Why the Left is more successful than the Right

John Adams eloquently stated that our Constitution was "designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other." At the same time, our Declaration of Independence enshrined the concepts of freedom and equality into our nation's DNA. The central objective of conservatism (ideally at least) is to keep our nation within the general bounds of biblical morality, also known as the Judeo-Christian Ethic. This is what the Founder understood as natural law. The conservative philosophy accepts the premise that this boundary is vital to the healthy funstioning of our society. As the Scripture says, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." The Right seeks to conserve this value into the future.

The problem is, there is an inherent contradiction between moral boundaries and freedom, at least in the minds of those who consider freedom to mean "absolute moral freedom." In the first 150 years of our nation, we have been involved in a great quest to extend the genuine attributes of freedom to all of our citizens. As of today we have achieved remarkable results in this area. But the modern liberal philosophy is that for freedom to be true freedom, it must not be constrained by biblical morality. Therefore, while the fundamental spirit of conservatism is to "hold fast," the fundamental spirit of libralism is to "push on." This makes liberalism a more naturally agressive political philosophy than conservatism. The Left seeks to liberate society from traditional moral restraints.

Joseph Farrah provides a good example of how this works in the real world. His issue of choice is same-sex marriage – or, as the left calls it, “marriage equality.” Farrah writes, "A mere decade ago, the very idea of same-sex marriage would have prompted the overwhelming majority of Americans to burst out in laughter. But the left kept pushing it – not only through the political channels and the courts, but, more importantly, through the press and entertainment industry, the schools and universities and all of the powerful cultural institutions they control and dominate. Today, as a result, a notion that seemed preposterous a decade ago is a reality today."

Today, with its political base strengthened by much of the press and entertainment world, liberalism is proving to be a more potent offensive force than the crumbling defensive force of conservatism. This imbalance is not likely to change in the forseeable future, if ever.

The intersection of deviance and treason

Bradley Manning is the most current example of the not infrequent intersection of deviance and treason. As a criminal responsible for the biggest breach of highly sensitive material in American history, Manning is an individual whose actions endangered American lives and national security. He is also deeply sexually disturbed, a fact he did not try to hide from his superiors before all this happened. They ignored the warning signs because, after all, there’s no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. There’s no difference between those who accept the gender God gave them and those who maintain they were “born in the wrong sex body.” We are all supposed to cooperate with this fiction and feel comfortable working beside, hiring and trusting such people.

The actions of a Bradley Manning are the predictable outcome of acute internal turmoil, and it’s not normal. It’s also not hate to say so, but an exercise of caution, reality and cultural security.

Comment by Linda Harvey of Mission America

FLASH: Women are NOT from Venus

An amazing report from the BBC:

“Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard. New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was. The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled. Details of the theory were outlined by Professor Steven Benner at the Goldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy.

 

Scientists have long wondered how atoms first came together to make up the three crucial molecular components of living organisms: RNA, DNA and proteins. The molecules that combined to form genetic material are far more complex than the primordial ‘pre-biotic’ soup of organic (carbon-based) chemicals thought to have existed on the Earth more than three billion years ago, and RNA (ribonucleic acid) is thought to have been the first of them to appear. Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the ‘soup’ does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar. RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by ‘templating’ atoms at the crystalline surfaces of minerals. The minerals most effective at templating RNA would have dissolved in the oceans of the early Earth, but would have been more abundant on Mars, according to Professor Benner. This could suggest that life started on the Red Planet before being transported to Earth on meteorites, argues Professor Benner, of the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, US.

 

‘The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock,’ he commented. ‘It’s lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless – as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there may not have been a story to tell.’

 

Home again, home again, jiggity jog!

 

Not Scott

 

August 28, 2013: Absent from the speaker line-up at the Let Freedom Ring event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was the nation’s only black Senator, Tim Scott (R-SC). African-American leaders who did receive an invitation to speak included Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Martin Luther King III, MSNBC host Al Sharpton, and movie stars Jamie Foxx, Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Hmmm. Wonder why.

4 Problems with Federal College Scrorecards

Yesterday, President Obama announced his plan to make “college more affordable, tackle rising costs, and improve value for students and their families.” But a big part of the President’s plan includes creating a college rating system—a federal scorecard—to evaluate colleges on measures such as graduation rates, the number of low-income students served (i.e., the percentage of Pell Grant recipients), graduate earnings, and affordability.

Scorecards are a seductive idea. But having the federal government issue scorecards to measure college output would be a mistake. Four problems with the President’s plan:

1. Government says what’s best. A monopoly government scorecard would inevitably reflect what bureaucrats—rather than parents, students, and scholarly communities—determine is or is not important in education.

2. Special-interest institutions with more clout could shape the standards. Existing institutions that are comfortable within the cocoon of protectionist accreditation would lobby hard, and no doubt effectively, for output measures that define success in their own terms.

3. Standard-setters would also control college funding. Educational institutions’ lobbying becomes particularly problematic when considering the second part of President Obama’s proposal: to then tie federal student aid to the new rating system by giving larger Pell Grants and lower student loan interest rates to students who enroll in colleges that fare well on the federal scorecard. The logical outcome is a system that has the federal government handing out subsidies based on a rating system designed by the people handing out the funding. What could possibly go wrong?

4. We already have scorecards. A competing range of private outcomes-based scorecards already exists, sponsored by such outlets as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, ACTA, and Kiplinger’s. Each of these reflects the differing visions of quality held by different Americans, from post-graduation salary to the likelihood of a well-rounded education. A one-size-fits-all federal rating system is unnecessary and will likely trump these independent evaluators that parents and students have long trusted.

If the Obama Administration truly wants to “shake up” higher ed and bring down college costs, it would acknowledge that federal government intervention is the problem, not the solution. Continuing to increase federal subsidies enables universities to raise tuition. Since 1982, the cost of attending college has increased 439 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation. Increases in college costs exceed increases in health care costs, which have risen more than 250 percent over the same time period. (Lindsey Burke on The Foundry)