The Gospel of Wealth

from NYT:

Platt grew uneasy with the role he had fallen into and wrote about it in a recent book called “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” It encapsulates many of the themes that have been floating around 20-something evangelical circles the past several years.

The material world is too soul-destroying. “The American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the Gospel,” he argues. The American dream emphasizes self-development and personal growth. Our own abilities are our greatest assets.

But the Gospel rejects the focus on self: “God actually delights in exalting our inability.” The American dream emphasizes upward mobility, but “success in the kingdom of God involves moving down, not up.”

Double Dip? The American economy is in serious trouble

from The Weekly Standard:

"...and the remaining weapons we have available to prevent a double dip are few indeed. We will try to avoid a long period of deflation of the sort that doomed Japan to a lost decade, but are not confident we can. That’s a free translation of what the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee said after last week’s meeting."

The Myth of the Fairer Sex

from The American Prospect:
Anyone who reacts with shock to the reality that women have the capacity to be immoral, malicious, and violent -- just like the guys -- hasn't paid enough attention in history class, much less to the nightly news.

Morals & the servile mind

from The New Criterion: By “the moral life,” I simply mean that dimension of our inner experience in which we deliberate about our obligations to parents, children, employers, strangers, charities, sporting associations, and all the other elements of our world. We may not always devote much conscious thought to these matters, but thinking about them makes up the substance of our lives. It also constitutes the conditions of our happiness. In deliberating, and in acting on what we have decided, we discover who we are and we reveal ourselves to the world.

This kind of self-management emerges from the inner life and is the stream of thoughts and decisions that make us human. To the extent that this element of our humanity has been appropriated by authority, we are all diminished, and our civilization loses the special character that has made it the dynamic animator of so much hope and happiness in modern times.

It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason. Aristotle thought that some people were “natural slaves.”

In our democratic world, by contrast, we recognize at least some element of the “master” (which means, of course, self-managing autonomy) in everyone. Indeed, in our entirely justified hatred of slavery, we sometimes think that the passion for freedom is a constitutive drive of all human beings. Such a judgment can hardly survive the most elementary inspection of history.

The experience of both traditional societies and totalitarian states in the twentieth century suggests that many people are, in most circumstances, happy to sink themselves in some collective enterprise that guides their lives and guarantees them security. It is the emergence of freedom rather than the extent of servility that needs explanation.

"This Time is Different" book review

from NYT:
“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.”

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

The New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, for example, praised the book as “the best explanation of the crisis” but referred to it as a history book, rather than a work of economic analysis, since it is “almost entirely devoid of theory.” (The implication being, of course, that genuine “economic analysis” must be hypertheoretical.)

Nasty, brutish and short. An Icelandic social history

from The Economist:
The dank squalor of the turf-built hovels in which most Icelanders lived is described with disconcerting relish, along with the suppurating sores, stoically borne, that resulted. Clothes were boiled in urine occasionally, but were otherwise worn without washing.

Life lightened up in the 19th century when mechanisation allowed Icelanders to make some money from fish. In 1940 British and then American forces occupied the island to safeguard it from Nazi Germany. That broke the country’s isolation for ever.

Stop obsessing about arugula. Your "sustainable" mantra -- organic, local, and slow -- is no recipe for saving the world's hungry millions.

from Foreign Policy:

What's so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid.

Internet resources on Cambodian Holocoust

Internet resources on Cambodian Holocoust...click here.

Lest we forget: 17 April 1975

from MercatorNet:
I remained for a long time traumatised by the cruelty, cowardice and inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge who walked into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. It is painful even now to recall and write these memories. Since then, I have lived other lifetimes, which include a return to Cambodia to revisit what remains of my home, my family and my country. Everything I went through, and all those who were lost, still haunt me.

The History We're Not Being Told

from Charity'sPlace:

Speaker and author David Barton of Wall Builders (a foundation dedicated to the preservation of American history) is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the founders and early American History. He owns the largest private collection of documents, books, and letters dating from the 1700’s until the first World War. These documents prove the history taught today has been radically altered over time through the deliberate “omission” of the religious history of our nation. Founders have been misquoted, misrepresented, and sometimes their personal views have even been completely altered to support an agenda. In short, our history has been rewritten in an attempt to diminish the importance of faith in the early Colonies.

Haiti Links

1) Military personnel download photos to Flickr
2) Updated coverage from North Shore Journal
3) Earthquake relief links
4) Haiti at the time the earthquake struck, from Belmont Club.
5) Why is Haiti so poor?
6) Haiti Earthquake in pictures. Eight million dollars so far...
7) Anchoress with constantly updated posting.
8) Quick Donation, from The Hill: The campaign -- run by the Red Cross -- instructs people to text "HAITI" to the phone number 90999 in order to donate $10 to the international relief organization.

