November 30, 2005
Random Thoughts
By Thomas
Sowell
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Bumper sticker
in Berkeley: "Animals are little people in fur coats."
My tastes
must be behind the times. When I see women in "before"
and "after" advertisements, I often think they looked
better before.
What enables
ex-President Jimmy Carter to be taken seriously is that millions
of people are too young to remember what a disaster the Carter
administration was. He lost his bid for re-election in a landslide
for a reason.
Who would
have dreamed that "Merry Christmas" would become a controversial
phrase? But increasingly schools and other institutions avoid
it like the plague, in order to be politically correct.
Is there
something about being rich that makes some people go off the deep
end? The limousine liberals among the Democrats and the country
club Republicans are the most unrealistic people in each party.
Cartoons
in "The New Yorker" magazine used to make me burst out
laughing but those in recent years don't even produce a smile.
Could it be that political correctness makes it impossible to
see and portray the humor in the many absurdities all around us?
Nightmare
for the 2008 Presidential election: Hillary Clinton versus John
McCain. I wouldn't know whether to vote Libertarian or move to
Australia.
It apparently
does not occur to some engineers who design products that most
of the people who will be using those products are not engineers.
We are so
much more rational about sports than we are about politics. No
one considers it "unfair" that Tiger Woods does so much
better than the average golfer, or resents him for it, or accuses
him of "gouging" when he collects big bucks.
One of the
many affectations of the political left and the intelligentsia
is to disdain crass material things. But it is the increased production
of crass material things which has released hundreds of millions
of human beings from the curse of grinding poverty and endless
toil, and given them longer lives.
British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave the best definition of "consensus":
Lack of leadership.
A liberal
can be found standing over a dead body with a smoking gun in his
hand and the media will remind us that everyone is innocent until
proven guilty. But the same media have for months been hyping
insinuations that Karl Rove is guilty of something he has not
even been charged with.
It is usually
futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying
a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.
Since neither
the creationists nor the evolutionists were there when the world
began, why are our schools teaching either set of beliefs, when
there are so many hard facts that the schools are failing to teach?
A recent
e-mail from a man who says that my writings have changed his mind
notes that this has not been all to the good. He says he was perfectly
happy as a liberal but now he is frustrated when he hears the
kind of nonsense that he used to accept without having to think
about it.
Someone
once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our
own ignorance. Our schools are depriving millions of students
of that kind of knowledge by promoting "self-esteem"
and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they
are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed.
I have long
suspected that there is a part of the male brain -- perhaps most
of it -- which automatically shuts off at the sight of a good-looking
woman.
Popularity
can change very quickly in politics. During the boom times at
the end of the 1920s, when Herbert Hoover was President, there
were several times as many baby boys named Herbert as there were
named Franklin. But just a few years later, after the stock market
crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, there were several
times as many boys named Franklin as were named Herbert.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
