From the Wall Street Journal:

Girl “Accidentally” Gets 56 Tattoos on Her Face

Let’s go to the video . . .

Hot, with astonishing levels of humidity this weekend. Last night the air was thicker than a taxi driver’s accent. On cue, we developed an A/C problem today. Help is on the way first thing in the morning.

Speaking of technologies on which I’ve become utterly dependent . . .

Last Friday morning my MacBook refused to boot up. Drove the catatonic laptop to a local Apple store and bellied up to the “Genius Bar.” Diagnosis: Bad logic board. Prescription: 5-7 days at the Mac hospital.

That means borrowing Mrs. Blather’s laptop this week and doing without most of my email addresses and contact information. Inconvenient, to be sure. But to put my travails in perspective . . .

A friend of a friend took his family out for a big birthday celebration a few nights ago as big thunderstorms were rolling through the area. They returned home to find a smoldering ruin where there house used to sit. Lightning had taken all they owned with no opportunity to salvage even a family photo album or treasured keepsake.

Not all inconveniences are created equal. I think I’ll stop bellyaching now.

I wrote the previous post right before turning in last night. As I was drifting off, I was reminded of a wonderful quote by William F. Buckley about the cluelessness of smart people. He famously said:

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

The current bunch of Ivy Leaguers running the government on behalf of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika represent a massive validation of Buckley’s insight.  In the name of creating and saving “jobs,” they have been relentlessly waging war on the nation’s job providers–small and large businesses.

Clearly, I’m not smart enough to understand how that makes sense.

Get comfortable. I feel an essay coming on.

Actually, this one has been germinating for a couple of weeks . . . ever since I saw a flurry of discussion last week about a study published in the journal of the National Institute of Education titled, “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability.”

I know you will be astonished to learn that some liberal academics decided to study the intelligence of conservatives and found us inferior to liberals in the smarts department. This research is of a time-honored tradition in academia–a previous shining example being a 2003 study funded by the NIH which posited that conservatism is actually a form of mental illness.

This is nonsense only a tenured Ph.D. can excrete and it has been ably given the thrashing it so richly deserves by other conservatives elsewhere.  (conservatives who miraculously summoned the mental capacity and grip on reality to read the research and respond.) See here, here and here for example.

Let’s set aside questions about the intellectual honesty of liberal academics and the unexamined presuppositions and agendas they bring to their research. Let’s just stipulate for a moment that liberals really are more intelligent than conservatives. If that is the case, then IQ is of little value in evaluating existing conditions and determining the wisest course of action.

Why is this so? Because history has shown liberals to have been wrong on virtually every important policy question of the last 100 years, with the qualified exception of the civil rights movement.

• In the 1920s, liberals were wrong about the Russian revolution and the nature of the nascent Soviet Union.
• In the 1930s liberals were wrong about the New Deal.
• In the 1940s through the 1980s, they were wrong about the Cold War.
• In the 1960s liberals were wrong about the “war on poverty” and put in place policies that destroyed the urban family and destined two entire generations of young black men to prison.
• In the 1970s they were wrong about forced busing, the Shah of Iran, unions, and the sexual revolution.
• And in the 1980s they vilified Reagan on a myriad of issues on which he has since been vindicated.

There is a great research paper waiting to be written about why it is intelligent liberals are consistently dead wrong in their publicl policy prescriptions. But don’t hold your breath. Conservatives in academia stay stealthed

Famous “intellectuals” like Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag are inarguably brilliant in their fields. They are also comically wrong about most things political.

Just today, Slate’s Camille Paglia, a very, very smart liberal wrote this paragraph (emphasis mine):

Barack Obama was elected to do exactly what he did last week at Cairo University — to open a dialogue with the Muslim world. Or at least that was why I, for one, voted for him, contributed to his campaign, and continue to support him. There is no more crucial issue for the future of the West, whose material prosperity masks an increasing uncertainty about its own principles and values. Religion, abandoned by the secular professional class, will continue to be a major marker of cultural identity for most people — even more so during periods of economic or political instability. But the now widespread stereotyping of Islam as medieval and inherently violent and intolerant ensures eternal war. Visionary leaders are vitally needed on both sides to call for mutual understanding and rational coexistence. Yet, post-9/11, troublingly few voices of Muslim moderation have emerged.

There are two real howlers packed into that highlighted sentence. First, Ms. Paglia confidently asserts that viewing Islam as “medieval and inherently violent and intolerant” is “stereotyping.” Seriously. This is sort of like decrying the stereotype of professional basketball players as athletic and inherently tall.

Then she asserts that it is this stereotyping that “ensures eternal war.” Again, this is a serious liberal intellect at work here.

As I suggested in my headline . . . apparently intelligence is overrated.

A bunch of billionaires got together in New York the other day to discuss the world’s problems. Apparently in the minds of these oligarchs, our biggest problem is too many people. Seriously.

As the Times of London described it:

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

Allow me to begin by pointing out that this list of seven billionaires contains three utter loons (Soros, Turner, Winfrey); one nanny-state champion who has run New York City back into the ground after Giuliani resurrected it (Bloomberg); a one-world-government utopian (Rockefeller); and two smart businessmen who tend to operate from some extremely flawed assumptions about how everything outside their narrow areas of expertise, works (Buffett and Gates.)

Come to think of it, the fact that Bill Gates thinks the world’s biggest problem is overpopulation goes a long way toward explaining why all my Windows-based computers are screwed up most of the time.

