Whitest Boy Alive - Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix)
A good song. Of course, the music video leaves something to be desired.
The Pope Touches Us
The following headline comes from the April 30-May 13 edition of The Downtowner, one of D.C.’s local entertainment newspapers. The article recounts the pope’s recent visit to the city:
John Q. Adams’s Foreign Policy
Earlier this evening, I began reading Ron Paul’s new book, The Revolution, A Manifesto. It’s a relatively brisk read, only 167 pages. Having only made it through the first third of the book, I was particularly struck by the eloquence of a quote by John Q. Adams, which is used in the second chapter regarding US foreign policy. It is as follows:
[I]f the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world . . . should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless, and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights; she has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own; she has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
. . .
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . .
The Single April Post
You no doubt have noticed that I have not posted once in the month of April. I’m not sure why this is so, except to say that I may be becoming increasingly desensitized to events that would otherwise drive the outrage needed to write often. There is quite a lot going on that is worth talking about - consider this a re-dedication to posting.
There’s also a couple of things that I need to fix with this stupid back-end. I’m all but sick of the discrepancies between the code and the wysiwyg javascript editor that I’ve installed for making posts. This needs to be tweaked. Furthermore, the wysiwyg editor is trapping my right clicks and giving me context menus that both don’t work and don’t display properly. Furthermore, I need to streamline the use of images in these articles. I always have to upload the picture, insert, and then go edit the html code to get it to work right. I’m sick of doing that. Plus, every time I put a jump in my articles, I have to edit the html to make sure they are placed properly, because it inserts them in the wrong place relative to paragraph tags, bold tags, and pretty much any other tag that is liable to break the remainder of the homepage after I post. This is not to mention that I probably need to fix this sifr plugin that I’m using to create flash-based headlines, as they’re not working in my browser anymore. . . . And I haven’t fixed the Translate options.
All-in-all, on any given article, I spend half of my time writing and the other half doing mundane and tedious edits largely as a result of the malfunctions that I describe above. It’s time to get this site back into tip-top shape.
P.S. Submitting this article caused an extra paragraph tag with nbsp blanks to appear after every paragraph in this article, requiring me to edit it yet again.
March 25th, the Day Conservatism Died
Many will look back on this time in American history and marvel at the steady decline of traditional conservatism - the philosophy of small government and big liberty. If one had to pinpoint a defining event signaling the death of the conservative movement, it would be this very day.
With the news that Nancy Reagan is set to endorse John McCain, conservatism has been buried, doused with a bucket of water, and swirled with a stick - only to the delight of socialist left-leaners and Smokey the Bear.