| Monday,
October 25, 2010
Maximum Effort
Election Day is one week from tomorrow, but with the modern trend in
absentee ballots cast early it may be decided by then. This election will be
decided in large part by the ground game. Who can get voters to the polls.
You may be certain that in nearly every election, state or local, there will
be enough people to have changed the outcome who did not vote, but would
have voted for the losing candidate had they bothered. That has been true in
most US elections, and it will be true in this one.
Which means, simply, that this week -- all of it, not just next Tuesday
-- is a time for maximum effort for the Tea Party. It is time to harvest the
votes. It is time to find the local tea party people and volunteer. If every
tea party enthusiast got just one more person who shares their sentiments to
the polls, the result will be a landslide. One more vote per precinct will
be important. This is a maximum effort election, and this week is maximum
effort week.
What the tea party needs is a landslide, not just a win: the purpose is
to put some iron in the spine of wavering Republicans, who will, shortly
after the election, be subject to every seductive move in the liberal
arsenal, including offers from the New York Times to praise them for their
"growth" when they succumb to the blandishments of the "cross the aisle"
arguments. If the tea party wins its close elections, the message will be
clear; and it needs to be clear.
Any close election will be contested, with recount after recount until
the result is what the ruling class wants. The only cure for this is a
landslide.
Maximum effort.
======================
The Bell Curve resurfaces
Murray: 'We are watching the maturation of the
cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in
"The Bell Curve" back in 1994.'
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102202873_pf.html>
---- Roland Dobbins
One important thing Murray does not address in this
important observation is just what is taught at Harvard and the other elite
schools. His most important point is that the new elites are isolated from
the rest of the nation.
Far from spending their college years in a
meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are
mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of
them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never
been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small
cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans
still live.
When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the
bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number
of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small
number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for
top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and
services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority
of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent
of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.
<snip>
The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses
ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have
influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not
defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their
fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the
New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.
This isolation is quite real. I grew up in the Old South,
where there was legal segregation. I was convinced that the law ought to be
colorblind and there should be racial equality, but after I got to high
school I never met any blacks -- Negroes, as we were taught to say in my
social class; others used different terminology. By the time I got to
high school we had moved from the Capleville farm where I went to school
with the children of farmers and small shop keepers and mechanics, and my
best friend's father was a Watkins route door to door salesman; but when we
moved back to Memphis and I went to high school, we were in a University
neighborhood and Christian Brothers was the "smart kids" high school, and I
didn't know many people who weren't college bound.
All that changed when I joined the Army, of course. We had
conscription in those days, and Basic Training was not segregated. I met all
kinds of people, from many parts of the country. The experience was
enlightening. I think that doesn't happen any more.
Self government requires people willing to govern
themselves.
==========================
The Henty Books
A reader with more patience than I have listened to all of
the ditzy MSNBC piece that concludes that Art Robinson isn't fit to be in
Congress because he has his kids read the Henty books, and that's just
unacceptable. Apparently someone at MSNBC found a Wikipedia article about
Henty that includes elided text, including this about Negroes:
"They are just like children," Mr.
Goodenough said. "They are always either laughing or quarreling. They are
good natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever
up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average
negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a
very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was
an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent
talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without
originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men,
their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of
civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state
little above their native savagery." -- from By Sheer Pluck, Chapter VIII.
To the Dark Continent
Note this is said by a character in a novel.
An irate fan once wrote a long tirade about the beliefs and
actions of one of Larry Niven's characters. Larry, who has more patience
than I do, wrote back:
"Dear Sir,
"We in the writing profession have a technical term for
those who attribute a character's opinions to the author himself: we call
them idiots.
"None of my best friends are idiots.
Merry Christmas."
Mark Twain might have written the same letter. As might
Charles Dickens. If we restrict our reading to books in which all the
characters are modern enlightened liberals -- which I suspect they do at our
elite schools -- we will throw out all the great literature and all of our
past.
==============
Now the pundits are joyfully (with pretended sadness)
reporting that Meg Whitman's son was accused of date rape at Princeton, but
acquitted of the charges. One of the gleeful pretenders keeps saying things
like this happened but it ought not matter, but it will.
When I was manager of Mayor Yorty's campaign for reelection,
the daughter of his opponent was arrested for shoplifting. That was
immediately reported to me by the police, and I told the Mayor. His instant
response was "We're not going to use that!" To which I agreed, and we never
mentioned it unless asked by reporters, in which case our comment was to
express sympathy for the Councilman and point out the irrelevance of the
question. Of course LA Time columnists couldn't leave it alone -- they tried
to somehow make it the Mayor's fault that he was even told of the event! I
fear my opinion of the integrity of reporters never recovered from this.
Anything for a story! Glee!
===============
Anyone in California who is aware of much would know to vote
yes on proposition 23, which suspends the operation of a crazy "ultimate"
carbon law in California. Apparently there is multiple advice on this in
various places. Meanwhile, although the Democrats took control of Congress
in 2006, and Obama got the White House and supermajorities in both houses in
2008, it's still the Republicans' fault that he hasn't got his most
left-wing proposals like amnesty for undocumented Democrats. The Republican
remnant wouldn't support his agenda.
Now he is angling to get the Republican leadership to work
with him. Fortunately not many of them have so lost their minds as to
believe that they will be inducted into the ruling class if only they
cooperate with Obama.
=================
For platinum subscription:
Platinum subscribers enable me to work on what I think is important
without worrying about economics. My thanks to all of you.
Patron Subscription:
Did you subscribe and never hear from me?
Click here!.
Monday TOP
Current Mail |
