Contra Celsum

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-31T21:29:00.001+13:00

The Ultimacy of Right Reason

Goo-Mongers - Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God.

First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. That is obviously out for the orthodox, on the basis of being ridiculous.

But if we say that logic is a created thing, fashioned as a could-have-been-otherwise sort of thing by God for this world, then absolutely anything goes, and God Himself becomes absolutely unknowable. I will explain this further in a moment.

This leaves the option that the font of all logic is somehow an attribute of God, like His love, like His holiness, and so on. More on this in a moment also.

There are three foundational building blocks for logic -- the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. In brief, this means that A is A, it means that A cannot be not A, and it means that for any given assertion about A, there is no middle ground between true and false. Now a great deal of damage has been caused by those who think that these laws are something we came up with down here in this world, and that it is inappropriate or even blasphemous to apply them in any way to God. It is the other way around.

Everything we might truly discover in this world is rooted or grounded in some way in the nature and character of God. The creation declares the glory of God.

We don't "apply" these rules to God, as though we were laying down standards for Him. That would be impudent and blasphemous. But a moment's reflection should show us that our ability to say true things about objects in the world depends upon the way He everlastingly is.

There is one fundamental thing that God cannot do. God cannot cease to be Himself. He cannot cease to be the way He is. From everlasting to everlasting, He is the triune God. And in saying this, we do not privilege one of His attributes over another (like His sovereignty over His love). The attributes of God are distinctions we make (following the example of Scripture), but we must not allow these distinctions to morph into separations. God is all that He is all the time, and He cannot be parceled out for the convenience of the theologians.

Nothing is easier than to distinguish height, breadth and depth. A child can do it. But if I remove the height of this book on my desk, I do not have a very, very flat book. I have no book. Height, breadth, and depth are easily distinguishable, as well as inseparable.

Some might want to say they are fine with all this, so far as holiness, justice, love, mercy, etc. go, but to say that "logic" is an attribute of God is just jarring to them. It just doesn't sound very biblical. First, it is biblical enough. Jesus is the Word (logos), and He is the foundation for all that holy words do. He is the Word, and all righteous words are grounded in Him. This is not limited to logic, of course, but it certainly encompasses it. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The Word, the Logos, is the foundation of poetry, but is also the foundation of all righteous reasoning.

Second, if you don't embrace this, you lose all the Bible words. If God is not necessarily internally-consistent (which is what I am intending by all of this), then He could be holy and unholy as well. He could love the elect eternally and not love the elect eternally at all. Since He is so sovereign over logic, He could even exist and not exist at the same time. And if someone objects to your striking combination of theism and atheism, just tell them that you follow Jesus and not Aristotle. Which, if true, would allow you to follow Aristotle at the same time you are repudiating him.

You see, the three foundational laws of logic were discovered by us, not invented by us. They could be discovered because the God who made this world (in which we discovered these descriptive laws) is eternally triune. This means that the Father is the Father (identity). This means that the Father cannot be not the Father (non-contradiction). This means that there is not a third option beyond true and false when responding to the confession that the Father begets the Son (excluded middle). Those who believe that logic does not apply to God are secretly reserving to themselves the right to be heretics.

When we love one another, we are imitating God. When we show mercy, we are imitating God. When we execute justice we are imitating God. And when we say that a book is a book (identity), and that a book cannot be not a book (non-contradiction), and that "the book is gray" is either true or false (excluded middle), we are imitating God. It is an essential part of our discipleship.

Of course there are pedestrian logicians, who think they are imitating God when all they are doing is revealing how tiny their minds are. This is simply intellectual legalism, conducted in the name of logic. We are petty little creatures and we do the same thing with His other attributes. There are love-legalists, and mercy-legalists, and justice-legalists, and all the rest of it. But whoever thought of denying that God is love because your Aunt Maude thinks that loving your daughters means making them wear their hair in a bun, just like she does?

I said earlier that a denial of an eternal grounding for our ability to reason was reserving the right to be a heretic. This is the heart of all pomo-rot-thot, and I would actually characterize it as the ur-heresy. This is what rebellious man finds necessary to assert in his quest to be as God. He wants the sovereign right to rearrange absolutely everything.

The bad news for all such rebels is that Jesus is Lord, and there is no way to wiggle off the point. Jesus is Lord means Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord cannot coexist with Him not being Lord. And when the holy confession that Jesus is Lord is faithfully made, there are only two possible responses -- faith and unbelief -- and there is no mystical "third way." Jesus rose, or He didn't, and there are no other options.

I believe in the ultimacy of right reason because I believe in Jesus.

Selling Our Souls Down the River

2012-01-31T07:48:00.001+13:00

State Control of Stools and Urine

The electronic communication zone is running hot over some inane comments by some "researchers in public health". These illuminati were interviewed on national radio and had the temerity to utter the following inanity:

Obesity, she said, was "not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we've proved successfully doesn't work". Instead it's the fault of "big institutions and the market".

Most of the criticism rightly points out that for 99 percent of the obese population their condition is caused by three things--what they ingest, how much, and what is not done to burn the calories off. It is a completely self-inflicted condition. Quite right.
Naturally, the "researchers in public health" have alternative predictable solutions: more rules, regulations, restriction, and government controls over what you eat. In the end, the government will have to ration our food and ban lots of nasty things. We will end up clinging to Mother's skirts in a perpetual, malingering second childhood.

Naturally enough this sort of nannying (incidentally, both researchers are females) is offensive. At this point in history most New Zealanders resent a government telling them how to act, what to think, and above all, what to eat. Sadly almost no-one amongst the objectors is prepared to acknowledge that the fight was lost almost eighty years ago.

When our forebears, in their myopic wisdom, decided that government had a duty to provide state funded health-care, and voted for politicians who would give them their lusts, it was all over, rover. For, as a perceptive sage pointed out, if you cede to government the duty and responsibility to take care of your health, you have implicitly given over total control of your physical being. A government that is responsible for your healthcare, is responsible for your health, period; such a government will inevitably extend its reach to control what you eat and what is allowed to come out the rear end--and how often.

It will all be done under the cloak of cost containment, of course. We have got to control what people eat, because if we don't the rampant costs of treating the obesity epidemic will squash us all flat. It's a matter of survival of our species as we know it. Toss in a dose of guilt and another generous helping of pious pity and who can resist--with principled consistency, that is?

Most of those railing against the two nannies who "research" public health do so with a fair dose of inconsistent hypocrisy. We do not doubt that these objectors would at the same time argue for the reasonableness of a publicly funded health system per se. Getting rid of the entire nannying edifice would be as offensive to them as the stupid observations of our elite health researchers.

We repeat: if you are going to look to government to fund your doctors' visits, health procedures, subsidize your medicine, and provide you with hospitals you have already, in principle, ceded to the state control over your body. Such a Leviathan will eventually move to control the food you ingest, the air that you breathe, the hours you must sleep, the length and temperature of your showers, and the "quality" of your stools and urine.

Whilst we remain gratified that there are still people in this country who will stand up to intrusive government controls, another part of us want to say, "Stop your whining. You sold your souls to the Devil a long, long time ago. Now Old Nick has come to collect."

File Cabinets in the Rat Tunnels

2012-01-30T21:00:00.001+13:00

5 Thoughts on the South Carolinian Newtslide

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, January 23, 2012

1. The voters are apparently in the mood for belligerence toward liberals and the media. This is not the same thing as insisting on belligerence that is coherent and consistent over time (for that would have excluded Newt), but they clearly want a scrap. The other candidates should take note.

2. The South Carolina results punctured for good and all the inevitability myth that Romney had been cultivating for himself. Santorum took Iowa, Romney took New Hampshire, and Gingrich took South Carolina. As one web site put it, that looks a lot more like evitability than inevitability. But we should not waste a lot of energy wringing our hands over the blood-letting of the primary season. It is a good system -- call it blood-vetting. We ought not to be pining for a "more rational" primary system. We have an honest tournament system now. Reforms by uplifters will just get us a political version of the BCS system.

3. When someone like Ron Paul freaks out the Republican establishment, there is not much they can do about their panic. Whatever you say about Paul, reticence to express the constancy of his views is not usually on the list, and the GOP establishment doesn't have any handles on him. There is good reason to believe that Newt freaks out the GOP establishment in a different way. Newt is a long-time insider, knowing the twists and turns of every rat tunnel under the Capitol. In return, the establishment knows him, knows where the bodies are buried, and knows where the file cabinets are. I refer to particular file cabinets, the contents of which would be enormously damaging to the Gingrich campaign. Look for the leaks to start very soon.

4. Newt cheated on his first wife with his second wife, and cheated on his second wife with his third. This means, incidentally, that in her recent interview his second wife was complaining about what Newt had done to her, when that was she and Newt had together done to his first wife. She complained that Newt had wanted an open marriage, but why was she surprised? She had participated in a practice run with him a bit earlier on. So this point is not taking up her account as gospel.

But, at the very least, does not this particular set of tangles call the caliber of Newt's judgment into question? Suppose the charge is not adulterous philandering of the predatory variety, but rather a short attention span with regard to everything? As Santorum put it, Newt has "an idea a minute," and there he is, impulsively charging off after the most recent shiny thing. Sometimes it is another woman, and other times it is global warming or the individual mandate. Oh, great. That's what America needs -- another Nixon, only without the discipline.

5. One of the historic reasons why homosexuals were denied security clearances is because of the possibility of blackmail. They were denied security access, not because of "bigotry," but rather because they were a security risk. The same kind of thing would apply to adulterers. Now run a thought experiment. If Newt gets the nomination, does anybody seriously think there won't be more about Newt's sexual proclivities surfacing in the general campaign?

These bimbo eruptions will surface in one of two categories -- the charges will either be true or false. If true, then, well, there we will be, wondering how many more trillions Obama can get over the next four years from his secret bank account on the moon. If false, then it will be slander, but it will be sticky slander. The public and acknowledged facts of Newt's life will make him particularly vulnerable to that slander. In other words, Newt is a nomination risk, and this aspect of his life is a no-lose proposition for the Democrats.

Subterranean Paganism

2012-01-30T07:15:00.003+13:00

How Did It Come to This?

Just how Christianised was Western Europe in the first place? Rodney Stark (One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001]) provokes readers with this question. His answer: not very.

In the past two centuries we have seen a move away from the Christian faith--and a rapid collapse of the First Christendom--in the West. What took centuries to build was gone by lunch time, so to speak. Why? Naturally, in all such "big" questions, the causes are always complex and multifarious. However, some factors will inevitably be more influential and affective than others.

Here is a summary of Stark's argument: he draws a fundamental distinction between the quality and timbre of missionary effort of the Church before and after Constantine.
He believes the great missionary movement of the apostolic and post-apostolic church ended within two and a half centuries, but not for the reasons we might expect. It ended, says Stark, because Constantine ascended to the purple and made the Christian church official.

