P&R Miscellany

Two Revolutions, Part 3 of 3

2012-02-01T09:42:00.002-06:00

Although many subsequent revolutions have invoked "the Spirit of '76", they have more likely been infused with the spirit of '92. Marx was full of the ideas of the French, not the Anglo-American revolutions. His goal was the same radical egalitarianism of the Paris mob, rather than the preservation of hard-won liberties. National Socialism in Germany, the Bolsheviks of 1917 Russia, Lenin, Mussolini, and far too many of the governments that replaced the colonial powers in the aftermath of World War II have taken their cue from France of 1792 rather than the North American colonies of 1776.

And it is the French, not the American Revolution that is the driving ideological force of the Progressive movement in the United States. Obama is the pinnacle of that movement to date and in him you see its tendency towards absolutism, a radical egalitarianism imposed from above, opposition to mediating institutions - especially the Christian church (and within that, especially towards the Catholic Church) - a willingness to incite the mob (think union violence against AIG executives, Tea Party, etc.; the Occupy crowds; and so on). The checks on governmental authority the founders viewed as essential to liberty, understood as the preservation of rights to property, self-defense (bearing arms), and representation are seen, correctly, as impediments to this egalitarian vision in which everybody has the same and is the same.

So it's no surprise that Obama ignores Congressional prerogatives to make "recess" appointments when Congress isn't in recess - or that leftists in Congress don't find it all that objectionable when he does (though they'd scream bloody murder if a Republican had done it). Nor is it a surprise that he has, through his health vice-dictator, imposed severe restrictions on the Catholic Church without regard to the First Amendment.

But have a care if he succeeds. Almost all of those -isms we supposedly fear - fascism, Nazism, communism, and the like - they have their origins in the French Revolution. They are fruit of the same tree. Like the Terror of the 1790s in Paris, the death of liberty in Italy under Mussolini, the concentration camps of Germany, and the gulags of communist regimes everywhere, death and suffering are the bitter taste of that fruit. If you don't think it can come here, think again.

Do I think this is what Obama wants? No. But Lenin also only had the best interests of the Russian people at heart, as did Hitler for the Germans and Mussolini for the Italians. One needs to break eggs to make omelets, right? They will create their perfect society no matter how many people must die in the making of it. Even if Obama were to hold back, he would be followed by those with no such scruples. We do not need a second American Revolution, this one more along the lines of the French.

Two Revolutions, Part 2 of 3

2012-02-01T09:24:00.001-06:00

The revolution in France in 1792 was a very different affair. But then, France's history was very different. During almost this entire love-hate relationship England was having with Stuart monarchs in which we saw Charles I (beheaded), the Protectorate, Charles II, James II (exiled), William and Mary, and then Anne, Louis XIV was king of France (1643-1715). Over the course of his 72 years as king, Louis pulled more and more power into the monarchy. He laid claim to Spain, Austria, vast swaths of what is now Italy, Portugal, the Low Countries, and significant parts of what is now Germany - and was opposed in these wars by various alliances and confederations (most of which were concocted by William of Orange).

Wars are expensive, and Louis squeezed as much as he could out of the territories and people he ruled. Then, like all mortals, he died. His great-grandson inherited the throne at the age of 5. While much admired, he was not a strong king. He cared little for politics and much for the privileges of his rank - his court was known for its debauchery and his fiscal policies were devastating. What saved him was the strength of the regents during his minority and the respect for his great-grandfather that they preserved in the people of France. He died in 1774, succeeded by Louis XVI.

Louis XVI was the king determined to reclaim the glory of his great-great-grandfather in opposition to the English. So he supported the American Revolution and other actions against England shortly after taking the throne. By 1792, however, these activities had almost bankrupted France.

Louis XIV, back in the 1600s, had revoked the Edict of Nantes which had allowed for religious toleration in France, thus driving out almost all Protestants and winning the favor and support of the Catholic Church in France. This support and close cooperation between the monarchy and the Catholic Church continued through Louis XVI. Thus church and state both came to be seen as primarily political forces and neither allowed much for dissent. An absolutist state and an absolutist church that were bankrupting the nation - no history of individual liberties, freedom, strong legislative assemblies, or anything like that.

The French Revolution was therefore far more radical. It attempted to impose - remember that nearly 2 century long history of absolutist monarchy - from above a drastic egalitarianism on a people who had never known freedom as the English understood it. It also required not only the overthrow of the state's power, but of the church's power, too. It sought, therefore, to redirect religious devotion to the nation, initially understood as the people of France, but very soon understood simply as the state - the government. The result was chaos, then the Terror of the guillotine and finally, Napoleon - an absolute dictator.

Although they spoke of liberty, brotherhood, and equality, the end result was tyranny and death, the inevitable results of unchecked power.

Two Revolutions, Part 1 of 3

2012-02-01T08:31:00.000-06:00

In the late 18th century, there were two dramatic revolutions - one in America, the other in France. The American Revolution, especially in the eyes of those leading it, was essentially a whiggish, conservative revolution. They were Englishmen, trying to preserve what had been secured over the tumultuous century preceding.

In 1642, conflict between king and parliament broke into open war - the English Civil War - in which the king was executed (Charles I, d. 1649) and his heir exiled. Oliver Cromwell essentially ruled the "protectorate" until 1659 at which time Charles II was brought back (the "Restoration"). He was followed in due course by James II. James was Catholic and wanted some measure of religious toleration for Catholics and Protestants who were not Church of England (aka "Dissenters").

Again, tensions mounted between king and parliament, partly religious, partly a matter of power and taxation related to maintaining standing armies, and certain other matters. This time, however, people remembered what it was like to have an unchecked parliament - Cromwell's Protectorate. Bear in mind, too, that Louis XIV was ascendant in France with visions of ruling all of continental Europe. While a strong executive would be needed to hold him at bay, the fact that James II was in many ways dependent on French money added to the suspicions.

Enter William of Orange, the Stadtholder of the Netherlands. He was married to James' daughter, Mary (at this point, James II had no sons) so he had a nominal claim to the throne. He was Protestant and willing to accept some limitations to his power, at least on paper. England needed him. He needed England, too, or rather, he needed English money, ships, and soldiers as William was devoted to containing Louis XIV. So in 1688 he was invited to come to England and landed with a force of some 16,000 men to march on London. James' support evaporated and he decided discretion was the better part of valor. He fled to France.

William and Mary had no heirs, but they were willing to see the throne pass to Mary's sister Anne and, through her to her son, the Duke of Gloucester. Unfortunately, Anne's son died before he could be king. Rather than accept the prospect of another Stuart (James II had a son just before William and Mary seized the throne), Parliament invited the Hanoverians to assume the throne based on some thin line of descent from somebody or other. The descent didn't matter so much as that they were Protestant. There were severe restrictions on the monarchy attached to that invitation in 1714, too. These included regular meeting of parliament, the right of (certain) citizens to bear arms, the need for parliament to raise taxes, and so on.

In rebelling against George III some sixty years later, the American colonists saw themselves as preserving their rights as Englishmen - rights that stemmed from these conflicts of the preceding century. The government they established was intended also to allow for a strong executive when needed, and a strong legislature when needed, but to prevent either from gaining sole authority and thus overwhelming the liberty of the people. They wanted repeats of neither Stuart monarchs nor Cromwell's parliament. They saw the need for government, but they also saw the dangers to life and liberty if it got too powerful.

Credentials Don't Mean Much

2012-01-31T08:34:00.001-06:00

I came across this lede to an interview/book review:

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey. He contributes regularly to Scientific American and other publications in the field, and has written several books about science, society and religion. In his new book, “The End of War” ‏(McSweeney’s; 222 pages, $24‏), he applies the scientific approach to a topic that has occupied him personally since childhood: Why do people fight wars?

Horgan, 58, examines all the standard theories offered over the years to explain why people go to war: a biological tendency to organized fighting among males, if not humans in general, or even primates; competition for scarce resources; the influence of religion or of dominating political figures; the thrill of killing.

So. He's a smart guy - director of this center at that institute contributing regularly to Scientific American. But he has this touching faith that scientific inquiry can come up with a solution to the problem of human sinfulness and evil. Whoops! Maybe not. Because if you look at the "standard theories offered over the years to explain why people go to war" you will notice that the actual reason wars come didn't even make the list.

Kind of hard to solve a problem when you exclude the problem's source from your investigation. But then, count me among those who, as Horgan says, consider this a "bunch of naive, hippie hogwash."

Not all that is called "science" is in fact science, and there are some very dumb smart people out there.

Another Flawed Argument for the Belhar

2012-01-30T09:47:00.001-06:00

Over at the CRC magazine, the Banner, we have an article advocating the Belhar again. This time it was paired with an article the previous month in opposition to it, so the editor is trying to keep things balanced.

The gist of Rev. Van Boom's argument is that:

(1) the purpose of a confession is to preserve a story ("Our confessions speak to us with passion and power because they were birthed in times of struggle and difficulty. Their stories continue to shape the church today—as long as we tell them and remember.");

(2) The story of apartheid, the misuse of scripture to support and extend it and the resulting suffering of Black Christians in South Africa is a story we need to remember ("Today our Reformed brothers and sisters in South Africa have a terrible story of apartheid to share with us. The church misused its power and privilege and now extends to us an urgent invitation: 'Take our hand in this pledge. We cannot make these mistakes again. Take our story with you, and tell it to your children.'");

And therefore (3) we need to adopt the Belhar Confession or we'll forget this story. ("Do we need to remember this story? No one would deny that we need to remember and to learn its lessons. But do we make it a confession? I offer a firm yes! All stories fade with time unless they are retold. Their lessons fade as well. Making the Belhar one of our confessions will ensure that our memory of this story will not grow dim. It will encode the lessons we learn from it in the DNA of our church. And as we take ownership, this confession will give us fuel with which to battle the growing darkness of our age.")

His first premise is false. Confessions are not to preserve a story, but to express settled doctrine - to establish where the line is between one group and another in terms of belief and teaching, and to protect the unity of the group espousing the confession. There are stories behind these confessions, and it may be helpful at times to know something of that story in order to fully understand and appropriately apply them, but for the most part they stand on their own independent of that back story. Most people do not know the story of the conflict between Gomarus and Arminius that formed the impetus for a larger theological conflict in the Netherlands of the late 16th and early 17th century, a conflict settled at the Synod of Dordt in 1619-1620. And they do not need to know it to understand the Canons of Dordt, either. Similarly, I'd wager that fewer than half of those who have studied the Heidelberg Catechism know anything more of its story than that it was written in Heidelberg at some point during the Reformation. This ignorance of the Catechism's history is no barrier to its present comprehension.

Notwithstanding, then, that his second premise is true - the abuse of scripture and doctrine to perpetuate abuse is a terrible thing, and this was done in South Africa under the apartheid regime - the conclusion is false, for it requires that both premises be true.

We might also ask, given that scripture and doctrine were also used in the U.S. with regards to slavery, conquest of the American Indians, numerous legal regimes intended to block out certain immigrant groups (although in the late 19th century and early 20th, eugenics premised on Darwinism and improving the species came to the fore), and in fact throughout the history of the church doctrines have been advanced to preserve injustices from the time of Constantine to now - we might also ask, how many other "story" confessions we would need to adopt if we accept Rev. Van Boom's reasoning? Dozens, at least, perhaps hundreds. I think that would be a bit excessive.

UPDATE: Added link

Reflecting on Paul Berman Reflecting on Vaclav Havel

2012-01-30T09:26:00.000-06:00

An interesting article by Paul Berman on Vaclav Havel, the late president of the Czech Republic. There's a lot in there, and I encourage you to read the whole of it, but this is the portion that grabbed my attention:

Havel was frightened by atheism. In his eyes, communism was atheism’s apotheosis. Communism led everyone to focus on material circumstances and to dream of improving the circumstances, and to dream of nothing else. For why should anyone dream of anything more than material improvements? More does not exist. Such was atheism’s message. To pine for a new automobile made sense, but there was no point in contemplating the state of your soul.

Havel was right to be frightened. We would do well to be frightened ourselves. In all the talk of the economy - which is valid, the economy right now stinks - we miss the greater threat, which is the threat to our liberty this focus on material prosperity entails and thus the threat to our being as individuals before a sovereign God. Berman gets at this a little when he also writes:

Nor was this a problem merely for the unfortunate populations who might live under a communist dictatorship. The Western-style democracies boasted of rule of law, human rights, democratic elections, market economies, and so on. Havel reminded everyone that these institutions, for all their charms, are “technical instruments,” useful only for achieving other purposes; and it was still necessary to acknowledge and refine and choose among the other purposes. In his estimation, an acknowledgment of other purposes required a notion of the transcendent.

Yet Havel and, in this article about Havel, Berman are reluctant to specify who or what that "transcendent" might be. It is sufficient for them to acknowledge that there is such a thing, that vague "spiritual values" and references to the "human spirit" are enough to meet the need Havel so poignantly identified. They are not. You cannot worship and serve "that great transcendent something sort of out there where ever it might be that's bigger than us". No, God must have an identity. If you cannot talk to your God, cannot hear from him, cannot relate to him, then you don't really have a God. You have a force or a power, like inertia or gravity, that you can seek to manipulate to your own ends, and your "spirituality" becomes indistinguishable from the materialism of so much of both Marxist and non-Marxist thought.

We, here in the West, are fortunate that the "technical instruments" we have are more conducive to declare the truth of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light, but we must also have a care that we use these instruments to serve - and call others to serve - the God who alone is the source of all being.

Crony Capitalism, a Brief Bit on Taxes, & a Better Way

2012-01-27T09:47:00.000-06:00

Jim Geraghty notes that quite a few of the president's favorite "green jobs" companies aren't doing too well.

He touted Solyndra - bankrupt. A company called Amonex - laying off 2/3 of its work force at a plant in Nevada. EnerDel - bankrupt. SunPower - struggling, likely going belly-up. BrightSource - has had negative cash flow since its inception, would not be around at all were it not for government bail-out money, and likely won't be around much longer even with that money. (You can follow his links for the supporting articles.)

There are other instances where Obama has funneled money to those politically connected in order to support questionable businesses. Check out The Myth of the Robber Barons and you'll find that from the beginning of these kinds of federal subsidies to businesses that have political connections, they have fostered inefficiency, gouging of customers, poor quality, and lousy business practices that do not compete well. Government subsidy of business is almost always money wasted. It is no different now. And it won't be any different when there's a Republican trying to subsidize Republican-connected businesses.

It's time to stop all government subsidies of any business - and that includes agribusiness. Cut the garbage out of the tax code, set a low, flat rate that taxes income only once.

What do you mean only once? Well, you know that hulabaloo over Romney paying only about 15% in taxes? That's on investment income. That money was already taxed at the corporate level at 35%. Say you own stock in Company A. That company makes a profit and pays 35% in taxes (soak the evil corporations, right?). They then distribute what's left of that profit to their shareholders as dividends - and they get to pay 15% of that in taxes. So Company A made $2,000,000 in profit. Uncle Sam takes $700,000 and the remaining $1,300,000 is distributed to shareholders who then pay another $195,000. So of the total $2,000,000 profit, Uncle Sam takes $895,000 - 44.75%. If you are unfortunate enough to make that profit in states like New York or California or Illinois, even more of it is confiscated by the state governments (who also tax both the corporation and the individual shareholder).

These governments then give that money back to the companies that donate money to their campaigns, hire their friends or family members, or use them as lobbyists once they're out of office. Obama is not the only president to do this - he's just more brazen. And the only reason he's more brazen is because he's confident the media will never call him on it. He's a Democrat. But if you think Republicans (Gingrich, when he was speaker was quite adept at this) don't do it, you're nuts. So we need to stop it all together - earmarks, subsidies, tax credits, guaranteed loans, and all the rest of these money-laundering tools need to go.

Beginning of the End?

2012-01-27T09:19:00.000-06:00

Over at National Review Online, there's an article by Michael Auslin on Michigan's Emergency Manager law.

According to the law, when the elected representatives of a school district or city government entity bankrupt their city or school, the state appoints an "Emergency Manager". Once that happens, the Emergency Manager has fairly broad powers and (according to this article), can:

An emergency manager can:

Hire/fire local government employees
Renegotiate, terminate, modify labor contracts with state treasury approval
Sell, lease, or privatize local assets with state treasury approval
Revise contract obligations
Change local budgets without local legislative approval
Initiate municipal bankruptcy proceedings
Hire support staff

He can't raise taxes, but he can do pretty much anything else without regard to the local taxpayers or citizens. The only check is that his actions must be approved by officials at the state's treasury department - the same folks that appoint the Emergency Manager. According to the same article, Emergency Managers of cities are appointed for as long as the state thinks they're needed but Emergency Managers of school districts have to be re-appointed every year.

This is not a good precedent, not at all. Auslin's warnings are well founded. It is, I think, the intention of Obama and the Alinskyites he surrounds himself with (Bill Ayers?) to intentionally make things sufficiently bad that we will be willing to accept these kinds of "Emergency Managers". California, for instance, is going bankrupt. There will be tremendous pressure to bail them out when it happens. Congress and the President will want control if they're going to provide that bailout, the same way they took over GM and Chrysler, AIG, and other financial institutions a couple years ago. Sure, it'll just be for an "emergency", but if the history of such "emergency" dictators is any indication, they seem to find a way to make the emergency last forever.

This is precisely how Germany lost its freedom and ended up with National Socialism in 1933. This is how Russia ended up with Lenin in 1917. Remember Pinochet in Chile? Same thing. Chavez in Venezuela? Yup, same thing. Better to weather these storms on our own than to surrender our liberty, or as Ben Franklin reputedly said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Loving Them to Hell

2012-01-25T18:26:00.004-06:00

So the Christian Reformed train continues down this track towards dissolution...

