A Web Site for Reading Lite
Here is the update for July. If you click in the menu to the left, the text should appear in this window. If you click on a link on this page, you should get a new window. Let me know what bugs you see in your browser or in my server (mail_to link is at the bottom). You should now be able to change the size of the text on your screen using the “View, Text Size” settings on your browser.
Today we know about warrantless searches because of news media coverage of the National Security Agency’s use of them in the War on Terrorism in regards to electronic communications where at least one party is outside the country. I’ve included an interesting article from Meriwether County, Georgia, where the dangers of abuse of warrantless searches are lifted up. Look in the “Miscellaneous” menu to the left.
The “Metrics, Book of Knowledge” menu item to the left now includes an index. It uses Microsoft’s “tabular data control” to manipulate a delimited text file, display it as a table, and then sort it by column if the user clicks it with the mouse. In the right-hand column are links to the poems (most of them are from the Book of Knowledge, but there are a few extras thrown in). The text file is treated as an “object” by browsers, so you may see a warning. Go ahead and allow the blocked content to load if your security settings block it. The sorting is done by standard javascript.
Here are the final two installments of poetry from Grolier’s Book of Knowledge. If you follow the web pages from one through six you see how a child expands his mind through reading and thinking each year of his schooling. After presenting the poetry in topics to be read and absorbed, the last installment presents the classifications of rhyme and meter. I remember it well from my sixth and seventh grade teachers. Today it is all but lost.
I have included in the “Miscellaneous” menu item to the left a link to a most important document – a little book entitled “The Law,” published in 1850 by Frédéric Bastiat. Please spend a little time with it, and come back to it again. Its central idea — that governments may not legally do what an individual citizen may not legally do — has been absolutely lost in today’s rush to have the government do more and more things that should be the responsibilities of free citizens. The link in the article is bad, but here is the correct link to The Foundation for Economic Education. They have paperback copies of the book for a very reasonable price.
Also, the fourth page of poetry from The Book of Knowledge is available in the menu.
For December, I have added only the third installment of the “Book of Knowledge” poetry offerings. It is tedious work, but I hope you gain as much insight reading as I have “marking up” these poems.
It took a lot of typing, but now there are two pages of poetry from Grolier‘s “Book of Knowledge.”
After becoming introduced to contemporary poet Carleen Zink’s impressive work, “Orpheus’ Child,” I decided to add a new menu item for poetry (but, of course, I had to find a synonym that started with M). In addition to Zink’s poem, I have begun to include the poems from the Grolier Society’s “The Book of Knowledge” from a 1951 edition. It is fascinating to compare what was thought to be important for a child’s education in 1951 with what passes for education today. Take a little time to scan the Book of Knowledge page, and then come back again and read the poems. If my “carpel tunnels” hold out, I’ll add more from time to time. (By the way, I set up the font for each poem’s title and the major headings to be in a font that closely matches that in the original book. If you do not have that font installed on your computer you will of course see a standard serif font. But if you would like to have the elegant BernhardMod BT font, please let me know by the mail_to link at the bottom of this home page and I will send the font file (it’s TrueType) to you by E-mail.) Back to Ms. Zink—you will enjoy her re-telling of the Orpheus story because of the fresh imagery she brings to the verse. And, in correspondence with her, I found that she was also inspired by what she learned happened to the landscape of Wales by the strip mining of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a work of high quality.
In the menu is Garet Garrett’s essay from 1952 titled “Rise of Empire.” It’s lengthy, but worth a visit. Garrett wrote for the old New York Sun, New York Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others. He spent several years as editorial-writer-in-chief for the Saturday Evening Post, where he exposed the fallacies of the premises and practices of the New Deal. Garrett was called “Exemplar of the Old Right,” a species as rare today as is the ivory-billed woodpecker. If you like “Rise of Empire,” you might want to visit another web site and read his Ex America and read a review by Ryan McMaken.
So much of the television and newsprint commentary on the life of Pope John Paul II comes from the world as it exists today. There seems to be little reflection about the world at the time he was elected pope. The Soviet Union loomed large in the world scene, and Communism influenced all European thinking. An atmosphere of pessimism (if not outright fear) about the future abounded. John Paul II faced, embraced, engaged, and celebrated the future by his contact and impact on the people he met. Here are a couple of paragraphs from a column by historian Paul Johnson published in the April 4 issue of the Wall Street Journal.
