Category Archives: culture

Some Thoughts the Relationship among Individual Liberty and Duty, Spirituality, and Government

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President Calvin Coolidge had a couple, on the day after the 150th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. He delivered these thoughts and others in a speech in Philadelphia on July 5, 1926, 88 years ago today, now 238 years on.

First, he said this:

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government.

He pressed the matter with this (keep in mind that this was an era during which Herb Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson among many others had been, and were, pushing Progressivism):

It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

He closed it out with this:

[The Declaration of Independence] is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like minded as the fathers who created it.

What he said.

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 236 years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities. At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government. They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years— any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office. This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial. And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 236 years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

The Iraqi Army and ISIS

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This is how the Iraqi “army” now is confronting the ISIS terrorists after those Iraqi persons won their foot race out of the Mosul and Tikrit:

In the western city of Haditha, tribal leaders were in talks on Tuesday with ISIS militants to negotiate the surrender of Iraqi security forces….

That’s right—this “fighting” force is hiding behind the backsides of elders.

And this:

…local tribal leaders negotiated the peaceful surrender of the last of the Iraqi soldiers trapped in the oil refinery at Beiji.

That oil refinery is was Iraq’s largest.

The gentlemen in the Alamo, and on either side of the question at Iwo Jima, or at Verdun, might have had a different view of the situations in Haditha and Beiji.

Again, Racism on the Supreme Court

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor is at it again.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected on Sunday the notion that alternatives to affirmative action such as income or residency could achieve similar results in diversifying the nation’s colleges and universities.

And

Sotomayor strongly backs affirmative action and wrote the dissent in April in a 6-2 decision that upheld a state’s right to outlaw the use of race in determining admissions.

Because Sotomayor insists on using race as a useful, somehow, discriminant in getting ahead.

She added, in so many words, that mere merit, just being actually qualified isn’t enough; she used “legacy” questions as her excuse [emphasis added]:

Look, we have legacy admissions. If your parents or your grandparents have been to that school, they’re going to give you an advantage in getting into the school again. Legacy admission is a wonderful thing because it means even if you’re not as qualified as others you’re going to get that slight advantage.

Because adding a second wrong corrects both wrongs. Of course we should have equal outcomes, regardless of qualification. Of course who you know and what color your skin is should be included in the determining factors. Minorities, this minority Justice insists, just don’t have what it takes to succeed without that special treatment.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

An Iraqi Mess

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Iraqi leadership, such as it is, thinking it’s helpless to devise solutions on its own, depends entirely on the US to “wave a wand” and make things all better.

[A] State Department briefer portrayed the central Iraqi government as desperate for the Americans to solve the problem for them. “All of them look to us for answers and solutions and like a magic wand,” the briefer said. “There’s a lot of that.”

And this:

[S]oon after ISIS overran Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the Kurdish military force known as the Peshmerga swiftly moved to seize control of Kirkuk, the strategically important city with enormous reserves of oil that the Kurds have long viewed as their historic capital in their quest for full autonomy.
…
“Just look at where the Peshmerga is now compared to where they were two weeks ago,” the [same] State Department briefer instructed reporters. “… Some facts on the ground can be created that might not be reversed.”

This is some of what comes of an attempt to lift a tribal society, reduced by a generation of barbaric tyranny, into nationhood when that attempt is cut short before the task is seriously begun. The environment created by Saddam Hussein’s butchery and madness required answers handed down from the outside just to stabilize the situation and begin to repair emotional, economic, and infrastructure damage. The task of erecting a nation—the political requirements, the societal needs, the things that must be interactively taught, not handed down from on high—had barely begun when the US left Iraq in toto.

Iran, on the other hand, while willing to “help” the existing Iraqi government does not want US involvement at all. Iran wants a puppet state west of the Shat al-Arab and the Hawizah Marshes and not the sovereign nation that might result from US aid to Iraq in this crisis. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei [Supreme Leader of Iran] had this to say on the matter:

We strongly oppose the intervention of the US and others in the domestic affairs of Iraq. The main dispute in Iraq is between those who want Iraq to join the US camp and those who seek an independent Iraq.

The US aims to bring its own blind followers to power.

Iran wants to halt the Iraqi efforts to erect a nation in place of a tribal polity buried under the ashes of Saddam’s barbarity. Iran will “take care of” Iraq and the Iraqis.