reminder of the times

Form last week's issue of The Week:

47% of Americans rate President Obama's Choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court as "excellent" or "good." 20% consider the choice "fair," while 13% view the nomination as "poor." (Gallup)

Given the masses we're working with, let's assume the other 20% were too stupid to understand the question. So well over half of people even intelligent enough to respond think Sotomayor is a good choice. Do I even need to add anything more?

We are getting the government we deserve.

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the church's future strength in america?

Just finished commenting on a thread over at Novaseeker's (see previous post for link) and figured I'd post it in slightly expanded form here too. An anonymous commenter over there made some interesting remarks...

...[T]he blue-state white birthrate is far below replacement.

What you are going to get are red-state Jesus-freak women who do indeed breed at replacement levels. The GenX and GenY women simply aren't making enough babies to clone themselves in 30 years time. Only about 70 of them will be "here" out of the 100 that you see now, easily outnumbered by Hispanic, Black, and Muslim cultural adherents.

White Jesus freaks, who are building an insular culture, will still be here then. In a way, SWPL-ism is a huge generational scam/fraud practiced on its own adherents. People with a birthrate of 1.6 children per female pretty much half their youth in what...70 years? We are in about years 15-20 of this trend now. We probably have maybe 15-20 more years for it to turn around before the demographic momentum damns these people (SWPLS-and-secular whites) to political irrelevance...

I live near two large churches. The parking lot is full of kids. If anything, I'd guess those folks have about 2.5 kids per family, and they provide all sorts of "social stuff" to keep the kids there from what I've been told... These folks will still be around electorally...but these Power Grlzzzz will not be around in 40 years.

As Sailer has noted again and again, who controls the future is who shows up for it.

Good observations, but he misses the mark significantly as a result of his unfounded assumption that all of those children born into "Jesus Freak" households will grow up to be strong Christians themselves. History doesn't support this, nor do current societal trends. I don't see Christians becoming a more influential voting bloc through the demographic suicide of other ideologies; instead, its influence will also wan over time due to its "spiritual birth rate" being well below replacement from generation to generation. I hope he's right and Christianity makes a resurgence, and it's certainly never impossible, but I can't say I'm expecting it either.

Just look at recent decades as an example. Children attending church used to be a most common thing in America. And look how well that has held up to the feminist onslaught over the years. I don't see the coming generations of churchgoers, who will have been raised in ever-weakening churches and an ever-desensitizing culture, holding onto that faith in droves. Christianity will continue its decline in the U.S. I think, for at least the short term and for the worse for the country. Again, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see how.

For one, most of these children attend public schools. Not all, and there are many who don't, but most do. So they're getting all the indoctrination they need to rebel against whatever mores their parents try to instill. And this goes many times more so for those who attend mainstream universities. It's a well-known statistic within church circles that more than half of churched kids who attend college turn their backs on their faith by the time they graduate--regardless of public, private, or home/group schooling. And folks like me, who only started attending post-childhood, are rare, and I'd say exceedingly rare if my own anecdotal evidence mirrors my generation's trend.

In light of that, I think it's fair to speculate that as a generation moves from youth to young adulthood to middle age, its overall percentage of traditional religious belief (i.e. not trendy or modern but handed down from previous generations) declines significantly. Many people drop those beliefs and much fewer take them up.* In recent times the churches in our society have not done a great job of providing foundations for lasting faith in young people, due in no small part to the steeping of the young (not to mention their parents) in secular thinking.

Also, more government presence and oversight in society will result in less devotion to religion as a source of morals and truth about the world, if history is any indicator. (Not only does the 20th-century U.S. come to mind but also Rome under Julian the Apostate; we in the States are merely stealing pages from his book.) While I suppose this might not be the case if we end up with an Islamic theocracy or variant thereof when the smoke clears, that would of course bring issues of its own and the resulting power structure would not at all resemble what we have today. So, does anyone really see government presence in and control of daily life abating or even slowing anytime soon? At the current pace that won't happen until we have anarchy, and even that "freedom" will only last until some strong-man or group can establish dominance at the controls.