He sought to limit, almost to the vanishing point, the occasions on which the state, let alone individuals, might legitimately extinguish or frustrate life. He had spent his manhood largely under the tyranny of the two vilest anti-life systems the world had ever seen: Nazism and Communism, together responsible for the unnatural deaths of over 120 million people in Europe and Asia. He had seen at close quarters the appalling consequences which inexorably follow when authority is directed by philosophy contemptuous of life.
The Pope was not content [merely – ed.] to speak out against the political wickedness, and analyze it in his powerful encyclicals. Along with President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he played an active and leading role in the overthrow of Soviet Communism and its despicable empire. The three great leaders did it together, and it could well be argued that the Pope was the most effective of them.
Here is a late-breaking addition. Richard C. Henry, physics professor at Johns Hopkins University, is urging the adoption of a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one that came before – in most cases, that is. The exception is that, instead of leap years, there is a one-week mini-month between June and July every five or six years. This leap week, which Henry calls “Newton Week,” would occur in 2009, 2015, 2020, 2026, and so on. It could be a good week for a worldwide vacation. Here is Henry’s web site that explains his calendar, and also includes a proposal for “common” time around the world. This means that everyone would operate on GMT, and thus, the Universal Date Line would cease to exist. Henry is hustling to get his calendar adopted soon, because New Year’s Day 2006 falls on a Sunday in both the old and proposed calendars, facilitating a seamless transition. What do you think?
There’s only one new item in the menu for March, a couple of spiritual articles inspired by paintings of Briton Riviere, the great British painter of animals. Two paintings of Daniel in the lions’ den accompany the articles.
Happy New Year. I spent a lot of time learning to do a simple task in Javascript. That is, to replace images in the same location on the page. To the left is a picture from somewhere in England. There are four more pictures that tell an unexpected story! You can view the sequence in a new window by clicking this button. 
(NOTE: Some pop-up blockers alert when you click. There is only a new window opening up and a javascript – nothing harmful; so you should tell your pop-up blocker to allow the blocked content through and enjoy.) I found the images on the Neal Boortz web site. He is the libertarian radio talk show host that I enjoyed on WRNG radio in Atlanta in the 1970s. At one point he got fired (he can be a bit controversial), went to law school, worked a while as a lawyer, then got re-hired at WRNG. If I remember correctly he opened his first show after the long absence with something similar to what Jack Paar said coming back to the Tonight Show after a spat with NBC. Today Mr. Boortz is heard on Atlanta’s WSB radio, and his show is syndicated across many cities. His web site gives the cities, radio stations, and times. He updates the web site five days a week with the day’s commentary.
Not much has been added for December. There is a new page written by the French jazz critic André Hodeir on the subject of swing in music. But you will see he takes flight often into other areas that suit his fancy. I like the enthusiasm in his writing. In addition to the menu, you can access the link here. While thinking about things French, you might want to try the French search engine KartOO. They display results in a map instead of merely a list. Often the results contain pages not found by Google (and vice versa, of course).
In the 1920s there was still a hint of federalism here in America. Cities, counties and states were the governmental entities most people looked to for order and justice. Holidays were largely local. On June 4, 1926, was a resolution enacted by the U.S. Congress inviting the people of the United States of America to observe November 11 as a day of thanksgiving and prayer to perpetuate peace between nations. Note that Congress still considered the people to be respected, even sovereign, in matters of conduct. Think how differently our government leaders consider us today.
By the end of the 1930s, how much more dominant the federal government was! The day (November 11) was declared a legal holiday on May 13, 1938, with the designation “Armistice Day.” It was a day set aside to honor veterans of World War I; but in 1954, the 83rd Congress amended the act of 1938 by striking out the word “Armistice” and inserting in lieu thereof the word “Veterans.” With the approval of this legislation (Public Law 380) on June 1, 1954, November 11th became a day to honor American veterans of all wars.
There are many web sites expounding on the history of Veterans Day. The link I got most of this information from is here at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Also interesting is this cemetery column. Wars are not good things; but it is necessary for a few people to become warriors in order for many people to enjoy the fruits of freedom and order. On this Veterans Day, I praise and thank the warriors of the United States of America for fighting in terrible circumstances to bring a glimpse of freedom to the people of Iraq.