For far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca.285--337) caused the triumph of Christianity. In fact, Constantine's conversion was, in part, the response of a politically astute man to what was soon to be an accomplished fact--the exponential wave of Christian growth had gathered immense height and weight by the time Constantine contended for the throne. However, despite a century of ill-founded skepticism, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of his conversion. To the contrary Christianity might have been far better served had Constantine's faith been pretended. For, in so doing his best to serve Christianity, Constantine destroyed its most vital aspect: its dependence on mass volunteerism. (Ibid., p.61)

Once Constantine made the Christian church the official religion, the church became a de-facto organ of state: consequently it became politicized and bureaucratised, subject to politics and influence peddling. The task of Christianisation moved from persuasion to coercion. True missionary endeavour declined, along with person to person witnessing, conversion of households, systematic instruction over years into the faith, and participating in a vibrant congregational life. Naturally, the switch did not turn off immediately. It was more like a dimmer-switch where the current is reduced gradually and the light fades.

Eventually the Western Church overcame its prejudices and decided that missionary endeavour outside the bounds of the Empire was an abiding obligation. Most of the accounts of this work focus around the missionary efforts of monks to kings, rulers, and elites. The idea was that if rulers, chiefs and leaders converted, the populace would be brought in as well--automatically. Take the accounts of the conversion of Clovis, for example:

When Clovis announces his decision to be baptized [after a Constantine-like experience of success in battle after calling upon the Christian's God] many members of the court proclaim that they will do so too. Immediately upon the public baptism of King Clovis, three thousand of his armed followers are also baptized. But about the Christianization of the several million ordinary Franks, no a word is said. (Ibid., p. 70)

In fact, the ordinary people were not Christianised. A century after the conversion of Clovis the man-in-the-street, or the field continued to practise idolatry; they did not recognize the one true God. The "trickle down" theory of Christianisation and conversion just did not work.

Having become dependant on state subsidies and governed by a privileged establishment, Christianity was by this time a top-down organization, and nothing could have seemed more obvious to the monastic missionaries than the wisdom of devoting all of their efforts to converting the elite. There were several additional reasons for this, safety being perhaps the most important. Successful conversion of a group of commoners would provide the missionary monks with no protection, either from the nobility, who may have feared that the group posed a religious challenge to their authority, or from other commoners offended by denunciation of their traditional Gods . . . . In contrast, successful inroads into the elite--even if just among the wives--offered substantial protection. (Ibid., p.73)

Thus, in general--particularly in north-western Europe--Christianity remained a culturally superficial religion, veneer thin. By the sixteenth and seventeenth century, church officials were struggling with the paganism confronting them not only in northwestern Europe, but in Italy and France as well. Concern was expressed about

. . . not only a "profound unfamiliarity with the basics of Christianity" but also "a persistent pagan mentality" and a persistence of "pre-Christian ceremonial." . . . . As Jean Seznec put it in his classic work on the subject: "Above all, it is now recognized that pagan antiquity, far from experiencing a 'rebirth' in fifteenth-century Italy, had remained alive within the culture and art of the Middle Ages. Event he gods were not restored to life, for they had never disappeared from the memory or imagination of man." That elements of paganism survive is one of the remarkable omissions of contemporary perceptions of religion in Europe. (Ibid., p. 76)

The rapid retreat back into Unbelief, the lionising of ancient Greece and Rome, the recrudescence of Norse pagan myths in Nazi Germany, the rapid descent into state-protected immorality and licentiousness reflect a recrudescence of what always lay beneath the surface in Europe, never having been thoroughly Christianised.

Roe Vs Wade

2012-01-28T20:52:00.004+13:00

Radical, Legally Untenable and Immoral

The following article is taken from Justin Taylor's blog:

Law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen has a remarkably helpful and concise explanation of what Roe v. Wade (especially combined with Doe v. Bolton) actually means: “The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe.”

Here are excerpts from his three critiques:

(1)The Radicalism of Roe
“I suspect that if more people understood Roe‘s and Doe‘s actual holding fewer would support that constitutional regime. Roe was a truly extreme decision, creating an effectively unrestricted constitutional right to abort a living human being for any reason the mother might have, throughout pregnancy right up to the point of birth.”
(2) The Legal Untenability of Roe
“[Roe] has absolutely no basis in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution. No rule or principle of law fairly traceable to the text, discernible from its structure, or fairly derived from evidence of intention or historical understanding of an authoritative decision of the people, remotely supports the result reached in Roe. In terms of fair principles of constitutional interpretation, Roe is perhaps the least defensible major constitutional decision in the Supreme Court’s history.”

(3) The Immorality of Roe
“The result of Roe and Doe has been the legally authorized killing of nearly sixty million Americans since 1973. Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution.”

Professor Paulsen does not quote Augustine—or Martin Luther King’s approving quotation of the same—to the effect that “an unjust law is no law at all.” But that’s essentially what he argues:

The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade should not be accepted as law, in any sense. It should be resisted by legislatures and it should be refused enforcement by executive officials because it is not the law. It should be resisted by all citizens, with all the resources at their disposal, and perhaps even with resources not (yet) at their disposal. Anything less is holocaust denial.

Read the whole thing here.

Corruption in China and New Zealand

2012-01-28T07:43:00.004+13:00

Theft by Any Other Name is . . . . Theft

The Left has little or no respect for property rights. What you own is yours only if the collective (society, the state) says you can retain ownership. At any time, for the "common good" your property can be devalued, stripped, or confiscated. In principle we are, therefore, slaves in our own country; any freedoms we may enjoy are at the pleasure of the collective.

This plight is put front and centre in the Australian classic, The Castle. Sadly, whilst this is a superb comedy, its dramatic tension actually relies upon a very serious matter that is all too real. In The Castle, remedy comes to Darryl Kerrigan through the courts. The High Court decided that the Constitution of Australia required that Darryl's "castle" could only be purchased on just terms. We have no such checks and balances in New Zealand. Parliament is supreme.

The Government in New Zealand is about to decide whether a Chinese consortium can purchase around sixteen NZ dairy farms.
The Leader of the Opposition, David Shearer is publicly opposing the sale on the grounds that selling to the Chinese does not bring enough value to "New Zealanders". The pseudo-property rights of the collective hive, in the mind of the Labour Party, trump those of the actual owners.

Of course there is another bid on the table--from a "genuine" Kiwi consortium of mega-wealthy plus Maori--but it just happens to be way below the $200m offered by the Chinese consortium. Apparently, Mr Shearer favours the second bid and in so doing wants to strip millions of dollars of private property from the current owner/sellers. The rights of the collective hive overreach and cancel private property rights every time--in the statist mind of the Left (and most Unbelievers), for the State is their god.

At this blog, we have warned repeatedly of the dangers of investing in China. Because of the prevailing corruption in that country, one's investment and property rights can go up in smoke and you can end up in prison for a very long time, or before a firing squad on spurious, trumped up convictions. But it would take a contorting clairvoyant to explain why Shearer's stand is any different. And if such practices are corrupt in China, they are equally corrupt in New Zealand.

Now, it is up to the Chinese investors to decide whether they wish to take the risk of investing in such a corrupt country where rival bidders can enlist a very senior Parliamentarian to do their bidding in an attempt to destroy the property rights of commercial rivals. But let them be in no doubt: corruption it is--up front and centre. Worse--no-one is outraged. No-one in New Zealand calls it corruption. Rather it is seen as "looking after our own". Gangster economics. Corruption out front and centre, and no-one turns a hair.

David Shearer has just sent a message to every gang, every corrupt businessman, every tong, triad, and mafioso that he is up for sale. He can be bought. He will oleaginously cloak his thievery by blowing smoke rings appealing to the "rights" of the collective hive. But it won't change the facts.

This is presumably what he learnt while he was working for the United Nations, we suspect.

Studies in I Samuel

2012-01-27T21:43:00.000+13:00

A Study in Failure

Expository - Book of Samuel
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, January 21, 2012

INTRODUCTION:
As 1 Samuel comes to a close, the life of Saul comes to a miserable end. As we will see, the manner of his death was a fitting picture of the way he had lived his life throughout the course of his reign. His reign was a long pattern of self-destruction, and in the end, Saul took his own life—the final act of self-destruction. He died the way he had lived, destroying himself.

THE TEXT:
“Now the Philistines fought against Israel: and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in mount Gilboa. . .” (1 Sam. 31:1-13).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT:
The chapter begins with the Philistines attacking, and they routed the men of Israel. As they fled from the Philistines, the carnage took place on the mountain Gilboa (v. 1). The Philistines were in hard pursuit of Saul and his three sons, and they successfully killed Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malchishua (v. 2).
In the next verse, the battle was going hard against Saul, and he was badly wounded by the Philistine archers (v. 3). The language here indicates an ongoing battle, which means it was not an utter rout. His wounds apparently made it impossible for him to continue the fight. Saul then told his armor-bearer to kill him, to keep the Philistines from abusing him. The armor-bearer refused, and so Saul fell on a sword, taking his own life (v. 4). When the armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he followed him, doing the same thing (v. 5). And so Saul, his three sons, his armor-bearer, and a number of other men with him, all died on the same day (v. 6). The men on the other side of the Jordan (not very many miles away), when they saw that the battle had gone badly for them, evacuated their cities, which the Philistines then occupied (v. 7). The Philistines came around the next day to strip the dead, and it was then that they identified Saul and his three sons (v. 8). They decapitated Saul, stripped his armor, and sent the armor to their homeland in triumph (v. 9). They displayed his armor in the temple of Ashtaroth—similar to how the Israelites kept Goliath’s sword at the house of the Lord. Saul’s body was then hung on the wall of Beth-shan (v. 10). When the men of Jabesh-gilead heard what had happened, their valiant men went there and recovered the bodies of Saul and his sons, brought them back and burned them (vv. 11-12). After that, they took the remaining bones, buried them under a tamarisk tree, and fasted for seven days (v. 13).

We should say a quick word here about the story of the Amalekite at the beginning of 2 Samuel who tried to ingratiate himself with David by falsely claiming to have killed Saul. The story was false (conflicting with this narrative), and David convicted him on his own terms. We should rather trust the author of 1 Samuel than a self-aggrandizing (and not very smart) Amalekite.

BURIAL AND CREMATION:
The customary biblical approach to the dead is that of burial. The customary pagan approach is that of burning the body in cremation. The difference has to do with making a good testimony about the hope of resurrection, and not because it is somehow harder for God to raise someone who has been burned than one who has been buried. The resurrection is not threatened by any degree of decomposition, however it happens.

For example, Joseph gave instructions about his bones, and he did this because he wanted to make a declaration of his faith (Heb. 11:22). In this passage, the heroic men of Jabesh-gilead burned the bodies of Saul and his sons because wanted to prevent any further dishonor to the bodies. This was the whole point of their mission. Jonathan is not going to be short-changed on the day of resurrection. Later in the story, David has the bones of Saul and Jonathan (and presumably the others) moved from this place to the family tomb (2 Sam. 21:12-14). Among the Israelites, there is one other mention of burning bodies (apart from unique penal or sacrificial situations), and it is found in Amos 6:10, where the concern is apparently to stop the spread of contagious disease. Under ordinary circumstances, though, the biblical pattern for dealing with the bodies of the faithful is through burial—in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.

