Vox Popoli

A public school principal believes the standards at his high school are too high:

Last month, Principal Bennett Lieberman sent off a stern memo to teachers. “If you are not passing more than 65 percent of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities, and you are setting your students up for failure, which, in turn, limits your success as a professional.”

I’m looking forward to watching the continued self-demolition of the American public schools. You might think they can’t possibly get any worse, but I have no doubt that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Huckabee attracts support from 23% of Likely Republican Primary voters nationwide and Rudy Giuliani earns the vote from 19%. The frontrunners are followed by Mitt Romney at 15%, John McCain at 12%, and Fred Thompson at 9% (see recent daily numbers). Ron Paul currently attracts 5% of Likely Republican Primary voters nationwide.

Now that Huckabee and Paul combined have the same support in the polls as “frontrunners” Giuliani and Thompson, it’s interesting to see that the usual suspects have suddenly dropped the “electability” angle.

Gordon Brown follows through on his threat to betray Britain to the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels:

Gordon Brown today has signed Britain up for the EU ‘non-constitution’ constitution without, of course, having bothered to have held the referendum that the Labour party had promised.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that representative democracy IS NOT DEMOCRACY in the same way that social justice is not justice. It is time to end the charade.

Now, I am no fan of Mike Huckabee or his love for the strong government nanny state. However, it seems really bizarre that he should be attacked for correctly pointing out Captain Underoos’s religious peculiarities. Rod Dreher provides a link to an LDS web site which completely support’s Huckabee’s statement:

On first hearing, the doctrine that Lucifer and our Lord, Jesus Christ, are brothers may seem surprising to some—especially to those unacquainted with latter-day revelations. But both the scriptures and the prophets affirm that Jesus Christ and Lucifer are indeed offspring of our Heavenly Father and, therefore, spirit brothers. Jesus Christ was with the Father from the beginning. Lucifer, too, was an angel “who was in authority in the presence of God,” a “son of the morning.” (See Isa. 14:12; D&C 76:25–27.) Both Jesus and Lucifer were strong leaders with great knowledge and influence. But as the Firstborn of the Father, Jesus was Lucifer’s older brother. (See Col. 1:15; D&C 93:21.)

How could two such great spirits become so totally opposite? The answer lies in the principle of agency, which has existed from all eternity. (See D&C 93:30–31.) Of Lucifer, the scripture says that because of rebellion “he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies.” (Moses 4:4.) Note that he was not created evil, but became Satan by his own choice.

So much for John 3:16, I guess. However, it’s pretty clear that Huckabee has no balls; the fact that he apologized for speaking the truth tells you all you really need to know about him… if his enthusiasm for a nationwide smoking ban wasn’t already enough.

Richard Dawkins is not wrong, in fact, it appears he hasn’t entirely grasped the full extent of Christianity’s influence on his thinking:

Staunch atheist Richard Dawkins recently denied wanting to stop Christian traditions, instead labelling himself a “cultural Christian”.

“This is historically a Christian country. I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims,” Oxford biologist Dawkins said on BBC’s recent “Have Your Say” programme on Sunday.

Where Dawkins falls short is that he is mostly a “moral Christian” as well. This is why the vehemently atheist Michel Onfray criticizes him and his fellow secular humanists in In Defense of Atheism, stating “many individuals who consider themselves atheists profess – without noticing it – an ethic, a way of thinking, a vision of the world saturated in Judeo-Christianity…. The Western body (including that of atheists, Muslims, deists and agnostics raised in the geographic and ideological Judeo-Christian zone) is Christian.”

Dawkins’s atheism, like most Western atheists, is inherently Christian in its very framework. This is why Onfray rejects “Christian atheism” and calls for a post-Christian “atheist atheism”. He writes: “The immanent ordering of the world distinguishes the Christian atheist from the Christian believer. But not their values, which remain identical…. Their concerns are charity, temperance, compassion, mercy and humility, but also love of one’s neighbor and the forgiveness of offenses…. Most of the time, this Christian atheism dismisses the Pauline hatred of the body, its rejection of desires, pleasures, drives and passions.”

Note that Onfray is saying exactly what I have been saying, that the New Atheism is an attempt to cling to Christianity without Jesus Christ, less the concept of sexual sin. Dawkins, those who have read The God Delusion may recall, does not reject the Ten Commandments in their entirety, he merely wishes to replace threefour of them. This moral parasitism is not undesirable in practice, but it is rationally indefensible.

It seems old Sigmund after all:

Protests from female soldiers have led to the Swedish military removing the penis of a heraldic lion depicted on the Nordic Battlegroup’s coat of arms. The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice, Göteborgs-Posten reports.

The lesson, as always….

No doubt the responses to this article will be amusing. I love the fact that they published it in the women’s section:

I am a massive fan of British women. UK girls, in my opinion, are the greatest natural beauties in the world . . . when they’re 17 or 18 years old. The girls I was surrounded by when I was a teenager were sublime roses with lustrous hair, flawless skin, bright eyes and lithe, athletic bodies. They dressed as if there would be a prize at the end of the night for the girl wearing the least. I then went away to Philadelphia for university. Four years later, I came back and wondered: “What the hell happened to all the beautiful girls I knew?” My first assumption was that one half of them had eaten the other half and washed them down with a crate of lager. These girls looked phenomenal when looking good took no effort. But when British women get to the age where they have to make an effort, they appear unable, or uninterested, in rising to the challenge….

