Recently in Culture Category

Businessweek.com: The 50 Top American Philanthropists

George Kaiser is 3rd at $2.377 billion, behind Buffett and Gates and just ahead of George Soros. Walton Family is 6th, T. Boone Pickens is 16th, David Koch is 25th, Charles Koch is 40th, and Henry Kravis is 44th. Depressing note: Most of the top philanthropists are very generous with left-wing causes and leftist approaches to solving problems. (Via Club for Growth.)

Project Liberty: What Is the Tytler Cycle? Where Is the United States In This Cycle?

An 18th-century historian identified 9 phases through which societies cycle: Bondage, Spiritual Faith, Courage, Liberty, Abundance, Selfishness, Complacency, Apathy, Dependence, and back to Bondage. Where is the US?

Beware the church of climate alarm - Miranda Devine - Opinion - smh.com.au

"But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy - whether in the parliamentary offices of the world's largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.

"As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.

"One of Australia's leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it." (Via Alarming News.)

Bounded Rationality: Weekend at Gilcrease Museum

Ansel Adams photography exhibit -- 138 of his most famous prints -- runs through January 4, 2009.

Jonah Goldberg On Kathleen Parker s "G-O-D" Shame - Right Wing News

Commenter Bill Dalasio, a non-religious libertarian conservative, says the threat to his liberty isn't coming from "oogedy-boogedy" social conservatives: "Put bluntly, I can't help but feel I'm being sold a bill of goods here. Progressives, with the full consent of moderates,...chip away consistently and unabashedly at my freedom. All the while, telling me how scared I should be of the religious conservative bogeyman hiding under the bed." He cites smoking restrictions, speech codes, gun laws, the fairness doctrine, and mandatory recycling as examples.

Via the Cranky Conservative, who adds, "The essence of modern liberalism is a quest to perfect society. It really should come as no surprise, therefore, that it is the left that seeks to use government to achieve that end. More often than not, social conservatives are merely fighting against greater government intrusion."

RedState: How To Tell The "Culture Wars" Are Not Over

We can tell, because the Left was actively fighting for cultural hegemony in this election. In fact, the Left has been the aggressor all along:

"The point is this: we have political conflict over social and cultural issues because we have two sides that disagree on a broad range of issues, and neither is willing to change its position. If these issues were actually unimportant or indefensible, the side that was losing elections on them would throw in the towel and adapt its positions, as for example happened with the end of the political battles over segregation and Prohibition. And if cultural liberals disdained conflict, they would never start battles on these issues - yet they do so all the time. Indeed, abortion wasn't an issue in national politics until Roe v. Wade; the NRA wasn't a force in politics until liberal politicians pushed increasingly intrusive gun-control measures."

President Map - Election Results 2008 - The New York Times

More cool maps! An interactive map showing county-by-county results from 1992 to the present. You can even compare this year to a previous year. The only areas that got redder since 2004: Cajun Country, the Redneck Riviera, and a belt from western Pennsylvania, through W. Va., Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and into eastern Oklahoma -- the migration path of the Ulster Scots (including my mother's side of the family).

The New Atlantis » Technology, Culture, and Virtue

"t has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture. Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance....

"By disconnecting culture from nature and regarding nature as an enemy to be conquered, we have, above all, disconnected ourselves from the most important aspect of culture: the inexorable lessons of the limits of human power and the pitfalls of human efforts at mastery."

Brit Gal' in the USA: A momentous day remembered

On the third anniversary of her move across the pond, Sarah reflects on the stresses and surprises of starting over at mid-life in a whole 'nother country: "You don't know what to dial for local and long distance calls, you don't know any street names, directions are given with north, south, east, west - not left and right. You have no idea where to go to shop for certain things, most of the store names are alien to you. Everybody you meet is new to you; your brain rapidly goes into overload with new names and faces to remember. You're driving on the wrong side of the car and the wrong side of the street. The food is very different, products are different, some things you love you can no longer get at all. All the measurements you have known all your life have been thrown out the window; whether it's shoes, clothes, cooking or weight. Everytime you open your wallet you are faced with different currency and coins are very confusing."

Brit Gal' in the USA: Okie's may have the cleanest mouths ever!

Sarah, a British expat living in small-town western Oklahoma, writes: "I kid you not, it's probably been a good few months since I was in the company of anyone who swore publicly! Coming from England, where I don't think you'd get through more than a couple of hours without hearing someone swear, it is quite bizarre."