From KLo at the Corner:
Massachusetts Superior Court rules that because Rhode Island has not explicitly prohibited same-sex “marriage,” it must be legal for them to marry in Massachusetts. Globe online piece here; the governor responds, urging AG Reilly, who has said he will not appeal, to appeal anyway.
I’ve long maintained that if you had deliberately set out to destroy American society and community 70 years ago, you could not have come up with anything more effective or insidious than television. And this would be true even if every bit of programming was quality stuff. Three points:
Television has terrible effects on us individually. It encourages passivity. It slips into the soul the idea that only those on TV have real lives; ours are just gray and plain. And every hour you spend choosing to do one thing (watch TV), is an hour you choose not to do something else (read a book).
Which segues to point two: Television has terrible effects on the foundation of all civilization – your family. Because those hours are also lost to raising your children, planning a surprise for your wife/husband, or being open to those moments that cannot be planned where your children or spouse open their hearts to tell you what’s troubling them. Even watching TV together does little to mitigate that many in families live utterly separate lives from one another.
Finally, Television has contributed tremendously to the destruction of community. It is not alone in this: the automobile has also played a big part, and no one save perhaps the Amish and Al Gore thinks we should get rid of the automobile (actually, Al just thinks everyone but Al Gore should give up automobiles, while he rides a few short blocks to his next “Global Warming” speech in his SUV motorcade). Take a walk in your neighborhood some night. It is empty outside. We don’t have everyone at the local church socializing. We don’t have neighbors out on the porch talking with other neighbors. Kids aren’t out playing. Instead, you see through the windows electric-blue lights flickering inside each dwelling. And each pair of eyes gazing at the screen belongs to someone more alone than they realize, even if the house is full of people.
And this ultimately destroys our nation, because it destroys our society. A nation is not a government. Soldiers and generals will tell you that the bedrock for an army is the loyalty and devotion of individual soldiers for the others in their little unit. In America, it has been the bonds and attachments of neighborhood and church and community that then extends itself to love of country, just as the soldier who is loyal to his unit is loyal to the whole army, with all of its other units just like his.
With some interesting recent data on how TV is destroying us, and some additional commentary, is the excellent Michael Medved on Townhall.com. Please read it.
Mrs. Mark and I have a 14 year old daughter. So Doug Giles’ advice over at Townhall.com caught my eye. It’s an interesting list of ten items, beginning with “Teach Them How to Fight” and including “Teach Them How to Rebel” and “Teach Them to Despise Anti-Intellectualism.”
Real environmentalists, of which there are few, actually care about real science, know that good intentions are never sufficient and are nearly always harmful without more, don’t hate mankind, understand that free people have great incentives not to foul their nest, and realize that like most things the lefties are enamoured of (finding “racism” everywhere, for example), “environmentalism” functions as an excuse for the elite to control everyone else’s behavior with as much government and regulation as possible.
Now the Enviro-wackos have this little conundrum to face. Seems perhaps their idea of a sanatized world isn’t what mother nature (mustn’t say “God”, eh?) had in mind (H/T to John J. Miller at the Corner):
From the Washington Post:
Scientists have run high-tech tests on harmful bacteria in local rivers and streams and found that many of the germs — and in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, a majority of them— come from wildlife dung. The strange proposition that nature is apparently polluting itself has created a serious conundrum for government officials charged with cleaning up the rivers.
Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there. But officials say it would be nearly impossible, and wildly unpopular, to kill or relocate enough animals to make a dent in even that segment of the pollution.
That leaves scientists and environmentalists struggling with a more fundamental question: How clean should we expect nature to be? In certain cases, they say, the water standards themselves might be flawed, if they appear to forbid something as natural as wild animals leaving their dung in the woods.
Michelle Malkin posted an interesting piece from this Ottawa Citizen article about a study of sleep quality and dreams of lefties versus conservatives.
Excerpts:
A dream researcher from John F. Kennedy University in California has discovered fundamental differences between the dream worlds of people on the ideological left and the ideological right.
Among his findings, Kelly Bulkeley discovered that liberals are more restless sleepers and have a higher number of bizarre, surreal dreams — including fantasy settings and a wide variety of sexual encounters. Conservatives’ dreams were, on average, far more mundane and focused on realistic people, situations and settings…
“While some of my colleagues think my research reinforces the stereotype of repressed, uptight conservatives, it also shows that many liberals may he hanging on the edge of mental well-being,” Mr. Bulkeley said. “There may be a lot of hidden distress and unpleasantness in the liberal mind.”
NO COMMENT on whether any women other than Mrs. Mark ever appear in my dreams.
My biggest single obsession in politics outside of political philosophy is the psychology of individuals’ political orientation. You know that few change their political orientation from (to oversimplify) left to right, or right to left, ever, in their entire lives. Argument and discourse rarely makes a difference. Therefore it seems a good bet that either one side is basically driven by some sort of broken psychology while the other is more reason-driven, or they are both nuts. (Of course, I have my opinion on that one!)
Little by little, some aspects of this phenomenon are starting to be revealed. (And I’m not talking about that terribly flawed “study” that was released a year or two ago from southern California that attempted to show that maladjusted kids grow up conservative. If people are really interested I’ll try to locate some links to the that study, and commentary on it.)