The irony is that, as obsessed as American women are with their looks, they totally ignore their social skills. Within 10 minutes of meeting an American woman, I guarantee you will know her salary and most recent medical/ dental procedure. They all but turn up with their CV printed out. In return, they will immediately want to know “all” about you, ie, how much you earn, how much you have earned in the past, what your future earning potential is, whether you own property, whether you have an investment portfolio, where you shop, where you “vacation”, what you drive and how large your parents’ house is. I once got to the end of a date in New York, pulled out my credit card to pay and the girl solemnly remarked: “A green American Express card? I didn’t know they still made them in that colour.” American women also take themselves too seriously and are annoyingly confrontational.

The solution for the British women is easy enough, as before too long they’ll all be wearing burkhas anyhow. As for American women, that problem is taking care of itself too, as men of the upper education and income classes marry non-career women and leave the high-flyers to their cats and gamma males. The ironic thing about the women who get so upset over wealthy executives and sportsmen marrying pretty secretaries and hot nannies is that it’s not as if there’s a shortage of plumbers and electricians and garbage men for them to choose from, it’s just that most white collar women think they are too good for such men by virtue of their paper collection.

But it’s that very attitude, of course, that is the very reason no rational white collar men wants anything to do with them.

Agent Provocateur makes a heartfelt plea:

Dear Gov.,

All I want to do, is wake up in the morning, walk outside and stand in my back yard with my Lab, the desert before me just as the sun rises, and take a deep breath of clean crisp morning air … a free man at liberty.

What is so hard about that?

Dear Agent Provocateur,

Put some clothes on or we’ll arrest you for disturbing the peace.

The Government

One of fantasy’s best and most entertaining writers, Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s:

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism.

I came late to Pratchett’s Discworld, but very much appreciate his books and the way he has become a better, more subtle and more amusing writer as his career has progressed. Here’s wishing him all the best in his battle and I hope he will write many more books in the years to come.

As NRO leaps the Lamnidae:

I have pretty much decided for Ron Paul myself. I am sympathetic to many of the reservations you have posted, but every piece of serious policy analysis I read confirms to me that our country has gone too far down a wrong path—a path that leads to nothing I recognize as conservatism.

Meanwhile, Joe Carter may be supporting the Huckster, but that doesn’t mean he can’t put a cogent point together about how the Manhattan Conservatives of NRO are increasingly out of touch with the Republican base:

Has National Review jumped the shark?

I don’t mean to be glib or facetious in raising the question for I love the magazine dearly. NR was a formative influence on my political philosophy and continues to shape my thinking. It introduced me to conservative ideas, policies, statesmen, and writers. Indeed, three of my favorite conservatives—Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Byron York—still write for the august publication.

But over the past few years (at least that is the time that I began noticing) there has been a shift to what I call “Manhattan Conservatism.” Because almost all of the NR staff lives and works in New York City, their concerns and values tend to reflect a NYC/DC-centric urban cosmopolitism. They’ve adopted a watered-down form of big-tent fusionism in which embracing any non-liberal ideas are enough to earn you the label of “conservative” (a Manhattan Conservative can have the same views on abortion and gay marriage as the liberal intelligentsia so long as they embrace supply-side economics or torturing terrorists)….

Now to be fair, Romney is not an unacceptable candidate if the criteria is simply to endorse a Republican. But to pass over true conservatives for a moderate is a slap in the face to the magazine’s dedicated readers.

And that’s exactly why I let my subscription to NR Digital lapse about eighteen months ago. NR is more Rockefeller Republican than Reagan Republican these days, that they would nominate Captain Underoos and do so with a straight face tells you all you need to know about their continued relevance. Romney gives off signals of High Weirdness even if one leaves his religious peculiarities out of the equation. (And before any Mormon readers get in a lather, please note that I’d cheerfully endorse a one-legged gay atheist crack whore if he genuinely supported small government, valued human liberty, and honored the U.S. Constitution.) Religion is not synonymous with ideology in many cases.

Joe’s take on the matter may help illustrate why I laugh when people attempt to mock me for choosing to write for WorldNetDaily instead of a more “reputable” publication. WND has grown from three million monthly readers to eight million since I’ve been writing for it, over the same timeframe, most media publications have seen significant drops in readership. The fact that Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee have both improved their poll standings since Ilana Mercer and I started writing about Paul and Chuck Norris came out for Huckabee may be a complete coincidence – I imagine the latter’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations was rather more important – but it would be a big mistake to assume that everyone across the right wing takes NRO more seriously than WND simply because the New York Times and Fox News do.

UPDATE: David Fredosso joins the Ron Paul Revolution too:

Now (I think) I can vote in what will be my first presidential primary election ever. I will not be voting for Huckabee, but for Ron Paul — but I still like to think I’ve helped the cause of Freedom and Democracy by helping Huck get on the ballot.

HT: Catkiller spotted these interesting developments first. It will be interesting to see where the rest of the NROniks go if Romney drops out after NH… and how many would go for Hillary over Paul.