A STUDY IN FAILURE:
The trajectory of Saul’s life had certainly been one of spiraling failure. He was characterized by his stiff-necked and close-fisted jealousies, and it was by this that he destroyed himself. By the end of his life, it could not be said that the Philistines had killed him—he had done it himself. It could not be said that David had removed him from the throne—he had done it himself. It could not be said that anyone other than Saul was responsible for the disaster of his final days. Saul did all of this by his own hand or, more specifically, by his own devouring envy. His end was decisive—he was struck with arrows, pierced in his belly, had his head cut off, and then he was burned.

He was buried under a tamarisk tree. The last time we saw him there, he was holding a tyrant’s spear in his hand, and lying about David (1 Sam. 22:6).

And yet, despite the fact that Saul fell to his death in this great catastrophe, we see even in this tragic conclusion, the height from which he fell. The men of Jabesh-gilead who retrieved his body were the first Israelites whom Saul had delivered from their enemies (1 Sam. 11:5-11). They were still grateful for what Saul had done in his better days. This is true also of David, who delivers one of the noblest eulogies ever (2 Sam. 1:17ff).

40 YEARS FOR NOTHING:
This book begins with a leader of Israel dying, along with his sons, as the result of a disastrous battle. The book ends the same way. The book begins with the Philistines in the ascendancy, and the book ends in the same way. The book begins with a great Philistine victory in battle, and it ends the same way. And yet, Saul’s appointed mission had been to deliver Israel from the Philistines (1 Sam. 9:16).

Saul did not do what he was commissioned to do. We are devoted to good works that God has commissioned us to do (Eph. 2:8-10), but our lives will go exactly as Saul’s did—unless we trust in the greater David, the Lord Jesus. He is the only one who perfectly fulfilled the mission that was entrusted to Him. Therefore God has highly exalted Him—as He did with David in a type—and this is why we can walk in the good works that God prepared beforehand for us to do.

A Curio at Te Papa

2012-01-27T07:08:00.002+13:00

A Complaint and Its Aftermath

The following piece has appeared in Quadrant Online. It concerns a visitor to New Zealand, a sojourn at Te Papa, a complaint, and what happened as a result. The complaint? It was about the museum's display on "Climate Change".

Climate correction in NZ

by Tony Thomas

January 19, 2012

In November I was a passenger on the cruise liner Volendam, ex-Sydney and hopping from port to port in New Zealand. Note: this is NOT a piece about cruise liners’ safety or otherwise. About November 18 we tied up at Wellington and I scampered ashore to enjoy a visit to Te Papa, the wonderful science and nature museum alongside the wharf.

The best bit was ogling the 4.2m metre colossal squid, alas looking a bit puce in its tank of formaldehyde but nonetheless with eyes as big as basketballs, outstripping the dog in Hans Andersen’s Tinderbox story that had eyes only as big as saucers.

From there I wandered over to the “Awesome Forces” display of nature’s power, where among other activities you can stand in a mock living room and feel what happens when a house is shaken by a NZ-style earthquake.

Nearby was the climate change exhibit, showing how ice ages come and go. I moved along it to the end, and there I got a shock.
The final display was to the effect that global warming is upon us, and the evidence was a blown up graph showing the soaring of temperatures in the past half-century. I looked closer, and discovered the graph was Michael Mann’s now-notorious “Hockey Stick” purporting to show that after 1000 years of stable temperatures, manmade CO2 outpourings were causing unprecedented warming – the graph line showing an uptick resembling the blade of an ice-hockey stick, if the shaft was positioned on the floor. (Remember, an ice-hockey stick blade is a lot bigger than our grass-hockey-stick’s blade).

The Mann graph was the darling of the 2001 IPCC report as it provided a simple, accessible ‘proof’ of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It was not only used half a dozen times in the report but was the poster-child for IPCC forums, for example used as the backdrop for a television address by the then science co-chair of the IPCC, Sir John Houghton. Al Gore of course used the graph tellingly in his movie “Inconvenient Truth”.

However, the graph was exposed as dud science by the McIntyre & McKitrick duo in 2003, whose efforts to check it had been delayed by Mann’s reluctance to provide them with his raw data. Among the revelations were that Mann’s algorithms were such that almost any data fed into his model resulted in a hockey stick shape, and that his 15^th Century temperature estimation depended on data from a single bristle-cone pine – oh influential tree! By the time of its 2007 report, the IPCC had tactfully swept the Mann graph under the carpet.
Whole books have since been written on how the Mann graph embodied the flaws of IPCC science and processes.

I made a bee-line to the Te Papa reception desk to get a feedback form, and on it I wrote my complaint to the director that a science museum, in a display tailored to the student demographic, was using discredited scientific material. I did my best, from memory, to spell out why and how the graph was discredited, and left my contact details.

I also dropped in to a public library and emailed a letter to the Dominion Post complaining about the exhibit, correctly assuming the museum itself would pay no attention to my feedback note.

It happened that it was a NZ election weekend and the letters page was full of election argy-bargy, with my letter understandably consigned to the bin.

Life moved on but on January 16 I decided again to be action-man, and sent my complaint this time to Terry Dunleavy, honorary secretary of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, a sceptic organization. Terry promptly passed my complaint on to Dr Hamish Campbell, Senior Scientist, GNS Science, a research institute and consultancy “demonstrating scientific excellence since 1865”. Hamish doubles as a Te Papa geologist and curator.

Terry ended his message with a threat that, in the event, proved quite unnecessary: “We would like your assurance that it (the Hockey Stick) will be removed from display in Te Papa, failing which we will be forced to complain to higher authority.”

Hamish’s reply was a model of pleasant and constructive response to criticism, a far cry from the defensive and often contemptuous feedback normally provided to ‘deniers’ by the warmist establishment. Hamish remarked that the Hockey Stick display resulted from collaboration among his GNS Science, the semi-government National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and the NZ official MetService weather bureau.

Hamish wrote:

Thanks for drawing my attention to this. You are perfectly correct: Mann's 'hockey stick' has indeed been substantively discredited.

We re-did the 'Wild Water' segment of Awesome Forces in about 2005 …

At the time it all seemed reasonable. And as you will know we chose to present information about climate change through time at three different scales.

I remember at the time that I was very uncomfortable with so-called predictions based on models of an inherently chaotic system that surely were a far cry from any representative simulation of nature.

However, part of Te Papa's role/function is to provoke or stimulate thought. I let it go with the proviso that the graph was properly referenced...and it is.

Things have changed and we at Te Papa have not made any effort to respond to those changes.

Now is the time to do so.

You are the first person that I know of who has raised any concerns about this component of 'Wild Water'.

Having concerns is one thing; doing something about it and writing to us is another, and I thank you for that.

We shall revisit this exhibit in the next few weeks and see what we can do.

Cheers and best wishes, Hamish

Terry replied in equally friendly fashion:

You should know that we in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition have a great deal of respect for the work of GNS Science, and your assurance of a re-visit accords with what we know we can expect from your one organisation at least in New Zealand that practises scientific method and values its tradition.

So there we have it. A casual visitor to a museum makes a complaint, an official agrees it is valid, and pledges to get to work on a correction. Is life meant to be this easy?
Tony Thomas is a retired business and economics journalist

It's a Girl, Part II

2012-01-26T20:31:00.000+13:00

Gendercide

Ram Mashru

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women.
The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

Hat Tip: The Independent.

Mis-Applied Civil Rights

2012-01-26T08:55:00.010+13:00

Panty Waist Liberals and Criminal Gangs

The case of the Turangi child rapist has sickened the nation. There has been a plethora of reports in the media about how the 16 year old, who has plead guilty, is an ordinary fellow. His friends expressed puzzlement, disbelief, and confusion over his actions. His community network spoke of his family being fine, upstanding people. We were all left wondering, What on earth has gone on here?

Now, more sinister matters are coming to light. This from Stuff:

The teenager who raped a five-year-old girl in a Turangi holiday park has gang connections.

The Sunday Star-Times has been told the 16-year-old, who has pleaded guilty to the attack, was motivated by the possibility of securing entry into a gang. Because of the suppression orders around the case, the gang cannot be named.

The Star-Times understands the teen's father had been associated with the gang, but not since the attack, which shocked New Zealand in the lead-up to Christmas. The boy's father cannot be named for legal reasons. The claims were made by several sources close to the investigation."The family and the boy are connected to a gang," one said. "The family is gang-associated. It's not just the father."

Another source said: "The family are well-recognised as being what they are ... rotten apples. Where are you heading in society when you have this underbelly?"

A couple of cautions. Firstly, the Sunday Star-Times is hardly a fish-wrap of record and reports such as this should be treated with a dose of salt until reliably corroborated elsewhere. Secondly, we note the report refers to "sources close to the investigation" and "another source". None are named. This hardly deserves credence until people are named and go on the record.

We shall see. In general, however, there is an aura of credibility about the story. It is well known that gang recruitment most often requires a novitiate to commit a serious crime as part of his "entrance exam". Whether or not gangs were involved in this case--something which will no doubt be corroborated in due course--it reminds us that there are vast criminal enterprises in New Zealand whose primary reason for existence is to prey on others and benefit financially from their crimes. And for many gang membership is an attractive career option.

It's time to clean up. We should never have allowed the civil right of free association to be abused by liberals to the extent that it covers the right of criminal gangs to exist. A serious respect for civil rights would lead a more enlightened society to conclude that if an organization were proven through due judicial process to exist for the purpose of committing crimes and preying upon other citizens, the organization needs to be outlawed and interdicted. Just to belong, or be associated would then be a criminal offence.

Oh, but then no doubt the UN would scold New Zealand as a pariah state. The shame and scorn would be just too much for our panty waist liberals who only see all of life through their insipid, one dimensional pinot-gris.

It's a Girl!

2012-01-25T20:19:00.000+13:00

The Three Most Deadly Words in the Language

Justin Taylor has posted the following:

A new documentary, It’s a Girl! The Three Deadliest Words in the World, explores the systematic gendercide taking place in India, China, and other areas of South Asia.

Ram Mushru, reviewing the film the Independent, writes: “The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.” That line makes me think of Romans 1:32: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things [like heartless, ruthless murder---see vv. 29-31] deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

You can watch it here:

We are thankful for the expose, the disgust, and the opposition. May it grow to an unstoppable crescendo. But don't expect much support from feminists and liberals. How can they oppose in India and China and South Asia what they promote in their own back yards as a human right?

Sluggards, Politicians and the Poor

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000+13:00

Nothing a Special Grant from WINZ Won't Fix

We are about to have another talk-fest on child poverty and income inequality in New Zealand. This will be a politically inspired confabulation.

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English and Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia are setting up a ministerial committee on poverty under the Maori Party's post-election agreement with the National Party. (NZ Herald)

Some social researchers have discovered that children born to parents living in "poverty" are likely to be significantly poorer than others in their demographic cohort for the rest of their lives. In other words, if they are born into poverty, it, more often than not becomes a trap, a deep slippery pit from which they never climb out.

A long-term study of 1265 children born in Christchurch in 1977 has found that those whose families were poor in their first 10 years of life earned about $20,000 a year less by the age of 30 than those who grew up in rich families. Those from poor families were more likely to leave school without qualifications, have babies before they were 20, commit crimes, go on welfare and have addiction and other mental health problems in adulthood.