Those are a couple of starting points; there are more. So let it suffice to say that I don't think we can look at the number of children being raised in churchgoing families as a prelude to what our culture will be shaped by. After all, had that held in the recent past then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

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* This may not be true as people move past middle age into their elder years, but that would be beyond the time frame we're talking about wrt today's generation of children. And I can't imagine it being significant enough to offset the lack of said beliefs among the younger crowd anyway.

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qotd

Just mined this gem from the comment thread at a good Novaseeker post about some fembot's wailing about how her divorce "just happened" and whatnot, apparently through little or no fault of her own...you know the story. Another one of those. Anyway, on to the good stuff, courtesy of Whiskey:

We are indeed looking at the end of marriage. Talk about reforming divorce, custody, alimony is a fantasy. There is not enough political willpower, demographic strength, or anything approaching organizational effectiveness to do this. To create that, every politician must be afraid of losing his/her seat and gravy train in order to vote for that program of reform. Against a hostile media dominated by women.

Not going to happen.

...

We just have to adjust. To a culture of single motherhood, zero fatherly investment in kids, pump and dump, the usual violent matriarchal societies.

Them be prophetic words there. We can all see it coming, it's just a matter of time--for the societal effects to set in, I mean. The demeaning of marriage has already been accomplished enough for society to suffer; whether or not marriage itself weathers the coming storm as anything more than a loose business partnership remains to be seen.

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sports vs. common sense

As a lead-in, let me briefly recount the situation at my alma mater in the years during and surrounding my attendance--and I don't figure much has changed--with regard to funding of athletics. The engineering department could barely get funding to keep its programs reasonably modern, the campus was hurting for more and better dorms, parking and commuting were terrible due to hilariously poor planning and infrastructure, and on and on. Yet the athletic department had more money than it knew what to do with. Football stadium expansion? New baseball stadium? New track stadium? New practice facilities? Coaches' salaries that make inflation look flat? Sure! And all because the program had boosters lined up that forked over hefty sums of cash to help fund such exploits. In other words, the athletic department was not balancing its budget on its own via ticket/merchandise sales or whatever; were that the case then there would be no complaint. But it was getting huge infusions of cash from rich alumni and folks in the state--who were choosing sports over the future viability of the school as an educational institution with every dollar they donated.

Well, seems we weren't as unlike Los Angeles as we might have thought back in the day in flyover country. Now I have nothing against the idea of a victory parade to celebrate a championship, but...people are forking over big money in "donations" for a sports parade? Really? That's the best "cause" they can come up with to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to? The article even talks about all the troubles the city of Los Angeles is having--unemployment is at 12.5%, the school district is underwater big time, homes are being foreclosed on, etc., etc. Even if those causes aren't at the top of one's list, surely they're ahead of enabling a basketball championship party, right? Call me cynical, but something just doesn't seem right about that whole picture.

Some priceless quotes from Mayor Villaraigosa:

"We're going to come together as a city at a time when we need to come together. The reason why so many people from the private sector came forward is because they know this town deserves to revel in itself for a day. We need it."

"At a time in the city when the unemployment rate is at 12.5 percent, when 21,000 people have lost their homes due to foreclosure, it's important for us to celebrate this great day. It's a victory for us, for the fans."

"If I declared a day off, I'd get beat up for that. People are going to take off whether I declare a day off or not. Some will say they were sick, others will take vacations. Still others don't have a job and will be there."

Okay, I gotta give him humor points for the last one. But the first two? They "need" it? It's "important" to celebrate "this great day" by throwing loads of money at it? I would say the guy must have Hollywood screenwriters doing his prep work for him, but I'm not sure they could even come up with stuff that fun to read.

And you can really see that 60s-era liberal feel-good-ism in full force there: "Huh? Never mind that there's some major change and upheaval going on that we need to plan for and ride out. Never mind that there are front-and-center problems that demand whatever effort and resources we can come up with. What we really need is to just all come together and celebrate and just feel good about ourselves for a while. 'Cause nothing beats reality like a quick emotional high. Yeah, that's the ticket!"

