder of the unborn for essentially any reason at any time in the pregnancy, and in providing incentives to make babies out of wedlock by paying more for each one.  It is arguable that left-leaning governmental policies did more harm to black America than Jim Crow.  And it’s worth noting that blacks were climbing out of poverty rather steadily in the period from 1940-1960 (Thomas Sowell writes very clearly on this), while Jim Crow was still the norm.  Progress slowed dramatically with the beginning of the Great Society, proving that you can indeed offer someone too much help.

“Social justice” activists are fond of pointing to the disproportionately high representation of black men in prison as evidence of white injustice in law enforcement, the judicial system, the economy, etc.  But when the statistics are controlled for the presence of a father in the home, blacks raised with a married father in the home are no more likely than whites to be in jail.   So the “justice” problem is a society that discourages black families from forming, let alone failing.  The Left will say that “there are all kinds of families” and imply it is prejudice to promote the traditional understanding, but the sociologists and criminologists know better, if they have the courage to look at their own data.

The third biggest social justice problem for blacks is the state of the schools, but that cannot be fixed without addressing the issue of black families at the same time.   All too often, the family values are missing that will produce children with whom schools can work effectively.  Schools, no matter how well intentioned and well funded, can’t replace successful parents.  Churches can certainly help, but not when they are basically apologists for the status quo, and are used as platforms for leftist politics as much or more than for faithful transformation of inner-city culture along Godly lines.  None of this means the schools can’t be better, and various experimental schools have shown that typical inner-city black children can benefit greatly from improved schools, provided those schools don’t have to keep the most troublesome students enrolled, and are allowed to pursue educational techniques and policies of their own choosing.  But no one believes that schools alone can make up for deficits in parenting, even in experimental schools that shuck the usual pieties of the education lobby, even when the schools simply do what works, without trying to be social laboratories and places to park troubled children.

The real “white male privilege” with which we should concern ourselves most is that of white doctors killing black babies in the womb, or just barely out of it, for profit, in abortion clinics placed conveniently near inner city neighborhoods to encourage repeat business.  We would submit that the apparent nature of “black male privilege” does more damage to blacks than anything white males are doing, or saying.  Finally, there is the “white male privilege” of mostly white politicians who depend on the black vote, and buy it with government benefits and promises of more, the new form of sharecropper oppression, because by taking the deal, blacks have crippled themselves as a group in being able to improve their own circumstances by their own efforts, though there are obviously many individual exceptions.

These problems will not be solved by whites.  They will not be solved by a black president, leading a government made up mostly of whites, unless that black president is determined to undo the government incentives that encourage bad behavior.  That seems unlikely in this case, doesn’t it?  These problems will only be solved by black leaders “on the ground,” who must spend more time challenging their own communities, straightforwardly demanding better behavior, teaching skills and values for successful living, than they spend twisting the arms of “white” institutions to be more “diverse.”   They need to be teaching their people to reject government handouts that weaken their motivation to lift themselves up, tempting them to lower standards for personal and public behavior.  We need ten thousand people like Jesse Peterson, Clenard Childress and Johnny Hunter for every Jackson/Sharpton shakedown artist and/or community organizer whose idea of service is to take a young woman who shouldn’t be pregnant to city hall to apply for benefits (to “find her voice”), or, even worse, to provide rides to the local abortion mill, and in either case protecting from any responsibility the man or boy who made her pregnant, and in many cases the parent or guardian (usually only one) who failed to provide her with adequate supervision.

Inner-city black America is suffering not from being non-diverse, not primarily because some colleges and universities are not diverse, but because it is killing itself. We have just inaugurated a president who will encourage much, much more of the same, judging by his record, his public statements, his political commitments to his supporters, and his chosen advisers.

In the meantime, those Christian colleges and universities that are in a headlong rush to “diversify” are learning that it is very difficult to avoid all the Leftist influences that accompany diversity activism.  Some of these schools, which were once unabashedly pro-life, pro-traditional-family and pro-American, are now finding that with diversity comes the choice between promoting life or lionizing Obama-as-symbol, between being pro-traditional-family or endorsing all kinds of other arrangements as being “just as good,” and between acknowledging the strong Judeo-Christian ethic in the American founding and social ethos, or seeing America as “just another nation” with no uniquely important religious elements shaping its heritage, values and behavior.

It’s a choice these institutions are making, this decade.  The faculty they’re hiring now will be the ones who decide the directions of those institutions in the next decade, not today’s adminstrators and board members, who may make policy statements attempting to “hold the line,” etc.  Adminstrators and trustees come and go, but faculty have tenure.  Unfortunately, it seems no more possible in the current environment for prospective faculty to be asked, “Are you anti-abortion?” than it is to ask a prospective supreme court judge about future rulings.  That’s because, somehow, abortion has been relegated to being a “political question” instead of the frankly moral one that it is.  Somehow, it has become acceptable in some quarters for Christians to vote for pro-abortion politicians, and for that choice, and campaiging for such, to be seen as a valid “political choice.”  Yet I’m quite sure that most Christians would consider it a sin to vote for a pro-slavery candidate.

