Charlotte Allen’s blog from the Templeton Foundation zeroes in on the upper-class “simplicity” movement.

Bottom line: The “simplicity” thought leaders want the rest of us to be poorer and have fewer choices so that they can feel good about themselves.

Reminds me of what one of Gandhi’s associates said. Three merchant princes subsidized Gandhi’s much-publicized “simple” lifestyle, and someone remarked, “It costs a great deal of money to keep Ganhiji living in poverty.”

Britain tests satellite traffic-cams…

This headline from an L.A. Times piece gave me pause: “Can we be too healthy and live too long?”

I wouldn’t quite accuse Mr. Rodriguez of preparing us to accept death panels and medical care rationing. I’m sure he’s just trying to be provacative without really thinking about what he’s writing. But his citing of the Japanese experience bears comment.

Japan is one picture of what a society looks like that radically embraces birth control. The Japanese population is not reproducing itself and may shrink by 50 million within a few decades. It has so many lonely, depressed older people NOT simply because of its excellent diet and health care, but because those older people have fewer children and grandkids to interact with. For some time now, Japanese toy companies have been selling “grandchildren dolls” to lonely elders.

But there’s a larger issue of spiritual crisis here. Japan is an almost completely materialist society that sees and presents no higher good than a materially comfortable life. Rodriguez’ closing question is disingenuous or ignorant: “But if Japan, where ancestors are revered, is plagued with unhappy seniors, what does it bode for us?”

Do the Japanese really “revere” their ancestors as they once did? Apparently not, if you read the stories about abandoned and neglected elders in Japanese society. Once you embrace selfishness toward the next generation (i.e., abortion and birth control), it’s hard not to adopt it towards preceding generations as well.

I usually disagree with Paul Krugman, but by all means let the SEC go after Goldman and other dishonest brokerages. Conservatives and Republicans generally need to be much more vocal about the financial abuses and ways to stop them in the future. What Goldman and other firms did had nothing to do with free markets. They were engaging in con games that depended on asymmetric information, which inhibits free markets.

But note one point in this Krugman editorial, as he speculates about what measures during the Bush years might have stopped the fraud:

“For one thing, an independent consumer protection bureau could have helped limit predatory lending. Another provision in the proposed Senate bill, requiring that lenders retain 5 percent of the value of loans they make, would have limited the practice of making bad loans and quickly selling them off to unwary investors.”

As I recall, when banks refrained from what Krugman now calls “predatory lending,” they were accused of “redlining” and discrimination against minorities, and were bullied by congressional committees.

It’s hard to sort out victims when everyone was on board for the bubble.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the editorial in the NYT supporting Hastings College’s anti-religious bigotry. But it’s worth noting the unembarrased, seemingly unaware way it abandons classically liberal principles for the goal of suppressing Christianity.

According to this illiberal view, every student group must embrace and admit every viewpoint. By this same logic, a strict Christian who believe in heterosexual monogamy and restricting marriage to a man and a women should also be allowed to join a homosexual club. (Think that will ever happen, or that Hastings–or the NYT–would support the Christian student if it did?)

“To qualify for official recognition, and receive money from a publicly financed university, groups at Hastings are required to adhere to the school’s nondiscrimination policy, which says that official student groups cannot refuse membership on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or other prohibited factors.”

More important, this tyrannical campus view turns “diversity” into an undifferentiated mush. If every club and society and club accommodates every viewpoint, they all become the same.  There’s no “diversity” at all, merely gray  conformity.

For “diversity” to be meaningful, it must exist at the level of the organization, as it does in the larger society from which nanny-campuses like Hastings are trying so strenuously to shield their tender charges. In other words, the important thing is not that each club should accommodate every viewpoint, as that every viewpoint should be represented in a club.The student is well served if she or he has a choice to join a homosexual club, a socialist club, the Young Republications or a strict Christian club. Students should be the best judge of who they want or don’t want to associate with.

The editorial’s claim that students are free to form unofficial student groups is disingenuous. Indeed, it makes the point that groups that receive funding are being given an official imprimatur–in other words, the college administration is NOT “viewpoint neutral.”