And, as usual here, a political twist: apparently the government's failure to prioritize has trickled down to its citizens. If that's the case then here's a PSA to Californy folks: All hope has officially been lost. Get out. And if you're in the greater L.A. area tomorrow then arm yourself or hide someplace safe, because we all know that when large crowds of excited people gather on L.A. streets the result usually isn't pleasant and wonderful. (Unrelated aside: I'm shocked that Barack rebuffed Cali's first swipe at bailout cash, but I'm sure we haven't even heard the end of the beginning of the begging yet. I mean, they haven't even played up the "for the children" angle yet.)

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thoughts on voxiversity iii, session 1

Just took my first Voxiversity quiz on Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. (I didn't know about VI until it was already rolling and was too lazy to jump into VII in time to keep up, so VIII is my first.) Given that Vox is off the high end of the intellectual scale, I figured the quiz would be a killer, at a minimum all fill-in-the-blank. In other words, something that would kick the collective *** of students such as myself who aren't great at reading comprehension to begin with and didn't spend a lot of time studying up for this one.

Well, I was wrong. It was more like something out of college, a simple 10-question quiz to verify that one actually did read the assigned material. So I'm a bit surprised he didn't ratchet up the difficulty more...or maybe that's coming with later sections since this only covered the intro to the book. Time will tell.

As for the book itself, it's shaping up to be a good read so far. (For anyone curious as to the subject matter of the book, EW provided a lengthy review several months back.) Goldberg appears to be going beyond the typical noise level in political books, in which authors just pick a flaw of the other side and start blasting away and citing contemporary examples here and there. He's reaching back into history and providing a common thread for understanding both contemporary liberalism and its predecessors. I'm looking forward to getting into it more.

And from what I can tell, it's meticulously researched, as the large amount of footnotes attests to. Goldberg isn't just shooting from the hip or taking huge logical leaps where convenient to make his view of events come into focus. He did his homework.

But I can already agree with the Wapiti's review on one thing: his frequent breaks in the action to emphasize that he's not, in fact, haphazardly throwing the "fascist" or "Nazi" or "anti-Semite" or whatever labels around among his ideological opponents are getting a little tedious. That he's taking care to choose his terms accurately and precisely should be obvious to anyone reading the book. The types who would take undue offense to his writing and fire slanderous accusations back in response are the types that do not operate from a basis of logic and reason in the first place. So there's no point in trying to hold their hand throughout by giving them reminders based on argument. Jonah is working on a thinking level and that's not going to trickle down to someone reading and responding on a feeling level. So I hope he just gives that crap up after the Introduction, but I'm afraid he's not going to.

Some money quotes:

Today's liberal fascism eschews talk of Christianity for the most part, except to roll back its influence wherever it can (although a right-wing version often called compassionate conservativism has made inroads in the Republican Party).

Excellent. I was really hoping Goldberg wasn't going to weaken his case substantially by focusing only on the "left" while giving the "right" a pass on the errors of big government. But it looks like he's going to dole out truth to causes or figures regardless of their political stripes. The credibility of the book when up a bit when I read that statement.

...[I]t's worth recalling that the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany partially stemmed from the unwillingness of decent men to take it seriously.

Amen! Freedom-loving Americans take note. The erosion of liberty has been happening here for decades (since the Wilson regime, if Goldberg is to be believed, and methinks he ought to be) and it's about time more people started taking it seriously.

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tracking the hacks

It's not easy trying to keep up with all the various types of hacks crowded around the public trough. It seems like every time we look, another species has spawned and is fighting for its share of the gummint slop. The feeding frenzy is just too furious to follow, especially here in Massachusetts, or Taxachusetts, or Hackachusetts, or whatever your name of choice is for this California of the East.

But thankfully, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr has provided an indispensable field guide to the hackerama that is leeching the government to its death and crowding out any species that might be beneficial to the welfare of the nation. This piece is both amusing and informative, and a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand just a few of the hackasaurus species roaming the lands of America.

His opening salvo says it all:

Tracking the not-so-elusive hackasaurus greedicus of Massachusetts is a lot like exploring the vast Amazon rain forests or the Marianas Trench - new species are constantly being discovered. The difference is that in the Massachusetts hackerama, no species of hack ever goes extinct.