This is the sort of thing that politicians don't like to hear because it means that intergenerational poverty is not something which can be fixed with a few more taxpayer dollars being showered down upon unworthy recipients.

Professor Fergusson said the study showed that income inequality and behavioural issues, such as parents' addictions, both had to be tackled to fix social problems. "For example, increasing the income of substance-using parents may be counter-productive since it will give them more access to purchasing alcohol or drugs," he said.

The academics are not sure what the critical factors or switches are which consign the children of poor families into lifestyles of poverty. No doubt there are many. Far too many for bureaucrats and state programmes to fix. So, the politically inspired confabulation will contribute to global warming, but little more.

We will state the matter plainly. Poverty is not the problem. Humanity, or the human soul is. The perpetual, intergenerational poor are that way because they have a malady of soul. Yes, the children caught this from their parents, but having caught it, they are enslaved and conditioned to such an extent their escape is virtually impossible, without a radical conversion.

What are some of the characteristics of this spiritual affliction?

Firstly, self-indulgence. You can be poor without being self-indulgent, but once self-indulgence has overtaken the soul, poverty is a perpetual occupant of the household.

Secondly, an epicurean "living for the moment"--that life is a matter of eating, drinking, and being merry, for tomorrow we all die.

Thirdly, a deep sense of envy and entitlement--that things are bad because someone or something owes us something, and we are doing it tough only because they haven't been made to pay it over yet.

Fourthly, a view of time and the future that counts the future in hours or days.

Fifthly, a lust for possession and consumption goods to satiate and provide temporary pleasure.

Sixthly, wealth is something which comes by chance, good luck, or winning Lotto. This is an outworking of the belief that there is no, or little, sense denying oneself in the present for the sake of the future. Everything is existential. Everything is now. Or, it is not real.

Seventh: hard work is an affliction that society from which society ought to protect me.

Eight: there is no sense of duty, obligation, or responsibility. There is no sense or belief that one has come into this world to serve, to honour, and to obey.

These are the eight deadly sins of poverty. In our view, a person can be living in threads and yet not be poor in heart or attitude. They can be far richer than their economic circumstances. By the same token, some people can be living in the lap of luxury and be poverty-stricken in heart. But once the richer person had squandered his or her wealth and are at the bottom of the heap, neither they nor their progeny are likely to escape, without a change of heart--a conversion, if you will.

The real issue, then, is whence and how will such a conversion come? Call us cynical, but state programmes are just never going to cut it. In fact, the underlying premises of statist amelioration actually locks the spiritual malady in place, reinforcing it, making it stronger. State programmes implicitly reinforce the maladies of envy, covetousness, demand rights, instant gratification, and instant satiation. (Why else would the State own and run lottery companies?)

In complete contrast, consider, for example, the testimony of the Proverbs (chapter 6)

⁶ Go to the ant, O sluggard;
   consider her ways, and be wise.
⁷ Without having any chief,
   officer, or ruler,
⁸ she prepares her bread in summer
   and gathers her food in harvest.
⁹ How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
   When will you arise from your sleep?
¹⁰ A little sleep, a little slumber,
   a little folding of the hands to rest,
¹¹ and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
   and want like an armed man.

Proverbs 26:

¹³ The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road!
   There is a lion in the streets!”
¹⁴ As a door turns on its hinges,
   so does a sluggard on his bed.
¹⁵ The sluggard buries his hand in the dish;
   it wears him out to bring it back to his mouth.

Proverbs 20:4

The sluggard does not plough in the autumn;
he will seek at harvest and have nothing.

But, no worries, mate. We'll all take care of you through a multitude of state programmes taking other peoples' money and giving it on to you.

Proverbs 24:

³⁰ I passed by the field of a sluggard,
   by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
³¹ and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
   the ground was covered with nettles,
   and its stone wall was broken down.

You poor thing. Here's a special grant from WINZ to tide you over.

Nope. Our expectations from the government talk fest on poverty and inequality are exceedingly low. Somehow, we don't think we will be disappointed.

One thing is clear: these texts from Proverbs are entirely offensive and unacceptable in a religious culture which believes in demand rights or state-funded entitlements.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-24T21:55:00.000+13:00

Unscrewing the Inscrutable

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, January 20, 2012

So then. Let us have a little chat, you and I, about the exuberant Newtlove that is popping up in some quarters. Whence cometh it? I would like to identify the point of origin first, and then give perhaps something of an indication of what I think of it.

The meme that is circulating, mostly in Newt's head, is that he is a great debater, and we need someone on that stage who could smoke Obama in a presidential debate. And I do grant that smoke would be involved, along with other acrid smells, but I don't really think a debate with Newt would result in Obama's second term aspirations departing from him with a whoosh.

Why do some think that Newt is a great debater? To pose the question is to ask me, to use Mencken's phrase, to unscrew the inscrutable. They think it for the same reason that others think Obama is a great rhetorician, and still others think the musical soundtrack from The Little Mermaid is great art.

But here is my stab at it. We have had politicians who are limp-wristed and indecisive for so long that we now think that anyone who has articulated a clear point of view in a manner that looks prepared to stand by it (for five minutes on either side) has actually argued for it already. Another way of saying this is that Newt is combative with liberals, and that is why some folks like it so much. Everybody loves a show, and Newt is a gorgeous mountebank. In the theater of drab that our press-release approach to politics has become, he is a saucy fellow.

John King of CNN wilted under Newt's bombast, but that is not the point. The point is whether or not he needed to wilt. King tried ineffectively to defend himself against Newt's attack by saying that it was another network that had done the interview, and it was one of those things that was "out there" with people "talking about it," gotta ask, journalistic duty, etc. Newt, in bellicose mode, wasn't having any and said to him, on the contrary, "your network decided to lead off with this question, and it was Disgraceful, Appalling, Reprehensible," or whatever words of high dudgeon he used. "How dare you bring moral indignation into a presidential debate! I'll show you moral indignation." The audience was at first agape, and then it roared to its feet. Is he not whacking a liberal? What's not to like?

Despicable is not serial adultery. Despicable is asking about it.

I don't think we have seen the like since Woodrow Wilson was a blastocyte. Obama is certainly arrogant, working that little tiptilted-nose-attitude thing of his, but his hubris is an arugula salad kind of pride. Newt works day and night in the great kitchen like a master confectioner of conceit, with one of those thirty gallon stainless steel mixing bowls, making tray after tray of the peanut brittle of brag.

I don't think I could watch an Obama/Newt debate without constantly looking around for the little car that the 13 clowns were going to tumble out of. This is the circus, isn't it?

We are dealing with a high vulgarian, living well above the tree line. We are dealing with an ego of field rank, looking around for Wellington. We are looking at a flyblown reputation, masquerading as something else -- but we should remember that shiny is not the same thing as clean. This is a merchant of buncombe, with everything in his shop priced to move.

If a Newt administration were to find its ideal historian, we would have to fill that role with a cross of Rabelais, Hunter Thompson, and H.L. Mencken.

The one question that has not yet been asked, and perhaps needs to be, has to do with that $1.5 million tab of his at Tiffany's. It has been too easily assumed that the jewellery was for his wife. But perhaps he needed to save up a little bling for the Obama debates?

Letter From America

2012-01-24T07:47:00.017+13:00

Voter Dissatisfaction

Here is Washington Times columnist, Charles Hurt's take on the Gingrich win in South Carolina. It's an interesting perspective.

COLUMBIA , S.C. — It is always here in the birthplace of the Civil War that things go bump in the night for presidential campaigns. . . . But all the shady twists and turns of the past were nothing compared with the Spanish moss-draped soap opera that has unfolded here in the past week. . . .

Two candidates — former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Texas Gov. Rick Perry — crashed and burned, each begrudgingly endorsing their former enemies as they withdrew. . . . It has been a week of more heartache and drama than "Gone with the Wind." More intrigue than a John Grisham novel. And the story has been so Southern Gothic as to make William Faulker wake from the dead to enjoy the show.

Far and away, the most salacious chapter of the past week has been the final-hours, heart-bearing interview by Mr. Gingrich's second ex-wife, telling the world that her ex-husband is an open marriage-seeking, dishonest cad unworthy of the presidency. And, yet, here in the first Bible Belt primary, it is the serial philanderer who left two wives on their sick beds who won handily last night. . . .

The truth is, nobody actually likes Mr. Gingrich. They just really don't like Mr. Romney or Mr. Santorum, and they are a little worried about Rep. Ron Paul. Most of all, it is the media that voters despise and they cast their votes just to keep Mr. Gingrich's relentless beatings of the media going on for as long as possible. The spurious claims made against the former House speaker by his ex-wife not only didn't hurt him, they actually helped him. Because a vote for him was a vote against the media that gave such voice to her aspersions.

So, it is hardly surprising that after a weeklong soap opera, it is the king of drama who emerged the victor after delivering the operatic performance of a lifetime trashing the media in the last debate. The king of drama, Mr. Gingrich is flawed, brilliant, introspective and full of passion. At times, he is the soul-searching Hamlet and at other times the destructive King Lear. . . .

Global Warming and Evolutionism

2012-01-23T20:23:00.003+13:00

Both are Junk Science

A post at The Resilient Earth discloses that Global Warming confabulators are calling for a new spring offensive. Stuck in the trenches of the Somme they are not yet sufficiently war-weary to give up. Just one more dash over the top, into the mud holes, bayonets fixed and we will have those global warming sceptics on the run.

Hoffman argues that it will not succeed because in the end global warming is just bad science--all conjecture with no experimental foundation. Unfortunately, his exertions against global warming have addled his brain. He is foolish enough to argue that global warming has no more scientific foundation than creationism. In his mind, global warming is akin to creationism; anti-global warming is equivalent to evolutionism. The latter pairing is scientifically founded; the former, not so.

But then he points out that evolutionists and global warmists are starting to team up as co-belligerents. He cannot understand why. It's because one of his premises is dead wrong.

Read his article below. We will rebut his mistakes about evolutionism and creationism at the end.

Climate Skepticism the new Creationism?
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 16:03

Those who thought that the war was won and the forces of junk science—who prop up the climate change alarmists—were sent packing need to think again. With the new year, a new assault on climate skepticism is being waged on multiple fronts. Editorials in Nature and Science herald the resurgence of the climate catastrophists and their attempt to bamboozle the public, mislead government officials and brainwash our children. Wake up and smell the steer manure, the battle against the bogus boffins of climate hysteria is far from over.