We've had about an article every other month in our denominational magazine pushing for a redefinition of sin so that it no longer includes homosexual sex. The basic argument seems to be that, because God is gracious, forgiving, forbearing, and merciful, whatever I do must be OK with him - so I guess that means I don't need his grace, forgiveness, forbearance, or mercy. God loves me and wants me to be happy, so I can poke whatever hole makes me happy. And if you disagree, you hate gay people and are a judgmental hypocrite who will never receive God's grace, forgiveness, forbearance, or mercy. Meanie! If you truly loved me, you'd never tell me I'm wrong.

And now we have an article in that same 'zine telling us that, while it's OK to be reticent about your kid (or parent or sibling) living with someone in a sexual relationship outside of marriage, you shouldn't really express that disapproval in any meaningful way because, well, they won't like you and might go away from the church. This is how it starts. Let's not make any demands on them because they might leave. From here, we will shortly - 5-10 years, if that - proceed to full acceptance of cohabitation apart from marriage, and then it will proceed to whatever 2 or more consenting adults wish to do will be fine with us. But we really don't think the goat can give informed consent, so you'll have to leave him alone.

Enough. Let them leave for a "church" that reasons away all need for grace, defines sin solely as daring to define sin (which, by the way, is unforgivable in their sorry creed), and builds up their self-esteem all the way along the road to perdition. If the only way to survive as a church is to exchange the Bible for Oprah, then let's just give it up all together. I for one am tired of being told that I have to modify the Gospel and its presentation in order to accommodate the sickness of our present cultural malaise.

The Gospel came to a world in which it was considered foolishness to Gentiles and a stumbling block to Jews. Not one of the apostles felt called to alter the Gospel to accommodate the culture of either Jew or Gentile, whether it be Greek, Roman, Scythian, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Frankish, or any of the others. Instead, by steadily and patiently presenting the Gospel, they transformed those cultures. Or as Paul says, do not conform to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

But that's too much to ask, I guess.

Income Gap Stupidity

2012-01-25T13:35:00.000-06:00

One thing the President apparently said in his speech - and it's a huge bugaboo among lefties - is that the "income gap" is terrible. At least, if news reports are to be believed, he said something to this effect. Sad.

1. Concern about the "income gap" is nothing but pure jealousy. That somebody else makes more than I do is not an indication of any unfairness, injustice, or anything else. If it bothers me that somebody makes more, it is because I am envious, not because I am ill-used.

2. It is irrelevant. If you're really poor - that is, unable to provide the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter - then what you need is food, clothing, and shelter. You do not need the CEO of Wells Fargo to make less money. In fact, the more money people like that make, the more likely somebody will come around to help you get food, clothing, and shelter. If you are not poor, then you have what you need and you will not get a penny more if the Wells Fargo CEO makes less. Rest assured, too, that Obama has no intention of making you rich, only of making a few others poorer.

3. It indicates a lack of faith. The reason Warren Buffett has been entrusted by God with more money than I have is not because he's a better man or smarter or anything like that. It's because Mr. Buffett is better at managing it than I am - he handles that responsibility better than most, as the string of broke lottery winners amply attests. He has his gifts, I have mine, and both of us will answer to God for how we use them and to be perfectly honest, I don't want to have to answer to God for millions of dollars (don't let that discourage you from giving them to me, however, if you feel you must ).

4. It is unjust. The President of the United States, or any government organization, has no business in a free country deciding that somebody makes "too much" (or "not enough", for that matter). The scofflaws who cannot be bothered to work, instead thinking somebody else should pay for their leisurely stroll through a college campus, have no right to the money earned by somebody who has worked. Taking money from those who work to give to those who do not only encourages more people to not work, which is a bass-ackwards way to run a country.

Jealousy, class-envy, faithlessness, injustice, misdirection - all hallmarks of Marxist-Leninism and the Obama presidency.

President's State of the Union Li- er, Address

2012-01-25T08:40:00.000-06:00

I thought about reading the President's State of the Union Address this morning, but I'm afraid I can't bring myself to bother. It's not going to be anything new. He'll acknowledge that there are problems, then blame everybody else. He'll then say he's going to solve everything, except evil Republicans who are just protecting fat-cat millionaires will try to stop him. In through there will be the occasional sob story, likely dishonest or at least dishonestly presented. Well, I'm fairly certain the whole speech was dishonest.

Who was it that arranged $500 million in guaranteed loan for his fat-cat crony as Solyndra went bankrupt? Who is it that spends millions of taxpayer dollars to fly his wife out to Hawaii just a few hours before he heads there himself on Air Force One? Who just killed the XL pipeline, even as he talks of being "focused like a laser" on jobs and energy independence? Who is it that increased the total national debt by more than 50% in just 3 years from $10,000 billions to over $15,000 billions? Who is it that has blocked every attempt by the House of Representatives to get our debt under control?

Yeah, the same guy who gets up there every year to harangue us for over an hour, blaming us for what he has done.

So I chose not to watch, and not to read his State of the Union Address. If you happened to watch or read it and find that I'm wrong in thinking this was the gist of his speech, let me know. I'll go back and wade through the darn thing, but for now I have better things to do, like picking lint out of my navel or trimming my cuticles or something.

Not About Articulating Policies, but Articulating a Worldview

2012-01-24T11:18:00.000-06:00

Mitt Romney is struggling against Newt, obviously. Why? Newt is articulate - he can articulate pretty much anything and over the course of his years in the limelight, he pretty much has. Newt also knows what conservatives want to hear - big ideas, sweeping reform, stop punishing people who work and stop rewarding people who don't, media bias attacks, and all the rest. He's throwing red meat to red-staters and they like it.

But Newt cuts corners, intellectually, morally, and politically. That's why he got bounced out of the speakership and then out of Congress. That's why he can ask for an "open marriage" (assuming he did), or at least pretend he has one even if he didn't ask. That's why he can take several thousand dollars from Freddie Mac for its lobbying operation and not think of himself as a lobbyist. His ideas on Social Security take a beating here, for instance - again, cutting corners, rushing to the end without thinking things through. His impatience will tell in the White House, too, if he ever gets there.

Romney, in attacking Newt on the ethics and morals line, is missing the point. Folks already know that about Newt. What they want is what they wanted from Perry and Bachmann and Cain - forceful, unapologetic, cogent presentation not just of conservative policies, but of a conservative worldview. Newt gave that to us in spades when he jumped on Juan Williams' attempt to accuse him of racism. Romney never has - because he not only doesn't share it, he doesn't know how to provide it. So when Romney is attacked from the left (by Newt, among others) for his work at Bain, Romney has a hard time responding because to him it's a reasonable criticism. However conservative Romney's policy positions may be, he has essentially accepted the basic worldview of the left. So did John McCain, and Bob Dole, and so did both George H. W. and George W. Bush.

Newt also accepts that worldview. If he didn't, he'd never have even thought about taking the money from Freddie Mac or sitting on that couch with Nancy Pelosi. But Newt knows how to articulate the conservative one. Romney, appearing inauthentic, is in fact being true to himself. Newt, appearing authentic, is not.

Not Standards, Just Measuring Tools Needed

2012-01-24T09:07:00.000-06:00

Here's a headline that makes me start to like Gov. Daugaard's education plan and I haven't even read it yet: "Sioux Falls School District Critical of South Dakota Education Plan".

To be fair, the criticism levied at the Governor's plan that says it's a "one-size-fits-all" concept has merit. A state-wide plan inevitably is going to be that. But then, if you're going to tax people in Mitchell to subsidize schools in Huron (or vice versa), it's hard to object to people in the one community wanting some control over how their money is spent in the other.

Better still would be to have a state-wide measuring stick, but complete local control and funding. Note that I say "measuring stick". Neither the state nor the federal government should say a school has to achieve a certain result, regardless of what that result might be. What they can and should do is establish tools that measure the performance of a school relative to other schools and then publish that information. These tools could include the politically correct variables as well as the more substantive academic ones - do your 9th graders have to do "community service"? How much? How well are they doing in reading? Integration? Foreign language instruction? Mathematics? Playstation literacy? Football? Music? Have a full palette of measurements. Then let parents see whether a given school measures up to their standards and decide where they wish to send their children - and the money attendant to them.

Giving Sioux Falls School District - or any other school district - control over other people's money is not the answer any more than is retaining control at the state or federal level. "Local control" must mean "parental control" or it's just cover for one set of politicians against another set.

Another Call to Pastoral Activism - I'll Pass

2012-01-24T08:20:00.002-06:00

My denomination regularly sends me e-mails asking me to barrage my congressional representatives with requests that they support left-wing causes, continue to spend money we don't have, and to use my influence as a pastor to mobilize people to be good liberals. All in the name of Jesus, of course. Jesus would want us to borrow 40 cents of every dollar spent so we can subsidize aid to China, "art" that makes your skin crawl, cowboy poetry contests, subsidies to multi-millionaire farmers and businessmen, bridges to nowhere in particular, and pensions so people can retire at 55.

But then again, I also get requests such as this from Family Research Council - "Watchmen on the Wall: Championing Pastors to Transform America". And how are we to do this? We are to attend a Washington Pastors' Briefing - Washington, D.C., you see, is where everything important is happening. We'll get messages from lobbyists, a senator, a congressman, a retired general, and a bunch of "pastors" who work for the Family Research Council. We're also supposed to send a letter to our representatives asking for 20 minutes of their time while we're in D.C. Armed with the information we receive, we will "pray for revival, preach on the urgency of critical moral issues, and partner with fellow pastors who, together, will make a positive impact on their communities and our nation."

I appreciate that the FRC at least recognizes that as pastors we pray, preach, and teach, but the intent is to turn us all into political activists - to focus our prayers and preaching on political matters and what is happening on Capitol Hill. Contrast that with with what Charles Murray writes in a recent article from the Wall Street Journal.

The only thing that can make a difference is the recognition among Americans of all classes that a problem of cultural inequality exists and that something has to be done about it. That "something" has nothing to do with new government programs or regulations. Public policy has certainly affected the culture, unfortunately, but unintended consequences have been as grimly inevitable for conservative social engineering as for liberal social engineering.

The "something" that I have in mind has to be defined in terms of individual American families acting in their own interests and the interests of their children...There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold...Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms.

The problem is not rooted in public policy, but in the human heart. Left or right, the idolization of government and public policy has led us into this morass. To head out of it, we must return government to its proper, more human and humane limits, and put our faith in God. This must be done one heart at a time, one family at a time. No lobbying trip to D.C. will put a dent in it.

Dangerous to Be Christian

2012-01-20T13:08:00.002-06:00

The blog site, Cranmer, has a list of the 50 countries where it's most dangerous to be Christian. We note, with them, that 38 of those 50 are muslim-dominant countries. The remaining twelve are mostly communist/socialist dictatorships. Of the top ten, only North Korea is not predominantly muslim.

Islam is, of course, a religion of peace, or so we are told by our supposed betters. In a way, they're right. Where ever muslims reign, muslims are at peace and those who are not rest in peace.

And communist countries - like Cuba, for instance - are utopias where everyone gets free health care, and it's worth every penny, too.

Muggeridge Sums It Up

2012-01-20T11:14:00.000-06:00

If you want to know why I'm conservative in both my politics and my theology, you will find Malcolm Muggeridge's piece on the liberal death wish fairly expressive of my thinking.

Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals.

There's more - much more - and even if you don't want to know why I'm conservative, it's worth reading.

Thomas Sowell Tries Again

2012-01-20T08:42:00.000-06:00

This article is essentially the thesis of Thomas Sowell's three volumes on culture - Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture, and Conquest and Cultures. I've only read the last (see here), but it's enough to know the general thrust of his argument.

Sowell argues, and has long argued, that the reasons for the disparities between individuals and groups is incredibly complex. Geography, genetics, history, conflict, and all the other things that are involved in bringing people together, keeping them apart, as well as the methods for getting together or staying apart, all play a part. People here want product X that's only grown over there. How do they get it? Conquest? Trade? Migration? These people develop on an island along a major north-south trade route. Those people live in the interior with no access to the sea. These people were conquered by Romans in this era, those people were conquered by Mongols in a different era. All of it is mixed, matched, mixed again, and then tossed about a few times before the next round begins.

Which means the answer to why some groups seem to prosper and others not can almost never be pinned down to a single factor.

Take, for instance, the plight of Black people in the United States today. There are genetic factors, historical factors, racialist factors (on the part of both Blacks and Whites), social factors, incentives created by government and economic activity, emotional factors, and on and on. You cannot simply say that poverty in Black communities is caused by White racism. Well, you can say it, but it isn't true. White racism has not forced Black fathers to largely abdicate their responsibilities to mothers and children (and when nearly 70% of Black babies are born to single mothers, it is undeniable that Black men have done just that). Government incentives are real, but they cannot solely explain the near absolute dependence in many of these communities on government largesse. The data examined in The Bell Curve is not fabricated, but also not entirely determinative, either.

Sowell is essentially applying Hayek's insight on the pretense of knowledge to social questions beyond mere economics. The humility this inspires is invaluable. And it challenges us to concern ourselves more with knowing what is right, in a moral and absolute sense, than with mere data.

President Not-My-Fault Kills Pipeline, Blames Others

2012-01-19T08:30:00.000-06:00

Our president, focused like a laser on jobs, killed a pipeline that would have created upwards of 100,000 of them. He'd announced that he was delaying a decision until after the November 2012 elections, insisting that this was not a political move but required to thoroughly look into the matter. The pipeline deal has been on the table for over 2 years already, but that's not enough time for your highly efficient, focused-like-a-laser federal government. So Congress passed a law they knew the president would have to sign and attached to it a requirement that the president decide within 60 days.

Ooohhh. The pressure. Can't handle it. So he said, "no." He then proceeded to blame the Republicans for his own decision to kill the pipeline. I'm sure this will be dutifully reported in the press. The "do-nothing" Congress did something, but that just forced the president to stop them so he could continue to call them a "do-nothing" Congress. If Congress had just played to his re-election theme and done nothing, there would have been no problem.

And that is the president's re-election theme. It's a lovely 2-step. Step 1, the lousy economy is evil Republican George Bush's fault. Step 2, the economy is still lousy because - just as I was getting a handle on it, turning it around and getting it going - you elected evil Republicans to Congress and they've just kept me from fixing everything.

I'm not to blame. I just got here. I mean, it was a really big mess and Congress is just getting in the way. I need more power - re-arrange and expand the government bureaucracy, control the banks, control the car companies, control the schools, not bother with Senate approval of my appointees, etc. I shouldn't have to bother with Congress. I'm the Messiah! Did Jesus need the disciples' consent? Did he have to get some silly Congress to approve? If you'd just get these evil Republicans out of my hair, I'd work some miracles - you'll see!

Captain Francesco Schettino and the COSTA CONCORDIA

2012-01-18T08:35:00.001-06:00

I've been reading a bit about this ship, the Costa Concordia, that ran aground off the Italian coast a few days ago. Fascinating.

The BBC has a fairly good overview of what happened - the Costa Concordia left Civitavecchia, the port servicing Rome, and headed north towards Livorno from whence passengers could go to Pisa, Vinci, Sienna, and Florence. On the way, passing between the island Giglio and the port St. Stefano on the coast, the ship steered a NW course to pass close aboard the island.

There are reefs and rocks near that island and the water depth goes from around 50' to less than 20' rather quickly as you approach. According to Wikipedia, the Costa Concordia draws 26' of water, so 40' is safe, 30' is not. For the bulk of those 9 miles between Porto St. Stefano and Isola del Giglio, the water depth is 350-400 feet.

It was night time, so other than some lights of Giglio's villages, there was nothing for passengers to see. There is no reason from the geography for the skipper to take her that close aboard the island, and the BBC report indicates the course change was not authorized by the cruise line. It seems Capt. Schettino brought the ship in close last August as well, and he did so again on January 13. The BBC says it's because the skipper wanted the locals to get a sight of the ship. Unless there's a particular local he wanted to impress, that makes very little sense, but then, the whole thing makes very little sense.

The ship struck a rock, tearing a gash in the hull below the waterline on the starboard side - which means the rock was to seaward of the ship as it headed north - and starts to list. The skipper brought the ship around, heading towards the shallows of Giglio until the ship runs aground and the order is given to abandon ship. (Some Photos)

The movement off the ship was undisciplined and panicked. You'd expect that from the passengers. The crew, right up to the skipper himself, however, also seem to have panicked and discipline collapsed. The captain seems to have been among the first off.

The primary cause of the accident, from all the preliminary information, is Captain Schettino. Other information might yet come forward to exonerate him, but I can't imagine what it would be. This will, however, ultimately be a story about him, not about cruise ship or the industry.

Good Article on Confessional Integrity and Christian Schools

2012-01-17T15:06:00.000-06:00

A good article in the CRC's Banner on the interplay between confessional integrity and the concept of academic freedom - worth reading.

It doesn't give pat answers, but outlines the difficulty, and that's useful for all Christian colleges, universities, primary and secondary schools.

More Pressure in CRC to Approve of Sin

2012-01-17T15:03:00.001-06:00

The pressure continues...

A group calling itself "Complete Covenant" has opened up. It's raison d'etre is:

We are a group of individuals in the West Michigan Christian Reformed Church working for inclusion of our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters in their faith families in the CRC. Please share the news of the formation of this new group and like us on Facebook. To contact us, send us a message here or email us at completecovenant@gmail.com. We would love to know if you would like to be involved, need support or would like a member or our group to come to your West Michigan church to share our presentation.

I wonder... Does "inclusion" require that we approve of homosexual sex? I suspect it does. Their facebook page refers us to this article, where we find somebody upset that an RCA pastor was disciplined ("put on ecclesiastical trial") for officiating at the "marriage" of his daughter to her girlfriend. This is "inclusion" - redefining marriage and overturning two millenia of church doctrine.

Nothing will satisfy these people short of full acceptance of the cultural trend in sexual mores, to include homosexual acts, legal unions, and all the rest. And they will not give up, either.