One of the most widely held myths of our time is that over-population is a problem. As I wrote elsewhere a few years ago:

It is now universally understood that as societies develop and living standards increase, populations tend to level off and even decline. Today most countries in the Northern Hemisphere actually have a negative birthrate—meaning that not enough babies are being born to replace the older folks who are dying off. As a matter of fact, a few years ago population researchers predicted that the earth’s population would level off in the year 2050, but now some analysts think the world may already be hitting that point.

At the same time, constant advances in farming methods have made it possible to produce ever more food on less and less land. The fact is, most hunger that exists in the world today is the result of war, bad government, and/or bad religion—not overpopulation. (Of course, that doesn’t mean we, as Christians, have any less responsibility to try to ease their suffering if we can.)

Zimbabwe used to be a well-fed country and a net exporter of food. Today, after millions have either died or left, millions are starving. Why? Bad government and bad religion.

The fact is, if we have a population problem in the future it will be one of too few people.

So why do smart guys like Bill Gates insist on tilting at this windmill? Guilt, I suppose. A perverse form of guilt, to be sure. It’s a response that recognizes that there are no lasting solutions in “philanthropy” and therefore the only other answer is genocide. In other words, “If you can’t stop these icky people from being icky by throwing money at them, then lets just make sure they stop making more icky people.”

That’s Gates’ logic. Treat the poor like a computer virus. Identify them, isolate them, and stop them from replicating.

Nevertheless, there are a few among these enlightened beings that have begun to recognize the truth. Back in December I pointed out an op-ed, also in the Times of London, written by an athiest who, after years of working with secular philanthropic agencies in Africa like those funded by Bill and Melinda Gates, had come to a startling understanding:

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

Until guys like Gates and Buffett have that same awakening, they’ll continue to prescribe the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.

Just when you start thinking David Brooks’ conservative sensibilities have been dulled by whatever they put in the drinking water there at the New York Times, he comes up with this awesome piece of punditry. (hat tip: Fergus)

An excerpt:

Recently we were uplifted when the president informed Chrysler’s secured creditors that they had agreed to donate their ownership stake in the company to the United Auto Workers. Just last week, we were enthralled to see a group of auto executives beaming with pride as the president announced that in order to reduce gas consumption, they would henceforth be scaling back on all those car lines that consumers actually want to buy.

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II.

“We remember those who were called upon to give all a person can give, and we remember those who were prepared to make that sacrifice if it were demanded of them in the line of duty, though it never was. Most of all, we remember the devotion and gallantry with which all of them ennobled their nation as they became champions of a noble cause.”

Ronald Reagan at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Memorial Day, 1988

Today Female Offpring Unit #2 graduates from high school. At 17 years and 9 months of age, she is the youngest in her class. And yet in many ways she has one of the older souls. I was the same way. I was even younger on graduation day — 17 and 7 months — but by then, most of my best friends were two and three years older than me.

Friends tell me it’s a birth-order thing, but this one has always crawled, walked, marched, and danced to a alternative drummer.

The fact that “everybody else is doing it”; or “nobody else is doing it” has rarely factored into the equation. I suppose that’s why this Fall, when all of her friends and classmates will be heading off to college, she’ll already be settled in in Nairobi, Kenya–happily dancing to that beatbox only she and her heavenly Father can hear.

A self-starter, this one. She’s always preferred to tackle new challenges on her own, in private, and in the timing of her own choosing. One day, around the time of her fifth birthday, we realized she had stopped having us tie her shoes for her. Somewhere along the line she had taught herself.

Riding a bicycle without training wheels? She tackled that one on her own, as well. On a visit to her grandparents, she had pulled a dusty old bicycle out of the garage and started riding it around the cul-du-sac. She came in the house later and casually mentioned she now knew how to ride a bike.

(Come to think of it, even potty training had been an exercise in frustration as long as we were actively involved. The breakthrough came when we just handed her a picture book and let her figure it out for herself–which didn’t take long.)

This fierce self-sufficiency is joined by a tendency to keep her cards held tightly to her vest. Often we’ve found out about deep traumas and major victories only well after the fact and usually via a third party. (Thank God her bookend sisters are open books who tell everything they know!)

Of course, to a mother whose primary “love language” is quality time and a father whose native tongue is words of affirmation this has meant adapting relationship expectations to fit the child as God made her, and some walking by parental faith not by sight.

The result is a truly remarkable young woman of whom we are unspeakably proud.

As regular readers know, at the first of this year, I spent several days of solitude, soul-searching and prayer out in Palo Duro Canyon. (I wrote about it here.) In that season, I spent some time praying for, and listening to God about, each of my three  daughters. On the day I was hiking and praying for #2, I heard the voice of Lord say something so clearly and emphatically that I stopped and wrote it down in my notebook. He said:

I have made her just as she is . . . with great promise . . . and for great purpose.

There is no question in my mind that every word of this is true. The fact is, God has graced my bride and I with three astonishing gifts–each uniquely wonderful. Each loved and celebrated and enjoyed in a different way.

But today is a day to celebrate one in particular. It is “G’s” day.

Even so, there is a part of me that can’t help but feel a heart-stab of sadness that this season of wonder — this bless-ed growing-up-time — is ending. The years have been so relentless in their blurry passing. Must this adventure be in such a rush to end?

Where does a father go to get this moment back . . .

[click on this picture]

*****

“Kiss for me, Daddy?”

Yes, my daughter. Always. Whatever you do . . . Wherever God’s plan takes you . . . Always, always a kiss for you.

Britain’s most famous (and blunt) car buff drives the new Honda Insight and shares:

It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

Read the whole amusing thing here.