A Living Text

Once again John Edwards is caught red-handed cheating on his wife who is dying of cancer and the press is not covering it. What a joke. Thankfully we have the internet, but there are so many older people out there who only get their news from the networks and so have no clue of what is going on. That is the last holdout of the propaganda machine on the left.

Edwards is a lowlife. Shallow, phony, narcissistic and an adulterer. Thank goodness he never made it.

In a review of several books about Theodor Adorno, Michael Rosen wrote the following:

In Adorno’s view, Nazism points towards a horrifying fact about the nature of European civilization itself. European civilization has acted as a cradle for ideals of equality and respect for humanity, ideals that have inspired great social movements as well as Europe’s most profound works of art. And yet it produced in Germany, a nation that had contributed to that culture in the highest degree, a regime in which human being treated their Jewish fellow citizens as so much disposable rubbish.

[Adorno wrote] Auschwitz has irrefutably demonstrated the failure of culture. That it could happen surrounded by the entire tradition of philosophy, art and the sciences-the mind-signifies more than just that they were not able to assert themselves and change human beings. Those very disciplines with their claim to independent validity are the home of the falsehood. All culture after Auschwitz-the radical critique of culture included -is rubbish.

Two things stand out to me: the inability of humanity to understand human nature apart from the doctrine of original sin, and the inability of culture to save man aside from the worship of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea of human goodness seems to span all religions and thought forms, and is inherent in modern day messianic beliefs such as that Obama will save America, or that America will save the world. Mankind is evil to its core, and apart from regeneration, is hopelessly bent on evil. But no amount of experience seems to drill this home, so the lesson has to be learned again and again. The current American mantra of “believe in yourself” is the ultimate rejection of original sin. There is nothing in yourself to believe in, cast your hopes upon the risen Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, in order for there to be any hope of progress.

In his book Democracy-The God that Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides these axioms:

Human action is an actor’s purposeful pursuit of valued ends with scarce means. No on can purposefully not act. Every action is aimed at improving the actor’s subjective well-being above what it otherwise would have been. A larger quantity of a good is valued more highly than a smaller quantity of the same good. Satisfaction earlier is preferred over satisfaction later. Production must precede consumption. What is consumed now cannot be consumed again in the future. If the price of a good is lowered, either the same quantity or more will be bought than otherwise. Prices fixed below market clearing prices will lead to lasting shortages. Without private property in factors of production there can be no factor prices, and without factor prices cost-accounting is impossible. Taxes are an imposition on producers and / or wealth owners and reduce production and / or wealth below what it otherwise would have been. Interpersonal conflict is possible only if and insofar as things are scarce. No thing or part of a thing can be owned exclusively by more than one person at a time. Democracy (majority rule) is incompatible with private property (individual ownership and rule). No form of taxation can be uniform (equal), but every taxation involves the creation of two distinct and unequal classes of taxpayers versus taxreceiver-consumers. Property and property titles are distinct entities, and an increase of the latter without a corresponding increase of the former does not raise social wealth but leads to redistribution of existing wealth.

You can read the horrifying truth here. To sum it up:

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

Unlike Mark, I am going to vote for the man because he is the only hope that the innocent unborn have in this race (and yes, it is a slim one). But yet again, it points out that ‘conservatives’ aren’t very conservative when it comes to preserving the family, western culture, tradition, or much else. Not that Democrats are.If this story were about Bill Clinton or Barrack Obama, we’d be calling for their heads and shaking our heads in disgust.

The GOP needs to quit pointing fingers at the media, the liberals and the courts and start pointing the finger at ourselves. We are in deep need of repentance and a long struggle to live holy lives and restore families, one at a time. That isn’t glamorous or earth-shattering, but without it, we end up with pathetic leadership from men like Gingrich, McCain and company who leave shattered marriages in their wake left and right.

Tobias Levkovich writes:

As we have stressed in the past, household net worth has increased a fair
amount ($18.7 trillion) in the past five years, a 48% jump from year-end 2002
to year-end 2007. Less than 17% of that gain was attributable to real estate.
Moreover, while the notion of the overly indebted consumer is often cited, with
statistics focusing on $5.6 trillion of additional debt being taken on by
consumers in the past five years, no air time or written space is generally given
to the surge in assets on the other side of the balance sheet, which yields the
gains in net worth. Furthermore, an easily accessible and veritable treasure of
$7.4 trillion in household deposits (which gained $2.3 trillion in the past five
years) is hardly mentioned either. Thus, it seems highly inaccurate to think of
U.S. consumers as out of cash and out of luck.

…

Finally, it is critical to understand that the average American pretax income
went from $51,128 to $60,533 from 2003 to 2006, at a ~4% compound annual
growth rate, while average gasoline and motor oil expenditures grew from
$1,333 to $2,227. Even if there is a 30%–40% increase in gasoline prices, it
could be more than made up for with just a 2% increase in income. Thus, one
has to be careful about generalities, especially since they don’t necessarily
take into account the vast wealth that could be tapped for consumption.

