Conservative Monitor

US Ambassador, J Christopher Stevens, was killed by a fanatical mob in Libya. This is a fact. There was also an assault on the US Embassy in Egypt. All this occurred on 9/11. What is going on here? Were we not told when President Obama came into office that he would make the Muslim fanatics love us? This murder of our ambassador should never have happened according to leftist dogma. We should have long ago talked to and placated the extremists, making them as pliable and cute as newborn kittens.

So what happened? The truth is, soft words only work when you are carrying a big stick. (Wasn’t it a Republican president who first enunciated this truism?) President Obama has allowed the military to disintegrate. He has talked lovey, lovey to terrorists and through his anti-Israel policy and avoidance of Iran Nuclear weapons (reminds me of the failure of Clinton’s policy with North Korea) he has made the lunatics more bold than ever before. Thus, we have incidents such as the concerted attack on US Embassies.

The response of the administration, coupled with past actions only shows the failure of leftist foreign policy ideals.

He was a cigar chomping, jesticulating professor who woke up the world to the left’s PC practice of shutting down discussion by making it taboo. His book The Closing of the American Mind was seminal. It was the first formulation of what has become an axiom: “The Left really doesn’t like free speech”. Why? because in any argument that pretends to logic, they cannot win.

Now Ellis Washington, in his blog has written a remarkable remembrance of Alan Bloom. For conservatives Bloom is inextricably intermixed with his ideas. We understand that a person is not judged by his race or gender, but by the force of his actions, his ideas, and yes, the content of his character. Washington gives the straight dope on Bloom, and though Bloom has been gone twenty years, we still feel his loss.

A great way to get across a message or idea is by analogy. Tell a story, and the story conveys an idea. This is especially true of children. This is one reason that the left has been so adamant about taking control of the media. It is why stories in schoolbooks now seem so skewed to a leftist perspective. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Conservatives have made inroads on the radio, TV, and the internet. Isn’t it time we began to get our message across to our own children. An easy way to do this is tell stories that have a point. We once had Aesop’s fables. We still refer to the ant and the grasshopper, but people have let such stories slide from the face of public consciousness as well as from the minds of their own children.

A new book makes easy to make up stories, fun stories. Check out Super Easy Story Telling, by Colleen Doyle Bryant, or visit the official website at www.SuperEasyStorytelling.com.

Constitutional scholars, liberal and conservative, have been arguing over the second amendment right to bear arms for over two centuries. The fact that the founding fathers wrote this freedom into the Constitution is an illustration of how important they thought it was. Since then liberals have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to make inroads against an individual’s rights to own a gun.

Yet all of the elitist notions of the left cannot dispute the fact that when push comes to shove, there are times when lethal power in the hands of the individual is the only thing that stands between liberty and tyranny, and of more immediate importance, life and death. To get people to understand this in their very gut, where they live must be the endeavor of conservatives. No one was better at this than Charles Bronson, whose movies were bloody, but instructive. There is a new book out which tells this story both on the gut level as well as the intellectual level.

Home Invasion, by Johnstone and Johnstone tells an exciting tail of an older couple who defend their home against intrusion, and in the course of the incident shoot one of the invaders. Naturally, they are sued, and the response of the federal government is to make guns illegal for their small town which just happens to be close to the Mexican border. Suddenly, the town is wide open for the depradations of a Mexican drug cartel. What can the people do to defend themselves with the heavilly armed criminals on one hand and the US federalis taking away their guns on the other. You can read this book for pure entertainment, but you will also take away with you a clear message.

I must make a confession. I have not read the Bible all the way through. Yes, I have read snatches here and there, but I have never started out on page one and just read it through. Maybe taking it piece by piece is better. But I think having a good overall knowledge of the Bible is a vital part of ANY western education. Whether you are an evangelical fundamentalist or an atheist, this is knowledge that will come in handy at least when attempting to understand literature, politics, and history for the last two thousand years.