The new page for this month is from the radio broadcasts of M. R. DeHaan, M.D. His topic The Chemistry of the Blood was quite popular for several decades (being first broadcast in the 1940s). At first I thought it would be a good idea to edit the several short essays into one consistent whole, with the curious typesetting and repetitions removed. But the page available in the link here and in the menu to the left is much as DeHaan spoke it. Maybe I’ll try the difficult work of being editor later.
Dallas Willard is a philosophy professor at USC (Los Angeles), an author, and a speaker. His award-winning book, The Divine Conspiracy, reminds us of God’s continuing relevance. I have included a chapter from this book on The Beatitudes of Jesus Christ. You may want to visit Dr. Willard’s web site: Dallas Willard
Also included in this posting is an article describing some of the chemical challenges associated with making the atomic bomb back in the days of the Manhattan Project. North Korea still hasn’t figured it out. In the page there is a cute animated gif that you may want to include on one of your pages. The article may be found in the menu to the left.
An article extracted from the memoirs of Davy Crockett surfaced while cleaning and organizing. It is so sad to reflect how our politcal debate has decreased in principle and in intellect when compared to a couple hundred years ago. Anyway, you might want to read Not Yours To Give. UPDATE: How about this? Walter Williams published an article on the same theme in February, 2005. Here is the link.
For the bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a strange fleet of sailboats, the “tall ships,” sailed into New York’s Upper Bay. The images on television and in newsmagazines were memorable – the tall ships silhouetted by a sky filled with fireworks. I wasn't there for the fireworks but I caught a glimpse of a few of the ships as I crept along the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge during Friday rush hour traffic, July 2, 1976. I was there to visit in-laws on Long Island and friends in Connecticut. I had the opportunity to explain to several “yankees” why my ’72 Plymouth Duster had a Reagan bumper sticker next to my Georgia license plate. Remember, in July, 1976, they were trying to make sense of the “Jimmy Who?” phenomenon. The primaries were pretty much over and the Democratic Convention loomed, and they were uneasy about a Deep South governor, especially when they learned this Georgian didn’t support him. Of course, Reagan’s bid to wrest the nomination from Ford didn’t quite succeed, and the next four years would be miserable, but the best was yet to come.
In my summer before entering high school I read A Choice, Not an Echo and A Texan Looks at Lyndon, both paperbacks courtesy of the Stuttgart, Arkansas, Barry Goldwater headquarters. There was no contest; Goldwater was the obvious choice. I’m sure I watched Reagan’s campaign speech on television and I wish I could say I remember it, but I don’t. Still, it’s worth reading forty years later. There is a link below.
Here is an exerpt from the June 8 issue of the Wall Street Journal by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge about Reagan’s conservatism:
Mr. Reagan may not have been an intellectual, but his sort of conservatism, just like the religious upheaval started by Martin Luther (another anti-intellectual populist) 500 years ago, combined renewal with heresy. The established faith that Mr. Reagan’s generation of American conservatives reinterpreted was classical conservatism (the conservatism whose most eloquent prophet remains Edmund Burke), and the heresy they introduced was classical liberalism (the creed of the Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill).
Traditional conservatism was based on six principles:
This was the creed that Burke shaped into a philosophy in the 18th century—and that most famous conservatives, from Prince Metternich to Winston Churchill, understood in their bones. Mr. Reagan’s conservatism exaggerated the first three of Burke's principles and contradicted the last three.
- A suspicion of the power of the state
- A preference for liberty over equality
- Unashamed patriotism
- A belief in established institutions and hierarchies
- A pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism
- Elitism
The exaggerations are the easiest to spot. Ronald Reagan did not merely dislike taxation in the manner of the East Coast Rockefeller Republicans who ran his party in the 1950s; he saw government as the enemy. An early patron of Freedom Forum bookshops in California (where they sold books with titles like “The Naked Communist”), he also took a Western approach to individual freedom, whether it was allowing people to carry guns or tolerating a high level of inequality. As for patriotism, conservatives are a nationalistic bunch, but Mr. Reagan celebrated his country in religious terms—as “the city on the hill” that God had chosen as the special agent of His purpose on earth.
If Reaganism had been merely a more vigorous form of old-style conservatism, then it would have been more predictable. In fact, Mr. Reagan—who began his political life as a New Deal Democrat—took a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism.