I understand that, while the CRC officially teaches that we should love the sinner even as we hate the sin, many find it easier to hate both and this is wrong. But it is no improvement to love both the sin and the sinner.

SD Public Schools - 29% Fewer Students and 67% More Administrators Since 1971

2012-01-17T13:35:00.000-06:00

Here's another bit of news on education, courtesy of our local paper. The information is quoted from a speech our governor gave, but it's telling.

The state had 173,000 children in grades K-12 in public schools in 1971, a number that fell to 123,000 in 2011. While enrollment fell, the number of teachers grew from 8,500 to 9,300 in the same period and administrators and other school employees from 5,400 to 9,000. He said the money spent on public education, adjusted for inflation, is more than double what it was 40 years ago.

Enrollment is down by 50,000 - 29% - in the last 40 years. Money spent has more than doubled. And where has that money gone? Not to teachers, good or bad. While there are 800 more teachers in the state than there were 40 years ago, there are 3,600 more administrators and other employees. For every two new teachers hired since 1971, we hired 9 administrators and support staff.

We've gone from a 20.4:1 to a 13.2:1 student-teacher ratio, from a 32:1 to a 13.7:1 student-administrator ratio, increased total spending (adjusted for inflation) by a factor of at least 2, all to achieve a stable or declining result.

And the answer from those who run this system is to throw more money at it. No. The problem is how the administrators are handling the money and what those teachers are doing. I strongly suspect that if we returned to the 32:1 ratio of students to administrators, management of both money and teachers would improve, and with that so would student performance.

It's Not the Grade. It's How Much You Spend to Get It That Counts.

2012-01-13T15:47:00.001-06:00

Our local rag, ever on the look-out for reasons to shovel more money at the South Dakota public schools, is touting a report in Education Week that gives the state low marks for its K-12 education. The lede tells us pretty much all we need to know.

Education Week’s “Quality Counts 2012” gives South Dakota particularly low marks for education spending, college readiness and supports for the teaching profession.The state did OK on an achievement index that examines test scores, improvement over time and poverty-based performance disparities.

Got that? We don't spend enough and we don't pay our teachers enough, but when it comes to actual achievement, South Dakota "did OK".

Now, I haven't been able to figure out just exactly how Education Week arrives at the numbers, scores and other such things they used to provide the "grade" - it's rather opaque and therefore not all that instructive. Its rating of South Dakota is rather more harsh than the local paper's opener indicates, too. I also haven't been able to find data on the Dept. of Ed site more current than 2009 (a report that has us doing fair-to-middlin' if not a little better). So I can't really say how well the state's public school system is doing. I only have anecdotal evidence and nothing in either the newspaper or the magazine under review here provides anything like reliable data.

Still, it is amusing to think that, had we only spent more money to attain the same actual achievement results, Education Week would rate us as having a higher quality education system.

It's not the grade. It's how much you spend to get it that counts.

Obama Seeks Power...

2012-01-13T09:41:00.002-06:00

I find this interesting - and I find the way the story is phrased both enlightening and frightening. The headline is "Obama Seeks Power to Merge Agencies".

You could delete the last three words of that and you'd have what this is really about. He is not asking Congress to merge these agencies. He is asking Congress to give him the power to do it. But if you give him the power to merge these agencies, you also give the President power to merge, or split, or reorganize, or rearrange any of a number of other agencies. He says he wants to consolidate and shrink the bureaucracy. Nothing in his actions over the last 4 years gives any indication that he seriously wants to limit or shrink government. In fact, everything he's done points in exactly the opposite direction. What he wants is to consolidate power in the executive branch.

Frankly, given his recent waltzing over the Constitution with his "recess" appointments when Congress was not in recess, I'm surprised he didn't just assert that he had the power to do this already. It's not like anyone in the Senate has the political gonads to stand for the Constitution against a Democrat president. They didn't in the 1990s and they don't now. They fund his unaccountable czars, turn a blind eye towards his legislation by executive fiat, and generally hunker down and hope the voters will return them to their sinecures.

Congress should consolidate and shrink the bureaucracy Congress has created and these agencies are a great place to start. But Congress should do it. The President has more than enough power as it is.

UPDATE: Somebody else is thinking the same thing.

Iranian Nuke Scientist Nuked

2012-01-11T10:22:00.000-06:00

A bomb was attached to a car driven by an Iranian nuclear scientist. That scientist is now dead.

Somebody, at least, is not sitting still, waiting for the Iranians to get a nuclear bomb.

The Iranian threat is real. They are forming an alliance with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, conducting exercises in closing the Straits of Hormuz, and planning night and day how they can thwart the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf and attack us here at home. Iran is also active in Iraq and Afghanistan supporting opposition efforts there. They funnel money and munitions to Hamas to drive Israel into the sea, and support islamo-fascist efforts in Egypt, Libya, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and throughout Africa.

The sanctions the President signed on to are not automatic and he will not enforce them automatically. There is no negotiating with the Iranians. They understand force, and we must be prepared to use it on a large scale. I'm sure Fifth Fleet has contingency plans to attack the Iranian Navy. If they close Hormuz, those plans should be executed without further warning and the Iranian Navy destroyed within 48 hours. These strikes should also include destruction of Iran's air defense network and nuclear facilities.

If the Iranians were Republicans, I've no doubt Obama would give such an order without a second thought. But they're fellow fascists. That will give him pause.

Human Zoo? Human Game Preserve?

2012-01-11T10:06:00.001-06:00

Interesting. And troubling on several levels.

There's the obvious problem that the article itself gets at - you've got some tribal peoples living in a rather primitive isolation, and some tourists go there and with a bribe or two, get them to come dance and put on a show. "Let's have a look at this ancient tribal people, Martha! Oooohhhh, such paint, such cavorting, such nakedness! It's just like a safari!" The outraged multi-culturalist do-gooders are calling this a "human zoo".

But who made it a zoo? Isn't it those same do-gooders? Are they not trying to preserve these ancient cultures for their own anthropological studies, from a misplaced sense of romanticism (the old "noble savage" theme), for their own claim to moral superiority? With their setting aside the tribe's home as a "preserve", the way you might set up a preserve for some species of bird, their speaking of the tribe's "habitat", referring to them as "rare" and concerned that they're "dying out", they are speaking the same language any game-management from the Department of the Interior might speak when discussing spotted owls.

Did they consult with these tribesmen? Maybe they'd prefer the cell phones and the modern medicine and the steadier food supplies civilization and technology bring. Who are these do-gooders to determine what state of development is appropriate for the Jarawa people? Are they not human beings? Should they not be free to make that decision themselves?

The difference between those in this article who are outraged and those who are outrageous is not that one treats people like animals in a zoo and the other does not. It's merely a question of whether or not tourists will be allowed to visit the zoo.

Making Money Isn't a Bad Thing

2012-01-10T07:31:00.001-06:00

So, Newt is out there criticizing Mitt Romney for...being rich.

Newt has made his money as a lobbyist, a politician, a writer of 2nd-rate novels and 3rd-rate history.

Mitt made his money in the market place, through a company called Bain Capital.

So Newt says things like, "Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation…we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job." (quoted in the Club for Growth statement).

What Mitt Romney and those at Bain Capital did, and what people like them do, is notice changes in the market and pull money from places where it is unproductive. They direct that capital then towards businesses that are productive. So, yes, the unproductive business dies and 1,700 people, or more, or fewer, lose their jobs. But a productive business is born, and 1,700 people, or more, or fewer, get jobs that didn't exist before.

Perhaps it's because they closed a plant in Michigan where taxes are high and unions have businesses over a barrel, parasitically draining them of value, and they open a business in South Carolina where unions are more constrained, taxes are lower, and they are not excoriated for turning a profit. Are we to feel guilty because one group of people got jobs and others lost them? Are we to be forever confined to yesterday's economy because we are not permitted to drop dying businesses in favor of growing ones? Is a decision to hire somebody a marriage, "til death do us part"? In businesses afflicted with strong unions, it's easier to get a divorce than it is to reverse a hiring decision, no matter how unproductive the employee might be. Indeed, the police union in Colorado is filing a grievance because a cop was fired after being clocked going 143 mph in a 65 mph zone while drunk. That's a public sector union, but I know folks in the auto industry, and they could tell horror stories like it.

If you want an example of the argument between Gingrich and Romney, between Obama and conservatives, between socialists and capitalists, you won't find better than this scene from the movie Other People's Money.

I'm no fan of Romney, but this kind of populist claptrap is why Newt Gingrich cannot be trusted with executive power, or any political power. He may say he regrets working together with Nancy Pelosi because he sees it hurting his prospects for higher office, but the fact is, when it boils down to core beliefs, he really isn't that far from her.

Unemployment Rate Down, Masks Real Unemployment Picture

2012-01-06T14:07:00.001-06:00

Unemployment is down to 8.5%. Yippee!!!

Or maybe not. One of the things that happened to keep unemployment numbers up is that unemployment benefits were extended. And extended. And extended. And extended. And...you get the picture. To continue to receive unemployment benefits, one has to remain in the labor force by actively (sort of) looking for a job. Since the jobs aren't there, but the benefits were, folks stayed in the labor force and thus the unemployment rate stayed high.

But benefits have been somewhat curtailed in recent months. Since many of these people have run through their benefits, there's no point in continuing to try to find a job - the jobs aren't there and looking for one no longer pays. Once they stop looking for a job, though, these unemployed are no longer counted in the labor force. If enough people are forced out of the labor force this way, you can bring the unemployment rate down without actually touching the number of people who are employed.

So, the population of this country in January 2009 was approximately 305.5 million and the labor force was 154.2 million. The size of the labor force that is the basis for that lowered unemployment rate is 153.9 million - 300,000 fewer people in the labor force, in other words. But the total population of the U.S. is 312.9 million, or 7.4 million more people.

To make that a bit plainer, we have 7,400,000 more people in the country, and 300,000 fewer people in the work force than was the case in January 2009. If the labor force had grown at the same rate as the population (2.4%), the labor force would be at 157.9 million, which is pretty close to what was projected in this pre-recession document (table 1, p. 4). If we take those extra 4 million whom we would expect to be in the labor force and add them to the unemployed, we get an unemployment rate around 10.8%. The way they reflect this in the Bureau of Labor Statistics document is through "labor force participation rate" (which has declined from 64.3% to 64% since January 2010) and the "employment-population ratio", which has stayed equally flat (from 58.3 to 58.5% in the same time frame).

All this is just a long way of saying that the only thing that's gotten better is the unemployment rate. The number of people working, the economy in general - all that's still in the dumps and the way they calculate the unemployment rate masks the broader negative picture.

Nationwide Surplus of Convention Centers

2012-01-06T11:16:00.001-06:00

The voters of Sioux Falls not long ago voted to borrow $115 million and repay it over several years with interest - a total of another $60 million. The plan is to build an "Event" center so we can host events. It is supposedly going to rejuvenate the city, increase the number of visitors, and - through increased sales tax revenues - pay for itself.

I said at the time that this kind of thinking was mere fantasy. I still think that. Shortly after the vote, one of the sports teams supposedly bringing business to the center announced that it would play at the (privately funded) Sanford Arena. There goes that business. But, hey, we'll attract conventions and such like stuff. Conventions are "events" too! We already have a convention center, and I hear the ads on the radio begging us to use them to cater our Christmas event.

Then I come across this piece in the City Journal. This is the opening sentence:

For two decades, American cities have used public dollars to build convention center space—far more than demand warranted. The result has been a gigantic nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention centers, and vacant hotel rooms.

Naturally, this was not widely touted in the debate leading up to the Event Center vote even though this information has been around since 2004 at least. The article points out the woes besetting Boston, Baltimore, and Dallas as they sink hundreds of millions into similar projects, and in the face of vastly underwhelming results, conclude the answer is to throw yet more money into convention centers.

There's a scene in the old Steve Martin movie Roxanne, in which the mayor of the fair city is trying to get an October Fest promotion going. He promises his fire chief that, after this thing gets going, he'll restore the fire department's budget and then turns to address the "crowd" - nobody. How sadly apropos.

Banner Publishes Article Urging Belhar Be Rejected

2012-01-06T09:08:00.000-06:00

The Banner, amazingly, published a rather lengthy article arguing against the Belhar Confession. What is more, they even made it their "cover" story in the print version.

Let me venture to ask the $64 question - a question I haven't seen asked anywhere else as of this writing: If this document had been written by White people, would we even be looking at it?

If the answer is "no" (and I suspect that's the correct answer), then the pressure to adopt it is an act of racist condescension and paternalism, premised on the belief that we cannot hold Black theologians to the same standards because they couldn't measure up. They are not judging the content of the document, but the skin color of its authors.

Then again, this is the same crowd that adopted the Contemporary Testimony, which was written by White people, so maybe their standards regarding the theological, linguistic, and organizational content of our confessions have just sunk that low.

Führer Obama Strikes a Blow Against Liberty

2012-01-05T07:51:00.000-06:00

President Obama is giving vent to his tyrannical impulses again. This man is no friend of liberty and does not like having to bother with democracy, the separation of powers, or the checks on his authority. He is, in fact, a tyrant and one who would prefer to be a dictator. He is, I suspect, rather jealous of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. He has certainly expressed envy of China's dictator, wishing he too could just dictate to us.

His latest affront to liberty is to make "recess appointments" to the National Labor Relations Board and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Constitution allows the president to appoint people to various offices for a one-year term when the Senate is in recess. All presidents have done this, but Obama has taken it a step further - making a recess appointment when the Senate was not in recess. Congress is still technically in session. Granted, it is a "pro forma" session - some senators and representatives gather, go through the motions, and then split up again so no actual business is being transacted, but it is still in session.

I hope, but rather doubt, the Democrats in the Senate act against this affront to their Constitutional prerogatives. It is yet another reason why we need to get this man as far away from the levers of power as we can. He has no respect for law, for the Constitution, for freedom and liberty, or for anyone other than himself. Four more years of him will render the Constitution a dead letter, a mere scrap of paper.

Post-Iowa GOP Race

2012-01-04T08:18:00.000-06:00

No doubt the biggest loser last night was Michele Bachmann. She netted just over 6,000 votes - about the same as she got at that infamous Ames straw poll a few months ago.

Of the other 116,000 voters, opinion was split. Thirty thousand went for Mitt Romney. About the same went for Rick Santorum (Mitt took 8 more votes than Rick). Some 26,000 went for Ron Paul, many of whom had not previously registered as Republicans. Newt got 16,000 and Perry less than that.

Perry's money will start to dry up, as will Newt's. Bachmann's will also evaporate. Perry might try to hang on through South Carolina's primary, but it'll be a tough sell. Their biggest decision in the next few weeks will be who to endorse on their way out. Newt - never know what Newt will do. He might just endorse Hillary Clinton. So that leaves us Romney, Santorum, and Paul - a guy with plastic hair, a sweater-vest guy, and a guy of questionable sanity.

Paul will taper off after Iowa. His support is shallow - largely youthful enthusiasms, but it won't be sustained the way youthful enthusiasms for Obama were encouraged. In any event, the pool of ignorant, unrealistic, excitable young people is small and Paul's brand of snake-oil cure-all is not near as popular among them as Obama's.

We really don't know Santorum. He has a sense of loyalty, which is good, but it led him to endorse Arlen Specter over conservative challenger Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania's Senate race a few years back. That wasn't exactly the smartest thing he ever did. He'll get a bit more media glare now, though so far has handled himself well. He'll probably be a bit more susceptible to class-warfare rhetoric, but it'll be harder to hit him from the left that way. The main thing I get from him in all this is that he isn't particularly bold in his policy prescriptions, but he's cut from the same cloth as Paul Ryan in many ways and if he's willing to listen to Ryan... He'll work well with John Boehner, too. All of them are from solid, working-class Catholic families. We could do worse.

Romney is still the "vegetables" candidate - everybody tells us he's good for us, but nobody likes the taste.

Thinking Back Five Years

2012-01-03T11:23:00.001-06:00

I resigned my commission in the Navy in 2007 when I took up my position here in South Dakota. Since October 1995, I had been a chaplain. This was not a title or a mere job to me. It's who I was. It set the patterns andrhythms of my life, defining me in a way that's hard to describe. And then one day it was done.

I still have some detritus from those days - rank insignia, ribbons,medals, buttons, boots, shoes, socks, t-shirts (many now used as rags). Only recently did I finally dispose of my old uniforms, and you wouldn't believe how many uniforms an officer in the U.S. Navy needs (summer, dress, and dinner dress whites; dress and dinner dress blues; camouflage in various hues; coveralls.....). Thereare plaques from the commands I’ve served and the places I’ve been along withother memorabilia populating the “I Love Me” wall that I, along with almost allsailors, have. I have images inmy head, on my computer, and in my photo albums. I remember people and situations, both verygood and very bad. How does one saygoodbye to twelve years of one’s life, of one’s very being?

Does it hurt the snake to shed his skin? I know ithurt me to shed that Navy Chaplain skin five years ago. For a while, it felt very much like an old dairy farmer who'd sold all his cows but still got up at 4 a.m. to milk them.

Now my sons are both in the Navy. One may well head out with the USS ENTERPRISE (CVN 65) on what will likely be her final deployment this spring. The other is becoming intimately acquainted with all 4,821 Navy Officer uniforms while studying at the Naval Academy. As I listen and watch them, I find two sensations coming over me. First is a bit of nostalgia, but second...well, that old dairy farmer who got up at 4 to milk has an option he never had before. He can go back to bed. I rather like that option.

Purpose, Calling, Task and Effect

2012-01-03T10:52:00.001-06:00

WARNING: LONG POST

For those unfamiliar with the pecking order in the Christian Reformed Church, it is rather dangerous to take on so notable a person as the recently retired president of Calvin Theological Seminary, Dr. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. But I'm going to.

