Today's Politicos vs The Words and Deeds of The Founders

This is going to be the first in a series of Saturday posts. It has nothing to do with anything historical or political, just for fun. This time Martin recounts a past woodworking adventure.

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If the fourth chapter of Ideas Have Consequences was difficult to come to terms with and harder to explain, the fifth chapter is one of painful clarity. Once again Weaver’s prescience is astounding, especially when one considers that the Internet did not yet exist when Weaver wrote this book in 1948.

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A totem is an emblem or revered symbol. Hitler had the swastika, Stalin the hammer and sickle. American leftists have the Obama logo and the statists’ claim to possess “the truth,” as in “the science is settled.”

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Federalist 39 is pretty interesting. Madison doesn't mince his words, explaining where the proposed Constitution consolidates power - even over individuals - and where it is limited and must share authority with the states. What follows in our attempt to put it in more modern prose - and understand it ourselves.

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The time: Some date in the future when the Democrats once again are the majority party in the House of Representatives. The place: A hearing of HAAC, the House on American Activities Committee. This doesn't seem as farfetched as it should.

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The following is a synopsis of the fourth chapter of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences intermingled with some thoughts from this reader. This is the fifth in a series of posts about this important book.

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The third chapter of Weavers seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences deals with yet another aspect of modern mans systematic abandonment of the classical search for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

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Thumbing through the April 2014 issue of Mechanical Engineering, one finds a heavy predominance of articles pertaining to so-called Green Engineering. Some of these articles cover pretty neat engineering science, regardless of the use to which it is being applied. Some of them are about technology being used to solve non-existent problems.

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Jane Robbins, author of “Uncommonly Bad” (Academic Questions, Spring 2013), reveals that one of the stated goals of the federally funded consortia creating Common Core-aligned tests and of the National Governors Association–which owns the standards– is for colleges and universities to accept a core-based test as sufficient for college entrance, no remediation required.

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Some books are nearly impossible to review. Such works have no wasted words and cannot be effectively summarized in the space available for any review. In fact, sometimes the explication of their contents cannot be done more concisely than the manner in which the author himself chose to arrange his words. Richard Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric is one such book.

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