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A Brief Excerpt From a Long Letter: C. S. Lewis to Warren, 5 November 1939

Old Mrs. Moore died on Thursday evening. She had complained of being “uncomfortable” and feeling “only middling” for about 24 hours before, but on the whole her last days seem to have been painless and only partially conscious – in fact she was, in most senses of the word, dead for the last week or so. Miss Griggs, whose behaviour Read More ›

The Other Mrs Moore

In 1998 public questions emerged for the first time about the mystery woman from Northern Ireland who lived and died on the grounds of the Kilns in the late 1930s. Her name was Alice Moore, but she was not any relative of Janie Moore’s. Yet when she died in 1939 Janie Moore was her sole heir and Maureen was her Read More ›

In God’s Country:

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2000-12-14/feature2.html/page1.html In the beginning, there was a bang. A very big bang. Nothing exploded into something. Quarks and leptons collided violently in an intense fireball of plasma. As the plasma expanded and cooled, the collisions became less violent, and particles joined together to form protons and neutrons and electrons, then nuclei and atoms and molecules. Huge clouds of these particles Read More ›

The South Rises, Joining the GOP

FOR the century and a quarter of the Republican Party's existence, the largest stumbling block to control of Congress has been the Democratic "Solid South." Along the populated states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line, as GOP analyst John Morgan notes, Americans long voted the way their ancestors fought in the Civil War. In the 11 old Confederacy states the only traditional Republican districts were in the Appalachian hills of North Carolina and Tennessee that once supported the Union cause. Last week's remarkable congressional elections suggest that the South may be uniting again, but this time behind the Republican party. It is enough to make Jefferson Davis spin in his grave - and William Jefferson Clinton chew his nails. In 1960, the U.S. Senate seat vacated by newly elected Vice President Lyndon Johnson was won by Republican John Tower and the present congressional realignment really began. Civil rights controversies and the weight of Great Society programs pushed many Dixiecrats into the GOP column after Barry Goldwater's defense of states' rights in 1964. Read More ›

The ‘Soft Tyranny’ of Hidden Taxation

THE issues of scandals, term limits, Haiti, Iraq and crime dominate the news and TV ads this campaign season. However something deeper and mostly unarticulated may be doing more to shape the nation's politics. The decisive issue of 1994 could well be people's continuing frustration over their inability to get ahead financially - and their conviction that government is both directly and indirectly hampering them. The large, increasingly middle-aged middle class finds salary increases scarce and restructuring layoffs common. If these are prosperous times, people wonder, what will the next recession bring? With many ordinary families turning over to government at various levels almost half their incomes (roughly 25 percent federal income tax, 15.3 percent Social Security, 8 percent state and local sales tax, plus property taxes and assorted special taxes and fees), it becomes harder and harder for the baby boomers who have so shaped political trends in the past to see how they can afford to send their children to college or save adequately for retirement. Polls show that voters no longer are impressed by politicians' offers to satisfy their personal concerns with still more government programs. That is part of the reason why Democrats, as the party that traditionally defends the utility of government action, are in particular trouble this year. Even now-standard efforts by congressional candidates to avoid a negative national trend by "localizing" campaigns may backfire. Localizing usually means showing how the incumbent can "bring home the bacon." But as voters watch television accounts of this going on all over the country - Sen. Ted Kennedy holding up giant posters of federal checks he is delivering to particular constituencies and Speaker Tom Foley boasting of road contracts and police positions brought to Spokane - they see that it is they who are paying for all that bacon and that the price is too high. Yesterday's bacon is becoming today's pork. Read More ›

The Hidden Fears of High-Tech Learning

IN THE 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge declared, "The business of America is business." In the 1990s it might be at least as true to say that the business of America is learning. Constant adjustment to change - coping with new facts and ways of doing things - has become the norm in commerce as computer hardware and software is introduced, adapted and, later, replaced. Now the high-tech revolution is coming to education. You might think that everyone would be thrilled. The high-tech motto of "better, cheaper, faster" sounds like an admirable aim for general school reform. But talking to many educators, business people, high-tech manufacturers, government officials and even parents, one soon realizes that below the surface many of them are as anxious as they are hopeful. There are new software products that recognize what kind of learning style works best for a student and adjusts accordingly. Some, for example, can help kids get over very specialized reading problems. On the other hand, for the established scholar and writer there is the entire three-volume Oxford English Dictionary on disc for a third of the cost of a hard-cover copy, and the manufacturer throws in several other reference works for good measure. Dozens of new products like these are appearing monthly, many of them produced in the Seattle area. Read More ›

