Plus ça Change

Britons are on the verge of redicovering some old wisdom:

Caning pupils 'can be effective behaviour control'

Government research showed some mothers and fathers believed corporal punishment was an "effective method of control" when they were at school.

They said the decision to outlaw physical chastisement contributed to a decline in discipline.

The comments - in a study backed by the Department for Children, Schools and Families - come just months after a fifth of teachers called for the cane to be reintroduced to restore order in the classroom...

A survey of more than 6,000 teachers last year found more than a fifth believed the cane should be brought back.

One supply teacher told researchers: "Children's behaviour is now absolutely outrageous in the majority of schools. I am a supply teacher, so I see very many schools and there are no sanctions. There are too many anger management people and their ilk who give children the idea that it is their right to flounce out of lessons for time out because they have problems with their temper. They should be caned instead."

This sounded so familiar that I immediately turned to my copy of Three Men in a Boat, where J. remembers his boyhood:

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general disinclination to work of any kind."

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would say, "get up and do something for your living, can't you?" - not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often cured me - for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.

You know, it often is so - those simple, old-fashioned remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.

And Surely the Age of Great Speeches Isn't Over

Tony Woodlief comments on Sunday's Inaugural concert:

Sunday's inauguration concert was designed to evoke strong emotion. It was certainly held in a dramatic setting, cast at the feet of Lincoln, in the place where Reverend King gave his nation-changing speech. The danger of standing where giants have tread, of course, is that doing so invites comparison. There was certainly little to be compared, this day, between the transformative words of these great men and the canned lines of the very small playactors selected to give speeches between the concert's musical acts...

...It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers...

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy—if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

Yet there was a time when scientists and thinkers were among the household list that today is entitled: Celebrities. There was a time when speeches were given by people who could write them, and further, could deliver them with greater force than the pale, this-is-how-we-talk-on-the-Academy-Awards-stage style of Judd, Jackson, et al. And surely the age of great speeches isn't over, as witnessed by the performance of the most gifted speaker on Sunday's stage, Mr. Obama himself. Might there not have been room, then, amidst all the glamour, for an Irving, a Goia, and perhaps—God forbid, given sensitivities about speakers who affirm the validity of the entire Bible—the booming voice of a pastor?

In President Obama we clearly have star power, and one hopes thoughtfulness and moral courage as well. Perhaps the modern American bargain is that we can no longer have the latter two in our public officials without a healthy dose of the former. The danger, of course, is that too few of us seem able to discern the difference.

Inauguration Haiku

Ace offers three haiku for the inauguration:

Po-TUS Obama
America the best
Bush goes to jail now

Trust in Obama
All your worries gone forever
Bush goes to jail now

Barack is dreamy
Sorry Iraq we leave soon
Bush goes to jail now

I'm going to have to think to meet that challenge.

Stick to What You Know

In Inaugural News, Bishop T.D. Jakes, senior pastor from Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, spoke at an inaugural morning service. Bishop Jakes taught from the book of Daniel and shared this thought:

“The problems are mighty and the solutions are not simple,” Jakes said, “and everywhere you turn there will be a critic waiting to attack every decision that you make. But you are all fired up, Sir, and you are ready to go. And this nation goes with you. God goes with you.

“I say to you as my son who is here today, my 14-year-old son – he probably would not quote scripture. He probably would use Star Trek instead, and so I say, ‘May the force be with you.”

Ahem. It's not enough that the good bishop uses some sketchy, Hollywood, faux-Tao saying, but he can't get the series attribution right.

Ah, well. As Admiral Adama used to say: "Beam me outta here!"

Notes to Myself

I spent some of the last two weeks snowed in, going through stuff in boxes in the basement. One of the things I found was an old memoranda book with just a few pages filled with notes.

I offer two of these entries without comment:

"Forgiveness sounds like a lovely idea--until we have something to forgive."

And

"Some people reject Einstein's Special and General Relativity on an emotional basis, saying that those theories remove fixed standards, which leads to complete relativism. In fact, what Einstein did was to move absolutes from frames of reference to the laws that describe the relationships between frames of reference."

That's all.

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem

An eye-opening article from the Times of London about the necessity of Christianinty--from an atheist. Some snipettes:

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...

...Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

...Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Merry Christmas!

The Pacific Northwest is having a white Christmas this year. To commemorate it, here are a couple of photos I took while going about the day.

On a dog walk:



A trip to the grocery store:



Down a quite road:

If Music be the Food of Love...

...play on, give me excess of it.

A fascinating article in The Economist about the speculative evolutionary roots of music.