We are in a grim place, and those of us who see it that way need to be deep in prayer over it, and then we need to work within our institutions to improve the situation.

UPDATE: Walter E. Williams on Race Talk

Race talk often portrays black Americans as downtrodden and deserving of white people’s help and sympathy. That vision is an insult of major proportions. As a group, black Americans have made some of the greatest gains, over the highest hurdles, in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history. This unprecedented progress can be seen through several measures. If one were to total black earnings, and consider black Americans a separate nation, he would find that in 2005 black Americans earned $644 billion, making them the world’s 16th richest nation — that is just behind Australia but ahead of Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Black Americans are, and have been, chief executives of some of the world’s largest and richest cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, appointed Joint Chief of Staff in October 1989, who headed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. Secretary of State, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, another black American. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities and a few are among the richest. Most blacks are not poor but middle class.

On the eve of the Civil War, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed these gains possible in less than a mere century and a half, if ever. That progress speaks well not only of the sacrifices and intestinal fortitude of a people; it also speaks well of a nation in which these gains were possible. These gains would not have been possible anywhere else.


May 12 2009

Deconstructing the Deconstructor

Category: church,religion,theology,Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 9:44 am

Bart Ehrman’s “Jesus Interrupted” is another in the line of books attempting to challenge orthodox understandings of the nature of the Bible and the validity of faith, more or less on the line of the Jesus Seminar approach.

Ben Witherington has a multipart blog/essay essentially taking on Ehrman on his own ground, in his own terms.  It seems to this layman to be excellent reading, and so I link to it below.

Bart Interrupted: Part One

Bart Interrupted: Part Two

Bart Interrupted: Part Three

Bart Interrupted: Part Four

Bart Interrupted: Part Five

Bart Interrupted: Part Six

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May 11 2009

Darth Greenspan

Category: economy,governmentharmonicminer @ 1:34 pm

Darth Greenspan Read it all at the link.

The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve shares a lot in common with one of the most famous villain characters in the history of Hollywood, Darth Vader, who was first a member of the Jedi coalition when his name was Anakin Skywalker.


May 11 2009

Things I learned at commencement

Category: higher education,humorharmonicminer @ 9:34 am

Just because somebody has posted a sign reading ADAM SMITH at the entrance to the university parking lot, it doesn’t mean the place is automatically filled with enthusiastic capitalists.   It may just mean that people are being directed to other parking lots…   one near ADAMS dorm, and one  near SMITH dorm.  But you can dream.

The side of the stage the faculty sits on is determined by taking the average political position of the faculty, and reversing it.  So the graduate faculty sits on the right, and the undergraduate faculty sits on the left.  Or something like that.  Or maybe it’s reversed, and I’m overthinking it.  Proves I’m a faculty member.

People are given doctorates these days for proving (with voluminous research reported in hundreds of pages) that blind and deaf kids have a harder time in school than other kids.  Good to know.

There seems to be a disturbing trend in doctoral dissertations about people who make “the insanity defense” successfully.  This could be because you have to be insane to start a doctoral program.  Or it may be that these Ph.D. candidates are planning a grim fate for their dissertation committee chairs, and are preparing their defenses in advance.

Tortillas are aerodynamically stable in frisbee-style flight profile, until the forces caused by the spin rate exceed the tensile strength of the tortilla, at which point it lands on somebody’s face.  (Corollary:  students do not pick up the tortillas they have launched.  They’ve obviously been listening to their professors telling them it’s their civic duty to create jobs.)  (Related observation: rolls of TP are even less aerodynamically stable, but are more fun to watch.)

History and poli-sci faculty are likely to wear nice, shiny, dark shoes.  Music faculty seem to wear sandals, or paint-spotted running shoes.  Art faculty don’t wear shoes, unless they’re highly decorative.  Theology faculty, befitting their vows of poverty, don’t wear shoes either.  English faculty wear shoes, but remove them during the commencement address.  Global studies faculty wear shoes of woven hemp, which appear, somewhat mysteriously, to have disappeared in a cloud of smoke before the commencement exercises are over.  (I notice that people who sit near the global studies faculty seem to be in an unusually good mood, as well.)

It is now socially acceptable to be on the phone during commencement.  Since everyone is talking through everything anyway, why not?

Advice for people attending commencement:

1)  If somebody passes you a bag of cubed cheese, don’t take any.

2)  Any joke about the approaching end of a commencement address seems to be able to draw laughs.  But it is still a joke.

3)  All commencement addresses are too long.

4)  Come early, unless you really, really enjoy walking.

5)  Bring a pillow or cushion to sit on.  If you’re a capitalist, bring two, and sell one dearly.

6)  If it’s outdoors, bring a wide brim hat.  This can protect you from flying tortillas.

7)  To impress fellow faculty, tuck a copy of People magazine into the cover of the Journal of Applied Theoretical Exogamous Endo-Philosophical Meta-Studies.  Nod now and then as you read it, and make notes in the margins.


May 10 2009

Music Majors are messy people

Category: higher education,humorharmonicminer @ 11:26 am

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