Pass National Service, Cripple Charity

Drawing on a moral tradition going back to the Bible, and wending through the American founding and the young republic described by Alexis de Tocqueville, this ideal has created what some call a "mediating" institution between the profit sector and the government. Now the government proposes not only to compete with this sector (as in the Vista program), but to invade it directly. Under President Clinton's national service bill, politically appointed boards chosen by state governors would funnel federal funds for service jobs to selected private and civic groups. Imagine you run a private charity. If it is chosen to participate in the national service program, you've hit the jackpot financially. But if your charity, like the great majority, is not chosen, your cause will find itself trying to compete with the federal treasury. Americans familiar with the notorious Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s should find the prospects for unabashed political patronage, and even corruption, obvious. Incapacitating the nongovernment charitable sector further, the national service bill allows (read, "encourages") the programs it backs to raise additional funds from private sources. Imagine trying to raise money for a private charity when the government's endorsed charities, blessed by your state's governor, can offer donors federal "matching money," prestige and public recognition as incentives to fund them instead. Read More ›

‘Let’s Draft Everybody’ – National Service vs. Real Service

THERE she is, a sweet, but emotionally overcome young woman from the New Jersey Youth Corps, being consoled with a hug from the president of the United States. Onlookers in a flag-decked classroom beam at this latest exciting moment in the new political production, "The Selling of National Service." It is the kind of scene repeated in photo-opportunities nationally as the White House hustles its plan to have college loan recipients pay off Uncle Sam with government-approved service. The consequence is a distinctly American tradition of committed, creative and effective community service. As figures from the Gallup Poll and the respected group Independent Sector show, in recent years Americans actually are giving more money and time to charities. And because they give it as they wish - not as they are directed by government - the voluntary service sector is more popular than either the profit sector of society or the government sector. Read More ›

National Service Promise Should be Broken

The idea, whose father was military conscription and whose mother was the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, was incubated in the Progressive Policy Institute in the '80s, placed in the foster care of the Democratic Leadership Council and then adopted by the [President] Clinton campaign. "Maintain the Pell Grant program but scrap the existing student-loan program and establish a National Service Trust Fund to guarantee every American who wants a college education the means to obtain one. Those who borrow from the fund will pay it back either as a small percentage of their income over time, or through community service as teachers, law-enforcement officers, health-care workers or peer counselors helping kids stay off drugs and in school." Would taxpayers really think they were getting a bargain by paying for students' college loans and then paying again to hire these same people in government-financed jobs? Would workers now in health care and education jobs be happy to see the cheeky new government-paid "volunteers" arrive, eliminate private-sector growth in low-skill jobs and drive down the private-pay scale? Would the volunteers really serve society best in such artificial, temporary posts, expending tax revenues, or by getting on with their own careers and contributing to tax revenues? Read More ›

Welcome to the Dawn of the Age of Victimhood

IN ONE of those "new studies" that repeatedly illuminate the medical news, we learned recently that genes may be responsible for disposing some people to smoking. This is a development beyond the hopes of America's weed addicts: Suddenly smokers are on their way from being seen as practitioners of a disagreeable vice to becoming the unfortunate victims of a genetic disorder. In America, once that kind of opinion switch is made a freshly established class of victims can start winning arguments and lawsuits. They are no longer accountable for their actions. In the Age of the Victim, society is always wrong. Some say that a nation founded on individualism is becoming a society of finger-pointing interests, each trying to score off the whole. Actually, we still believe in individualism, it's just that it's an individualism of rights, not responsibilities, and, paradoxically, those rights are now the products of group membership. For example, our tattered code of individual responsibility would have it that a chronically late employee might expect, eventually, to be fired. But, in "A Nation of Victims," a new book by Charles J. Sykes, the case is related of a Pennsylvania school employee fired for constantly arriving late at work. It seems that the worker then sued for reinstatement because his therapist said he suffered from "Chronic Lateness Syndrome." He won the case, too, though it later was lost on appeal. Read More ›