With the the Arab Spring, recession and national default looming in Europe, and America being distracted by its quadrennial presidential circus there has been precious little mention of that old bugaboo global warming in recent days. So little news that the casual observer might think that the mater is settled and rationality has put paid to the alarmist rabble. Not so! To start off 2012, the editorial section of the British journal Nature has sounded a clarion call for a climate change resurgence.
In an editorial titled “Reach out about climate,” scientists of the world are urged to put 2011 behind them and rejoin the fight in 2012:
With US politics in gridlock, Europe in financial turmoil and minimal progress at the climate conference in South Africa in December, 2011 was a bad year for political progress in tackling climate change. In addition, surveys of public opinion show a declining belief that climate change is an urgent problem. Clearly, the need to make the public aware of the threat has never been greater. In the face of climate-change contrarians and denialists, some of them with political clout and voices amplified by the media, climate scientists must be even more energetic in taking their message to citizens.
By their own admission, 2011 was a very bad year for the purveyors of alarmist tripe. On most fronts they have been stymied and governments have turned a deaf ear to their ever shriller protestations. Worst of all, the public has grown tired of the climate Cassandras and their constant droning on about doom and destruction. But the true believers are using the distractions of the current news cycle as cover while they lick their wounds, marshal their forces and plan a new offensive. Again quoting from the Nature editorial:
Two challenges face those who communicate the science of climate change to the public. The first is to make the messages from models and observations as vivid as possible while maintaining scientific probity — avoiding the blurring of dispassionate discussions of the science and the equally important individual right of advocacy. The second is to find the right ways of conveying uncertainties without losing grip on the central, generally agreed, conclusions.
Bemoaning government difficulties in achieving “clarity of national action on climate change,” they nonetheless urge the climate faithful forward. “[S]cientists and their organizations need to do more to help citizens engage with the issues and not be misled by travesties of the evidence.” Travesties of evidence? As in there is no convincing evidence backing the climate cabal's claims? This ongoing guerrilla war on rationality is the only travesty here.
The view from Europe is echoed by the even shriller climate activists at American journal Science. In a January 17^the online article, under the title “Education Advocates Enter the Climate Tempest,” the question is posed: “Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups?”
This is not the first attempt to place climate skeptics on the same disreputable level as creationist. The inference is that doubting climate change dogma is the same as denying Evolution—the province of religious fanatics and fringe science loonies. Sorry, science doesn't work that way. Disbelief in a poorly formed theory supported by scanty evidence in no way implies belief or disbelief in any other unconnected theory. Real scientists would know better.
Yet the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it's going to take on climate change denial as well. In the article from Science, NCSE environmental education expert Mark McCaffrey states “There's a climate of confusion in this country around climate science.” Amazing! Wasn't this supposed to be settled science? How can something so supposedly well accepted by science meet with such resistance? Surely the climate change alarmists have incontrovertible proof of their assertions. Oops.
NCSE expects opposing climate skepticism to be much harder than fighting creationism. “The forces arrayed against climate science are more numerous and much better funded,” says NCSE Director Eugenie Scott. Armed with contradicting facts and rational arguments those cheeky skeptics are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media. I've got news for you, Eugenie, it's not the funding. The fight against climate skepticism is so hard because the warmists' evidence is so unconvincing.
This is supposed to be a scientific debate, yet the warmists are putting their efforts into propaganda, particularly propaganda aimed at the young. Better to teach our children the scientific method, at the heart of which is the principle of hypothesis rejection by contrary empirical evidence. As one poster on Slashdot recently said, “neither the IPCC, nor NOAA, nor the Royal Meteorological society have made any clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.” In short, global warming doesn't even qualify as a scientific theory.
So gird your intellectual loins and man the ramparts, the forces of crap science are mounting a counter attack. Their evidence has not improved, their models have not miraculously become a stand-in for the real world, the validity of their weak, ad hoc theory has, if anything, diminished. But yet they yammer on, after all there are buckets of grant money at stake. We skeptics must remain strong and objective, for the cost of freedom from crackpot science is eternal vigilance.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

The reason that the propagandists of evolution and global warming are recognizing each other as allies and co-conspirators is that they are kissing cousins. Both are anti-scientific, both endeavour to cloak that reality with endless shrill claims to be the product of hard science, and both resort to propaganda and government lobbying in lieu of a solid scientific foundation.

Evolutionism is not science at all. At best it is a conjecture, but one built upon a self-immolating paradox. Therefore, it has to proceed by resorting to non-scientific methods. As does global warmism. The kissing cousins have found each other and are embracing. No surprises there.

As to the spring offensive---bring it on.

Great Work We'd Rather Not Have

2012-01-23T07:41:00.002+13:00

Unpaid Government Agents

Zen Tiger has written an important piece on the increasing trend to make businesses an administrative and enforcement arm of government.

The current stoush is over controlling the Internet. In the latest piece of legislative coruscation, the US Congress has been considering bills which would appear to make all internet businesses legally responsible if they do not take positive action to shut an offender down and out.

A wartime moral equivalent would be that if a village did not rush to dob in a resistance fighter, the entire town would be wiped out. Au contraire. Any government which contemplates such moral and legal monstrosities should be shown the door. Immediately. By democratic means, of course.

Unfortunately, as Zen points out, the principle is now accepted, and is expanding. It's an inevitable result of Big Government. All the citizenry, in the end, becomes unpaid workers for the Big Guy, Sharkey. Or else.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-21T19:51:00.000+13:00

Basic Math as Dark Horse

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

I have made this economic point before, but it appears to me that I need to keep making it. This is because we live in a time when we will all need to be reminded, regularly and at periodic intervals, that red ink does not really exist. Related catastrophes do, but I should explain myself.

We are in the same position as two drunk guys who were out on the town, and on a friendly bender.
Because one of them was sloshing full of the milk of human kindness, he promised the other guy that he would write him a check on the morrow for a million dollars, or perhaps two million. He promised this, not because he had the money, or because the money existed in any fashion, but because he was drunk, friendly, and magnanimous. The other guy believed him for the same drunk reason, and adjusted all his mental plans for his financial future accordingly.

The federal obligations to the unfunded big ticket entitlements like Medicare and Social Security (that nobody appears to want to deal with honestly) add up to something between 80 and 100 trillion. This does not include other related sinkholes -- like the state pension plans, for example. For purposes of comparison, the total net worth of the entire U.S. is around 70 trillion.

These entitlements are in a different category altogether than the annual bundle of lies called the federal budget. The annual deficit is a shooting star that lights up the night sky, making you almost want to say, "Isn't that cute?" The entitlements are an asteroid the size of Rhode Island that's going to land on New York.
The entitlements embody a staggering amount of unkeepable promises. And the reality is that unkeepable promises won't be kept. Let us go over this principle again. That which cannot be done won't be done, that which cannot happen won't happen, that which is not sustainable will not be sustained, and that which cannot go on will not go on. You get the drift.

Ron Paul has many good idea when it comes to annual budgetary spending, but even he does not have a plan for the entitlements. He wants to have an "adult conversation" about them, but you cannot have an adult conversation with an asteroid the size of Rhode Island. The only adult conversation I can envision just now is, "Fire on the mountain, run, boys, run."

But in this diminishing sea of candidates, who cannot or will not say what must be said, we are indeed fortunate in the arrival a dark horse candidate. Like many horses, including the dark ones, he has an odd name. Basic Math is the dark horse candidate who is going to successfully bring in a true austerity program. And unlike all the other candidates, he doesn't even need to get elected to do his thing.

So we do not have to worry about the consequences of paying out all those entitlements. It is not going to happen. The money doesn't exist, and there is no conceivable way that amount of money is going to come into existence. Life will go hard for some when this realization sets in. The only question is "who will that "some" be?" The odds are that these people will be, to return to my first metaphor, those who stayed drunk the longest.

S-Files: First Award in 2012

2012-01-21T07:47:00.007+13:00

Good One, Guys

ContraCelsum is pleased to announce the first S-Award of 2012. The Award Committee has voted unanimously to recognise the heroic efforts of three water main contractors in saving the life of a three-year old, taking charge in an extraordinarily stressful situation.

Here is what went down:

Paul Tuki, Rob Batt and Louie Wehipeihana were part of a crew replacing water mains in Ashburton when (a three year old) boy was bitten in the lounge of a relative's home on Wednesday. It is understood the Doberman-Staffordshire bull terrier cross lunged at the boy's throat as he was eating a chocolate.

The first they knew was when the boy's distressed aunt came running down the side of the house saying a child had been bitten. Mr Wehipeihana said they expected to see a minor bite, but when the boy's older brother ran out with the victim in his arms and they noticed the blood, they knew it was bad.

As the boy's aunt and brother panicked, the crew took control. Mr Tuki said the child was being held upright and was choking on his own blood so they put him in the recovery position. He and the brother held the boy while Mr Batt - who has extensive St John training - used bandages from the crew's first-aid kit to put pressure on the wound. The boy's aunt was on the phone to emergency services but too upset to speak so Mr Wehipeihana took over. "You could see she was extremely distressed so it was easier just to take the phone off her," he said.

The men played down their efforts, but Mr Wehipeihana said Mr Batt had shown maturity beyond his 18 years, keeping a level head as he administered first aid until emergency services arrived after about 10 minutes.

They described the initial moments after they ran to the scene as gruesome and scary, and yesterday morning did not want to listen to news reports in case their efforts had been in vain. To their relief the boy was alive in Christchurch Hospital in a critical but stable condition.

The dog has been put down.

Paul, Rob and Louie receive the ContraCelsum S-Award Class II for actions that were Swift, Smart, and Salvific. Good on ya', mates.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-20T20:16:00.000+13:00

A Heap the Size of Mt. Sinai

Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Well, nobody can say that the Republican primaries have been deficient as entertainment. People blowing up left and right like there were no tomorrow. At this rate, we'll get to Jeb in no time.

Cain was glib but fun, and while solid on some stuff, he encountered a situation he couldn't quip his way out of, maybe because it was one he quipped his way into. Huntsman was the boutique candidate who couldn't get any WalMart shoppers to switch over. Perry is likely to be dropping out, and the report is that he will be endorsing Newt, at just the very moment when Newt's candidacy has an event that we used to call in the Navy a "reactor scram." One of Newt's exes is poised to dish the dirt on him, and no one is exactly shocked to find that she has the wherewithal.

Newt is insufferable for various reasons, but one is that he appears to be a geyser of hormones and ego and ideas, all in sporadic rotation. He is a gorgeous spectacle, the perfect candidate for dolts and swindlers, and any others eager to be gulled. Look for him to try to quell this insurrection at the debate tonight by force majeure, most likely delivered from a heap of moral indignation the size of Mt. Sinai. The argument will have to reason from Newt's inability to keep his trousers on to Romney's nefariousness, and so students of hair-splitting casuistry should probably limber up and stretch before the debate. You don't want to pull anything.

Ribald pundits look to have a good week in front of them.

Self-Serving Rubbish

2012-01-20T07:44:00.010+13:00

Ram Secularism Down Our Throats

Kiwiblog doyen and chief purveyor, David Farrar has entered the lists to explain why he does not like Bishop Brian Tamaki. Fair enough. Everybody is entitled to his express his view. Regrettably, in this instance, Farrar's comments are little more than pious, self-serving twaddle with a generous dose of confusion thrown in.

Farrar adopts the mien of humility to explain that he is really not qualified to pass judgement on the doctrines of Destiny Church. Nevertheless there are some things which, to his mind, definitely put Destiny so far out of the corral it is way over the mountain range. Wait for it. Here it is . . .

The Catholic Church never formed a political party that stood for Parliament on a platform of forcing its religious beliefs on all New Zealanders. The Catholic Church also never organised a march called “Enough is Enough” where a thousand or more identically clad black shirted followers marched in military like precision down the main street of Wellington, waving their pre-supplied signs to support the Church’s agenda. (Emphasis, ours.)

