The Unremembered Dead

From Touchstone’s Mere Comments:
Imagine what it might be like, not to be forgotten, but to know, as you are growing old, that you will soon be forgotten — that, in a few short years after your death, no one will care for you, or will preserve your wisdom, or uphold what you stood for, or honor your grave. Would that not be like dying before dying? Isn’t there a pathetic rootlessness of time as well as of place? Maybe we can define modern life as that truncated and diminished state of having no home to call your own, no country to serve, no family tradition, maybe no family at all, no piously tended grave, no past, and no future.
If that’s the case, then our educators do a very fine job preparing children for modern life. They too sever them from home, country, family, the past, and the future. In the April Touchstone there’s a brief report of a study done by a Stanford professor of education, who asked 2000 high school students to name the ten most famous Americans from the time Columbus stepped foot on the continent to the present. The choices are telling… read the rest and the list and some readers’ lists as well, here

Care to add your own top 10?

Bleeding Hearts but Tight Fists

From George Will:
Residents of Austin, home of Texas’s government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming “Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All,” “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty,” “The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion,” “Arms Are For Hugging,” “Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India),” “Jesus Is a Liberal,” “God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts,” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,” “Republicans Are People Too — Mean, Selfish, Greedy People” and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”
Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.” The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives. (full story)

Some Wicked Friends of Public Schools

…What happened in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, however, was preceded by what happened in Oregon in 1922. The Ku Klux Klan supported and passed the Compulsory Education Law which required that parents send their children to public schools and not private schools. The avowed purpose of this law was to get children “while their minds are plastic” and to turn the child into “a true American.”… (article here)

Librarian fired after reporting patron viewing child porn

A librarian assistant at the Lindsay Library, Biesterfeld was on the job late last month when she noticed 39-year-old Donny Chrisler downloading child porn on library computers. Biesterfeld told her supervisor Judi Hill, who instructed her to issue Chrisler a warning. Instead, Biesterfeld called police the next day. A few days later, Chrisler returned and Biesterfeld noticed he was once again viewing child porn. She notified police, who came and arrested Chrisler on the spot.

A WARNING???!!!
It actually gets worse. article here

Weird (and wonderful?!?) ‘laboratory art’ in Euro culture capital

…They include Orlan, a French woman who is truly prepared to suffer for her art, having undergone surgery several times to have implants inserted into unusual areas of her face, such as cheek implants into her temples.
Visitors to Liverpool are spared the blood which is liberally splashed over photographs on her website — instead she has crafted “Harlequin Coat”, a jacket just a few centimetres (inches) long from a mixture of her own skin cells and animal cells. It is supposed “to symbolise cultural cross breeding”.
American artist Julia Reodica, a qualified nurse, has produced designer hymens using her own vaginal tissue, which are displayed in jewellery boxes.
The idea is to show “how different cultures value female virginity and the associated pressures,” the organisers said in a statement.
And a video installation shows in detail Austria-based artist Stelarc undergoing an operation to have an extra ear grafted on to his arm.
Laura Sellars, the head of programmes at FACT, denies that the exhibition is merely seeking shock value. (full story)

Well, OK -if you deny it…

Black Blocs: Upping the Ante at Protests

From StratFor

A small bomb exploded outside a military recruiting station in New York City’s Times Square in the early morning hours of March 6, causing minor property damage but no injuries. The New York Police Department said surveillance videos of the area show a single person arriving at the scene riding a bicycle and wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. Police say the blast was caused by a crude device made from a small, green ammunition container filled with black powder. In the video, the attacker appears to be acting alone, suggesting the person who planted the device was also the bombmaker. There have been no credible claims of responsibility for the attack, though police have lifted latent fingerprints off of what they believe to be the bicycle used by the perpetrator.
Although bombings are uncommon in Manhattan, several unsolved incidents have occurred that could be related to the March 6 attack: (full story here)

Peacenik Thugs

Michelle Malkin reports:

From Pittsburgh to Berkeley, anti-war extremists have smeared recruiters as “death pimps” and “child predators.” The militant Code Pink group continues to organize in-your-face protests to drive recruiters from major metropolitan areas.
The Times Square bombing wasn’t an isolated incident, but a symptom of reckless tolerance for dangerous “peace” peddlers skating on the edge of sedition. Lone nuts? Here’s a brief history of the anti-military recruitment movement’s mounting acts of vandalism and violence:
more here

Liberal Fascism

Excellent review over at FrontPage.
Liberal Fascism:The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah GoldbergDoubleday, $27.95, 487 pp.Review by David Forsmark

That “thwack” you hear from coast to coast is conservative book-writing pundits smacking themselves on the forehead and exclaiming, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
The reason is National Review editor Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, as it racks up huge sales and dominates best-seller lists.

Jonah Golberg is the Editor over at National Review founded by the late William F. Buckley