Self-discipline

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.

- - Henry Ward Beecher

Virginia Tech

It's already started.

At a press conference with the president of Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg, Virginia police chief yesterday, reporters already were looking for someone to blame. Should the college have been locked down after the first shooting incident? Did the police fail to react promptly? The talking heads on TV are already talking about banning guns and violent video games. A lot of people are blaming the general cultural violence and decay of moral values.

Everyone is hopelessly (irrationally?) searching for a rational explanation for an irrational act.

But crimes of passion happen every day. How many are followed two hours later by a killing spree? Almost none. So how were the police or college administrators to know that a love-sick student would kill his girl friend and another student, wait two hours, and then kill 30 more students? It was irrational. Unpredictable.

If guns are to blame, shouldn't it have been a good thing that the gunman was the only person with a gun? No, it wasn't a good thing.

If today's violent video games are the "desensitizing" agent that led to the killings, how do you explain Charles Whitman's rampage at the University of Texas in 1966?

In 1927, 45 people--mostly schoolchildren--were killed in Bath Township, Michigan, by a nut who didn't like his taxes. He used explosives, so we can't blame guns. There were no videogames, so we can't blame World of Warcraft. This was even before TV and before prayer was removed from schools, so we can't even blame the culture.

But we have to blame someone. Or something. Don't we?

The Postwest - A civilization that has become just a dream.

Everyone....Please read Victor Davis Hanson's column at NRO.

More on "global warming"

Here's an interesting graphic and description from NASA:
The number of sunspots on the Sun’s surface is roughly proportional to total solar irradiance. Historical sunspot records give scientists an idea of the amount of energy emitted by the Sun in the past. The above graph shows sunspot data from 1650 to the present. The Maunder Minimum occured from 1650–1700 and may have influenced Europe’s little ice age. (The data from this period are not as reliable as the data beginning in 1700, but it is clear that sunspot numbers were higher both before and after the Maunder Minimum.) Since then, sunspot number have risen and fallen in a regular 11-year cycle. An 11-year running average shows only the long-term variation, which shows a rise in total sunspot numbers from 1700 until today. [Graph by Robert Simmon, based on data compiled by John Eddy (1650-1700) and the Solar Influences Data analysis Center (SIDC)]

Giuliani stands by support of publicly-funded abortions

CNN - Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Giuliani stands by support of publicly-funded abortions

When asked directly Wednesday if he still supported the use of public funding for abortions, Giuliani said "Yes."

As far as supporting Rudy in the primaries, he just shot himself in the ass with me and a whole lot of other Christian conservatives. It's bad enough that he's "pro-choice." Now he wants to make all of us accessories to murder. Maybe he gets an A for honesty, but I'm honest, too, and I can't honestly vote for someone who thinks like this--at least until I have no other choice.
I read a letter from a woman, I think in the Washington Times, who took issue with the charge that pro-Lifers are often single-issue voters. She made one excellent point: that single issue tells us an awful lot about how a candidate thinks and makes decisions--especially if he claims to be "personally against" abortion, which is exactly what Giuliani does in the citation above.
Remember Chesterton's words: "To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose."

If Giulani is the Republican nominee I'll more than likely vote for him. Someone else will be getting my primary vote.

The Trouble With Islam

Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence.

BY TAWFIK HAMID
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.

But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

(read more)