I was sent Original Sinners, the book by John R. Coats, for review. Reading this book made me realize just how deep and rich the Bible is. The Old Testament itself is a foundational book for three of the world’s major religions, Muslim, Jew, and Christian. This book about “Genesis” and why it is important in the modern world is a great way to embark upon a study of the Bible. Its multi-layered analysis and snappy style make it difficult to put down for anyone with any interest in scholarship.

What I got from this book was a flood of ideas about the beginnings of history. I am just embarking on a series of articles on ancient world history beginning with the paleolithic period and neolithic period. To read accounts that were written very close to that period reveals how truly the people of that period were so very much like us. They had personalities, intelligence, faults, and attributes along the lines of people today. The cave dwelling, city living, shepherding, and other activities pulled from the bronze age talleyed closely with what historians have had to say on the subject.

But beyond reading history, I found many passages from Genesis were appropriate to my own life. Coats does a good job bringing out the applicability of a book written several centuries BC. The relationships among the personalities from Abraham to Joseph seem quite modern. It goes to show that things have not changed all that much since those days despite all of our technology.

Read an indepth review of Original Sinners.

Capitalism is not perfect. Sometimes as we work to evangelize the deluded liberal millions we get a bit too exuberant and paint the capitalist system as the only road to an ideal world. The fact is that capitalism does not lead necessarily to happiness and long life. Nevertheless, capitalism creates the best of all possible worlds. It grants us freedom to be what we want, and it also allows us to make mistakes. It allows us to learn to become better people, and to create better organizations.

Reading Loren C. Steffy’s Drowning in Oil made me realize that we do have to temper capitalism with a bit of reason. Some regulation is good as long as it has the desired effect of promoting safety and leaves a level playing field. As an example, there are building codes that help ensure that houses are built with a degree of standardization and quality standards. I did not appreciate how important this could be before I built an addition on my house and the inspectors saved me from making some errors that could have fostered long term problems. My tendency in that day would have been to cobble things together. Regulations, although they seemed onerous at the time, were beneficial, especially to the people who bought the house.

In the case of oil exploration and processing, regulation is perhaps more important, that is when it is properly done. Lives can certainly depend on the government’s actions in this regard. The key is to balance freedom and government interference. Too much government control in the form of regulation can stifle advancement and competition. While too wide open an environment can lead to ecological and human disaster.

There is little question in my mind that error should be on the side of freedom and capitalism. An argument can be made that playing fast and loose with the safety of humans and the environment generally leads to penalties for individuals and companies that far exceed any savings accrued from cost cutting.

The case of British Petroleum and its liability in the Deepwater Horizon incident at the Macondo well that polluted the Gulf of Mexico illustrates how poor government oversight combined with a corporate culture with inverted priorities can lead to disaster. BP paid significantly for its sins in this regard with its reputation as well as monetarilly. The fall-out from the gulf oil spill has not even begun to settle. There will surely be more costs for the British oil giant. Which illustrates that there are, indeed, corporate costs for incompetence that create an incentive for that company as well as others to mind their p’s and q’s.

Even so, it would have been best to have avoided a disaster on this scale altogether. Could the explosion that caused the oil leak been avoided? Technically, of course. Bureaucratically, perhaps. Intrinsically, no. As Steffy shows in his book on BP’s “reckless pursuit of profits”, neither government oversight nor enlightened capitalist self-interest will necessarilly overcome ingrained habit and short-sightedness.

Thus we see that capitalism does not cure every ill. Freedom on the whole is good, but it does have to be tempered with good sense, especially where it can affect the lives of millions. This means giving people the freedom to live and produce as they will. But it also means providing a framework where this can be done in the most intelligent manner.

Read our indepth review of Drowning in Oil.

I got a note from a reader this morning to the effect:

actually, Fidel Castro is not at all a bad man. Cuba has one of the best government medical care in the world ‘,:

This statement is total nonsense. If Cuban healthcare were really so great wouldn’t the country be aswim in tourists looking for the cure to what ails them? Wouldn’t Cuban life expectancy be longer than in US and other advanced countries?