This, says the sage Farrar, is a "huge point". Clearly, it is a legend in his own mind, for he returns to it at the end of his piece:

It is the combination of having formed a political party to force his religious views on us, having declared himself God’s vessel on earth and having an extremely aggressive approach to forcing believers to tithe that get’s my goat, and most people’s. Nothing to do with him being Maori. (Emphasis, ours.)

Now this leaves us all thoroughly confused. Either Farrar is just fundamentally ignorant of the very nature of democratic government or he is being deliberately deceptive. One would have thought that forming a political party and seeking electoral support is the right of every citizen or group--a right which all of us are duty bound to defend constitutionally. Surely Farrar is not suggesting that Brian Tamaki and Destiny Church ought to be excommunicated from any political involvement or engagement. Surely Farrar is not calling for the abrogation of Tamaki's civil rights.

One gets the distinct impression that Farrar is now channelling Helen Clarke's bitter reaction to the Exclusive Brethren daring to have political views that opposed her own and publicising them via pamphlets at their own expense. How dare they! How offensive! Chinless scarf-wearers! This is huge, I tell you.

One would have thought that Destiny's views on the homosexuality being totally immoral was a legitimate perspective (as pointed out, anyone who takes the Scriptures seriously is bound to condemn sodomy and lesbianism in all its forms). One would also have thought that seeking electoral support for that view, so that it can be codified in the statute book is a perfectly reasonable form of political activity--thoroughly lawful and commendable as far as it goes.

But, we suspect the "money quote" is Farrar's emotive broadside to the effect that Destiny was involved in "forcing its religious beliefs" on all people when it stood for Parliament. That is what sticks in Farrar's craw. But this is just specious special pleading. Every political party that has ever existed since Adam has sought to force its religious beliefs upon others. That is what lawmaking is all about. Does Farrar not understand that laws do not tolerate voluntary non-compliance. Law is force. Every law forces its particular world-view down the throats of all citizens. Surely Kiwiblog's doyen would grant that.

Yes, but religious law is offensive and beyond the pale. So in the matter of sexual ethics and human procreation, some positions apparently reflect religious views, others do not. Clearly Farrar, being a self-professed irreligious fellow, would presume that all his views on such things are clearly not religious, but secular since he is a secular chappie. But if a Christian holds a view contrary to his own and seeks electoral support to have that view codified into law, that is completely unacceptable because his view is religious, and Farrar's is not.

So Farrar can impose his religious secularism upon us all via the law book, but he, in the same breath, removes the same rights from religious people. Only secular views allowed in the public square. Why? Well, its my public square; its only for people like me! What kind of democratic value and philosophy is that? Some pigs are more equal than others, it would seem down on Farrar's Animal Farm.

His objections to Brian Tamaki are so self-serving and circular that he has shamed himself. If Farrar, the ardent democrat can only muster the charge of Tamaki trying to force his religion upon us via the ballot box, the special pleading and hypocrisy on display is beneath us all, including himself.

But then again, Farrar gravely tells us that his argument is "a huge one". For our part we would politely invite Farrar to desist standing on lofty self-serving heights whilst trying to ram Jurgen Habermas's secular "public square" down our throats and, instead, to get serious about democracy--or, at the very least, he owes us both a public confession and an explanation. It's good for the soul, we are told.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-19T20:05:00.000+13:00

Sexual Obedience Outside Scripture

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, January 14, 2012

And so here is my final response to the issues surrounding the publication of Real Marriage. The fundamental issue here is hermeneutics -- how do we read God's Word, and more important contextually, how do we read God's Word in the context of God's world? This is actually an issue having to do with the intersection of natural revelation and special revelation.

My beginning assumption is that they are not two books in the library, which can somehow be checked out and read independently of one another. They are interlocking realities.

Calvin famously began the Institutes by saying that we cannot know God unless we know ourselves, and we cannot know ourselves apart from knowing God.
We have a similar kind of thing with the relationship of special revelation and general revelation. I cannot understand general revelation apart from the grace of God brought to me through His Word -- enough general revelation gets through so that I am "without excuse" for suppressing it, but unless the Spirit quickens me, I cannot read the world rightly. By the same token, I cannot get to the special revelation God has offered us except by routing it through natural revelation. How can I hear without a preacher? My Bible is outside me in just the same way that the starry heavens are, or the bowl of oranges in the kitchen. I must assume something about God's reliability in the world to even pick up a Bible, or drive to an evangelistic meeting.

I must read the Word to read the world, and I must read the world to read the Word. This extends beyond natural phenomena like planets, spiders, oceans, and lawn crickets. It also includes fallen human culture, and all its tawdry sins. I cannot understand the culture apart from the Word, but I do not approach the Word from "nowhere." I come to the Word with a particular set of cultural assumptions, some of which may be retained, and others which must be jettisoned. But if I had none of those assumptions, if I were a tabula rasa, this would not enable me to come in a pristine condition; it would prevent me from being able to come at all.

The grace of God is what happens when the Spirit straightens out all the dislocations that sin and evil have introduced. When He causes new life to spring into being in a man's heart, He is in the process of restoring that man's relationship to everything. God reconciles, not just man with God, but also heaven with earth, male with female, parents with children, man and animals, and man and the created order. In order to accomplish this sweeping set of reconciliations, it is absolutely necessary for man who has been put right with God to see how he needs to be put right with everything else. He cannot see this unless and until the Spirit enables him to read creation, read the other sex, read his children, read his history, and read his culture.

And this knowledge, this literacy, is not just something that comes to us as the end result of a chain of reasoning. Newborn infants know how to suck, and this not because they "figured it out." They know this bodily. When Adam and Eve made love for the first time, this was not because they had passed the sex ed course. They hadn't read a book on it. They knew what to do because their bodies were configured to know what to do. Sin freqently dislocates this kind of knowledge, but it does not eradicate it. When we are converted, and when we start to grow in grace, our dislocated forms of knowledge are gradually restored and put right.

"About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:11-14).

There are many things that can be said about this passage, but let me draw just a few things from it for now. The first is that discerning good from evil is a kingly act (one which Adam and Eve grasped for prematurely), and kings are those who have been given a gift for rule. Kings make decisions. They sort out; they adjudicate. Those who have not grown up to this, who are still on the milk rations, are not up to the task. People who claim to have kingly maturity before they actually do, legislate poorly.

Now those who are not up to the task can do one of two things. They can grasp for decision-making authority anyway, and this is where we get numerous petty legalisms. For example, people get drunk, so let's ban drink. People live in fear of "it might lead to." Well, sure, in the sense that enrolling in school leads to the possibility of poor grades, and getting married leads to the possibility of adultery.

But the other thing that they can do is refuse to budge. They take the dominion task that God assigned to us, and refuse to do anything with it -- except perhaps to wrap it up in a napkin and bury it in the ground. The refusal to move away from "black letter" instructions is a refusal to grow up, a refusal to mature. And of course, the petty legalisms generated by the group in the previous paragraph gives this group plenty to point to as a cautionary tale. But the so-called liberties that this group can tumble into provide the legalist group with their own cautionary tales.

Legalists give application a bad name. Libertines give lack of application a bad name. They both lean against one another, and the only way out is to learn how to read culture like a grown-up. The only way out is to learn how to make the applications that the Holy Spirit is leading us to make.

This is why we should not want to ban, discourage, or prohibit anything except what God has expressly prohibited, along with anything which the Spirit of God is leading us to discourage as we make necessary applications from the Scriptures. A whole host of scriptural requirements requires us to be able to read the culture in which we are making those applications.

Honor all men (1 Pet. 2:17). How exactly? Standing up, saluting, bowing, what? Elders should have a good reputation with outsiders (1 Tim. 3:7). What does it take to accomplish that? Membership in the Chamber of Commerce? Wives are to be obedient to their husbands so that the way of God will not be blasphemed by outsiders (Tit. 2:5). What is that to look like to outsiders?

Women, dress yourselves modestly (1 Tim. 2:9). But how? We see that obedience to Scripture requires careful thought while shopping, while applying make-up, and while buying jewelry. A woman has to make decisions about modesty while sorting through a rack of dresses at Macy's, and we may be confident that the apostle Paul never saw any one of those dresses in all his born days, or in any of his dreams, and would not know what to make of them if he did. The Bible tells women to dress a certain way, in order to achieve a certain effect, and tells them to do this without giving them a dress code. This means that obedience requires women to make decisions about their sexual attractiveness in their culture. Here is the principle -- certain kinds of obedience cannot happen unless we learn how to go beyond Scripture. Women need to learn how to be attractive without attracting all and sundry, and they must do this without specific warrant from the Scriptures for any one of their particular decisions.

All these same realities apply to the marriage bed. For example, the apostle Paul says nothing about video-recording a marital sex act on your cell phone. This is because he wrote to the Ephesians, to the Galatians, and not to the Idiots. If he were writing to the Idiots, he might have felt constrained to mentioned it. Oh, no, you might reply, feeling a little stung by my insensitive use of the word Idiot with an upper case I, you are your wife are being "very careful." Very careful. I see. So careful that when you both die in a car wreck nobody is going to go through your effects?

So in closing, this approach, an insistence on cultivating obedient cultural literacy, brings us back to the principle I discussed earlier.

"That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God" (1 Thess. 4:4-5).

In order to able to obey this, in order to make love not like they do, it is required that we be able to read what they are doing. And when we read what they are doing, and why, we are not reading it in the pages of the Bible. But we are doing something better -- we are obeying the pages of the Bible.

If culture is the externalization of worship, and it is, then our worship of God in the twenty-first century is going to have a certain cultural embodiment. This is inescapable. We ought not to run away from it, and we must not grasp for the decision-making authority in it prematurely. How can we avoid these twin errors? The author of Hebrews says that it takes "constant practice." That is our problem -- we are afraid to practice this.

Working Amidst the "Decline and Fall"

2012-01-19T08:00:00.000+13:00

Diaspora and Mission

Much debate over procedural issues concerning the global Christian mission to convert the world remains superficial and trite. By "procedural issues" we mean, how do we (the Church visible) actually get the task of discipling all of the nations done?

Whenever this question comes up, sooner rather than later the discussion shifts to the book of Acts. This is not unreasonable. Yet, the outcome is not that helpful, more often than not. One reason for this is that reading the book of Acts as if it were an operational missions manual--a "how to" book for dummies--necessarily strips that wonderful book of Scripture out of its redemptive and historical context. Whenever you do that with the Bible little good will come.

Let's throw down a particular precept as an example.
It is impossible to interpret the rapid spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome within four decades (AD 30--70) without knowing about the Jewish Diaspora. It turns out that post-exilic Judaism represented one of the greatest missionary movements the world has ever witnessed, and the Christian Gospel mission piggy-backed off this amazing work of Divine grace.