Here is one, thanks to Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online’s Corner blog:
USA Today has some absolutely fascinating data [here, here, and here] on how the GOP is the party of married couples with children and the Democrats are the party of, well, pretty much everyone else.
There are lots of specific analyses of Congressional and Senate races. And some overall highlights from USA Today:
Of the five Republicans who have the lowest rates of married people in their districts, four are in tough battles with Democrats. On the other side, Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., whose district has a high marriage rate, faces a strong GOP challenge.
Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., whose district has the highest marriage rate (66.1%), says the gap exists because “people get more conservative when they settle down.” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman says the gap is magnified because a greater percentage of married people vote than unmarried people.
Republican House members overwhelmingly come from districts that have high percentages of married people and lots of children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of 2005 Census Bureau data released last month.
GOP Congress members represent 39.2 million children younger than 18, about 7 million more than Democrats. Republicans average 7,000 more children per district.
Many Democrats represent areas that have many single people and relatively few children. Democratic districts that have large numbers of children tend to be predominantly Hispanic or, to a lesser extent, African-American.
This “fertility gap” is crucial to understanding the differences between liberals and conservatives, says Arthur Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. These childbearing patterns shape divisions over issues such as welfare, education and child tax credits, he says.
Judith Klinghoffer reports on a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll:
Overall 94 percent have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views. The Sunnis are also quite negative, but with less intensity. Seventy-seven percent express an unfavorable view, but only 38 percent are very unfavorable. Twenty-three percent express a favorable view (5% very).Views of Osama bin Laden are only slightly less negative. Overall 93 percent have an unfavorable view, with 77 percent very unfavorable. Very unfavorable views are expressed by 87 percent of Kurds and 94 percent of Shias. Here again, the Sunnis are negative, but less unequivocally—71 percent have an unfavorable view (23% very), and 29 percent a favorable view (3% very).
Michael Petrilli has a superb article in National Review about the increasingly horrific state of education in the US. He’s looked at some of the inner city school closings in detail and has found a disturbing trend. Private schools that had been providing quality education are closing and leaving behind a trail of failing public schools. How can our inner cities ever turn around if we can’t give these kids a good education? According to Petrilli,
The [schools] leaving children standing outside their locked doors are generally places of deep learning, community institutions that have effectively served the children of the poor for generations. They are Catholic parochial schools — and their closure is nothing but a tragedy.
The trend is unmistakable. The Archdiocese of Detroit closed 21 schools last year (and more are likely to shut next year). The New York and Brooklyn archdioceses shut down 36 schools over the past two years. In 2005, the Chicago archdiocese ended operations in 18 schools. And the tally in Boston? Twenty-one schools over four years. The longer-term trends are even bleaker: Several big cities, such as Chicago, serve less than a third of the students today than they did 40 years ago.
The closures have little to do with the quality of education that these schools provide. Two decades of studies have shown them to be effective, especially for poor and minority children. Rather, broader demographic trends are to blame. Simply put, most Catholics have left the urban core for homes in the leafy suburbs, and urban parishes have dried up in their wake. No parishes, no parish subsidies, no parish schools — yet thousands of needy children remain downtown.
Hats off to Peter Lukes for digging up this tremendously detailed analysis of Deval Patrick’s primary win. The bottom line is that Republicans and Kerry Healey are going to have work very hard in several key areas of the state to pull off a win in November. According to Commonwealth Magazine:
Woburn may be seeing a lot of Kerry Healey this fall. The results of last week’s gubernatorial primary showed few weak spots for Democratic nominee Deval Patrick, but unless the lieutenant governor can drastically change the dynamics of the race, the Republican’s best chance for victory lies in the mix of suburbs and smaller cities between Route 128 and the New Hampshire borde
Read the full article and make sure you look at the maps…in detail. Think Lowell, Billerica, Chelmsford, and Tewksbury. Southern Worcester County also has some good possibilities, as do some of the towns south of Boston.
I wasn’t especially happy when I saw that Deval Patrick got quite the lift in the polls. Some lift is expected after all the primary hubub. But the first post-primary numbers showed Patrick up 64-25 over Kerry Healey. And when I read how much Margery Eagan gushed over him, I wondered what was up.
But according to a recent Howie Carr article, “This is the way it always begins for Deval, in a rush of euphoria and beaming liberals feeling less guilty about their trust funds. It usually ends not so well, in the corporate world with a seven-figure severance, or in the public sector with Senate hearings and denunciations of Deval’s ‘Gestapo tactics’ and running roughshod over citizens and communities.”
Here’s the surprising part. Carr isn’t actually the one who said this. It was Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, a black Democrat from Deval’s hometown of Chicago. When he served as Assistant Attorney General, the then mayor of San Diego told the senator that “Patrick’s office had been so tyrannical that she had to ask herself if she was still living in the United States of America.”
It’s got to be pretty bad if liberals say this about their own! I thought they saved that stuff for their Bush-bashing parties.
Patrick also has a more than typically radical record on racial preference. In fact, he pushes so hard for blacks that one time Jesse Jackson became alarmed and raised money to pay a wronged white teacher to go away. Read the full article at the Boston Herald.