High Tech Dumb

Did googling start making us stupid or did stupid start making us google? This is the question James Bowman takes up in a fascinating essay in The New Atlantis about short attention spans, technology, mass media, and the woes of our badly-educated, poorly-disciplined, and overly-pampered modern culture.

The "Bush Doctrine"

When journalists chide politicians--in particular Republican politicians--for not being able to satisfactorily articulate just what the "Bush Doctrine" is or is not, they reveal little more than their own monumental insularity, narcissism, and hubris.

Consider: the term was not actually coined by the Bush Administration, but by editorial writers at the New York Times and Time magazine; it is almost universally used derisively by opponents of the "War on Terror," the administration's foreign policy principles, and the president himself; it is rarely ever clearly defined beyond a handful of broad ideological categories, catch-phrases, epithets, and accusations; many of the concepts supposedly contained in the "doctrine" have been forthrightly denied and rejected by administration officials and their defenders. So, since the Bush Administration does not claim to have a "Bush Doctrine" per se, which "Bush Doctrine" are we to discuss when the subject comes up? The "Bush Doctrine" of Charles Krauthammer, of Ben Wattenberg, of Anderson Cooper, of Charlie Gibson, of Robert Kaufman, or of the constantly-barking Move-On blog-dogs?

The bottom line is that the whole concept of the "Bush Doctrine" has become little more than a liberal media-fabricated exercise in intellectual-insider-trading.

Now, to be sure, someone like Sarah Palin probably ought to be up to snuff on the latest prog-left logomorphing jabberwocky--if only to point out its preening self-absorption and soaring egotism.

Get Your Pirattitude On

Arrr! Avast, ye lubbers! It's ye old International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day! Shiver me timbers!

To Autumn

John Keats wrote his remarkable poem, "To Autumn," in a single afternoon on this day in 1819. It was first published a year later in the Talor and Hessey edition of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. It has been reprinted innumerable times since. In fact, according to University of North Carolina professor William Harmon, the three-stanza ode inspired by the beauty of the changing season has become the most anthologized poem in the English language:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Londinistan

The Labor government of Great Britain--the same government that recently endorsed Barack Obama in his presidential bid--has officially officially adopted Sharia Law, with special Islamic courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases. One must wonder if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.

TR Rex

On this day in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to become President when he was sworn in upon the death of President William McKinley. He was 42. McKinley died in Buffalo, New York, from gunshot wounds he had received at the Pan-American Exposition more than a week earlier.

Worldviews Matter

"The most practical and important thing about a man is his view of the universe. For a landlady to consider a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. For a general to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy . The question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them." G.K. Chesterton

"As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." King Solomon

"Worldview is the most important thing that we can know about a man. Ideas have consequences. And those consequences affect everything in the practical realm as well as in the theoretical realm. Discernment of worldview is therefore the most necessary of all the tasks of wisdom." Richard Weaver

Get It?

"In some languages,” said the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, “a double negative yields an affirmative. In other languages, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language, either natural or artificial, in which a double affirmative yields a negative.” But then suddenly, from the back of the hall, in a round Brooklyn accent, came the comment, "Yeah, yeah."

The Mufti's Prayer

Just two weeks before the brazen and horrific terrorist attacks were carried out on the Pentagon in Washington, DC and the World Trade Center in New York City, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Ekrima Sobri offered a chillingly prophetic prayer in the Al Aqsa Mosque:

“Allah, there is no strength but your strength. Destroy, therefore, the Zionist occupation and its helpers and its agents. Destroy the U.S. and its helpers and its agents. Destroy Britain and its helpers and its agents. Prepare those who will soon unite the Muslims of the world and march in the footsteps of Saladin. Allah, we ask you for forgiveness, forgiveness before death, and mercy and forgiveness after death. Allah, grant victory to Islam and the Muslim’s in the coming war.”

A host of questions immediately spring to mind: what did the supreme spiritual leader of Palestinian Muslims know and when did he know it? What war is he talking about? Why would he invoke such virulent hatred against the Western world? Why would he pronounce such fierce anathemas against the nations most responsible for brokering peace between his own people and the Israelis? Why would he reserve such impious enmity for the powers that had insured the transformation of Yasser Arafat from a rogue terrorist operative into a respected nationalist leader and his Palestinian Liberation Organization from a disreputable revolutionary cell into a legitimate regional government? Why would he so openly attack his land’s chief financial and political patrons?

Preparing the Way

Seven years ago, when President Bush was interrupted during a visit to a Sarasota, Florida elementary school with the news that a plane had struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, he had already been providentially prepared for the Herculean task of leadership that would follow.

Earlier that morning, his regular habit of reading a selection from Oswald Chamber’s classic devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, had led him to a very telling passage--how telling, he would have had no way of knowing at the time. Based on the model of servant-leadership from the Gospel of John, the short reading portended and portrayed the path the president would have to take in the difficult days ahead: “Ministering as opportunity surrounds us does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God's in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.”

The President would indeed soon find himself in haphazard surroundings. The passage continued even more dramatically: “Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.” And finally: “We have to go the ‘second mile’ with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say, ‘I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.’ If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.”

It is a great comfort to know that regardless of how magnificent or mundane our path may be in the days ahead, God is even now preparing the way for us.