Debating the Crusades

Debating the Crusades

Living Responsibly: Václav Havel's View

from the Acton Institute:

Havel believes in the old-fashioned concepts of good and evil. He speaks of truth, without quotation marks. He sees individuals as the chief engines of history. Championing human liberty, he warns against the centralization of power, and his plays describe the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy. Challenging the doctrine of progress, he looks to the past for wisdom. He speaks freely about God and religion. He conjoins these themes in a call for each of us to live responsibly. Personal responsibility is his central theme.

Because “communism was the perverse extreme” of this modern world-view, Havel sees life under communism as “a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies.” He once admitted being particularly “taken aback by the extent to which so many Westerners are addicted to ideology, much more than we who live in a system which is ideological through and through.” But the West shows “unwillingness to hear the warning voices coming from our part of the world.” 

The Two Faces of Janus: Marxism and Facism in the Twentieth Century

from PolicyReview:
Berkeley Professor A. James Gregor, in his superbly researched book, has presumably selected Janus to symbolize the twinning of the two ideologies that have so scarred the twentieth century.

Having combed their literature, Professor Gregor has shown beyond a shadow of doubt the affinities, too long ignored, between fascism and Marxism-Leninism. (It was Don Luigi Sturzo who provided the reductio ad absurdum: Fascism was black communism and communism was red fascism.) Richard Pipes has written that "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."

Fascist theoreticians pointed out that the organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.

Left liberals have frantically denied the "Janus" notion that Marxism-Leninism and fascism have a common origin. With scholarly skill and an enormous amount of reading has Professor Gregor made such denials as dated as the Communist Manifesto.

Pearl Harbor importance resonates nearly seven decades later | Everyday Christian

Pearl Harbor importance resonates nearly seven decades later | Everyday Christian

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It is imperative, then, we take advantage of listening to first-hand accounts of people who experienced these events when possible and catalog them for future reference. The sacrifices made nearly seven decades ago still reverberate today and as Americans we recognize those sacrifices, the same we hope future generations will recognize our accomplishments as relevant and not just another date and time from the distant past.

things-we-are-glad-we-have-done vs. things-we-would-choose-to-do-at-the-time-if-we had-an-unfettered-choice

from Slate:

We take our daughter to the violin lesson on Saturday morning when we want to sleep in because if we don't do it, no one else will. This is true of some very large proportion of the things that good parents do for their children. Good neighbors see to it that their hungry neighbors are fed for the same reason--if they don't do it, nobody else will. If someone else will, they are inclined to let that someone else do it.

Remembering Winston Churchill

from ClairmontReview:

"Today, November 30th, is Winston Churchill's birthday. We remember the great man for his defense of the free world against the forces of evil led by Adolph Hitler. The world today is no less dangerous and we are just as ill-prepared to meet the challenges presented by the on-going threat of Communist China, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and the new and deadly designs of mainstream Islam.

Here are two essays, one by my predecessor Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn that appeared in our Claremont Review of Books and another by our Distinguished Fellow Harry V. Jaffa:



Thoughts and Adventures, by Larry P. Arnn
Can There Be Another Winston Churchill?, by Harry V. Jaffa

Both point to why Churchill is worth studying. I recommend them to you. "

Don't date your boss

from Charity's Place:
The repercussions are always unfortunate and unfortunately, also always fall on the female -- men usually emerge from these romantic entanglements unscathed, which isn't fair and is sexist, but is the sad truth. It's bad enough when there are just two people involved, but if Mr. Handsome happens to have a wife and kids, then it's even worse and you become the proverbial homewrecker... or Anne Boleyn.

Dear Mr. President . . . Read Your Kipling

from WorldAffairs:
I have bad news for you. You’re an imperialist. I realize that for a man like you, educated in the highest circles of modern academia, what I’ve said is a grave insult. While I’m at it, let me offend you completely. Your foreign policy is an attempt

“To veil the threat of terror /
And check the show of pride.”
You’ve vowed to
“Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile /
To serve your captives’ need.”
The result of all this will be to—
I’ll bet you a second term—
“Watch Sloth and heathen Folly /
Bring all your hope to naught.”

The Aesthetic Urge

from PolicyReview:
"...to understand human conduct in all its dazzling variety you must understand the universal features of human nature. To be sure, many economists and political scientists assume that human beings are rational, self-interested actors. And influential schools of psychology and linguistics hold that the mind is constituted by fixed structures that organize and direct perception, cognition, and language. But it remains a common opinion among significant swaths of social scientists and the dominant opinion in the humanities — including political theory and philosophy — that human nature is a discredited notion, the search for which reflects reactionary tendencies.

The disbelief in human nature stems from several sources..."