He is the author of a statement on Calvin College's web site entitled "Educating for Shalom: Our Calling as a Christian College". In it, he says (among other things),

Christ the warrior has cometo defeat worldly power, to move the world over onto a new foundation, and toequip a people—informed, devout, educated, pious, determined people—to followhim in righting what's wrong, in transforming what's corrupted, in doing thethings that make for peace.

and

That's what Christianhigher education is for. It's for shalom. It's for peace in the sense ofwholeness and harmony in the world. It's for restoring proper relationshipswith nature and other humans and God, and for teaching us to delight in thewonders of creation that remain. As my teacher Nicholas Wolterstorff used tosay, Christian college education equips us to be agents of shalom, models ofshalom, witnesses to shalom.

Seems innocuous enough, doesn't it? But think about it for a moment. “Christ…has come…to equip apeople to follow him in righting what’s wrong, transforming what’s corrupted,in doing the things that make for peace” and that we Christians are to restore “properrelationships with nature and other humans and God…” Such a formulation of a college's (and church's) mission, left unchecked,runs the risk of reducing Christianity to political or community activism inpursuit of a rather earthly utopia. This is because implicit inthese statements is the assumption that we, mere mortals, can do whatis ultimately only possible for God himself. So let me offer a different approach to the purpose of the Church, andtherefore of the Church’s school.

When Peterexpounds on the purposes of God’s chosen people, royal priesthood, specialtreasure, he says we are “to declare the marvelous deeds” of God, and more specificallyhow “once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; how onceyou had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Ptr 2) On the hilltop outside Jerusalem, prior to his ascension, Jesustells the disciples “you are my witnesses” to the world (Acts 1). And at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, he tellsthem to go and make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to observe whathe has commanded (Matt 28). Thus we have as the mission of God's royal priesthood, the disciples he summoned to himself: 1) declaring thedeeds of God, specifically that we are made to be one people, belonging to God,and have received mercy; 2) bearingwitness to what we have seen and heard in Jesus; and 3) making disciples via baptism and teaching“everything Jesus commanded”.

You might note that neithershalom, nor acts of charity, nor any of the other currently popular buzz-wordsare the purpose of the Church. We declare, witness, and make disciples. In other words, we speak the truth in loveand teach. Teaching is of course morethan simply telling people things. New and growing Christians,whether they come into the Church as children or as converts, learnChristianity best by apprenticeship. In other words, we can hardly teach disciplesto observe what Jesus commanded if we do not observe it ourselves and there isno doubt that Jesus commands us, quite specifically, to care for the poor, theoppressed, and the marginalized of society. Do not, therefore, think that I am necessarily opposed to either individual or socialaction in the service of these marginalized or that I think all we are to beabout is words.

At the same time, though,Jesus does not offer a pipe-dream utopia as if we can eliminate poverty,establish peace, and bring the world a Coke – er, harmony. Instead, he tells us that the poor willalways be with us, that there will continue to be suffering, and that therewill still be sin. So, while we havetasks beyond simply speaking, none of this indicates that we, as human beings,are to right what is wrong, transform what is corrupt, or even do the thingsthat make for peace. Indeed, a fundamentaltenet of Christian teaching is that we cannot. That’s why we need Jesus. In other words, Jesus came to right what is wrong,transform what is corrupt, and do what makes for genuine peace. Jesusis the one who came to restore the proper, wholesome relationships between thecreation, the steward and the creator. And Jesus does it still. Our part in this is to be one of themeans by which he does it - and that is through our assigned tasks of preaching, teaching, and administering the sacraments. If we think we have to take over the entire responsibility for this houseof God that Jesus is building, then we will fail in the tasks that aregenuinely ours, in addition to interfering with the Carpenter as he builds hishouse.

I am sure Dr. Plantinga was not personally thinking in terms of mere politicalactivism or earthly utopias. I am evenmore confident that he does not think anyone other than Christ Jesusaccomplishes this great work of shalom. His words, however, in the context of trends in academia and society– trends reflected in the Christian Reformed Church and Calvin College– along with the history of the West since the French Revolution, leave himopen to, even invite, such interpretations. From the beginnings of the scientific/industrial revolution, we in theWest have been plagued by utopic visionaries and their followers. The trail of blood, broken societies, andbroken lives they’ve left behind is long and bitter. Such is always the result when mere mortalstake to themselves the responsibilities of God. We must therefore be extremely careful not to encourage ourselves or ouryouth to make the same mistake. Ratherlet us focus on the tasks we have been given – to make disciples through thesacraments, our example, and our teaching; to bear witness to Jesus; and todeclare the wonderful deeds of God who showed us mercy and made us to be apeople. There is work enough in this fora Christian school, for the church.

Iranian Threats

2012-01-03T08:48:00.000-06:00

Iran has threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz. I'm sure most Americans aren't entirely clear on what, or where, that is - or why it's a big deal, beyond "something to do with oil".

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran access the sea in the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf. These countries produce quite a bit of oil - a little more than 25% of the world's supply. All of that oil heads into open water through the Straits of Hormuz. According to Wikipedia, some 15 million barrels pass through the straits every day. At its narrowest point, it's 34 miles across, but that's a bit misleading.

Take a look at this map:

It's a little small here, but the link takes you to a larger image. Notice the islands off the coast of Iran. Notice how the entire length of the straits are bordered on one side by Iran. Imagine gun and missile emplacements on those islands and on the coasts of Iran - they would have command of the entire passage and be able to put any ships in a deadly cross-fire. Notice also the way the depth slopes out fairly gently from the Iranian side, and how for a good portion of the straits, the water depth is merely 25 meters (82'). A fully loaded supertanker these days can draw as much as 24.5 meters (that's the depth below the waterline), making the navigable area of the strait significantly less.

Meanwhile, Russia has said Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. Nobody believes them, but it effectively serves notice that they have no interest in assisting us with Iran. China has helped Iran in many matters, including the electronics that allowed them to jam and capture the drone.

I said when Obama was elected that he would get us in a war before all was said and done, what with his bowing and scraping to tyrants, silly "reset" nonsense with Russia, his desire to "talk" to Ahmadinejad, and so on. He thought he could save the world just by not being George W. Bush, but the Mullahs in Iran didn't and don't hate George Bush. They hate America. The guy in the White House doesn't matter to them. Obama's naivete, arrogance, and folly are going to get some people killed. Rather, some more people killed. His "fast & furious" program run with Holder's Justice Department has already gotten quite a few killed, including Border Patrol agents.

Latest Look at GOP Presidential Race

2012-01-02T08:14:00.000-06:00

The Iowa Caucus is upon us.

Romney is still leading. Newt has sunk nearly 24 points in polls. He blames Romney's "negative" ads. When it comes to politics, ads that point out the flaws in my record are "negative" while ads that point out the flaws in your record are simply a matter of keeping the voters informed.

Romney's record is not conservative, though it is trending that way. He would have been a better candidate than McCain four years ago, but he is less than what we need now. Trouble is, all of the Republican candidates are less than what we need now. And of those candidates, the two most recent not-Romney contenders have been worse than Romney. Newt is not conservative. Newt is not consistent. He alienates, shoots off his mouth, and cannot abide having somebody other than himself in the headlines.

Ron Paul is also not conservative. He would himself freely admit this. He is an isolationist libertarian. Libertarianism is an idealist approach to a world that is not ideal. We cannot isolate ourselves from countries like Iran who want to destroy us. We cannot abandon Israel to its fate. Neither can we be purely libertarian in our domestic policies. People are not basically good. Rather they are from conception inclined towards all evil, to quote the Heidelberg Catechism. Government's fundamental purpose is to restrain evil. Libertarianism essentially abandons that basic purpose in favor of....what? Not much. Granted, I think we could move a lot closer to some of the things libertarians like Ron Paul like - lower taxes, slashed government, vastly reduced regulations, and so on. In an ideal world of ideal people, I'd be willing to go all the way to Ron Paul's side, but this world isn't ideal and neither are the people in it.

It is good to see Santorum surging a bit. As the newest not-Romney contender, he has the best conservative record. We'll see what he does with it. I'm not terribly hopeful.

Christian Martyrdom Still Happens

2011-12-30T11:45:00.000-06:00

It is worth remembering at this time that Christians are still persecuted and martyred for their faith around the world.

There are indications that some wish to bring some form of restraint and persecutions to Christians in the United States, such as in the systemic effort to shut down Christian charities via regulation and state usurpation of charitable care for the poor as documented in this post by David French over at National Review's Corner. It is not yet severe, though it is serious. In too many instances, the church has already been co-opted by statist policies and does not see the danger. I fear my own denomination is headed in that direction, but we shall see. But the idolatry of the State that is part and parcel of the leftist, "progressive" program and has been since the French Revolution (see Michael Burleigh's book, Earthly Powers) will not long permit the worship of other gods.

The so-called "tolerance" of the politically correct project will not tolerate religions that do not worship politics and the state and the most severe examples of that project - communism and fascism - are among the most dangerous societies for Christians. China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, among others are leading persecutors of Christians.

The other type of society where it is most dangerous to be Christian is Muslim. Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and increasingly Turkey are among the most oppressive of Christians. In Nigeria, Muslim-instigated bombings martyred 40 Christians on Christmas day. Egyptian Christians have been in fear for their lives since the so-called "Arab Spring" began. This was not a flowering of freedom and justice, but a flowering of violent Islam that will result in oppression such as we have already seen in Iran from the Gulf of Aden to the Straits of Gibraltar.

As I said in an earlier post. Only Judeo-Christian societies have managed to be genuinely open, tolerant, and free. Societies that reject Judeo-Christianity inevitably sink into tyranny. Something to think about.

Puerto Rico - 51st State?

2011-12-30T10:23:00.000-06:00

Puerto Rico is going to vote in a referendum concerning its status once again. There will be two ballot questions. The first, do citizens want to change their status vis-a-vis the United States or not. The second is, independence, statehood, or something called "sovereign free association". You can find a pretty good explanation of what this means here.

I think it would be great if Puerto Rico became a state. But then, I think it would be good to expand the size of the current House of Representatives by at least a factor of 2 - no state should have fewer members of the House than they do in the Senate.

I also think it would be good to break the "50" barrier. It's a nice, neat number, but there's nothing sacred about having 50 states. Five states were admitted last century - Oklahoma in 1907, New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, Alaska and Hawaii in 1959. Seven were admitted in the last 11 years of the 19th century (North and South Dakota, Washington, and Montana in November 1889, Idaho and Wyoming in January 1890, and Utah in 1896). That's a dozen states between 1889 and 1959.

Puerto Rico accepting independence in some fashion would, I think, be fine as far as the U.S. is concerned. I don't think it would be all that great for the people of Puerto Rico. It's their call, though. If I were a betting man, I'd bet they stay where they are.

Mark Steyn, Elizabeth, and Demographics

2011-12-28T09:00:00.000-06:00

Mark Steyn reflects on Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, in the light of current demographic trends in Europe and North America.

I can't improve on what he says, so go read him saying it.

Partial List of Scandals

2011-12-28T08:37:00.000-06:00

If you want a run-down of Obama's scandals, Michelle Malkin has a brief list. These are only the most egregious scandals involving hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to favored Democrat Party/Obama contributors, deaths, and vote fraud.

But the most scandalous thing of all is the determined effort to bury these stories by those so-called custodians of truth who call themselves "journalists".

If you're relying on the AP, CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times/Washington Post newspaper axis for information, you're more than likely misinformed.

Enough Planet Saving, Time for Corner Brightening

2011-12-28T08:07:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Witt has a couple pretty good pieces on the problems inherent in the very phrase "social justice" (also "social gospel" and all the other phrases to which "social" has been appended in recent years). The biggest problem is the assumption that justice or the Gospel weren't social until they were socialist.

If a society extends justice to the rich and well-connected but allows the poor to be bullied and swindled by corrupt players inside and outside of the government, the problem isn't unsocial justice but a lack of justice....Such a society doesn't need a social brand of justice any more than a poor neighborhood without stores needs a social grocery store. The neighborhood needs an ordinary grocery store, and the unjust society needs basic justice. Grocery stores and justice are already intrinsically social.

Social justice, like the social gospel, isn't really about being social, that is, dealing with the interrelationships of human beings. It is about justifying the theft (often through taxation) of one person's property in order to give it to another. What this almost always means in economic terms is taking resources from productive sectors of the economy and forcing it into unproductive sectors, impoverishing the wealthy without materially affecting the prosperity of the poor.

Since the 1930s, this method of being "social" has been tried in the West in various forms ("New Deal", "Great Society", etc. in the U.S.). Since 1917 it has been tried in Russia and her neighboring states. It has been tried in China since 1949, in Cuba since shortly thereafter, and is being tried anew in Venezuela. It has informed government policy throughout Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East since the end of the colonial era in the 1940s. It has largely failed. In practice it has been neither social, nor just, nor Gospel - indeed, in many places it has explicitly excluded the Gospel.

I understand the desire of many Christians to have Heaven come a little sooner, to build our Tower of Babel and re-connect Heaven and Earth through government action. But whether it is a physical tower as in the story from Genesis, or a metaphorical tower as found in the pages of Sojourners, it is bound to fail and the effort expended in pursuit of this inevitable failure will mean much of suffering, injustice, and sin will go unaddressed if not actually encouraged. We need fewer people who want to save the planet and more who want to brighten the corner where they are.

To Militant Atheists: Be Careful What You Wish For

2011-12-27T15:43:00.000-06:00

Jonah Goldberg has a column out on the annual "secularization of Christmas" meme. It's not bad. He points out that part of the problem is capitalism. In a free society, capitalism will find a way to commercialize pretty much anything and everything, no matter how sacred. This is, sadly, true. If there were a way around it that did not make matters far worse, I'd be right there advocating for it.

He then says this:

And for the atheists who see “winter solstice” as some kind of victory, you might consider the fact that what you’re doing is clearing the field not for glorious logic (which ain’t so glorious Christmas morning — socks are a logical gift), but a rank, petty, and vastly more commercialized paganism that lacks anything like the intellectual and moral rigor of Christianity.

Intellectual defenders of a secular Christmas hammer the point that there are some vestigial pagan frills to the Christian holiday, as if this proves something important. Indeed, in pop culture it’s now a given that Santa’s boss is “Mother Nature” (and his colleagues are the Tooth Fairy and the Miser Brothers). It’s pretty odd that a Christian saint — you know, Saint Nicholas — doesn’t answer to God, but to a pagan deity. And we all know paganism is such a font of tolerance.

That's a worthy reminder to those who oppose Christianity. We Christians have our faults, but show me a religious culture with greater freedom, including the freedom to not be Christian. It doesn't exist except in Israel. In pagan societies, stepping out of the traditional lines of religion brings on ostracization, isolation, even death. In Muslim lands, it's dangerous to be a Christian as Copts in Egypt and Iraq are finding, and death to be Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu. In fully secularized societies like Cuba and China, it can be deadly, too - Christians, Falun Gong, Muslim, Jewish; none of them are welcome.

All you atheists offended that Christians are Christian, be careful what you wish for. You could get rid of Christianity, but I can guarantee you wouldn't like what replaces it.

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

2011-12-23T12:38:00.001-06:00

Merry Christmas.

These are tumultuous times, and it is easy to think that all is at stake in the contentions and struggles we face today. It isn't. As much as I complain and harp and criticize in this blog, it is in the final analysis nothing and the things I complain about are equally insignificant. Who, after all, am I? Who, after all, is Barack Obama? Or Harry Reid? Or John Boehner? Or Romney or Gingrich or Paul or Santorum or....? Mere mortals who will in due course go the way of all flesh, leaving nothing behind them but the dust from which we are formed.

The United States is not "the last, best hope of Man" and, as tragic as it would be for it to collapse into a historical footnote, the world will go on as long as God wishes it to do so.

The last, best hope of Man isn't anything of this earth. It is this Jesus, God-made-flesh who dwelt among us, suffered for us, died for us.

So put away your newspapers this weekend. Don't bother with the news on TV. Put it all aside for a couple days and pay attention to what is really important, to what will outlast all our proudest monuments - to the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Undemocratic Democrats Plead Guilty

2011-12-22T08:18:00.002-06:00

There have been numerous instances of vote fraud in recent years. We've got a situation up in Troy, NY where several officials have pleaded guilty. Another situation is developing in Indiana where signatures were forged on nominating petitions for the 2008 primaries. ACORN's reputation is notorious and they've faced charges in Ohio, Nevada, and several other states. Eric Holder's "Justice" department dropped charges against the New Black Panther party for voter intimidation after prosecutors had won the case.

The news article says this happens on both sides of the aisle, but it's interesting that all these cases involve Democrats and liberals. Democrats also continue to oppose any and all voter ID laws, too. Why would they find it problematic to require a positive, visual identification of a voter before he is allowed to cast a ballot?

I am sure that there are dishonest Republicans, and I'm sure that the temptation to not pester the people with asking for their votes is strong. But the Republican party as a whole, and conservatives in general, do not engage in this kind of systematic vote fraud. The Democrat party as a whole doesn't, either, but a whole lot of Democrat-affiliated groups seem to think this is normal and acceptable. That's not surprising. Their titular head, our President, doesn't seem to like dealing with electoral politics, either. He prefers to dictate.

The Democrat Party and its affiliates are in fact the most undemocratic organizations in the U.S. today. Ironic.

Subsidizing the Wealthy to Save the Planet

2011-12-22T08:05:00.000-06:00

Speaking of government subsidies, I got a referal to this little item in my e-mail this morning (HAT TIP: Jim Geraghty's "Morning Jolt").

Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Hohman looked at total state and federal assistance offered for the development and production of the Chevy Volt, General Motors’ plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. His analysis included 18 government deals that included loans, rebates, grants and tax credits. The amount of government assistance does not include the fact that General Motors is currently 26 percent owned by the federal government.