Some comments:

Today, people are so surrounded by other people’s music that they take it for granted, but as little as 100 years ago singsongs at home, the choir in the church and fiddlers in the pub were all that most people heard.

My father's family was very musical. Old tintypes of them show them at family reunions looking like a small orchestra. Occasionally, when he was disgusted at popular culture, he would talk about how the entire town of Roff, Oklahoma would meet and everybody was expected to to have something, such as a song or recitation, to entertain the others.

Of course, I find that the hypothosis fails in this regard:

Another reason to believe the food-of-love [evolutionary] hypothesis is that music fulfils the main criterion of a sexually selected feature: it is an honest signal of underlying fitness. Just as unfit peacocks cannot grow splendid tails, so unfit people cannot sing well, dance well (for singing and dancing go together, as it were, like a horse and carriage) or play music well. All of these activities require physical fitness and dexterity. Composing music requires creativity and mental agility. Put all of these things together and you have a desirable mate.

I offer this in rebuttal:

Wonder Woman--The Animated Movie

You're doing it rather well, actually...

All the Cool Franchises are Re-Booting

The Ten Hidden Gift-Giving Rules

This week marks the kickoff of the Holiday shopping season, so from the wonderful Unplug the Christmas Machine:

The Ten Hidden Gift-Giving Rules:

1. Give a gift to everyone you expect to get a gift from.
2. If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year. (Some people have pre-wrapped generic gifts for just this event.)
3. When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter.
4. The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient.
5. Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value.
6. The presents that you give someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years.
7. If you give a gift to a person in a certain category (for example, a co-worker or neighbor), give a gift of roughly equal value to everyone in that category.
8. Women should give gifts to their close women friends.
9. Men should not give gifts to their close men friends—unless those gifts are alcoholic.
10. Whenever the above rules cause you any difficulty, solve the problem by buying more gifts.

Articulate

Now that the Republican Party is looking for it's next standard bearer, we all have been compiling lists of what qualities the ideal candidate will have, and what priority we should impose on those qualities.

Let me state that whoever leads the party and whoever becomes the candidate in 2012 must be, in the words of Joe Biden, "...articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking."

She aces "bright," "clean," and "nice-looking;" but much as I love Governor Palin, she did not demonstrate "articulate" during the recent campaign.

Why is this so important? I think that while we have seen that George W. Bush has been an effective administrator in protecting the country for the last 8 years, his inability to communicate his plans and directions ceded to his opponents the marketplace of ideas and opinions. So his accomplishments (no attacks on the order of 9/11, forstalling a depression in 2002, etc.) became not victories, but clubs used by the left to beat him.

James Pethokoukis points out that if the Democratic plans for US health care policy proceed unopposed, Conservatives may never recover the ground. He makes this observation:

3) Republicans better learn to competently talk healthcare.
John McCain's healthcare plan was perhaps the most provocative policy proposal of the entire 2008 campaign. Too bad he could neither fully explain how it worked nor persuasively argue why it was better than Barack Obama's plan. Also too bad since his plan would have smartly reduced healthcare costs by getting companies out of the healthcare benefits business and empowering individuals to buy insurance on their own. This would have helped fix what economist Arnold Kling calls the insurance vs. insulation problem: "Insulation relieves the patient of the stress of making decisions about treatment. The patient also does not have to worry about shopping around for the best price. The problem with insulation is that it is not a sustainable form of healthcare finance."

Mr. Pethokoukis ends with this:

Another interesting healthcare reform option is highlighted by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in the book Grand New Party. Uncle Sam would require individuals and families to put 15 percent of their income into health savings accounts. If you run out of money before year-end, the government steps in. If you don't, you get the money back or it rolls over into a retirement account. Of course, any conservative alternative would be easier to implement if it doesn't first have to kill an existing nationalized health plan. But thanks to Tom Daschle, that is just what might have to happen.

The Constant Reader will remember that I endorsed this idea when it was proposed by Megan McCardle.

If the Government Built Cars

Michael Moore told Larry King this:

In an interview Wednesday with CNN's Larry King, Moore criticized the automakers for ignoring the desires of consumers, building instead bigger, more profitable cars as foreign automakers pursued both SUVs and more fuel-efficient sedans and compacts.

Moore suggested that Congress demand change in exchange for the money, including a call to help rebuild mass transit in the country.

"President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer," Moore said. "We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reins on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline."

What would such a Congress-mandated car look like? Why, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition!

So take the bus to your local CM dealer today and find out why the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is the only car endorsed by President Barack Obama. One test drive will convince you that you'd choose it over the import brands. Even if they were still legal.

Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max

Daniel Henninger writes in his November 20th "Wonder Land" column about the link between Christmas (or the lack of it) and the current economic meltdown:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Hmmm...

No Ogoodey-Boogedy?

Oogedy-Boogedy

I love the sound of it.

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

UPDATE: Oogedy-Boogedy!!

MORE UPDATE: I was amused by the controversy over the idea that Christians should vote like we are told and drop the "Oogedy-Boogedy" stuff.

As I pointed out last month:

Many critics stand ready to mock Palin’s Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama’s and Biden’s?

Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name.

I don't ask that my political allies believe in the miraculous, I just don't what them to expect me to deny it.

Kiss a Wookie, Kick a Droid

If you want a big, overbearing, orchestral movie score, John Williams is the man.

I kid! I kid because I love his work.

But not as much as this:



UPDATE: Just to be clear, the video is of a chap lip-synching to an acappella quartet. The quartet is called "Moosebutter," they approved of this video. For more Moosebutter, check out www.moosebutter.com.

Crazy Pills

Back in mid-October, Ben Smith published an email that really shocked me. It was about focus group results from a test of a McCain ad:

Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he's too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON'T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT...but they STILL don't give a f***. They said right out, "He won't do anything better than McCain" but they're STILL voting for Obama.

The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I sat on the other side of the glass and realized...this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy....

When I read that I knew that a) Republicans had "lost the brand," and b) many of the people voting for Obama were doing so for non-rational reasons.

Now there is this video. It consists of excerpts from Obama voters fresh from the polling booth. After viewing this I know that a) Republicans have to quit whining about the "media bias." This isn't the result of just "media bias," it's the result of cultivated stone ignorance.



I so much love the part where they ask people where they get their news. And the woman who declares, "NPR, PBS, & The New York Times" was as pig-ignorant as the people who got their news from the Comedy Channel.

Huck-a-POW

I have, in the last few weeks, enjoyed watching several of the Republicans who were in the Presidential campaign. Some have retreated to their tents to sulk, some to their caves to lick their wounds, and some have started laying foundation for future campaigns.

The king of this last group is that Energizer Bunny of Conservative Ideas, Newt Gingrich. Newt writes books, founds think tanks, and turns up on the news talkers as frequently as most candidates inhale.

But now Newt is being joined in his Long March by Huck. Mike Huckabee now has an interview show of Fox and had released a new book: Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America. Time magazine reviews the book:

Many conservative Christian leaders, who never backed Huckabee despite their holding very similar stances on social issues, are spared neither the rod nor the lash. Huckabee writes of Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian leader and former presidential candidate, as having an "ever-changing reason to deny me his support." Of one private meeting with Bauer, Huckabee says, "it was like playing Whac-a-Mole at the arcade — whatever issue I addressed, another one surfaced as a 'problem' that made my candidacy unacceptable..."

...Huckabee describes other elders of the social conservative movement, many of whom meet in private as part of an organization called the Arlington Group, as "more enamored with the process, the political strategies, and the party hierarchy than with the simple principles that had originally motivated the Founders." Later Huckabee writes, "I lamented that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices — like Naaman, confronting King David in his sin and saying, 'Though art the man!'— to being voices of patronage, and saying to those in power, 'You da' man!' "

He calls out Pat Robertson, the Virginia-based televangelist, and Dr. Bob Jones III, chancellor of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, for endorsing Rudy Giuliani and Romney, respectively. He also has words for the Texas-based Rev. John Hagee, who endorsed the more moderate John McCain in the primaries, as someone who was drawn to the eventual Republican nominee because of the lure of power. Huckabee speaks to Hagee by phone before the McCain endorsement, while the former Arkansas governor is preparing for a spot on Saturday Night Live. "I asked if he had prayed about this and believed this was what the Lord wanted him to do," Huckabee writes of his conversation with Hagee. "I didn't get a straight answer." Months later, McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement because of controversial remarks the pastor had made about biblical interpretations.

UPDATE: Allah Says: <

A desperately needed fix of campaign drama during this post-election interregnum detox. Just give me a little hit of score-settling to get me through the day, bro. Just one hit.

Ah, that’s the stuff

The Look of Blog

So I am fooling around with the look of the blog.

So far: meh.

If anyone wants to point me to a cool template (minimalist, lots of white space, focusing on the posts rather than the graphic of Ratatouille in the heading), post the link in the comments.

Veteran's Day 2008

HERE DEAD WE LIE

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

A E Housman