Oct 012008
Things I’ve linked in the past 24 hours:
- George F. Will – A Vote Against Rashness – "We are waist deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots of the financial crisis without transgressing this cardinal principle of politics: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.
Concerning which, a timeless political trope is: Government should budget the way households supposedly do, conforming outlays to income. But the crisis came partly because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does, hitching outlays to appetites.
Beneath Americans' perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar's worth of government. Conservatives participate in this, even though deficits fuel government's growth by obscuring its cost."
George Will gets it right.
- Elsewhere in Dreams » Blog Archive » Bullet Points for a Tuesday Evening –
- The Shaman and the Chicken Bones [Topic: Creation and Food] – "These pastors either don't know any better, in which case they cannot be trusted to handle the sacred text of Scripture, or they do know better but are afraid of the coterie of health ladies in the church who are propagating this kind of nonsense, in which case their cowardice disqualifies them."
- FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life – "This much, I think, is clear: Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life. "
- prayers for blowouts » Blog Archive » The 2008 World Series of Worship Leaders –