As Rodney Stark argues:

What is far less known . . . is that Judaism of this (Roman) era was a missionizing faith--probably the "first great missionary religion." There are four main bases for this claim. First, Jewish doctrines set the goal of saving the entire world. Second, both Jewish and Roman writers testify to extensive, and often very successful, Jewish proselytism, especially in the Greco-Roman diaspora. Third, estimated growth rates of Jewish populations, especially in the diaspora, strongly support the assumption of high rates of conversion. Finally, early Christian writers frequently reported large numbers of converts to Judaism. (Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p.52)

The Old Covenant scriptures makes plain everywhere that God's intention and plan has always been the salvation of the entire world. Drawing on passages such as Isaiah 49:6, Isaiah 66: 18-19 and Psalm 117 the rabbis before the coming of our Lord in particular were focused upon bringing converts into Judaism to worship the one true God. One rabbi argued that the reason God sent Israel into Exile among the nations was for the primary purpose of acquiring converts. Post-exilic Judaism was not a ghetto religion: it was an ardent and successful missionary faith.

Philo, the Jewish Alexandrian theologian (c20--50AD) traced the missionary history of the Jews and the large numbers of Gentiles that had converted into Judaism down through the centuries, from the time of Moses onwards. In his day, he opinion, the synagogue had become a powerful tool for spreading the faith and the conversion of Gentiles.

But of particular importance is Philo's report that synagogue services were public, that everyone was welcome and that it was common for Jews to invite gentiles to attend. (Ibid., p. 54)

But was the mission successful? Very much so.

Greek and Roman writers often mentioned the success of Jewish mission efforts. Dio Cassius reported that the Jews "were converting many of the natives (Romans) to their ways." He made this comment to explain why in about 40 BCE Emperor Tiberius ordered Jews expelled from Rome, a claim supported by Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius. . . . This led to frequent complaints such as that of Seneca (3BCE--65) about the popularity of Judaism--"the customs of this accursed race have gained such influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The vanquished have given their laws to their victors." (Ibid., p. 55)

How is it that our Old Covenant forebears were so successful? They held public worship, they welcomed Gentiles (which meant they had far more contact with Gentiles than was usual in Palestine), they held worship services in Greek (the lingua franca of the day), and they taught from the Scriptures about the One True God, and publicly feared, worshipped, and adored Him. The sicker the Roman Empire became the more potent and powerful the attraction of the Jewish religion.

It was into this climate and circumstance that the Gospel of Christ, the Messiah first came. The great evangelising work of the Apostle Paul was first of all to the synagogues throughout the Empire, in which were large numbers of people born Jewish, those who had converted and become Jewish, and the God-fearers (Gentiles who believed, but had not yet become members of the Jewish people). The apostles stayed in the synagogues until they were forced out.

In the West, the circumstances of our mission work at home is much, much more like the Jewish believers of the Diaspora. Surrounded by the indifferent and the hostile, mission work needs to be based around strong, open communities of faith where public worship is front and centre. The West is tired, jaded, lacking self-belief. It is both effete and increasingly culturally powerless.

We could learn much from our brothers and sisters of the Jewish Diaspora, the first Great Missionary Movement.

Letter From the UK

2012-01-18T22:16:00.000+13:00

O Canada our only hope

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph

I love Canada. I love Canadians. I like very much what their government is doing. I have great faith in their future. And if it weren't for their winters, I'd go and live there like a shot. Weird, huh?

Well it's certainly weird enough for those of us old enough to remember Canada in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties when it was little more than an embarrassing liberal-lefty joke. Sure we still remembered the suffering and courage of those plucky Canucks from Vimy Ridge to Dieppe to the Low Countries, but that spirit appeared long since to have vanished under the noisome regime of Pierre Trudeau and his grisly communitarian successors. Canada was like a pale imitation of the US with all the worst aspects of European Socialism and political correctness tacked on to it.

But suddenly – sorry South Park – but Canada-is-crap jokes just aren't funny any more because they lack the key ingredient of truth.

And the truth is that right now, of all the great Western nations Canada is probably the only one left still standing up for the values that made the West great. What better evidence of this could there be than the glorious news that Stephen Harper's Conservative administration has declared war on the anti-growth, anti-energy, hair-shirt eco-loons who are trying to destroy the Canadian economy? (Mega H/T Benny Peiser at GWPF)

Terence Corcoran has the story:

It is a cliché in journalism to declare metaphorical wars at the drop of a news release. In this case, it looks like war is exactly what Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver launched Monday in an unprecedented open letter warning that Canada will not allow “environmental and other radical groups” to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”
“These groups,” said Mr. Oliver, “seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interests to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.”

The "foreign special interests" are the ones exposed by Vancouver investigative blogger Vivian Krause in articles like this – on how America's Tides Foundation has spent at least $6 million funding a propaganda war on Alberta's oil sands production – and this blog post.

According to my preliminary calculations, since 2000 USA foundations have poured $300 million into the environmental movement in Canada. The David Suzuki Foundation alone has been paid at least $10 million by American foundations over the past decade. Why are American foundations spending so much money in Canada instead of in their own country or in other countries around the world that are far more needy than Canada?

Actually I think the sinister-foreign-interests-trying-to-destroy-Canada angle is overdone. It's not Canada these green activists specifically want to ruin: it's Western industrial civilisation generally. The only reason Canada may be attracting more flak than most at the moment is because of its courageous position on Kyoto (it wants to pull out), on fossil fuels (it has lots and wants to exploit them) and on economic growth (controversially among the current crop of Western administrations it considers it to be a desirable thing).
Now let us pause for moment and weep for America where sadly rather different attitudes to the environment and economic growth now obtain:

Oil and politics are a volatile mix for President Barack Obama, as he weighs whether to approve a pipeline to bring crude oil from Canada to Texas. On the merits, Obama should greenlight construction of the Keystone Pipeline. Our economy runs on oil. Given the political volatility in some oil-rich regions of the world, it's just common sense to help maximize the oil-producing capacity of our friend to the north.
But Obama tried to put off the issue until after the election. That's because to decide is to antagonize either labor unions, who want pipeline jobs, or environmentalists, who fear pollution and climate change.

America's problem is that Canada isn't going to wait for it to make up its mind.

“I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to China,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week. “I ran into several senior Americans, who all said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get Keystone done. You can sell all of your oil to us.’ I said, ‘Yeah we’d love to but the problem is now we're on a different track.’”

So now the battle lines are drawn. On one side are China, Brazil, India, Korea and the other emerging economies whose priority is growth – and, by extension, jobs, a higher standard of living and a future for their citizens. On the other are the moribund economies of the West – weighed down by regulation, hamstrung by activist pressure groups on issues ranging from equality and diversity to environmentalism and elf and safety – whose slow demise will meant that for the first time in two centuries the latest generation is all but guaranteed to enjoy a worse standard of living than its parents. Canada, by joining the former, has chosen well for its children.

As I outline in my expose of environmentalism Watermelons, the green movement bears a huge amount of responsibility for our economic decline. Greens are not kind, they're not fluffy, and they're definitely not caring. At least not unless you're one of those ruddy, completely un-endangered polar bears.

UK Labour Critiques Welfare

2012-01-18T07:13:00.000+13:00

Intriguing Developments

When conservative political parties turn mushy and move to the centre to make themselves more electable, left wing parties sometimes force themselves to face up to reality. Ironically this can mean they adopt traditionally right wing ideas.

Something like this may be happening in the UK right now. Labour, out-mushed by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, is starting to rethink social welfare. The idea that the state should fund life-style benefit dependency in perpetuity is coming under Labour critique. Leading the charge is the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne. The Guardian reckons that Byrne is leading a significant redrawing of Labour's position on welfare.

Three things are in Byrne's sights:

the spiralling housing benefit budget, benefits for long-term unemployment, and the lack of proper incentives to reward responsible long-term savers as three key flaws in the current welfare state.

He is looking at term limits for unemployment benefits. He wants to return to the original welfare state concept which was help for those temporarily out of work.

How much traction it will have within UK Labour is not clear. Probably not much. Attempting to return to the original principles of welfare is not going to cut it. Those principles went the way of the dodo decades ago. Now, welfarism is underpinned by an ideology of human rights. If the UK were to have a thorough debate over that fatally flawed idea we would be more positive about the prospects of change.

But, it's a start. We shall see. Eventually the UK welfare state will run out of other people's money. Then a more serious conversation will begin. Probably not in our lifetime.

Letter from the UK

2012-01-17T21:53:00.003+13:00

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review

A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion

Terry Eagleton
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 12 January 2012 10.00 GMT

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. . . .

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. . . . There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John.
Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensable to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society. . . .

Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn "how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper". Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.
What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there's something believers can get their teeth into …

• Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale.

Not so Fast . . .

2012-01-17T08:57:00.021+13:00

Knowing Where the Butteries Are

The Scottish Nationalist movement is skirting a dangerous precipice. How times have changed.

For years the SNP ("Scottish National Party") has pushed for a referendum where the people of Scotland get to decide whether they withdraw from the United Kingdom and establish themselves as in independent, sovereign nation. Scotland is a net fiscal drain to the UK. It could not easily survive if it depended upon its own taxation basis to support welfare payments and central government lolly scrambles.

That has never been an impediment in the past because the plan always was to enter the European Union as a sovereign nation.
SNP acolytes had watched Ireland's economic "miracle" once it had entered the European Union. It has successfully farmed money from Germany, enjoyed the endless payouts and "free money" from European socialism's re-distribution model, run up massive debts, and enjoyed an economic miracle, which is now proven to be a mirage. "We'll have some of that," they said. Independence full steam ahead.

Now things have completely turned around. To enter Europe and the euro-zone now would require Scotland to take on the debts and liabilities of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy--just for starters. It would cost Scotland now to enter the European Union. Instead of Europe becoming the sugar daddy to replace London, almost overnight Europe would require Scotland to be a sugar daddy to profligate Mediterranean countries.

Now, the SNP is not so keen on independence--at least not just at the moment. No surprises there. Its leader, and Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond wants to delay a referendum to 2014, prompting David Cameron to mock that SNP wants a "never-endum". Of course Salmond knows full well that if a referendum were held tomorrow or any time soon it would be overwhelming rejected by the people of Scotland, who, despite any faults, have always known on which side the bread is buttered. Canny people.

Salmond complained that Cameron was sounding--horror of horrors--Thatcheresque! According to the Guardian:

"I thought his (Cameron's) intervention at the weekend was almost Thatcheresque in its nature – the idea that London knows best and it is operating in our best interests but wanting to set the ground rules for our referendum despite the fact it has got no mandate whatsoever for doing so," he said.

He says that Scotland needs to think about other options apart from full independence--like devolution.

That sounds a lot like wanting Scotland to do its own thing and have Whitehall and UK taxpayers continue to pay for it.

Ah, the perpetual puerility of so many in the West. Let's hope Cameron continues to push aggressively the "put up, or shut up" line.

From our perspective we have no problem at all with Scotland becoming an independent, sovereign nation--as long as it does not look to everyone else to pay for it.

Serious Deficit Measures

2012-01-16T21:18:00.002+13:00

When All Else Fails . . .

A thoughtful proposal to cut national deficits, from The Onion. In the end we all have to contribute and do our part to cut the national debt.

More Lanchashire Cotton Wool

2012-01-16T08:41:00.001+13:00

Troglodyte Reactionary Syndrome, Part II

Economic ignorance amongst the left never ceases to surprise it seems. Hidebound in ideology, leftists would appear unable to see what is right before their face.