Ain't that the truth...no species of hack ever goes extinct. Nowhere is that more true than in the deep, dark jungles of Hackachusetts.

Howie has done his homework here, covering everything from hack-ademics to double-dipper hacks to green hacks to lobbyist hacks. Each is provided with its biological classification as well as a brief description of its identifying characteristics and behavior. However, I am a little disappointed that he left out one of the most prolific and dangerous types of hack. He included some of its breeds, such as Globe hacks and MBTA hacks, but he didn't identify the species itself. So I'll take the liberty of adding it to the list...

Union hacks

hackasaurus noworkus

This numerous species is known more for its voracious appetite that has brought about declines in industries that were once pillars of strength for the U.S., as well as its ongoing devouring of other previously healthy sectors of the economy. But despite the success of some breeds in bringing down private enterprises, many other breeds of this insatiable hack are always found close to a source of government spending. These hacks forage in packs, using their strength in numbers to overpower the good intentions of government functions. Often responsible for channeling significant amounts of taxpayer largesse to themselves and their members and servants, no efficient program is safe when they draw near. In times of duress, the older, more powerful hacks of this species have been known to display utter disregard and even cannibalistic tendencies toward their younger, less experienced cohorts. (The recent behavior of the Globe hacks is an example.) Despite their differing traits and habitats, one thing is certain: when these hacks take over the show, the credits are soon to follow.

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another dr. paul!

It's not often that good news comes out of the political arena. Heck, by modern standards, anything only moderately terrible or less could be considered "good." Such is the insane society we live in, where people would sooner sell off every personal freedom they can think of in exchange for a short bit of false contentment than actually take responsibility for themselves and the problems around them. And in doing so they think they have power to control and restrain the supposed bad behaviors of others, when in effect they're only furthering the controlling and restraining of us all by something beyond our control--and without a care for our best interests or freedom. When that collective sloth and shiftlessness reaches the level of politics, the mob rule we see today is the result. No rules, no accountability, no idea what blunder will (not) surprise us next.

But at least there are a few out there who don't succumb to the ruse that we should all play the same game and only pretend to be "different" or "opponents" just enough to keep the illusion going. One of those, of course, is Ron Paul. And another is Dr. Rand Paul, who takes after his father in opposing the juggernaut of stupidity that infects all of politics nowadays. The guy did lots of work on Ron's behalf during this past atrocity of an election cycle, and he even stood in for his father and debated Phil Gramm in a televised debate during Ron's unsuccessful campaign for Senate in Texas. Them be solid credentials if you ask me.

And now the great part: Rand Paul may run for Senate in Kentucky! There aren't a lot of possible scenarios out there that would make me prouder to claim residency in Kentucky than being represented at the federal level by a Dr. Paul. Here's hoping and praying that his first foray into electoral politics is a successful one!

What are his chances? Who knows. Kentucky would seem to be a reliably conservative state by national standards, and we have two Republican senators now (though McConnell has a moderate streak in him). However, we also have a Democratic governor who I don't know much about but whose election nonetheless disturbs me. So I really don't know what to make of Dr. Paul's chances, but I dearly hope they're good enough to at least make a splash and, as a minimum, serve as another wake-up call to anyone paying the tiniest amount of attention to the trend toward bigger, more expensive, more oppressive government that's gone unabated for too long.

A drawback here is, Dr. Paul has stated he won't run if Sen. Bunning pursues reelection. That's honorable and respectful of him, but I'd much rather see him in there than even Bunning. So as much as I've supported Bunning and cheered him on over the past several months, I hope he decides to call it quits. He's been solid recently, but he's simply no Rand Paul.

Rand Paul 2010, baby!

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qotd

From Vox's assessment of public education:

If you truly don't grasp that the public school system is an idiot factory, staffed by predatory, propaganda-infusing idiots, you probably aren't capable of reaching the logical conclusion about your own place on the intellectual totem pole. Which is fine, I see absolutely no need to spell it out for you and wish you all the joy of the summer re-runs.

Nobody can lay down the truth quite like Mr. Day.

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