Time Immortal

Vox Day reflects, by way of citing Joel Belz, on an odd blip in American attitudes toward socialism and socialized institutions:

…Socialized medicine? Most of us recoil at the idea. Socialized airlines? Reminds us of Aeroflot. Socialized banks? When it happened last month, it terrified us.

But socialized schools? Nine out of ten of us patronize them regularly. And we do so with na’ry a thought or concern about how such an arrangement affects next week’s election, or the election after that, or the lifetime of elections to come.

Seizing the intellectual high ground of education has always been a priority for totalitarians. Marx advocated it, Lenin prioritized it, Hitler incorporated it into his 25-point plan. It’s important because it negates the natural advantage of conservatives, which is that they propagate themselves. Socialists, by and large, don’t, which is why they have to propagate by parasitic conversion.

You know, I’m only now beginning to understand just what level of involvement Grace and I are going to have to have in Ella’s education once she starts attending school. And it’s not even just in things like sex-ed, which we of course attempt to supplement with Church teaching when necessary (and it almost certainly will be necessary). It will be in things like history (I’m not suggesting whitewashing all the evils done in and through colonialism, but I’d rather that not be the only side of the story presented. Also, not all cultures are equal, and some are indeed better than others; I’d rather she learn this truth too), art, English, and possibly the sciences as well (no dysteleology, please!). And that says nothing about what her teachers might say by way of offhand remarks during class.

And don’t get me started on the concept of Religion classes. Grace was fortunate, and got a solid education in theological concepts; I was not so fortunate.

I admit a genuine fear of what my daughter is going to be exposed to in school, in the slant that will shape not only what she learns about the world and what has gone before, but which will also shape how she learns about it. And quite frankly, I’d rather she grow up with a properly nurtured ability to look at facts and to make decisions based on truths, rather than be spoon-fed a progressive worldview.

In Alberta, there’s still some hope: many rural schools are simply excellent, I gather, and actually teach students to think critically, without demanding that they likewise put on the proverbial rose-coloured glasses of modern liberalism. My wife stands as an example of someone who has encountered just such an institution.

Failing that, the temptation to home-school Ella is getting stronger.

6:30 PM — some dude was getting interviewed on the CBC, telling the reporter about how the “last 8 years” have been the longest of his life. He was getting all weepy about the idea that some change might finally be in sight.

Somebody needs a life. Check that: somebody needs more to his life than who is in office.

6:45 PM — Grace has, of course, been taking care of Ella all day, and so made a point of taking a survey of all the various news channels: she’s all but disgusted at the pro-Obama slant in the coverage.

7:00 PM — Turning the channel away from election coverage; we’re getting too infuriated at the bias.

7:15 PM — And it’s my turn to hold the baby, while Momma finishes her dinner.

7:30 PM — Ohio for Obama? That’s what the CBC just said. I call shennanigans, personally. Other results have flipped toward McCain as we’ve been watching…so we’ll see.

7:45 PM — Peter Mansbridge is certainly no stranger to fawning over Obama, praising his rhetorical abilities. To which I say: it’s not the man, it’s the Teleprompter.

Still, I see that Ace’s and Hillbuzz’s predictions were essentially correct: the media is going all out to call states for Obama at the first possibility. The CBC is showing McCain at 90 and Obama at 200, but there’s no way those numbers are anywhere in the vicinity of finalized as yet.

We’re gonna turn off the TV for a bit; there’s too much American…sensory overload…on the television at the moment, and all of it for Obama. I’m gonna go grab some dinner myself, I think.

7:54 PM — Beef stew is good.

8:57 PM — We’ve switched to Star Trek.

9:16 PM — Well, it seems that the hype and change won the day. Barack Hussein Obama has gone on to defeat John McCain in the election. Star Trek had a better ending, I have to say.

It will be an interesting four years, and I mean that in the most Chinese sense possible.

So, what can Americans look forward to? I mean, besides partial-birth abortion becoming legal again, higher taxes, “redistribution of wealth” socialism, and assorted other treats? William Ayers as Secretary of State?

8:47 AM — well, it’s all historic and such, first black (half-black, whatever) President and all. I’m not sure the Obama presidency will be marked by much else than that particular distinction, and I wonder if perhaps this election result won’t steer the approval ratings for the presidential office in the same direction that the Democrat majority in the House has taken that legislative body’s approval rating.

Apropos of Kathy’s rant on the subject, I think it’s worth observing that in this election, that old maxim was once again proven true: if a conservative candidate starts trending left, he loses. McCain talked a fairly liberal game on a lot of issues, and his attempt to appeal to the immigrant vote — especially with concessions on illegal immigration — cost him in the end: Latinos voted for Obama. And so did the more progressive swing voters.

The shape of things to come will be…yes, interesting (in the Chinese sense) is by far the best term for it. Abortion rights will be vastly expanded, infants born alive after a botched abortion will be stripped of their legal protection, taxes will rise, and state-mandated “wealth redistribution” may well become the norm for American taxpayers and businesspeople.

Still, one interesting positive has emerged from all of this: Canada is now the conservative country on this continent. How’s that for odd?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Well, sorta.

I think the $700 billion “bailout” is just a bad idea: soft socialism, almost certainly doomed to failure, and a waste of money. I think it’s an inexcusable act of paying even more money to the banking bigwigs who steered the U.S. economy into the mud into the first place, a reward for their dismal performance and greedy behaviour. And I think it’s a distraction, a whitewashing of the complicity of the Democrats in the whole affair, from as far back as the 90s.

Rehmat thinks it’s a conspiracy by the Jooooooooooooos.