Oh - and another thing. For all you social justice types out there? The average salary of a volt owner is $170,000/year, or somewhere in the top 5% of income-earners in the country. The 99% being taxed to subsidize the boutique vehicular interests of the 1% but, since we slap an "environmentally friendly" label on this toxic beast, don't expect the "Occupy" crowd to be all that bothered by it, any more than they are by the government subsidy of Solyndra, or any of the other "green" boondoggles designed to funnel money to the politically well-connected. The number of times in history when a government subsidy has been better for the country can be counted on the fingers of one hand with digits left over.

Chevrolet's web site says the MSRP of a Volt starts at $31,645. Plus the $250,000 in government money. So we're talking $280,000 for a glorified golf cart so rich people can brag about their moral superiority and because, as Chevrolet's web site says, "Somebody has to be first." Indeed. There's always a lemming in front of the crowd.By the way, if you check out this web site, it seems that little investment in GM has so far netted the taxpayer a $16.3 billion loss.

Short-Sighted Ag Policy in Pierre

2011-12-21T10:28:00.000-06:00

Taxpayers in South Dakota will be hit with the bill for ethanol blending pumps. Republican Governor Daugaard says it's a "great way to increase the value of our agricultural base".

Really? Sure, it's a great way to help keep the price of corn high. It's a great way to keep land values inflated, too. Taxpayer subsidies can have that effect. The value, however, is a fiction, since it is created not by market forces but by government fiat.

Take this reasoning and apply it to some other business - tourism, for instance. Let's have the taxpayers buy new shelving units and store displays for all stores that sell souvenirs. Let's also make sure the price of each souvenir is lowered by providing a 10% tax rebate to every store for the souvenirs they sell. That way, people will buy lots of souvenirs at Wall Drug and Mt. Rushmore and Yankton and...

Why not? It's a great way to increase the value of our tourism base, right?

No. It's a great way to tax people who aren't souvenir-sellers or farmers in order to provide largess to those who are. When we do this with AIG or GM we call it "corporate welfare" and "crony capitalism". Like all welfare, these subsidies create an untoward dependence on government - a dependence government cannot long meet without going bankrupt, as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, California, and our own federal government are in the process of demonstrating.

It also sets farmers up to fail. There are quite a few farmers who are wise to this, hedge their bets, and know that what the government can give, the government can take. But there are others who will overextend on this basis. The government effectively creates a "bubble", just like they did with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and like the earlier bubbles, this one will inevitably pop, too. When it does, those farmers on the margins who overextended will be toast. They will go from an imaginary prosperity to a very real destitution in short order.

These subsidies are short-sighted, ultimately damaging the very people they are supposed to help at great cost to the taxpayers and future generations. Government should stop trying to dictate the market.

Lying with the Truth

2011-12-20T10:28:00.002-06:00

I like this. "House Poised to Reject Payroll Taxcut Deal". And if all you read is the headline, you're thinking, "Republicans are meanies, rejecting a tax cut!" What's going on, however, is a bit different.

In the first place, it's not a deal. "Deal" implies some negotiation, some give-and-take. There wasn't any. The house sent a payroll tax cut extension that lasts for a year over to the Senate. Harry Reid wouldn't consider it. He sent back a 2-month extension, which is hardly worth the trouble of enacting. The newspaper article helpfully tells us that some Republicans voted for Reid's bill. It neglects to mention that some Democrats voted for the House extension, so it was a "bipartisan" bill, too. The House prepared to set up a conference committee to hammer out the differences, as has traditionally happened when the House and Senate propose different bills and Harry Reid over at the Senate said he would not negotiate with the House.

Technically, it's true that the House is set to reject the Senate bill, but in the larger picture, who's rejecting what here?

Freedom or Flat Line

2011-12-20T10:13:00.000-06:00

Jeb Bush lays out the choice before us in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. It is a choice between a government that promises to smooth out the road of life, and freedom to face an uncertain world with both triumph and disaster.

A world in which there are no failures is a world in which success is not permitted, either. It is a world in which humanity itself is denied - it is a world very much like that known by North Koreans. It is, as Jeb Bush says in his piece, a flat line, the flat line of death.

Freedom is frightening. Not everyone you trust will be trustworthy. Not every effort expended will pay off. Sometimes an opportunity will come to you and you'll grab it and prosperity will fall in your lap. Other times, you'll pass it by and regret it. Sometimes you'll put years of your life into a project that comes up nothing. Other times, you'll take the safe course and be glad you did.

So it's understandable when those who come with their siren song of certainty are believed. The "experts" who know all and see all and understand all in this complex world will fix it for us. All we have to do is turn it all over to these czars of academia, these managerial elites, and we will be safe. It is what Friedrich Hayek called "The Pretence of Knowledge" in a lecture given when he received the Nobel prize in economics in 1974. But no human being can know all that needs to be known to achieve this.

All of the experts who worked so dilligently to end the Great Depression failed, and recent studies have concluded they may actually have made it worse. Richard Nixon's experts, Jimmy Carter's experts, George W. Bush's experts, and now Barack Obama's experts - none of them really know what they're doing. It's not their fault. They can't. Their fault isn't ignorance, but claiming to know what they cannot know.

Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, our greatest strides and prosperity have come when we accepted our place in the world with greater humility, when we did not know and knew that we didn't know, when we stepped forward into the future "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" rather than on ourselves, or experts, or our government.

Life is not easy. It is not fair. It is not certain. But with a firm reliance on Providence, life is beautiful.

With a firm reliance on experts, however, life isn't.

Wimp of the Hill

2011-12-20T08:24:00.001-06:00

Kim Jung Il is dead. I wish that meant an improvement in he lot of his people, but I doubt it. Fear, distrust, and a god-cult worship of the tyrant has plagued North Korea for nearly 70 years now. They've been increasingly bellicose over the last decade. The plague may be trying to break out.

Iran has gotten one of our drones. They may not be able to figure it out, but they've got a lot of connections with the Chinese and the Chinese are experts at reverse-engineering. Our entire drone/electronic-surveillance network is compromised. It is a disaster. Some have found fault with Obama over this, but I think that is misplaced. He wasn't flying the thing when it went down. I don't think he or the DoD were sufficiently aggressive in retrieving it, but it's a judgment call - how many lives do we risk to keep a secret? I'm rather shocked that it did not have a self-destruct mechanism installed.

The EU is in the early stages of breaking up, and good riddance. As a customs union it makes some sense. Allowing free trade and establishing uniform product standards - or at least labelling - from Ukraine to England and from Norway to Sicily is reasonable. The common currency, the efforts to regulate everyone and everything from Brussels, the erosion of national sovereignty, the silly fiction that there is a common culture to "Europe" - these never made sense. Italians are different from Norwegians, and that's not a bad thing. Our own president's activities in regards to this crack-up have not been of a sort to make it go more smoothly or inspire confidence.

On Obama's watch, relations have soured with China, Russia, Venezuela, the Koreas, Europe from Ireland to the Ukraine, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Egypt... You cannot point to a single area of U.S. foreign policy where the situation has improved since Obama rode into office thinking George Bush was the problem, so all he had to do was be not-George-Bush. We may well have pulled out of Iraq, and we may well be drawing down in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean we're at peace. If we go 4 more years with Obama, there will be war that makes 10 years in Iraq look like a cake-walk. I don't know where, but you can't sit at the top of the hill projecting an image of weakness and unresolve, and not expect somebody somewhere to try to knock you off.

Ignore Them - They'll Go Away

2011-12-16T11:05:00.001-06:00

Apparently the Christian Reformed Church got mentioned on a prime-time TV show - The Good Wife. The show is in third place (behind Family Guy and Desperate Housewives) with the 18-49 demographic, grabbing a 1.9 rating/4 share in its time slot on Sunday night and 9.7 million total viewers (down from 13 million last season).

I've never seen the show. Don't plan on watching it now, either. It's a typical TV show with typical biases from what I can tell by reading reviews. They want to deal with "hot topics" so that it's "relevant", but they do so in a way that does not seriously challenge leftist orthodoxy. Whether it portrays conservative positions accurately or not, I neither know nor care.

Reaction in the CRC has ranged from a valley-girl giddy, "He noticed me! Really! He knows I exist?! I can't believe it! Ooohhh", to offense at not getting the whole of CRC doctrine and theological nuance into a 2-minute scene where the CRC is not the focus. The executive dirctor, Rev. Joel Boot, actually wrote to CBS asking them to link viewers to the CRC page outlining our position on homosexuality and requesting the episode be edited to reflect it before it is re-aired or issued as part of a DVD collection. I can tell you just how seriously that will be taken by the suits at CBS, regardless of how (or whether) they reply to it.

The thing that strikes me about both ranges of response is the notion that being mentioned in a single episode of a single TV show is somehow an accomplishment, however marred the offended group might feel it to be. It is indicative of both a misplaced sense of self-importance, and a misunderstanding of what it means to be important in the first place. It partakes of the "celebrity culture", mistakenly thinking this one brief mention makes us a celebrity, and then complains about our treatment. It's all rather like an extra on the set complaining he doesn't get his own dressing room but making sure everybody knows he's going to be on TV.

I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that, unless they live in CRC circles where we're making a big deal of it, 2/3 of that show's viewers couldn't tell you what denomination was mentioned. But you can bet there will be more mentions on other shows now, too, since they've figured out a way to tweak the nose of a tiny denomination in an out-of-the-way corner of fly-over country. When dealing with broadcast television and its products, it is best to grant them the indifference they so richly deserve.

Welfare Hijinks in Line at Walmart

2011-12-15T10:31:00.000-06:00

This article has been making the rounds. It should be required reading for all who think the answer to poverty is government entitlement programs.

My son works at a gas station/convenience store. He could tell you similar stories. I didn't think I was paying taxes so somebody collecting food stamps could buy the 64 oz. Big Gulp fountain drink with them, but apparently I was wrong.

So when you see the news item like this one, claiming nearly half of Americans are living at or near poverty, consider how they define what "poverty" is and develop a healthy skepticism. Times are hard, I know, but nowhere near half of Americans are unable to provide basic necessities for themselves. The half that is taking care of themselves should not be penalized for accepting responsibility for themselves and their families by having their money confiscated in order to subsidize those who are all too willing to bilk the system.

China Launches Carrier, U.S. Launches "Biofuels"

2011-12-15T10:07:00.000-06:00

There is some concern over the launch of the Chinese aircraft carrier formerly known as the Varyag. It's a Russian Kuznetsov class carrier the Chinese bought, towed to China, and refurbished.

Its full-load displacement is a bit over half of a Nimitz class carrier and its aircraft capacity is significantly less. It also has a much lower sortie rate - the speed with which aircraft can be launched, recovered, serviced and re-launched. As a vessel intended to project power beyond local waters, it is insignificant. As a test platform to allow the Chinese to develop and deploy her own, superior design in the next ten years or so, it's much more important. And, while it cannot really begin to compete with U.S. carriers, it doesn't have to if the Chinese are only trying to intimidate Vietnam or Thailand.

Meanwhile, Obama required the Navy to cut a deal with one of his buddies to spend $16/gallon on 450,000 gallons of "biofuel" (the going price for JP5 - the standard jet fuel - is $4/gallon, so $5.4 million more to buy less efficient fuel). He is also pushing cuts in Defense that could very well eliminate two Carrier Battle Groups according to Powerline.

It will take the better part of a decade if not two to undo the damage Obama has done to U.S. standing in the world and to the U.S. military.

You Can Save the World!!!

2011-12-14T09:19:00.000-06:00

I just got this from the denomination's Office of Social Justice:

Young Ministers: You Can Help End HungerBread for the World invites you to apply for a comprehensive advocacy training in Washington, DC. this June to:
Eplore the biblical foundations of anti-hunger advocacy
Gain skills in advocacy and community organizing
Connect with like-minded ministers from across the U.S.
Speak out on Capitol Hill by meeting with your members of Congress
Lead advocacy efforts back home
Full scholarships and travel assistance available. Application deadline is March 1. Visit (web site) or email (email address) for more information.

Uh, no, you can't help end hunger. At least, you can't end hunger in the aggregate. You might be able to end the hunger of a few individuals at a particular point in time, but they'll be hungry again later. There will also always be poor people who don't have enough to eat. Since we cannot usher in the return of Christ and bring Heaven to earth, we cannot overcome the effects of sin and end the suffering of this world.

And you won't end hunger even for a few individuals if you think the way to do that is by relying on the U.S. Congress. As for the rest, I would advise young ministers to instead focus on preaching the Word in season and out of season. That will include calling your congregants to look beyond their own noses and neighborhoods to see people who are suffering and reach out to them to meet both physical and spiritual needs, and that is sufficient to a minister's calling, regardless of his or her age.

You would think that the officials of a Calvinist denomination would have a more robust understanding of human sin and its effects, and a more humble appraisal of human ability to overcome it. At least, I would think that.

Time Magazine Still Exists?

2011-12-14T09:04:00.003-06:00

I'm perusing several blogs this morning and they keep talking about this "Person of the Year" thing in some magazine called Time. The first thing that comes to my mind as I read them is, "Time magazine still exists?"

I haven't seen a copy outside of a doctor's waiting room in years. I don't think I've seen an actual, physical copy of Newsweek or US News and World Report in nearly a decade. I haven't subscribed to a newspaper for delivery of a hard-copy since 1995. At present, I get three magazines delivered to my door - The Banner, National Review, and First Things. Of these, I only actually read the latter. The first is delivered to every family in the CRC, primarily because if they didn't their circulation would drop to about 1,000. The second I read on line but subscribe to the hard copy as a way of financially supporting them.

I'm toying with the idea of subscribing to Naval History and Proceedings, both put out by the Naval Institute.

All this is by way of saying that I'm not unique. Many in my parents' generation still get the paper or one of those news magazines, but it is more out of habit than anything else. The trend in magazines is towards those with fewer annual issues and higher entertainment value. I find the kind of discussions in First Things and National Review entertaining, and the same is true of Naval History and Proceedings. They cater to interests of mine that are fairly narrow and specific. A magazine like Maxim is but a different sort of interest-niche magazine, although the number of men interested in photos of scantily clad females nestled amongst reviews of gadgets and fitness pointers is rather larger than those interested in naval history.

People get their news from television (mostly FoxNews and local broadcasts), radio (often talk-radio, but mostly the top/bottom of the hour news blips while in the car), and then the internet. Of these, only the television and radio are more-or-less passive. Folks happen to "catch" something there, but if you don't get them in the first couple sentences, you won't. On the internet, people are looking for news, so they tend to go for news or information sites they've decided are trustworthy, often multiple sites to compare and contrast how stories are presented or see if they can get a better picture or video of the event.

I'm not sure what that all means, but it has caused no end of consternation in the people whose livelihoods depend on predicting the next big thing.

The Leap of Faith

2011-12-14T07:14:00.000-06:00

It is our place to live in interesting times. Conservatives are trying to change things, while Progressives are trying to hold on to the past. The first Black president in our history is a victim of affirmative action. Print media is dissolving in the face of a digital revolution in which anyone with a phone can be a reporter - but none of the reporters (even the professionals) can be trusted when images and audio are so easily manipulated. Great strides in technology that are introduced as ushering in a brave new world run up against the reality of an unchanged human nature. We celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, by introducing a revised New International Version and an English Standard Version in answer to it. We are at war, but only the warriors (and their families) know it.

It engenders in many a feeling of insecurity. The way we have done things for the last 70 years is passing and we don't know what is coming. More than anything else, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a response of fear. We have allowed our children to grow up coddled, enwombed until nearly 30 in some instances. Our people have grown old with the idea that their interests are secure - it is, after all, social security. Those in the middle have endured because they were promised peace and prosperity in later years that would come while they were still healthy enough to enjoy them. And now those children must face reality - there are no free lunches. Those elderly learn again that in our transient lives nothing is really secure. And those in the middle see the funds supposedly set aside for their pensions and retirements vanish like so much dust in the wind. Oh yes, it is unsettling.

It forces us to ask ourselves, in whom do you trust? Do you really trust in God? What does that mean when you're down to your last $50 and you've no idea where the money for your kids' next meal will come from? Do you trust in your fellow man? Which fellow man? The one trying to buy your vote with other people's money? The one offering you a quick jolt of cash if you'll only deliver this package - no questions? The one walking his dog down your street? The cop driving by? Do you trust in yourself? But you can't give yourself a loan to start a business, and you can't hire yourself, so what does that mean? Do you trust your government - the one that's $15,000 billions in debt and borrowing 40% of what it spends?

But you have to trust someone. You must take the leap of faith. Where you land, and how you land, will have a lot to do with which leap you take. Choose wisely.

Sometimes the Best Witness to Truth Is Silence

2011-12-13T12:28:00.000-06:00

George Weigel has an excellent article in December 2011 issue of First Things - "The Evangelical Reform of Catholic Advocacy"(subscription required). Although he is writing about the Roman Catholic Church, much of what he says applies to others, not least to my own denomination.

When the Church's chief pastors or their public policy agencies intervene in the public policy process on a vast array of matters that do not, except in the remotest sense, touch on questions of first principles or on areas of the Church's special competence, they inevitably suggest that all issues are equal in the eyes of the Catholic Church.... It also overestimates the Church's political throw-weight in the public policy arena...and it is both self-deluding and politically counterproductive for Catholic bishops and their agencies to think that it does and act as if it does.

Delete the word "Catholic", substitute "chief pastors" and "bishops" with "Synod" and you could pretty much say that about the Christian Reformed Church, too. I have pointed out to some that my denomination's 250,000 members in the U.S. and Canada constitute a mere .08% (eight hundredths of one percent) of their combined population. I'd bet around 275 million people in the two countries have never heard of it. Still, the earnest knights at the Office of Social Justice continue to urge "action", which typically means firing off a copy of their latest letter to your elected representatives in the legislature as if our paltry few can sway those who count votes for a living.

