Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

Quick Takes

James Mann has written a new book: The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression .  I saw Mann interviewed on television yesterday.  Current U.S. policy postulates economic progress will weaken China's authoritarian, Communist government.  There's no sign of that happening.  Are we kidding ourselves?  Mann thinks so.  James Mann is associated with John Hopkins University.  He was previously the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief. 

Here's a summary from another blog post:

James Mann challenges the assumptions that have guided American policy toward China for more than three decades. Americans believe wrongly that with increasing prosperity and with the arrival of McDonald's and Starbucks, China will move inevitably toward political liberalization and democracy. U.S. leaders suggest, with waning conviction, that trade and investment will eventually bring an end to China's one-party system. But Mann argues that this is merely a new version of the old fallacy that the Chinese are becoming like us. In fact, Mann suggests, the newly enriched elites in cities like Beijing and Shanghai could turn out to be not the vanguard for democracy, but the driving force in favor of perpetuating an authoritarian regime.

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Victor Davis Hanson doesn't have much respect for Newsweek magazine  and in particular its current cover story on President Bush and Iran.  He explains why here.   It strikes me that skepticism (if not cynicism) is becoming an appropriate posture to adopt towards our mainstream media.

Quick Takes

If I had more time I would blog about the following articles:

The Supreme Court Opinions of Judge Clarence Thomas

Dennis Prager on "Global Warming Denial = Holocaust Denial?

Mark Tooley on "The Religious Left vs. 'Demonic America'"

Hugh Hewitt's fascinating interview with former Undersecretary of Defense, Douglas Feith, on The CIA, The WMD, and the Information War.  This interview really sets the record straight on a number of hugely important issues.  UPDATED 2/14/07  here.

Michael Crichton on the present disaster of gene patents

Quick Takes

        - Did you know that 35,000 people rallied outside the U.N. against President Ahmahdinejad of Iran the day he spoke there?   I didn't.  Where is the  reporting of the MSM??  That's  major news!!   Photos here.     (HT: Instapundit via Hugh Hewitt)

       - Thanks to Michelle Malkin for reminding us (some days ago) of this Toynbee quote: "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."   

       - Corporations, unfortunately, have bought into mainstreaming homosexuality.  A report says 138 major U.S. Corporations earned the top rating of 100 percent from the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for homosexual issues.  That's up from 101 companies the year before.  Here's the top-ranked list of homosexual friendly companies.

QUICK TAKES

In the "Things I Didn't Know" Department:

        - "The fastest rise in rates of depression since the 1990s is among children, at younger and younger ages.

        - "Mental health problems in college students have been rising since 1988, and in 1996 anxiety replaced relationships as the main source of student angst. 

        - "Less than a third of adult males now reach responsible adulthood (indicated by a steady job, marriage, and children) by age 30. "                         - Source: World Magazine

QUICK TAKES

Thomas Sowell - We have now been through at least two generations of constant denigration of American society. Is it surprising that we seem to have dwindling numbers of people willing to take responsibility and make sacrifices? Harvard is just one small example.

Chuck Colson - "In his marvelous book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, Rodney Stark writes that “Christianity created Western Civilization.”  Without Christianity’s commitment to “reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800.”

Susan Konig  - These days, many parents with children in public middle school are concerned with issues involving sex and drugs among kids as young as 10, 11, 12. As a mom with kids in parochial school, I hear from these parents on a fairly regular basis. They say to me, “I’m almost tempted to send my kids to Catholic school — except for the God thing.”

So they would rather have their kids more likely exposed to drugs and sexual situations than to God? “I just don’t know how I would feel about them being exposed to religion,” they explain.

Jonah Goldberg   - on "American Exceptionalism" - 
I loathe the sort of commentary stories like this generate.  It's all about how America contributes more greenhouse gasses than other countries.  Okay, guilty as charged.  It's not like these greenhouse gasses don't have a context.   The American economy sustains the planet, pulls millions out of poverty, keeps the sea channels open, develops most of the medical breakthroughs, provides most of the funding for international institutions (including the finger-waggers at the UN's environmental divisions), offers the best higher education to the world's leaders.