The heroes of Burke’s conservatism were paternalist squires, who knew their place in society and made sure everybody else did as well. Mr. Reagan’s heroes were rugged individualists, defined by the fact that they do not know their place. He packed his kitchen cabinet with entrepreneurs who built up businesses out of nothing and he worshipped the cowboy. He kept a bronze saddle in the Oval Office and—rather magnificently—rushed to appoint Malcolm Baldridge as commerce secretary when he discovered that he liked going to rodeos.
Mr. Reagan took an equally heretical attitude to the fifth attribute, pessimism. Churchill famously “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” By contrast, Mr. Reagan was fond of Tom Paine’s adage that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” When Walter Mondale questioned the cost of America’s space program, Mr. Reagan proclaimed that “the American people would rather reach for the stars than reach for excuses why we shouldn’t.”
As for the sixth characteristic, elitism, instead of dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did) Mr. Reagan was a populist who argued that “Bedtime for Bonzo made more sense than what they were doing in Washington.” His was the conservatism not of country clubs and boardrooms, but of talk radio, precinct meetings and tax revolts.
Like all generalizations, ours come with exceptions. Mr. Reagan allied himself with authoritarian Evangelicals; some fairly feudal Southerners; elitist neoconservatives; and William Buckley, who founded The National Review in 1955 with the intention of standing “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” American conservatism, indeed, has many tributaries. Yet the mainstream that gathered around Mr. Reagan still looks distinct—not just from the more tepid Republicanism that preceded it, but also markedly from European conservatives.
The only European who spoke the same language as Ronald Reagan was Margaret Thatcher; and, as time slips by, she seems an ever more heretical figure—an American conservative who happened to be born in Grantham, not Houston. Her heirs in Britain’s Conservative Party seem unsure whether they should cut taxes, even though the state eats up roughly 10% more of the economy than it does in America—and Britain, remember, is the country which is closest to America.
This points to the exceptional strength of the movement that Mr. Reagan helped foster. When he went searching for radical ideas in the 1950s, he turned to European intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek; there was no rive droite of conservative think tanks or foundations. Nowadays, it is no exaggeration to say that one building—1150 17th St. in Washington, D.C., which houses both the American Enterprise Institute and The Weekly Standard, as well as some smaller conservative organizations—contains more conservative standard-bearers than most European countries; and there are similar idea-labs in every state in the union.
The thought-provoking and humbling address-sermon by Henry Drummond on Chapter 13 of I Corinthians is worthy of meditation. The title is The Greatest Thing in the World. It was written late in the nineteenth century apparently to commission a group of foreign missionaries, and its popularity allowed Drummond to preach it many more times around the world.
There are couple of files on the parables of Matthew 13 by Paul Van Gorder from the early 1970s. They can be used as an eight-week Sunday School series. They ought to generate discussion because Van Gorder says the standard commentaries get it all wrong as they explain the meaning of these parables. You can access the files from the menu.
Here are some interesting articles about things common to our modern world:
I used a plain vanilla formatting in these files using the Georgia font (I read somewhere that most people prefer a serif typeface and I read somewhere else that Georgia was developed for web page viewing) and using space between paragraphs. What do you think? Is plain, old Times Roman better than Georgia? Does the default spacing between paragraphs seem too much?
The “Soap” and “Glass” articles were written almost ten years apart. When preparing these web pages I seemed to notice that the lengths of sentences and paragraphs were longer in the earlier “Soap” article. I was trying to learn how to use HTML frames so if you click here you can view them side by side and see whether you agree. In any case, take a look at the last sentence of the “Glass” article. The author was either tired or on deadline, but the editor must have been snoozing.
The Frank Sinatra book was significantly longer than the other articles, so I did away with the spacing between paragraphs and went with the traditional indent. Here I used several style classes for paragraph rendering to match what the book used. Hopefully, the table format isn’t too annoying. I added the third installment in May and inserted a photo in each file. The photo files are small and should download quickly.
Leonard Read was a great modern thinker and leader. His famous essay, I, Pencil, shows how greatness and humility work together to make society work. He was a believer that one does not try to convince others to follow you because of your cleverness or power, but rather that others choose to follow you because of your consistent good example.
This personal web site was created in the spring of 2004, and I've been making changes. I welcome your comments for improvement by E-mail at Byrdland.