The fact is, Fidel is just another tin-pot dictator who uses/used socialism as an excuse to bend an entire nation to his personal comfort and gratification. Examples of his kind abound, from Stalin to Hitler to Mao to the ever-lovable Hugo Chavez. An  analysis of the patern of behavior of any of these strong-men is that they use the unremunerated labor of millions to aggrandize wealth to themselves. If any class benefits it is not the working class, but the apparatchiks who siphon off what they can through bureaucratic obstructionism.

Socialism/communism does nothing but stifle inovation and the advance of civilization. Those who ascribe to it are either dupes or charlatans wishing to take advantage of the gullible. When I look into the eyes of someone espousing the philosophy I look for naivete or blatant greed.

The true radical, the true thinking person is one who understands that capitalism and private property are among the bullwarks of freedom, and ultimately fairness. Without them we are condemned to a life of slavery in the service of government.

China is a highly nationalistic state. But this is not what is wrong with China. Nationalism has proved a boon to many nations over the centuries since the concept swirled from the primordial soup of Medieval Europe. Could it be the dedicated, striving workforce? No. This coupled with the economic boom triggered by market reforms which allowed for a more free market environment have made China far more affluent.

The release of Fault Lines on the Face of China :  50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great, by two western Journalists, Lacroix and Marriott, got me thinking about this. The authors come up with 50 criticisms of China and spell out why these will hold China back. But every time I try to think of an aspect of China, I think, wow, I admire that… China has great universities, science, an ambitious space program. They have a burgeoning, vital populous, great resources, forward-looking businessmen. They are moving in to take over much of the worlds resources, buying up land, oil, companies, steel, coal, and uranium all over the planet. What is there not to admire about China?

In a word, it is totalitarianism. If there is a stumbling block to greatness, it is the stifling of political and religious thought. A regime where one party rules can mean stagnation and rigidity that can lead to ill-considered geo-political moves. I would argue that the authors might be slightly awry in their title. China already is great. But not as great as she could be…

I decided to indulge myself and buy a copy of Mark Twain’s autobiography (vol. I). It has sections that Twain (Clemens) determined should not be seen until a hundred years after his death. Well, a hundred years have passed, and the new autobiography has been released.

I called this book an indulgence because I usually read conservative books for this blog or I read the WSJ or the National Review. That is about all I have time for. As it turns out Twain may have been a fairly conservative fellow.  On page 87 there is a passage in which he is discussing a sculptor he was helping to support until he could get some good commissions. The sculptor was one Karl Gerhardt, who though talented had particular notions about what he should be doing in order to make a livelihood.

When he failed to even look for work. Twain had a few choice words with him. He says, “I saw that he did not want to work for a living in outside ways when art had no living to offer…[His finally getting a job] saved me from applying in his case a maxim of mine that whenever a man preferred being fed by any other man to starving in independence he ought to be shot.”

Although Twain was given to hyperbole, and certainly exercized it in this case, it is easy to see that he had strong feeling on the subject of “living off the resources of others”.  One wonders what he would have to say about the modern welfare state, the new deal, and the great society.

You don’t really know how bad things are with the Federalis (as my father likes to call the guys who inhabit the nation’s capital). But Patrick D. McConnell has taken the time and effort to find out. He has written a book, Government of Deceit, about the disaster going on in Washington which is sure to create problems not just nationally, but world wide. Things are even worse than we thought.

Basically the problem involves excessive spending that has been going on for decades. This spending which has involved vote buying in the form of entitlements has encroached heavily on property rights. In the course of this it has seriously undermined American individual freedoms. By taking away incentive to work, the government has also reduced productivity and creation of new products to a bare fraction of what is possible. Little do liberals understand that it is the creation of goods and services that provide the wealth and largess that keeps a society affluent.

All of the unemployment and financial chaos we have seen over the last few years is occuring because we have gone past the tipping point. The economy’s producers can no longer keep up with the entitlements disbursed by the government. Mr. McConnell insists that chaos and disorder WILL result. There is no getting out of it at this point. He may be right. I only know that this next election must be a total rejection of leftist ideas or the U.S. is just one more civilized society that is headed for the trash heap of history.

Check out Mr. McConnell’s website, http://www.govdeceit.com/