Keith Burgess-Jackson

My friend Peg Kaplan will like this. By the way, Peg just passed the 100,000-visitor mark at her blog. Congratulations!

Here.

Kevin Stroup sent a link to this website, which I had not seen. I will add it to the blogroll.

Hereditary monarchy and aristrocracy [sic] cannot really be rationally defended in an age whose assumptions are secular and egalitarian. That is one of their strengths. Because they cannot really be defended, the hereditary aspect of government manages to be, simultaneously, both wonderful and risible; it inspires devotion, but cannot, by its very nature, inspire fanaticism. Monarchy partly immunises the body politic against ideological disease.

(Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 164)

Don’t be influenced by the Chicken Littles of the left, who are screaming that the sky is falling.  See here.

Addendum: As usual, George Will gets to the heart of the matter.

To the Editor:

The warning sounds are loud and clear in “Bush Is Not Above the Law,” by James Bamford (Op-Ed, Jan. 31).

As he points out, presidents in the past have been held accountable for their actions when they have clearly broken a law (Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton).

President Bush has been found in the United States District Court in Detroit to have “undisputedly violated” the Constitution as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance law against warrantless eavesdropping.

Without a formal independent investigation of Mr. Bush, erosion of our Constitution and our justice system is inevitable.

Will our government join the “democracies” of South America where presidents rewrite constitutions to suit their needs, or will we become an example to our neighbors and the world that democracy works when the Constitution and the laws of the people prevail?

Carolyn Jacobson
Great Neck, N.Y., Jan. 31, 2007

Note from KBJ: Does this woman realize that we’re at war?

Here.

Did you know that Mark Steyn is Canadian? (Have you read his book, America Alone?)

My hypothesis as to why so many people find anthropogenic climate change so intuitively compelling, despite the dearth of science in support of it, is this: In our evolutionary history, it was somehow adaptive for proto-humans to interpret their environment, including their social environment, in ways that attributed human or supernatural causes to everything. Everything had an explanation that placed human agency at the centre. The world was created so as to provide a stage on which the human drama could take place. Virgins had to be sacrificed to the volcano god, or to the sun god—or lambs had to be sacrificed to Yahweh—to effect seasonal good fortune and atone for sins. Nowadays, many people still attribute devastating natural calamities like tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes to god’s retribution against sinning humans. The puritans among them want to criminalize such things as homosexuality and pornography and drug use to please this vengeful god. (In other parts of the world, the ultimate sins are women’s equality, eating pork, or capitalism.) If only we humans could control our passions and lay low the satisfaction of our natural desires, god will be pleased and all will be well again, as in the Garden of Eden.

The modern non-godists who proclaim climate change as the end of the world as we know it think they are more sophisticated; they mock these primitive theocratic explanations for the course of nature. Yet they fall victim to the same kind of atavistic, anthropocentric thinking. If the climate is changing, it must have a human cause, and moreover, it must be because humans are behaving sinfully. The only way to avert calamity is for us to become puritans—in this case, to make sure we don’t leave a “carbon footprint” in the Garden of Eden. I find it deliciously ironic that the same tendency toward mythological anthropocentric thinking is found in the leftist “progressives” who stand opposed to the religious right in America on so many issues. The only difference is that the religious right thinks that America is going to hell in a handbasket because of homosexuality, pornography, and drugs (and maybe rock ’n’ roll and dancing), whereas the non-religious left thinks America and the world are going to hell in a handbasket because of SUVs, BBQs, and cows (and smoking).

As usual, both the right and the left are wrong. As usual, the only sane view of things is the libertarian one.

-gb.