Weigel suggests the church needs to recognize the limitations of its competence in the technical aspects of public policy. I concur. Instead, the church should focus on what he calls the "first things of public life". These would be an insistence on attention to the human person as a person, an individual with a moral sense; a desire to promote the common good; subsidiarity (trusting the laity - those who are members of the church, but not embedded in the institution as clergy, bureaucrats, etc.); and solidarity, which is to say that we are one body, rich and poor, healthy and sick, employed and not.

Or, as the founder of the magazine, Msgr Richard John Neuhaus used to say, one of the most important messages the church brings to the public square is that the public sqare is not the first thing.

Yes, I comment here on specific policies - the technical details. I've studied a fair bit of history and economics and I understand a bit about human nature, and on that personal competence, I speak. But I do not speak as the church here. I claim no special competence on the basis of my role in the church and in fact work to disavow any such special competence. These are not the views of the Church or sanctioned by divine revelation and you will not be judged by God as failing in faithfulness if or when you disagree with me.

The declarations by the CRC's Office of Social Justice claim a different character. They claim to be not merely one man's opinion, but Truth. The more they make that claim, the less likely it will be so, and the instances when it is not so will be used against the Church when it does speak Truth. They would speak more truthfully if they did not speak at all.

Leave 'Em Be

2011-12-09T08:32:00.001-06:00

My denomination has a girls' club program intended to mirror and improve on Girl Scouts. Unfortunately, they've accepted some of the feminist tripe that infects the latter organization, too. So I recently got a mailer from them asking for money in order to "help more girls grow a deep love for God as they learn what it means to be activists for Him!"

Great. "activists for Him!" Given the materials handed out for leaders to teach that include stuff on climate change/environmentalism, politically correct sensitivites, and various odes to the latest leftist cause, I can just imagine what "activists for Him!" means. Fortunately those leading the program in my congregation feel free to edit some of this stuff out. Still, it's not something that inspires me with sufficient confidence in the organization to send them additional money.

How about we not try to brainwash our children and turn them all into activists? How about we recognize that there is something appropriate and honorable about going through one's life tending to one's home and hearth, caring for one's own family and neighbors, and not trying to make kids feel guilty because they're not changing the world every other month? How about we let kids be kids and wait to burden them with adult responsibilities until they're able to consider the complexities of the problems? Your typical 7-year-old doesn't have an answer to the problems we face and that's OK. Frankly, your typical 70-year-old doesn't have an answer to the myriad problems our society faces - and that's OK, too. Leave 'em alone and let them live the lives they're called to without making everything a political statement. There's more to life than politics.

Not Waiting at the Bank

2011-12-09T07:15:00.001-06:00

A while back the president bemoaned the invention of ATMs because it means poor bank tellers lost their jobs. The fact that thousands of man-hours spent waiting in line for the next teller were suddenly freed up to be productive is lost on him. For myself, I think it's cool.

I remember when I had to wait for my physical paycheck. Since the bank was only open during the hours that I worked, I had to go on my lunch break, along with several other people who were in the same situation. If I was lucky, I was able to still get lunch that day but most times not. Now I don't see a paycheck - it's deposited directly. At first, that kind of thing could only be done by larger corporations with the computer assets to manage it. Now it can be done by a business (or a church, in my case) with five employees and a couple desktops.

To get cash out, I don't have to guess how much I'll need while in line at the bank with my check. I can swing by almost any business as most grocery stores, gas stations, and even some restaurants have ATMs on the premises. A few button-pushes later, I'm on my way with the cash. If I want cash. Most of the time, I spend the money with a plastic card.

Then there was the process of writing the checks, recording them in the check ledger, making sure the right checks got in the right envelopes, and that those envelopes got mailed in time to get to the biller before the due date. About the only check we write now is the check to church - all the rest of it is done online. No stamps, envelopes, physical checks, or anything. I tell the bank when I want the money to get to the biller and they make sure it happens.

Now, the latest development with my bank takes it the last step. There are occasions when I do get physical checks. These I used to take to the local credit union and process them. When my daughter got a job that issues a physical paycheck, I was thinking we'd have to open a local account for her and then transfer the money to the bank she's used as her primary financial institution since she started at college. As I was looking over how I'd handle that, I discovered that the bank allows one to deposit checks from home.

That's right. I scan the checks at home myself and deposit them with a bank I've never visited located in San Antonio, TX. It's incredibly efficient, entirely reliable, and done in a few minutes' time at home. I think that's pretty awesome.

And you know what? Not one teller lost his or her job because of it. But President Barack Hussein Obama, our sooopperrr genius president who was going to lower the seas and heal the planet - being as he was the one we've been waiting for and all - wants us to go back to waiting for a teller in the bank.

Church Says, "Spend More!"

2011-12-08T14:48:00.001-06:00

Got another "Action Alert!" from my denomination's Office of Social Justice. As you might expect, they're afraid the U.S. federal government will spend less money. They're going to cut!! spending!! refugees!! death!! despair!! Write your congressman!!

Except they aren't planning to cut spending on refugees. They're talking about increasing the spending on refugees by less than the baseline. Remember baseline budgeting? We autmatically assume we'll spend 5% more, so if we only spend 3% more we can call it a "cut".

Besides. We're broke - but that doesn't matter to the OSJ either. Just tax the rich.

Fools.

Former SEIU Chief Wants to Give Slavery a Chance

2011-12-06T15:14:00.001-06:00

It's been out there for a bit, but allow me to also point out how strange it is for an American to think a horribly oppressive, tyrannical regime like that of the Communists in China is superior to freedom.

Freedom is messy, true. And in a free society, people sometimes lose out. But in China, everybody loses - it's just a matter of time. But Andy Stern, late of the SIEU, is just one of a long line of progressives who have admired tyrants. In the '30s you'd find his ilk singing the praises of Mussolini and Stalin and even ol' Adolf. They brought order and method to their unruly countries, made the trains run on time, and so on. If only we could do that here... Now they go to do fawning interviews with the Castros in Cuba, write sympathetic pieces about China, and so on. They always assume that they wouldn't be the ones oppressed, just like Al Gore and the global warming crowds fly all over the world to tell others they should trade in their cars for bicycles.

Equally blinded to the horror of these tyrannies and the joys of American freedom, they wish to assuage their own consciences with the suffering of others. Sad.

UPDATE: added link.

McDonalds 1, San Francisco City Hall 0

2011-12-06T15:06:00.001-06:00

Remember a while back when San Francisco decided to make a strike against childhood obesity by banning toys in kids' meals? That's right - no more "happy" in the "happy meal" because nagging nitwits at city hall think parents can't decide for themselves on their childrens' diets. I said at the time that it wouldn't work, that McDonald's would make them available for a nominal charge, so they weren't "free" in the kids' meals any more and thus compliant with the law.

Well, that's what McDonald's did. You buy your somber little kid's meal, pay an extra 10 cents, and voila! it's Happy again!

To add insult to injury, they're simply donating the 10 cents to Ronald McDonald House, so now the only way the smart set at city hall can go after them is if they want to come off as opposed to the Ronald McDonald House (if you don't know, it's a place for families to stay if/when their children are undergoing treatment for serious illness or injury).

I love the way these fools think they'll pass their oppressive laws and regulations expecting us to just take it.

Told You So

2011-12-06T07:19:00.001-06:00

The people of Sioux Falls voted to spend $175 million on an event center. Shortly afterwards, our local basketball team - the Skyforce - anounced that they will not be playing at the event center, but instead at an alternate venue being built by Sanford Health west of the airport. The city council is concerned. I should think so. I wonder why word of Sanford's arena and the possibility of the Skyforce moving there were not more widely disseminated prior to the bond vote. Could it be our mayor and the event center backers (including the Argus Leader) didn't want it widely known?

Probably not - they were more likely just so certain of themselves that contrary data just didn't register. But I do recall saying at one time that if this thing were such a great idea for making money, private individuals would be already engaged in making it happen. I've never been one to avoid an opportunity to say "I told you so" and I won't now. I told you so.

The word schadenfreude comes to mind. Problem is, as a citizen, I'm still on the hook for my share of that $175 million. Of course, I could move. Whether I do or not, others will. There's nothing better for growing suburbs than making living in the core city more expensive.

Take Heart, Folks

2011-12-06T06:45:00.001-06:00

So, Cain is out - as others have remarked, in a most clumsy fashion. Whether he had an affair with this latest accuser or not, his gregariousness has undone him. You can't run for president unless there's steel under that velvet exterior. When control over billions of dollars are at stake, men are ruthless. Cain isn't. So he's gone.

Unless folks want to go back to one of the earlier "not-Romneys", there's only Ron Paul left.

Yes, I remember Rick Santorum is still running and hasn't had his "not-Romney" shot yet, but he doesn't have the machismo, if you will.

Yes, I know Newt is surging in the polls, too. I can't imagine anyone more able to get me to vote for Romney on the Republican side. His leadership style, such as it is, is chaotic and often incoherent. He's a hog for headlines, and he likes to toss out bombshells that he quickly abandons. He takes his mind out for a walk and then leaves the crap on other peoples' lawns. Compared to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney is a model of consistency, clarity of purpose, and resolve.

As for Romney, I'm not so bothered by where he's changed his position as by where he hasn't - Romneycare in Massachusetts, the model for the execrable Obamacare that is set to afflict the nation in 2013 if it's not stopped.

I wish we had someone more solidly conservative and capable running, but we don't.

It's also well to remember that politics is incremental. The trend lines are obviously moving, and have been moving, to the right since Reagan. The left is putting up quite the rear-guard fight, just as many on the right did when FDR was putting this stuff in place 75 years ago. The biggest rear-guard fight was from 1860-1865, so this is mild by comparison. We need to keep the pressure on, and we need to take as much as we can get with every election cycle at every level of politics.

Consider:
*2010 state and local elections devastated the Democrat party.
*Scott Walker & Wisconsin Republicans (along with Mitch Daniels in Indiana) have shown a way forward to cut off Democrats from union money.
*The liberal media monopoly is broken - MSNBC is a laughingstock, CNN an also-ran, print media in ICU on life-support but nearly dead, the "big three" are so insignificant as to hardly warrant attention, and people are begging Rush Limbaugh to fix things.
*Occupy Wall Street was never more than a bad joke.
*People are fleeing California and even the Democrat governor of New York has come out opposing tax increases

I could point to more, but such optimism is already more than a curmudgeon can bear. Even so, take heart. We've a long way to go, no doubt about it, and there will be losses and retreats to come (Ohio maybe?), but we're making progress.

Governments May Kill - A Response to Joseph Bottum

2011-12-01T08:08:00.001-06:00

Joseph Bottum over at the Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse has an interesting article on capital punishment. He asserts that the United States, in its present form, lacks the authority to kill - to execute criminals. He suggests that there is a middle ground between what governments, simply by being governments, always have authority to do and what governments never have authority to do. From there, he asks, "But are we willing to grant that each [government] possesses—metaphysically, constitutionally, and logically—exactly the same powers as the others?"

From this, he looks at several different governments, both present and historical, points out the differences, and suggests that authority in governments varies. The government of Richard III (the "Lionheart") had authority the government of Nikolas Sarkozy (modern France) does not have. He then goes on to say:

Perhaps some forms of government have a colorable claim to the authority to execute murderers, while others do not. Sorting all that out, I believe the United States is one of those that does not have the authority—at least, not in the form of an attempt to use execution as a way to do real retributive justice to the fact that a murderer has taken a human life...

But what high powers for justice—what balancing of the cosmic books, taking blood for blood—logically exist for a nation in which a supreme court can read its founding documents to say, for example, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”?

If we are going to say that a government lacks the authority to execute criminals - to "balance the cosmic books" - because a judge has said some incredibly silly, irrational, even stupid thing, then no government would have such authority, not even the government of David in Jerusalem. But government is not in the business of balancing cosmic books, since governments are human, not divine enterprises. Neither David, nor Richard III, nor the federal government of the United States has taken over God's job.

The question of a government's authority that he initially raises, that is, what governments always have authority to do and what they never have authority to do, gets at the question of what government is - what is the essence of government? Bottum talks in his article about the "social contract", which is a pleasant conceit of recent vintage, a way of constraining government somewhat, but that's not the essence of government, either its nature or its purpose, and it is because Bottum mistakes the nature of government, taking it from enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau, that his argument goes awry.

The essence of government is force - physical force. The government, to use the language of Romans 13, bears the sword. The essential purpose of government is the restraint of evil, and therefore the converse as well, namely the encouragement of behavior in accordance with the moral law of God - a concept often rendered in English translations of the Bible as "justice". The authority of government is constrained by its nature and its purpose, not by the inanities of judges, however highly placed they might be. As he notes himself in the opening paragraphs, a manifestly tyrannical government, such as the current regime in Iran, still has the authority to punish thieves, murderers, and rapists. It is where it violates its essence and purpose, such as when it executes victims of rape rather than the perpetrators and thus encourages evil, that government lacks authority.

Given that this is the essence of government, the United States, as all governments, does have the authority to kill when it is used to restrain evil, that is, according to the purpose God has established for government. This is not the authority to kill because a criminal deserves to die. We all deserve to die (Romans again - wages of sin and all that). It is not a matter of retribution, either. It is about the restraint of evil. The question of whether it is effective, or the most effective, or necessary to apply maximum force - to kill - is a prudential question and it will have different answers. The sword is not always a precision instrument and using it may damage other aspects of society we would rather preserve. Nor is the sword the only power available to restrain evil, even though it is the only power essential to government. But all governments, by definition, have the authority to kill.

Dmnd if You Do, Dmnd if You Don't

2011-11-30T10:34:00.001-06:00

Ever in search of victims, the AP has hit on soldiers who now will not deploy.

That's right. Not calling out the Guard and Reserves to go to Iraq and Afghanistan is now a terrible injustice because some of those people were counting on military paychecks that won't happen.

So, calling out the Guard and Reserve from their civilian life to go to war is terrible, and so is not calling out the Guard and Reserve to go to war is terrible.

I understand the frustration with the DoD's "go" "don't go" "be ready to go" "stand down" "why aren't you already here" kind of chain-jerking. Fact is, it's part and parcel of life in the military, including the Guard and Reserve. It's why we have phrases like "semper gumby". It's why I used to tell Marines and sailors, "nothing is certain until after the fact, and often not even then."

But these men and women are soldiers (and Marines and sailors and airmen). They're not victims. They're volunteers. Let the civilians whine. We will up-kit and work around it because that's what we do.

Iran Mugging for Camera Again

2011-11-30T10:25:00.001-06:00

So, an Iranian mob - no doubt organized and encouraged by the government (the police in the lead photo when I looked at that article don't seem to be opposing so much as regulating the attack) - assaulted and trashed the British embassy in Tehran.

Britain has now ordered all Iranian diplomats out of the country within 48 hours.

I thought Obama was going to reset that diplomacy thing and make for peace and harmony in Iran - after all, the only reason they hate us is because of evil Republicans like George Bush, isn't it?

How the British (or French or Germans or whoever) can still think this is a regime we can work with is beyond me. They're thugs and tyrants intent on developing nuclear weapons so as to bully even more people. Any solution in the Middle East that leaves the government in Tehran still standing is no solution at all.

Reflecting on the GOP Campaigns as They Presently Stand

2011-11-29T07:59:00.001-06:00

More allegations against Cain. Yawn. What soured me on Cain wasn't the accusations, but his response. It was undisciplined, included false accusations against other campaigns and against at least one journalist, and thoroughly discombobulated him. A Republican president is going to have to endure far worse, as Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II amply demonstrated. The hatred of those who prayed for the assassin who attempted to kill Reagan, of those who published the vitriolic bile and hoped for death of Bush II, who arrayed all the forces of dishonesty and demagoguery against men like Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, who maliciously abused Palin's children, not to mention the lies about herself - that kind of hatred cannot and will not be sated. Any Republican who aspires to the presidency must be prepared to face it and deal with it.

Santorum is still at the end of the line hoping people will notice him. They won't.

Bachmann is betting it all on Iowa. She'll lose that bet, even if she wins Iowa (which I doubt).

Perry is hoping to make a comeback, but the narrative is sealed, I think. He blew it. I don't know why - his performance in his campaigns for governor of Texas and as governor are certainly far better than his performance on the campaign trail for president - but he blew it.

I'm rather stunned at the elevation of Gingrich in recent polls. He's about the only person in the GOP field I would have put lower on my list of preferences than Romney. Anybody who calls himself a conservative, and thinks it is a good idea to advertise some environmentalist initiative - while sitting on a couch with Nancy Pelosi - is either not a conservative, not thinking, or both. In Gingrich's case, I think it's both.

That leaves Ron Paul as the only other not-Romney candidate. Say this for him, he's consistent. He's driven by principles, not polls. And he's not going to blow smoke just to get elected. I'm just not sure about those principles when it comes to foreign policy.

Or I can bite the bullet and tag along with Romney. It would be nice if Romney could give us some plausible passion for conservatism, but then Romney wouldn't be Romney.

I can't help but wonder, though, will the GOP manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again?

Not Everything's Wrong

2011-11-25T10:57:00.001-06:00

I can be a bit curmudgeonly - this is a curmudgeon's blog, after all. Then I see stories like this one and I think, there is so much right in the world that never makes the papers, never gets to the news. You get something like Abu Ghraib, for instance, and the tens of thousands of soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors who do their duty fade into the background. Same thing for the church - one clergyman goes off, whether it be something like burning Qu'rans or protesting funerals or abusing his parishoners, and that makes the news while the thousands who serve faithfully continue unnoticed.

And for teenagers, too. One guy with his pants on backwards, a chip on his shoulder, and a gun in his hand - he'll make the headline news and "Young people these days..." precedes some complaint about them. But most teenagers today are like the teenagers of ages past, trying to figure out what they're supposed to do with their lives, what's right, and once they figure out those two things, how in the world are they going to do them.

Sometimes they nail it, and that's good, and we should note it more often. So have a look at some teenagers who nailed it.

