At The Turn Of The Cycle

FOR THOSE of you worried about the start of solar Cycle 24, good news. A small sunspot recently appeared in the sun’s southern hemisphere. So it looks like the next sunspot cycle has well and truly started.

Meanwhile scientist Don J Easterbrook reports that the northern Pacific Decadal Oscillation has flipped, threatening 30 years of colder weather, and the American Thinker’s Marc Sheppard wonders what happens as the global warming community admits that there are factors other than anthropogenic warming that affect the planet’s climate.

Then there’s the political cycle. In Britain, the Conservative Party has staged a stunning victory in the May 1 local elections, gaining over 250 local councillors and electing Boris Johnson, a conservative journalist and Member of Parliament, as Mayor of London. The voters that fainted in adoration of Tony Blair in 1997 have flipped, and are now saying “push off” to the Labour Party that has failed to improve education and crime prevention.

The first thing that Mayor Boris Johnson is going to do, according to Melissa Kite and Patrick Hennessy, is beef up policing in London’s crime-ridden transit with the “broken windows” policy that’s been so successful in the US. Says Johnson:

"There is a vital necessity to drive out so-called minor crime and disorder as a way of driving out more serious crime."

The lightweight Boris Johnson sounds like a man with a plan, so pundits are reduced to grumbling that Conservative Party leader David Cameron has not yet produced a plan to win the next election for Parliament. This is odd, because recently the Conservative Party has been rolling out proposed reforms almost weekly. Conservatives want to limit welfare just like in the US, to review all 2.5 million cases of occupational disability (amounting to 15 percent of the workforce), and to introduce school choice, Swedish style. Who knows? The voters may eventually break through the BBC’s wall of silence and find out what the Conservatives are proposing.

Back in the United States it looks as though the Reagan/Bush cycle is ending, But Democrats seem to be eager to distract angry voters from an understandable intention to say “push off” to a tired Republican Party and start a new liberal cycle.

At this remarkably favorable moment for Democrats, when Republicans have lost the confidence of the voters with rising food prices, sky-high gas prices, and mortgage meltdowns, they have nothing to offer the voters except same-old same-old. As Senators Obama and Clinton differ strongly on whether to fiddle with the gas tax, they both agree on a retreat in the war on Islamic extremism; they are proposing more one-size-fits-all health care, more subsidies for the real-estate sector, no change on their harmful environmental and energy policies, and they are proposing marginal tax increases on the most productive Americans.

After the 2006 mid-term elections the question was: had Democrats learned something from the Reagan/Bush era? Had they figured out a way to deliver the goods to their tax-feeding client state in a way that had learned something from the efficiencies of the low tax-rate, entrepreneurial economy of the last 30 years? The answer became clear within months, as the Pelosi/Reid Congress demonstrated in dozens of ways just how un-serious the Democrats had become.

Like the Bourbons after the French Revolution, it became obvious that Democrats had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, Their successive efforts to de-fund the troops in Iraq and their full-court press for a program to increase health care subsidies for the children of leisured middle-class liberals showed that Democrats had nothing to offer the American people beyond hyper-partisan politics as usual.

Political cycles are like climate cycles. Everyone is out there analyzing and predicting. Is that cute little Cycle 24 sunspot the beginning of a strong sunspot cycle typical over the last half century or the beginning of a sunspot minimum?

There’s nothing you can do about sunspot cycles except make predictions. But political cycles are different. When the political cycle flips in your favor you get a chance to make a real difference. You need good leaders and good ideas that will make a difference in peoples’ lives.

In Britain, David Cameron’s Conservatives seem well positioned at the end of the New Labour cycle to deliver real change to voters fed up with eleven years of New Labour spin and “eye-catching initiatives.”

In the United States, the Democrats are not so well led, and they have not done the serious thinking that’s needed to change the political odds in their favor.

Perhaps John McCain’s campaign can exploit this opportunity, cheat the gods of the political cycle, and lead Republicans to victory in the months ahead.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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