1. John Podhoretz looks at Bush's disappointing second term.
2. If we socialize medicine in America, then where will rich Canadians go for health care? Sally Pipes looks at Michael Moore's dishonesty. Here is a horror story about an American with an ingrown toenail in Italy.
3. Primacy of Awesome points us to a story about John Lewis being denied tenure by Ashland University because his Objectivism is in opposition to "Judeo-Christian values." Quite fascinating. I suspect that liberals, postmodernists, deconstructionists, existentialists, agnostics, New Age mystics and all sorts of non-Christian leftists have been granted tenure, but Ashland draws the line at Objectivism. It makes sense, actually: Objectivism is the only philosophy that challenges Christianity's moral code of altruism.
4. Bush is worse than Hitler because at least Hitler meant well. No, this is not in the Onion. I shudder to think how liberals would react if we ever got a President who was a principled individualist that set about dismantling the welfare state at home and stopping all appeasement abroad. Not that I expect to see such a President in my lifetime.
5. Independent voters are leaning toward the Democrat Party. A study by the Pew Center found:
Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies....[At the same time] the proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994....Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.
If this study is right, then it looks like liberalism is catching on with the American people. Something to watch in the next few elections.
6. Noumenalself links to a report on a study that shows that the less education a young person has the more likely he is to reject religion. These young people are not getting their atheism from college professors.
My unscientific, anecdotal experience has been that uneducated young people are often in the heavy metal subculture, which is hostile to Christianity. These kids have lots of tattoos, swear a lot and drink heavily. Some of them are attracted to the "wiccan" religion and think of themselves as witches. Some bands, such as Slayer, are satanic -- at least in their image. How prevalent this is and what it all means, I don't know. Perhaps this is the functional illiterate's way of rebelling against Christianity, political correctness and traditional values.
7 comments:
Is NoumenalSelf posting again? I don't see a new post.
Myrhah,
Great links, especially the ingrown toenail in Rome. But I have a question. According to world ranking of health care, the United States is 37th whereas Italy is in the top 10. France is number 1. Could this possibly be right? I know that one such ranking was done by the WHO, but I wouldn't trust the time of day if they gave it to me; the god-damn commies. But still, I wonder if there is any merrit to these ranking figures or if they are totally non-objective.
Mike, no Noumenalself is not posting, but if you scroll down a bit, you'll see he puts up links on the right side of the screen.
Madmax, your guess is as good as mine on those rankings. I'm very suspicious of anything like that.
Speaking of suspicious sources, one of them is Pew. They are the guys who manufactured the campaign finance reform "grassroots movement" out of whole cloth, don't forget.
Hey, I'm an uneducated young person. Or maybe "self-educated" would be a better term. I don't have formal training, but I know how to think.
Jennifer, you're more educated than many people who have college degrees. College is a place where people get drunk for four years and play the game to get a diploma that employers use to select employees. Today college is so full of political correctness and New Leftist premises that I'm not sure I could bear four years of it. Not at my age, anyway.
Statistics and studies involving statitics should ALWAYS be viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye. NEVER show a causal mechanism and almost always display more about what we don't know than what we do know. I learned this from my father (a sociological statistitian) and it has been confirmed by every instance I have ever studied.
In this case, the article is not yet on line, but the statstics given on the link are enough to raise some doubts in general, and certainly of the idea that there is very little or no secularizaion effect of higher education in the sense evidently intended.
I will be looking for the whole text on line, anxiously awaiting the answer to this question: At what age did the subject become an atheist? Decrease church attendance? My guess is that, if this question were asked, the age would be in inverse relation to the amount of decline after some higher education. Reason? Those that have the expectation of college are more likely to question their religious belief and reject it prior to attending college. That was certainly the case for everyone that i know that is an atheist. Any exceptions out there?
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