A Day to Remember Who's in Charge

2011-11-23T08:41:00.001-06:00

I think the most common form of idolatry in the West since 1917 is the worship of the State. It is clear that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is hugely into this religion - the state is supposed to teach them, provide work for them, pay their bills for them, pick up after them, heal their diseases, clothe them, house them, and everything else their hearts desire. No rules, just freebies.

The Democrat Party in large part also worships at the altar of the state. A bit of regulation here, a tweaking of the tax code there, some new law or program over in this other place, and voila! Heaven. No more sorrow, no more sadness, no more poverty or destitution, no more sickness or injury, no more pain, brought to you courtesy of your friendly neighborhood government bureaucrat, congressman, senator, mayor, or whatever.

But quite a few conservatives and Republicans (no, that's not redundant) also have an abiding faith in the ability of government to fix things. That belief was George W. Bush's undoing, as well as his father's. It feeds quite a few in the Tea Party, too. What they think government should be doing to create this utopia might differ from what Democrats think government should do, but the idea that government can solve whatever ails us is still a key element of their belief structure.

So it is good to have our government set aside a day each year to remind us that this is not true. Thanksgiving is just that day. The annual proclamations issued by almost all presidents surrounding Thanksgiving, the law making it a holiday, and the way we celebrate it, all point us to the real power in the world. Even as committed a statist as Barrack Obama will not use the occasion to call on us to thank him or any other person or agent of government. We will be summoned to thank God, the Lord of lords and King of kings.

Or, as the Psalmist says:
   Put not your trust in princes,
           in mortal men who cannot save...
   Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
           Whose hope is in the Lord his God...   (Ps. 146, 3, 5 NIV)

Have a blessed Thanksgiving.

Youth Leaving Because...

2011-11-22T13:55:00.001-06:00

So, now the latest from my denominational magazine is an article saying that young people are leaving the church because of our stand in regards to evolution. Except our official position on evolution isn't what the young people seem to believe it is.

What might be the cause of this misunderstanding? Could it be that same magazine's sensationalist and biased reporting on a recent kerfuffle regarding the historicity of Adam and Eve? Naaahhhh. Couldn't be that. Funny, too, how all the writers in the Banner seem to believe that young people are abandoning the Christian Reformed Church because we are not making sufficient accommodation to the mainstream of secular culture - not endorsing gay marriage, not buying the evolutionist line (or at least, not all of it), resisting the kind of radical, Gloria-Steinem-type feminism, and so on. Confusion about the Gospel, about the mission and calling of the Church, about our heritage, and watering down the radically counter-cultural claims of the Gospel are never a problem.

For the record, we do believe that Adam and Eve were real people - historical figures. We recognize there are certain problems within the text concerning the historicity of everything, particularly dates and timelines, in Genesis 1-11. For instance, Cain killed Abel, then went off with his wife to the land of Nod to build a city. But wait a minute - where'd Cain get a wife from if there was only him, Abel (now dead), Adam and Eve? And I can see building a nice home for the family, but a whole city for just the two of them, or even 10 if his wife mimics the "Octomom"?

We also realize that there is a problem with understanding "day" as "24 hours". In the first place, the reason a day is 24 hours is because that's the time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis relative to the sun. The day was broken down into two sections by the Babylonians with six hours before the middle, and six hours after. Similarly, the night was so divided. So we got four segments of six equal time units called "hours". The reason they were divided into six segments is because of the Babylonians - their numbering system was a base six system rather than the base ten system we use. This, by the way, is why in Revelation the number of the Beast is 666 - a kind of "perfection", if you will, of the Babylonian captivity. Anyway, however many segments you use, it's tough to arrange for such a day when there's no sun (not created until the 4th day) and no land (the 3rd day) to rotate relative to it.

One could also point out that vegetation (1:11), animals (1:24), and human beings (2:7) are all created out of pre-existing material. In the first two instances, God says "Let the land produce..." and in the latter, God formed man from the dust of the earth (also, in Gen 2, Adam is created before the vegetation, but in Genesis 1 the vegetation comes on day 3 and humanity comes on day 6).

So we are not bound to a literal reading of Genesis 1-11 or to any other reading that precludes understanding God as using some method resembling evolution to create the universe that is. Theologically we are committed to a real Adam and Eve, but even the most hardened evolutionist would aver that we had to start somewhere. The idea that we might have seen this new species - humanity - arise independently in multiple locations, to be perfectly frank, displays a far greater faith in miracles than anything suggested by even the most fundamentalist of Christians.

Congressional Hot Potato

2011-11-22T06:59:00.001-06:00

As many people predicted, the so-called "supercommittee" turned out to be less than super. The whole point of that committee was to kick the can down the road in hopes the populace would be concerned with other things by then. Once it became clear they would still be engaged, it became a game of "hot potato" - one guy says "increase revenue" (the latest euphemism for tax increases), the other says "cut spending". Both sides know that the populace wants neither higher taxes nor reduced services and hand-outs from government.

What they don't know is two things. First, they don't know how to continue to maintain the fantasy that the voters can get everything they want, courtesy of the government, with no payments due. Second, they don't know whether the people will think they can increase taxes only on other people while still getting their hand-out (the Democrat position) or if they will accept a smaller government but one that lets them keep their own money (the Republican position).

So the blame game begins as each tries to toss the hot potato of unpleasant news to the other party. "Republicans are meanies out to protect billionaires when just a little increase in Warren Buffet's taxes will save it all." It's a lie, but one quite a few people want to believe. It might work. If it does, then we'll see Democrat majorities in Congress again and we'll see the calamity facing Greece come to our shores.

"We can save Medicare and Social Security with just a few tweaks around the edges, and with our 'pro-growth' tax cuts, you'll save money, too!" That, too, is a lie. We can't save these entitlements - not in the long term - because they are premised on an untruth commonly referred to as a "Ponzi scheme". But that, also, is a lie quite a few people want to believe. It might work. The advantage of this second lie is that it starts to pull us away from dependence on government and makes it possible to gradually prepare people for the truth.

What truth is that? A truth applied in a radically novel way in Robert Heinlein's book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: TANSTAAFL.

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

So, Who's Being Disrespectful?

2011-11-17T12:36:00.001-06:00

I've been reading Gordon Campbell's Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011, a fascinating history of how the KJV came to be and how it has functioned in English and Western Civilization since its publication.

One of the interesting tidbits that was entirely new to me is that "thee" and "thou" were, at the time of version's initial publication, informal forms of the singular 2nd person pronoun. It is only because of their use in reference to God in the KJV - a pattern picked up from the tendency to use that form when referring to any deity, pagan or otherwise - that they came to be regarded as formal and more respectful than "you".

Wish I'd known that when I was a teenager and inclined to give a smart answer to the old folks insisting on "thee" and "thou" in their prayers... Then again, probably better for my long-term spiritual health that I did not.

Church Folks Display Math Impairment

2011-11-17T08:14:00.001-06:00

As I've had occasion to note before, church people are apparently not all that good with numbers.

Both the "Circle of Protection" yahoos endorsed by my denomination and the authors of the "Creation Stewardship Report" just published - both of which I mentioned in earlier posts - advocate U.S. federal government expenditures of vast sums, apparently blithely unaware of the fact that the United States Federal Government is over $15,000,000,000,000 in debt.

Just what money do they propose we spend on these projects of theirs?

I could also point out the obvious ineffectiveness of global frameworks for anything - the UN wastes more money in five minutes than many nations will see in five years. Everything they do sucks money into the pockets of tin pot dictators, corrupt bureaucrats, and third-world kleptocrats.

And if those precious child poverty programs are so wonderfully effective, why have they not made any appreciable dent in child poverty?

But let's just stick to the basics for now - the money isn't there. The Federal Government is broke. If we don't start acting on that fact, then the fate of Greece and Italy and Ireland awaits us. Think what that will do to your precious children, eh?

Whose Politics Are Acceptable in Church?

2011-11-17T07:45:00.001-06:00

My denomination's Office of Social Justice sent this out in an e-mail:

Take action on the US budgetThe Super Committee, which is charged with dealing with our budget deficit, is finalizing its recommendations this week. A final proposal may be submitted for a vote as early as tomorrow. Please call your Representative and Senators and encourage them to form a Circle of Protection around the programs that assist the poor. Programs such as SNAP (formerly food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit are working to keep hunger and poverty at bay for millions of Americans. Emergency food aid and development assistance provide sustainable and lifesaving support for children and mothers, including in the famine-stricken Horn of Africa. These and many other programs are on being threatened. The budget must not be balanced on the backs of the poor. Please take action now to encourage Congress to continue funding these live-saving[sic] programs!

There was a link connected with the "take action now" that would take you to a denominational web site where you enter your zip code and get a list of your representatives and senators along with a form letter to copy and paste. Another link takes you to "A Circle of Protection" web site - essentially an on-line collection of leftist church leaders. I can't find anything that tells us the source of this site or its funding, but where Jim Wallis is, can George Soros be far away?

I've gotten some grief over the years I've been keeping this blog from people who think I'm too political or strident - usually by people who have no problem with this kind of broadcast e-mail.

Nothing I do as a pastor limits the ability of those with opposing political views to serve in the church. Never have I from the pulpit come close to saying that Christ requires agreement with me on matters relating to the federal budget. And I have urged no more political activism than that my congregation take steps to become informed and participate in the political process explicitly as Christians and on Christian principles. As a matter of principle, there is no American flag in our sanctuary and we do not distribute election literature from the SD Family Research Council or any other organization. I am careful to restrict the use of patriotic hymns that are too often directed more at praising the country than praising God. We are a church, and harbingers of the Kingdom of God, not a political action committee or instigators of some earthly utopia.

But this came from the denominational headquarters and represents an official stance by the Christian Reformed Church of North America.

So I ask those of you who object to this little blog of mine expressing my personal views in a way that does not in the least impinge on the freedom of Christians to hold other views, when will you begin objecting to these kinds of statements from your denominational officials? The CRCNA is not the only one that does this - the ELCA, PCUSA, Episcopal Church in America, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and so on are also perpetrators of leftist ideologies under the banner of Christ.

And understand, too, why I might think your problem isn't that I'm political on this blog, but that I'm conservative.

Succumbing to the Spirit of the Age

2011-11-16T14:50:00.001-06:00

I didn't go to Princeton Theological Seminary. I went to Calvin. I can't say that my experience at Calvin Theological Seminary mirrored Dr. Dalrymple's at PTS, either. But then, I graduated 20 years ago. Things have changed since then.

I really can't say how they've changed. Judging from the seminarians I've met or recent graduates who have been examined, I'd say it's a pretty mixed bag. But then, the bag was pretty mixed 20 years ago, too.

I can say how things have changed in the church, and the trends in play in the Christian Reformed Church in North America over the last decade are disturbingly like those Dr. Dalrymple portrays from his own seminary days. Princeton serves the Presbyterian churches, in particular the PCUSA - a denomination with millions of members. The CRC has no more than 1/4 of a million members and is likely going to continue shrinking at an average of 2-3,000 per year for the foreseeable future - faster if these recommendatinos being made to Synod 2012 are approved. The next decade will determine whether we survive to see our bicentennial in 2057 or not. I'm not confident that we will. Frankly, if we continue along this path, I'm not confident that we should.

CRC Issues Eviction Warnings to Conservatives

2011-11-16T07:59:00.001-06:00

We have the Belhar foolishness, and there's also a revised Form of Subscription for office bearers going before Synod 2012 that, by including the Contemporary Testimony: Our World Belongs to God, effectively establishes a political test for leadership positions in the church. If that weren't enough, the CRC has a study committee ostensibly on "Creation Stewardship". It's not. It's about....TA DA!...global warming politics. The bulk of the report just re-iterates the standard anthropogenic global warming alarmism, discounts skeptics, and asserts that everybody says it's happening, the only question is magnitude, and if we don't stop exhaling (CO2 is the primary culrpit, remember), we're all going to die. Women and minorities to be hardest hit, of course.

The report, as you might expect, calls on the Synod of the CRC to declare (on the basis of what competence, I don't know) that human activity definitely is causing global warming, and then goes on to recommend:

G. That synod call upon the churches, their members, and appropriate denominational agencies and institutions to respond with generosity and compassion to people and places affected by climate change, as well as to make efforts to mitigate it. This includes advocating with our governments to commit the necessary financial resources in an effective global framework to assist populations that are bearing the brunt of the negative effects of climate change while being the least able to cope. (Emphasis added)

That's not about creation stewardship. That's about political activism. The rest of the report's recommendations are similarly political and secular. It is an attempt to commit the Christian Reformed Church, as a church, to the questionable political enterprise of global economic regulation in the name of warding off global warming - a warming that may or may not be occurring and may or may not be caused by human activity.

It is looking like Synod 2012 will be a watershed synod in the CRCNA - and may very well spell its demise. In addition to this nonsense, we have a revised Formula of Subscription that in effect sets a political test for office bearers in the denomination, and a decision on the Belhar Confession that opens the CRC to the dangers of Liberation Theology. The room for those with conservative political and economic views is quickly shrinking in the CRC and if these things all go through there will be none at all. It could very well be that by July of next year, I'm no longer a pastor in the CRC.

Progressive=Paternalist Elite

2011-11-15T18:04:00.001-06:00

If you wish to understand the mind set of liberals in power - the paternalism that thinks people like the late Ted Kennedy or Barney Frank somehow know better how to run your life than you do - then this piece from National Review is a must-read.

Enjoy.

Church Is Important

2011-11-15T08:55:00.001-06:00

Worth reading - and it matches my own experience, too. I've had to be away from family quite a bit over the last couple decades. Knowing there are others looking out for them makes that possible.

Church is important.

UPDATE: Added the link.

Take His - Mine Is Essential!

2011-11-15T06:37:00.001-06:00

The so-called "supercommittee" is under pressure. Budget cuts shouldn't affect whoever the latest commentator thinks is really important. The most recent are "poor" and "defense".

The intent for the Democrats is to force the across-the-board sequestration, and then blame it on Republican intransigence on taxing the rich. Because Republicans wouldn't raise taxes on Warren Buffett, the pitch goes, poor people are starving. They aren't, in large part because there aren't very many genuinely poor people in the U.S., but that's the pitch. Regardless, using government to steal from somebody else is hardly the answer, as Constant Conservative and the Montana editor to whom he links explain.

This pitch of the Democrats is nonsense, of course, but it's nonsense that too many people will believe when it is bombarded at them in advertisements, "news" broadcasts, print media, and the caterwauling pleas of those dependent on government spending.

But if it were ag subsidies, ethanol, or anything else, there'd be somebody screaming. Somehow in all the trillions of dollars we're borrowing and tossing about, there's not a penny that can be spared. Not from me, anyway, whoever the latest "me" is. Somebody else has to give up their place at the federal teat.

We've run out of "somebody elses" to stiff. We're all going to have to wean ourselves off the feds. We don't have the money - and not all of Mr. Buffett's billions will change that.

Crystal Squabbles

2011-11-15T06:31:00.001-06:00

This is what happens when you have a church based on a mere mortal rather than on Jesus.

I don't doubt that much of what happened at the Crystal Cathedral did indeed glorify God, but far too much was dedicated to glorifying Robert Schuller. It is his image, his books, his sermons, his presence that formed the foundation of the place. Since he has retired, the congregation has been beset with declining revenue, excessive bills, division and controversy. The family, the congregation, the church board, and various other factions are squabbling - not over how best to be faithful to God, but over who gets the money and how much.

Tragic. But it is a lesson - build your church on the same foundation Paul laid for the Corinthian church, on Jesus Christ, and have a care how you build.

It's About Time

2011-11-15T06:20:00.001-06:00

The cops are finally acting to evict the "Occupy Zuccotti Park" miscreants. For health reasons. Violence, assaults, rapes, theft, trespassing, and being a public nuisance are apparently not sufficient reason, but rats, tuberculosis, and other such things are.

By the way, this is what the Al Gores of this world would impose on us - in the name of saving the planet, of course: squalor, poverty, anarchy, illness. If we are going to hit their precious targets of CO2 reduction and live more "naturally", this is it. Hobbes and Calvin were right. In their natural state, men are beasts and we are witnessing a whole bunch of miniature Lord of the Flies encampments in these cities.

The residents and owners of the area, including the various businesses, should remember the refusal of Democrats in their city governments to maintain order, protect their citizens, and inhibit criminals when the next election comes around. I hope they remember in Oakland, and all the other places where these refugees from sanity have imposed themselves on the citizenry unchecked.

UPDATE: A judge has issued a straining order, denying the owners of Zuccotti Park access to their property and preventing the police from enforcing the law. One wonders what they teach in law school these days...Oh. Right..

Law Prof does what Law Profs Do in Massachusetts

2011-11-14T21:34:00.001-06:00

They say silly, ignorant, wrongheaded and stupid things. He's irrational, unfeeling, and hardly merits the privilege of cleaning restrooms for the troops.

It is rather tedious, this cloying self-righteousness he claims for himself. But he's a law professor at a school in Massachusetts. Whatever would you expect?

Syrian Rebels Fighting Back

2011-11-11T09:17:00.001-06:00

It seems that things are heating up in Syria. Some of those opposing the regime have obtained weapons of their own, and they include some defectors from the Syrian army. There are reports that the army is now taking casualties, too.

There are voices, according to this article, who are concerned that a supposedly peaceful protest movement is turning violent. It is rather the case that the protest movement has had violence thrust upon it. Assad has made it clear that he is quite prepared to see the streets of his cities run red with the blood of his people. Peaceful protests only work against rulers with a conscience and a sense of morals - if Ghandi had been going up against Mao instead of the British, India would still be a colony today.

Syria is going to break up. The Turks, Hezbollah and their Iranian handlers, various other factions in Lebanon, Syria, and the Middle East at large, will then be vying for the pieces. The Turks have the upper hand, I think, and for all the ominous signs coming out of Ankara, they'd still be a darn sight better than Hezbollah or Assad. It will also be interesting to see what effect this has on Lebanon which has been for all intents and purposes a Syrian puppet for 20 years now.