R.J. Rushdoony wrote this some years ago, but it is a timeless truth:

Everything associated with roots and certainty is today despised by the self-styled new elite. Marriage, morality, family, law, order, certainty, and above all, Christianity, are hated with a passion. Man’s freedom is to avoid all certainty except himself; the quest for certainty is seens as the quest for death. Life for these men means uncertainty and rootlessness. One student radical has remarked, “I hate people who know anything.” The hatred of certainty is a major passion of existentialist man.

This hatred of roots and of certainty is basic to revolutionary activity. The revolutionist destroys things of value precisely because they have a value apart from him. Only what he decrees can stand. The revolutionist destroys roots, values, and laws because they speak of certainty, and he is at war with certainty.

This article is chilling, not surprising, but chilling. This may be where we are headed. Having a President Obama won’t help. One excerpt:

What was Father de Valk’s alleged ‘hate act’?

Father defended the Church’s teaching on marriage during Canada’s same-sex ‘marriage’ debate, quoting extensively from the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals. Each of these documents contains official Catholic teaching. And like millions of other people throughout the world and the ages - many of who are non-Catholics and non-Christians — Father believes that marriage is an exclusive union between a man and a woman.

The response from Mark van Dusen, a media consultant and spokesperson for CHRC, shocked me. I have interviewed van Dusen in the past and he has always struck me as an honest person willing to field tough questions on behalf of the commission. If he feels an accusation against the commission is hogwash, he states so plainly. If he feels the CHRC and its personnel are being unfairly tainted, he states so boldly.

Yet van Dusen did not dismiss the question out-of-hand as I thought he would. “We investigate complaints, Mr. Vere,” he said, “we don’t set public policy or moral standards. We investigate complaints based on the circumstances and the details outlined in the complaint. And …if…upon investigation, deem that there is sufficient evidence, then we may forward the complaint to the tribunal, but the hate is defined in the Human Rights Act under section 13-1.”

A couple months ago, Barrack Obama issued some theological pronouncements. Speaking on March third he said:

I will tell you that I don’t believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don’t think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans. That’s my view.

Here Senator Obama is practicing what theologians call ‘canon within a canon.’ That is, he is saying that we should view some parts of the Bible as more important than other parts, and read the other parts in light of those more privileged parts. But let us not concede to the Senator the high ground of the Sermon on the Mount. Loving your neighbor as yourself, which is presumably what he was referring to, does not equal accepting their sin. In fact it might mean just the opposite, as in warning one’s neighbor of his sin so that he does not fall into eternal destruction.
(more…)

Scott Richert has an excellent series going over at Chronicles on Christians in the American nation. He writes:

There is no doubt that the idea of America as a credal nation has been used to great advantage by men from Lincoln to George W. Bush. And the fact of multiethnic immigration to the United States (pre-1965, let alone post-) has made it easier to sell the idea that what binds us together is not a common language, culture, genetic endowment, homeland, and history, but an “abstract and revolutionary idea,” whether equality or liberty.

As I have discussed in a number of articles in Chronicles and elsewhere and in two speeches at the John Randolph Club, this idea was used in an Americanization campaign in the early 20th century to strip Continental immigrants (many of them Catholic) of their particular European ethnic identities—all in the name of aiding “assimilation.” While superficially successful (these groups began to regard themselves as fully American to the extent that they rejected their native traditions, language, and culture and subscribed instead to the American “creed”), the process had the opposite effect in the long run. The true assimilation that comes from living together and developing common traditions and a common history—the assimilation that actually creates a nation—was strangled in its crib. (The better route would have been to cut off immigration and to let assimilation occur naturally.)

And yet, despite the obvious effects that policies predicated on the idea of America as a credal nation have had, their success has proved the point: To the extent that we can say that there is an American national identity today, it is in spite of, not because of, the concept of credal nationhood. The nation is not found in the credal capitol of Washington, D.C., but where nations are always found—in the surviving traditions and folkways of people living real, rooted lives on the land where their fathers lived and died.

Having gone on at too great a length already, I’ll save one final point—that “credal nationhood” is, and always has been, more about the state than about the nation—for my next post.

What is a conservative? The word is tossed around like most words are, without much critical reflection on what the term actually means. Is it conservative to support the United States no matter what? To support any war started by a Republican? Just what is it to be ‘conservative’?

I like to start with the dictionary, and mine defines conservative as:

“holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.”

That seems to be a good definition - but is that what the GOP and modern conservatives mean when they say they are conservative? Is it really about conserving the past and the permanent things? In a happier age, Edmund Burke wrote:

“…in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.”

So the first principles of true conservative thought are a love for, and healthy embrace of, the past.