But hey, at least we agree that the United States government shouldn’t have done it!

Update: David Warren cites one economist’s humourous remarks on the “usefulness” of the bailout:

Here is how John Cochrane, Myron S. Scholes Professor of Finance in the University of Chicago, characterized the bailout, in an interview with Fox News: “The legislation is like this: some boats are sinking, so rather than bailing those boats out, you blow up the dam and drain the whole lake.”

What a disaster this will be. In my own limited considerations of the implications of the bailout, and in weighing its potential positive outcomes against its probable negative outcomes, I’m reminded of Mark Steyn’s incomparable turn of phrase: “if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog feces and mix them together, the result will taste considerably more like the latter than the former.”

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Canadians can be very complacent, especially where the threat of force is concerned. Perhaps as a function of our government-dependent, socialism-addled attitudes which disavow most notions of personal responsibility or obligation to the well-being of others, we tend not to want to risk our necks when an imminent danger to ourselves, or to others, emerges. When the man with the gun shows up, we tend to just do as he says — indeed, we’ve been taught to just do as he says — rather than make a stand against the would-be bully.

This was certainly true in Montreal all those years ago; fourteen women died there not because of the latent misogyny of society, but because of the cowardice and complacency programmed into the men who meekly obeyed the gunman’s order to leave their female classmates behind in those classrooms. And it might have ended up being true in Regina, Saskatchewan’s Luther College High School, but for the actions of school principal Mark Anderson. Because when a former student showed up with a firearm (which turned out to be an air-driven pellet gun) and demanded, at a school rally, that a list of grievances be read, the principal did what was right: he found a way to get close and wrestled the gunman to the floor.

A lot of modern folks might click their tongues at Mr. Anderson’s attitude: as the Shaidle notes, “those of us who praise such men [as Mark Anderson] are publicly condemned by lesser “males” who tremble at the implication that they should feel obliged do likewise.” And yet, at the end of the day, that was his obligation. As the principal, he was charged with the safety of the young students attending the school; their lives were in his care. And he acted in the only way that a moral man could have acted when faced with a threat to that which he is charged with keeping safe — he stood up to fight.

Would that his story were not newsworthy! Would that Canadian men and women could always, and readily, display this sort of courage, so that the truly surprising stories in the news were not stories of normal courage, but stories of shocking cowardice rightly condemned by all good people.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The connection between what we call, in modern times, Earth Day and the birthday of the monstrous man once known as Lenin is tenuous, admittedly. But not so tenuous that some people don’t remember that the first April 22nd Earth Day was put on that day to deliberately coincide with the marking of what would have been Lenin’s 100th birthday.

Because the Russians — especially during the Soviet heyday — were so environmentally friendly, after all. Not that the fact that there are, shall we say, close ties between modern rabid environmentalism and modern rabid socialism comes as much of a surprise.

So it would appear that the founder of the Facebook group opposed to Bill C-10, University of Alberta professor David Kahane, is also the teacher of a course where students meditate, repeat to themselves “May I have the ease of well-being,” and have as homework the task of sitting in public places directing thoughts of love and kindness at passers-by.

And this is apparently a “social justice“-themed class.

Look, I know a lot of Catholics out there have some strong reservations about the “social justice” movements that have been gaining ground in the Church of late (some see it as nothing more than a backdoor attempt to sneak socialism back in to the Church). Be that as it may…for all the reservations that people might have about such groups, at least they do works of social justice from time to time, usually.

Not Professor Kahane’s students, it seems. They’re too busy telling themselves that they are okay, too busy having “the ease of well-being” (whatever that might be). And when it actually comes time to do something apparently related to social justice, what do they do? Sit on a park bench and think happy thoughts at the people going by.

It’s nice work if you can get it, but do you suppose that any of Professor Kahane’s students — let alone David Kahane himself — has ever, I don’t know, seen the inside of a soup kitchen? That is social justice. Sitting on a park bench wishing yourself “the ease of well-being” and intently hoping that your positive vibes are reaching the people walking past is not social justice.

It’s just lazy, self-centered liberalism at its finest.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Mike Brock has an interesting analysis of changes in average global temperature relative to changes in solar activity. While a lot of people still attempt to downplay the role of the Sun in changes in Earth’s climate (sidetracking the discussion into things like CO2 and methane), the best evidence we have still seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that all the gases humanity can pump into the air count for almost nothing compared to the effect that the Sun has on Earth’s climate.

Indeed, since the ending of the last solar cycle, since which time no new sunspots — a good indicator of an active star — have been observed, the Earth’s global average temperature has reversed almost all of the 0.6 C rise above “average” that was observed at about this time last year.

That’s not to say that humanity should just pump industrial and agricultural emissions into the atmosphere all willy-nilly — that would be stupid, because some of those emissions have other harmful effects not related to global warming (although others are mostly harmless). We should do our best to curb the emission of substances which cause, for example, cancers or respiratory maladies. But there is no point in trying our damndest to break otherwise healthy, functioning Western economies in pursuit of a phantom goal of “reversing” a trend over which we have no control anyhow.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced NASA’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

One cannot, hopefully, have failed to notice that the climate change alarmism movement has become a moneymaking enterprise for some, while for others it has become a vehicle through which policies of massive state intervention in industry — that is, socialism — is demanded and advocated for. The science upon which the movement is based is shoddy and uncertain at best (if not outright an outright fallacy in many respects), and the outcomes of the changes that folks like Al Gore and David Suzuki are demanding would be crippling and disastrous.

It’s a good thing, then, that more and more evidence is now coming to light demonstrating just what kind of lies are being told to us, the Western public.