Another Reason to Defund NPR

2011-11-10T08:30:00.000-06:00

So, NPR has taken to producing libelous slanders against South Dakota.

Reading Hinderaker's report makes my blood boil - the more so in that my tax dollars go to pay for these outrageous lies.

Pope Benedict XVI Gets to the Heart of Things

2011-11-09T15:12:00.000-06:00

I've been reading Pope Benedict XVI's book, Jesus of Nazareth Part II - it's well worth reading, by the way, as are most things written by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

One of the themes he's been working with is the intermingling of the religious and the political as it relates to Holy Week and the Passion of Christ. For instance, on p. 170, he writes:

It is important to distinguish between this underlying religious and political motivation on the part of Israel's leaders and the specific power-interests of the dynasty of Annas and Caiaphas.... To this extent the death sentence passed against Jesus is characterized by a curious overlapping of two layers: the legal concern to protect the Temple and the nation, on the one hand, and the ambitious power seeking of the ruling group, on the other.

It is an overlap that corresponds to what we discovered in the cleansing of the Temple. Jesus fights there, on the one hand, as we saw, against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end.

What he's saying is that, from the position of someone like Caiaphas, the political need to protect his power base - the Temple and the nation that is Israel - overlaps with his function as the high priest of a religious order. They encourage each other. So naturally, he tends to view Jesus in a similar vein when he claims to be the Messiah. Since he represents overturning the cultic practices of Temple worship, he is also a political threat.

But when they bring him to Pilate, they must emphasize the political yet, "From the point of view of the Roman juridical and political order, which fell under [Pilate's] competence, there was nothing serious to hold against Jesus." (p. 189) As Pilate interrogates Jesus, Jesus answers him by pointing out that he has no army, then continues: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." (Jn 18:37). Reflecting on this, Benedict says (pp. 190-193),

Dominion demands power; it even defines it. Jesus, however, defines as the essence of his kingship witness to the truth. Is truth a political category? Or has Jesus' "kingdom" nothing to do with politics? To which order does it belong? ...it is entirely understandable that the pragmatic Pilate asks him: "What is truth?" (Jn 18:38)...

"Bearing witness to the truth" means giving priority to God and to his will over against the interests of the world and its powers....We may also say that bearing witness to the truth means making creation intelligible and its truth accessible from God's perspective - the perspective of creative reason - in such a way that it can serve as a criterion and a signpost in this world of ours, in such a way that the great and the mighty are exposed to the power of truth...

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.

And if you think about it, that explains quite a bit of the problem the West is facing right now. The sad thing is that my own denomination is also succumbing to the pragmatism of the world.

I Hope I Was Wrong

2011-11-09T06:29:00.000-06:00

Final vote to spend $175 million for an Event Center was 23,283 in favor, 16,806 opposed. I hope, for the sake of the city, that I've been wrong. I fear that I am not.

Cain Helping Cover Holder - Tho' Not on Purpose

2011-11-08T16:04:00.000-06:00

The Cain accuser's circus is at least useful to the Obama administration. It keeps Holder's testimony before the Senate regarding the "Fast & Furious" program out of the headlines.

If you don't know about "Fast & Furious", it was a program instigated in mid- to late 2009 (well after Obama was inaugurated) in which weapons were sold to known gun-runners for Mexican drug cartels. Several hundred weapons were provided to the cartels under the auspices of the program and much of the violence in Mexico of recent vintage has involved these weapons - including the murders of some Border Patrol agents.

Holder's claim was, first, that he didn't know anything about it until Congress started asking questions. Some e-mails then surfaced showing he'd been pretty thoroughly briefed on the program several months earlier. So now he's retreating to the standard line from the Obama administration whenever there's a problem - it's Bush's fault.

The economic news isn't all that great, either, so Cain is keeping that in the back pages, too.

As for the Cain stuff, what we have so far is:

Ms. Bialek said Cain did some despicable things, but there is no evidence other than her statement.

Cain says he didn't, and that Bialek has a history of gold-digging and mismanagement (for which they produce evidence, though it's not what anyone would call "conclusive").

And I'm reminded of the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill mess. As with Clarence Thomas, it doesn't matter if it's true. All that matters is that it get out there. It raises doubts, calls into question Cain's reputation. Some will assume he's guilty because, after all, whenever a woman accuses a man of sexual assault, he must be guilty. The media template supports this - conservatives are always guilty, even if proven otherwise; liberals never are (unless you're Jonathan Edwards).

All I can tell for certain is that Cain is not handling these accusations as well as Holder is covering up his misdeeds - and Cain is helping Holder immensely in that regard.

Sioux Falls Event Center - Pays for Itself (Maybe - in 100 years)

2011-11-06T07:04:00.000-06:00

I find this interesting little tidbit in our local rag concerning the proposed event center.

The thing is going to cost us about $175 million - $115 million to build and another $60 million in interest over 20+ years. This past year, the city of Sioux Falls paid $1.3 million in subsidies to the current Arena/Convention Center. Proponents of this event center boondoggle, however, claim that it will net a $1-2.5 million profit - take the middle and figure $1.75 million. The paper doesn't say whether they believe that will be an annual profit, or over a more extended period, but we'll assume they mean annually.

Think about that for a moment, and you notice two things. First, the event center will essentially replicate/replace many of the services now provided by the Arena/Convention Center, and will be part of the same complex. So we're going to somehow magically get a $1.75 million profit out of a business that, up until now, has been running at a $1.3 million annual loss simply by making it bigger?

The paper doesn't report how they figure profits, either, but I'm not sanguine that it includes paying back the loan, so even if we do make $1.75 million per year in profit off the thing, we'd have to make that annual profit for 100 years just to recoup the initial investment.

But it won't make a profit, and we'll be saddled with one very, very expensive white elephant.

UPDATE: Thought I'd explain why I don't think they're figuring the cost of building and financing in their imaginary "profit" figure. The building and its financing will be paid for out of a separate pot of money - sales tax receipts - and not calculated in the operating costs of the event center itself. It's a whole lot easier to calculate a profit if you don't include the majority of your expenses and costs.

Cain Flubbing Response

2011-11-03T13:58:00.000-05:00

I still think that the assault on Cain in regards to these harrassment accusations are driven in part by his race. I have no knowledge of their veracity, but as far as those who seek his downfall, veracity in these things is irrelevant.

I must also say, however, that the Cain campaign has done a lousy job responding and that's telling. How will he respond when one of the people he appoints or nominates to some office turns out to have a scandalous closet? How will that be managed? From all appearances, I think it's safe to say, "poorly".

His business experience is good, and I am not to the point where I am unwilling to support him. Nevertheless, politics is not a business and there are limits to how business experience translates into governing acumen. In politics, no scandal is ever truly behind you, and a few dollars thrown at the person complaining will never solve it. Neither can you get off by not knowing - not when you're after the top job. Truman was right. The buck stops there. Cain's handling of the matter is therefore more than a little troubling.

Encouraging News

2011-11-03T07:19:00.000-05:00

Well, I find the news encouraging anyway. The nattering nags who managed to eliminate some of the rights of private citizens to act as they see fit with their private property - the ones who managed to push through a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, etc. - have cost the state of SD at least $5 million over the last year.

You cannot fund the government, or any part of it, through a tax on substances the government bans. This simple truth you might think is self-evident, but apparently it isn't. Here's hoping it's another $5-10 million in 2011.

So, naturally, the nagging do-gooders (who can't imagine that there's any waste in a system where the local superintendent has a higher salary than the governor of the entire state) are now pushing for increases in state sales taxes - to "fund education". It won't fund education. It'll fund administrators, boondoggles, gimmicks, and other such things that may or may not have anything to do with actual educating or learning, and it will prevent schools from feeling the pressures everybody else feels to find efficiencies, improvements in methods, and tightening of priorities.

Maybe we can get a referrendum going to reduce the state sales tax by a penny, too. Put them both on next November's ballot?

Oh - and next Tuesday? If you live in Sioux Falls, remember to vote on the Event Center question - and please vote "no". If it's all that profitable, then private enterprise can do it without my tax dollars. If they need my tax dollars, then it's a sure sign it won't be profitable. If it goes through, then my recommendation would be to call it the Sioux Falls Solyndra Center.

Reflecting on Reformation Day

2011-11-01T06:51:00.001-05:00

In addition to being Halloween, yesterday was also "Reformation Day" - the day Martin Luther submitted his 95 theses to the Archbishop of Mainz for disputation. The problem was the sale of "indulgences". If you're not familiar with what that meant in 1517, it was a crass practice in which the church dispensed from its "treasury of merits" in exchange for dispensations from a more worldly treasury. Those presumably being purified by the fires of purgatory could have that purification accelerated if you would buy an indulgence or two from the church, thus getting your loved ones into Heaven a few centuries sooner than they otherwise might have.

Luther, being a bit naive, saw the matter as a theological and biblical issue and assumed the Archbishop was equally concerned with discerning the truth. He found, instead, that the issue was about money - lots of money - and that this was the primary concern of both the Archbishop of Mainz and the Bishop of Rome. Money from those indulgence sales paid for St. Peter's Basilica and the Archbishop's residence, both rather lavish affairs. The response of the church, therefore, was to denounce Luther and try to shut down his nascent theological objections. If he were to convince people that indulgences were worthless, then how would the church raise money for its various projects?

Some political leaders, including the ruler of Saxony where Luther resided, also saw Luther's objections in terms of money, but to them it meant ending a practice that siphoned off much of their national wealth to Rome.

A struggle for political and economic power, mixed in with efforts to proclaim, defend, and impose varying perceptions of revealed truth, ensued. From 1517 until 1648, Europe was at war with itself. Massive upheavals in France, the Low Countries, England, what is now Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire (these latter two known at the time as the "Holy Roman Empire"), and Italy tore Europe apart. Towards the end of this period, the Ottoman Empire made its last attempt at Vienna, only being driven back in 1643. There were peasant revolts, civil wars, rebellions, invasions, conquests, and re-conquests until Europe was spent.

If the churches of Europe today are too-frequently empty, it can be traced to the seeds of disillusionment planted and nurtured during those 130 years of war. The First Amendment to the US Constitution also owes its existence to that conflict and its eventual resolution in the Peace of Westphalia.

I have often wondered how things would have turned out differently had the Archbishop of Mainz and the Pope responded as spiritual leaders rather than worldly potentates. How much of the pain and suffering that ensued might have been spared? Would the church in the West still have fragmented? What, of good or ill, would change? But I have a hard time celebrating Reformation Day. It was a tragic, painful necessity. The church, both Protestant and Catholic, is better today for having endured it, but at such a cost - millions dead; millions more disillusioned, rudderless and unable to trust those who would present the truth.

I think of the Reformation the way I think of the U.S. Civil War. I'm glad slavery is over. I'm glad the church is reformed. I wish both could have been accomplished without the bloodshed.

And We Call These Guys "Moderates"??

2011-10-31T07:00:00.001-05:00

If the Israelis thought they might gain a moment's respite by agreeing to the 1,000-1 swap for their soldier, they should think again and I suspect they are. In addition to the recent rocket attacks, we now have a Saudi - a member of the royal family no less - offering a $1 million reward for capturing an Israeli soldier so they can replicate this exchange.

Absolute, irrevocable defeat of the Palestinians and their allies is the only way to achieve peace, and the sooner we do it, the better.

Cain Highlights Racial Basis of Abortion

2011-10-31T06:56:00.000-05:00

Another reason to go after Herman Cain is surfacing - he's exposing the truth behind Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, and Ms. Sanger was a strong believer in eugenics. The idea behind eugenics was that we would use our understanding of genetics and evolution to breed a superior and improving human race. They supported the forced sterilization of criminals and those labeled as insane, as well as those who seemed to come from families with a multi-generational history of poverty, certain diseases, and so on.

As part of that effort, they decided to make abortion readily available to poor people from "inferior" races - Black people fitting both of those bills in their minds, a lot of their clinics were located near Black neighborhoods and towns.

That history is still very much a part of Planned Parenthood's present. As this recording makes clear, they mask it as providing "support" to minorities, but the woman is unphased by the "donor's" assertion that there are too many Black people in Ohio. Live Action has also demonstrated Planned Parenthood's eagerness to earmark money to kill Black babies, and in New York City - one of the few places that tracks abortions by race - the rate of abortions for Black women is nearly 3 times that of White women (59.8% versus 20.4%).

But Planned Parenthood doesn't want you to know this.

Going After a Black Man Who Left Plantation

2011-10-31T06:39:00.001-05:00

Cain is doing well in the polls, so the smear campaign begins. Politico carries an anonymously sourced story that says two women accused him of sexual harrassment while he was running Godfather's Pizza. Whether it's true or not doesn't matter. All Politico needs to do to satisfy their liberal masters is get "Herman Cain" connected to "sexual harrassment".

Cain, of course, denies the allegation but almost everybody - including Bill Clinton - denies the allegation no matter how much evidence is produced. Such a denial, therefore, carries little weight in the scandal-hungry populace.

The fear of libidinous Black men goes back to the days of slavery. People would stoke the fires of fear by painting verbal pictures of virile Black men running off with the villager's pure White virgin daughters, inspiring lynchings and evictions occasionally over the years since. You can still find the stereotype expressed today in various porn fetish publications. Black men as sexual predators often figure as major plot devices in literature, too - take the movie The Color Purple, for instance.

So such accusations are to be expected when it comes to a Black man ascending to power. Notice how they went after Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. They used a Black woman there, as Justice Thomas was already married to a White woman, but the sexual predator stereotype was the tool. But liberals do not respond kindly to Black people who leave the Democrat plantation to think for themselves.

Response to Israeli Peace Overtures? Rockets

2011-10-30T06:33:00.002-05:00

Israel agrees to a 1000-1 prisoner swap, agrees to cede land, agrees to this, agrees to that - all in hopes of peace. They've been agreeing to these kinds of things since the Camp David Accords 35 years ago.

And all they get is renewed terrorist attacks, more rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, more violence.

The obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not the Israelis and never has been. The obstacle to peace is muslims - Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Iran... These people cannot abide the continued existence of Israel. It's more than just those who actually blow themselves up or launch the rockets. Theirs is a culture infused with a hatred of Israel in which children are weaned on anti-semitism. Defeating their military forces will not be enough. The entire people must be defeated so thoroughly that they never think to take up arms again.

I take no pleasure in this conclusion, but I cannot see any alternative, given the actions of the Palestinians, Egyptians, Iranians, Syrians, and others throughout the region.

Meet the New Guy - Same as the Old Guy

2011-10-28T05:42:00.000-05:00

In other muslim news, Saudi Arabia has a new Crown Prince - effectively a Prince Regent. He's the de facto ruler, but as the king himself is not quite dead yet, they can't call the new guy "king".

The "young" man (he's 78) is not much different from the dead crown prince he's replacing or the 87-year-old king he'll follow on the throne - assuming the older guy dies first. Don't expect women to get a license to drive any time soon in the Jurassic Kingdom.

We also note that Tunisia has held elections that were, more-or-less, free. A party labeled by various news outlets as "moderate islamist" won a majority in their new parliament. They have "promised a broad-based coalition, and vowed to wary Tunisians that democratic principles as well as gender equality will be respected in line with Muslim Tunisia's strong secular tradition" according to the report.

We'll see. "Moderate islamist" is, as far as I can tell, an oxymoron. Time will tell which of the two - moderate or islamist - is the truth.

The Long, Slow Suicide of the West

2011-10-28T05:26:00.000-05:00

Muslim students at Catholic University - it's not "a Catholic university" but simply Catholic University - anyway, muslim students at Catholic University object to Catholic symbols in the classrooms. They also object to not being allowed to form a muslim student group. They say their "human rights" have been violated and now the Washington, D.C. "Office of Human Rights" is investigating.

This is, in effect, part of the muslim community's ongoing law-fare against Christians in the West. If it were a Catholic student at a muslim university, would these whining muslims consider it a matter of justice to set up a small chapel where they could say Mass? Of course not. And if those Catholic students were to complain to some silly bureaucrat at a ridiculous "Office of Human Rights", would they even get the time of day? Hmmph. If you are gullible enough to think so, then send me $5,000 so I can help release the $279 million being held in Nigeria just for you.

But when a muslim student claims he's being dissed, the politically correct bovine excrement brigade kicks into high gear.

We Done Good

2011-10-25T14:56:00.000-05:00

I am ambivalent about the withdrawal from Iraq. To be sure, there is much work still to be done there and I'm worried about the influences of folks from Iran, the sectarian divisions that have always been there, the increasing trends towards authoritarianism in Iraqi Kurdistan, and more.

But is that really our responsibility? We removed a horrible tyrant. We greatly aided the Iraqis in establishing a functional, representative government. We have given them an opportunity rare in the muslim world, and not seen since Attaturk remade Turkey in the 1920s. But at some point their problems are their problems, not ours. At some point, it's got to be up to them. We achieved our objectives, at least in the short term. That is no small thing in itself.

Yes, there are some who will continue to be angry at the U.S. For them, like the idiots in Zuccotti Park, no matter how much is done for them, it will not be enough. Millions more, however, got to see the U.S. liberate a country at no small cost to us in blood and treasure, establish a representative government, and then leave as we said we would. Some of the "hate America" rhetoric that is standard-issue in the Islamic media and propaganda will not meet with universal acclaim any more. They've seen American soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors and seen that they're a pretty damn good group of people. Millions have gotten a chance to vote in free elections who otherwise never would have. The Iraqis have what we had in 1787 - a republic, if they can keep it

It's not the nice, clean ending of dignitaries signing surrender documents, but it never was going to be that, and at the end of the day, I can honestly say I am proud of what we did there, and of my little piece of doing it. We fought, and some of us died, giving the Iraqis a precious gift as others fought to give us a similar gift. I pray that they - and we - will use it well.