The latest example: the self-styled humble blogger, Danyl at Dim Post.

Labour Party candidate Josie Pagani (relation) has a column in the Herald about Labour’s identity problem. Some of it’s interesting, but this jumped out at me:
There’s a reason we’re called “Labour”: We have always represented people who work. If you work hard you should earn enough to pay the bills, save a bit and enjoy the holidays with your family. If you have a great idea to build a business and work really hard, a Labour government will back you to be world class. It’s not just about dividing the economic pie fairly, it’s about increasing the size of the pie so everyone can get their piece.
Growing the pie. David Shearer used the same cliche in his first speech to Parliament. Here’s my question: why are Labour still using ACT Party rhetoric about the panacea of economic growth, when all our economic statistics, social indicators and lived experience over the past thirty years tell us that the benefits of ‘growing the pie’ now aggregate to a small number of high-net worth individuals? The rest of us stay where we are, or go backwards.

For a few years during the mid 2000s it felt like we were going forwards – but that was just a bubble fueled (sic) by overseas debt. During this time Helen Clark constantly resorted to the tired old Kennedy/Sorenson trope that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. But this just isn’t an accurate way to think about economic growth. It may, eventually lift general living standards over a long period of time, but it always involves an element of ‘creative destruction’. Businesses go bankrupt and people lose their jobs, and their occupations become obsolete.

Two things stand out. Firstly, Danyl seems to have little idea of what economic growth actually is. Ironically, Danyl is making his point via a blog on the Internet; he presumably is using a PC; no doubt he has a cell-phone--maybe even one of those latest funky smart phones. He probably owns a car with performance characteristics undreamed of thirty years ago. He presumably has travelled overseas via a Boeing or Airbus aircraft, and the food on his table is likely much more interesting, varied, and more healthy than what was on his grandfather's table thirty years ago. Moreover, the cost of the shirt on his back is a fraction of what it cost his grandfather at the time, and we are pretty sure Danyl has far more shirts overall in his wardrobe at present than his grandfather ever owned in his entire life. We don't know Danyl, and are speculating. But we think our speculations will not be far from the truth.

But for some unfathomable reason, Danyl does not regard these phenomena as economic growth. He does not think the pie has got bigger. Spare us. It represents a classic example of leftist ideology blinding its adherents.

Secondly, Danyl appears offended by the idea that economic growth can only come via creative destruction. Some things, firms, jobs have to go the way of the dodo as economic growth happens. This, to Danyl represents human suffering. It is why economic growth is costly and bad. Puleeeeze!

To Danyl its somehow evil and sad that our thoroughfares are not longer filled with horses perambulating up and down, filling the roads with fly infested dung. So many hostlers and stable hands out of work. And think of all those doctors whose livelihoods have been threatened because they no longer get to work on attempting to cure tuberculosis. And all those nurses made redundant once the TB sanatoriums had to close down, because economic progress killed them off. Terrible. What a cost.

He can't be serious. No, he just can't think straight. Why? His hide-bound ideology has made him myopic, if not blind. One more troglodyte reactionary living in nineteenth century Lancashire cotton wool.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

Cocooned in Lancashire Cotton Wool

2012-01-14T07:57:00.002+13:00

Troglodyte Reactionary Reflex Syndrome

Mike Lee--Auckland Councillor, former Chair of the now defunct Regional Council, and left-wing true believer--has weighed in on the Ports of Auckland stoush. His argument draws upon a spurious ideology and is parlous economic on fact.

Mike complains that competition between the Ports of Auckland and the Port of Tauranga is doing no-one any good. It is driving down prices and operating margins so that big business (Maersk and Fonterra) can make a killing. The people who suffer include every Aucklander (an argument likely to be less appealing to Bay of Plenty folk than a fetid, mildewed jaffa) and, of course, the unionised work force at Ports of Auckland. This, from the NZ Herald:

Lee, the Waitemata and Gulf ward councillor, said part of the problem was that the price Ports of Auckland received for processing containers was "significantly lower" than that received by Australian ports. "That is simply because [of] the astute manipulation by the shipping cartel Maersk and the major shipper Fonterra," Lee said. "They've been able to keep the price right down by playing Tauranga off with Auckland."

In ordinary parlance, Mike, it is called competition. It is some accomplishment, one supposes, to have a socialist acknowledge that competition drives down prices. This is usually not the case. Most socialists argue that open market competition means that prices go up because business will inevitably resort to cartel-like manipulation of the market. When it gains control of the market, big business will gouge out the right eye of us all.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Competition is driving down costs and prices at Tauranga--it is competing aggressively to take business off Auckland--forcing Auckland to do the same. Mike implies (but does not overtly state) that this is a bad thing because it turns these ports into commodity services. Cheap as chips; narrow margins, parlous profits, and, before you know it, every man and his dog will be shipping containers every which way through cheap ports.

We have heard somewhere that this is one of the great virtues of open market competition. It lowers prices so that you end up getting more of whatever it is you sell to the point where it becomes a low-cost commodity. If you have too much of that, living standards rise exponentially, and that would be a perfectly dangerous state of affairs.

No, Mike argues that we need to featherbed our ports through co-operation, not competition. To the untutored ear this sounds remarkably like a call to act as a cartel and fix market prices. It is the kind of thing the Commerce Commission tends to frown at, just before they cripple you with punitive fines.

Lee said there was a "race to the bottom" in container pricing between Auckland and Tauranga, which did not benefit the shareholders of either port. The two companies should collaborate and get a higher rate per container. "It seems to me that Tauranga and Auckland need to get together, because they are both cutting each other's throats economically, and get a world-market price for processing containers," he said.

Collaborate to get higher market prices! Mike has just said that the two ports should break the law. Ah, yes but collusion and cartel market fixing is terrible when they (predatory big businesses) do it, but when we, the righteous, do it, its a good thing. When we do it, it's business that gets ripped off, and we get to suck at the nipple of Monopoly. And that, dear friends, makes all the difference in the world, if you are socialist. It's all about redistribution--cutting up the wealth cake differently, in our favour.

To their credit, spokesmen for the ports weren't going anywhere near that. The last thing they want is a Commerce Commission investigation for market fixing dropping on them like seagull splatter. They quickly pointed out the only legal way you could collaborate is for the two businesses to become one. Not going to happen, especially now that Councillor Mike has publicly stated that price fixing would be the primary objective of such a proposal.

Who, then, benefits from lower commoditised port prices? Every exporter in the country. And importer. Need we remind Mike and his colleagues that we are a very small vulnerable trading nation, depending completely on international trade for our economic existence.

Mike makes an attempt to give some factual basis for his aspirations to illegal activity. He claims that Aussie ports have higher charges than we do.

An Auckland Regional Holdings study released in 2009 said Australian ports received on average about 50 per cent more for processing a container than their New Zealand counterparts.

True? Half-true, at best. A Ports of Auckland spokesman said:

. . . when comparing prices received per container with the prices fetched in Asian ports, Australian rather than New Zealand ports were the outliers.

Mike still has not come to terms with the reality that we trade globally and we compete globally. He gives the impression his mind is still back in nineteenth century Lancashires cotton mills. It's sad to see a man who presumably knows of the existence of the internet and who probably drives an automobile mentally locked in a cruel warp--to a time and place where socialism was born and people wore cloth caps.

It all has the marks of troglodyte reactionary reflex syndrome.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

2012-01-13T20:52:00.001+13:00

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

When a society or culture looks to government as its god, this is the sort of thing that happens.

A Fine for Not Using a Biofuel That Doesn’t Exist
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.
But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.

Ah, yes. It may not make much sense, but when governments, legislators, bureaucrats, politicians and voters all believe that governments have the divine power of ex-nihilo creation--bringing things into existence out of nothing by speaking a legislative or regulatory "word"--that's what you get.

The Scriptures tell us that God sits in the heavens and mocks the stupid attempts of governments and nations to rid themselves of His control and the dominion of the King of kings (Psalm 2: 4).

The best thing we can do is join with the Living God and add our mockery and laughter to His. It's the best medicine.

Grand Pooh-bahs and High Priests

2012-01-13T07:15:00.000+13:00

Religious Libertarians

We had to hoot with laughter over this one: Peter Cresswell, high-priest of libertarianism, has deigned to declaim libertarian Ron Paul. The Grand Pooh-bah of the Orthodox Libertarian Church has pronounced that Paul is not an orthodox libertarian. He is a sectarian libertarian, holding views and opinions that no true believer would dare hold.

Now, to be a true member of the true church of libertarianism you have to bow five times a day towards the last known resting place of Ayn Rand. [For our readers not familiar with the wonderful attributes of the Goddess, we have posted a couple of times on her holy attributes, here and here.] Paul does not bow and worship. Therefore, he is not even an apostate--one who once genuinely believed, but then departed from the true faith. He is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Paul's heretical belief?
He apparently rejects the Jeffersonian principle of a "wall of separation" between religion and government. Whoa. No doubt Paul, being a strict constitutional constructionist would argue that the US Constitution does not at all call for a separation of religion and government. Neither the framers in general, nor Jefferson in particular, called for such a separation. Jefferson wanted a highly religious government: he was, of course, a staunch Deist. But don't let these subtleties get in the way of an interdiction of ex-communication from Grand Pooh-bah Cresswell.

Moreover, Paul is a strong anti-abortionist. Clearly the man is not Randian. Ayn Rand proclaimed the great Aristotelian distinction between "potentiality" and "actuality". The potential is not real. The unborn baby is not an actual person; it is a mere potential person. Therefore, abort at will. Rand herself did. And when the Goddess speaks, well then, it must be true.

And to cap it all off, Ron Paul is a creationist. Now at this point, Cresswell is at risk of exploding in holy wrath. But he skilfully deflects his rising jealousy for the Name of libertarianism by resorting to mockery.

In addition, he is a Creationist—a point of view disqualifying the holder from intelligent discussion of, well, virtually everything.

Well, that's it then. Case dismissed. Paul is an idiot, not a Libertarian. Now, just before we slink off into shameful silence under the scourge of Cresswell's holy scorn let's recall that Grand Pooh-bah Cresswell is an evolutionist. Yup. One of those hyper-intelligent rationalists who believe in a random cosmos, yet clings to the notion that intelligent discussions not only can be had, but are meaningful. Whoa. What a religion. Clinging to a cork of rationality whilst bobbing on a sea of stochasticity. And you thought you could have an intelligent discussion with this guy!

In the end, one can do no more than bow before Goddess Rand, lost in wonder, love, and praise. Now, that's true Libertarianism. It's just as well there are believers and high priests like Cresswell to keep it all pure.

Running on Fumes

2012-01-12T21:05:00.008+13:00

It's All Going to End--Not

Part of the catechism of Green Catastrophism is describing the forthcoming horrors of Peak Oil. You know, the world is running out of oil and the dislocation and suffering that will bring to humanity is unthinkable--so, the governments of the world (through the UN) had better come up with a government led solution to save us all, yah de yah de yah.

But, we recall the sage words of Sheik Yamani. He opined that the Coal Age ended not for lack or shortage of coal, and the Oil Age will also eventually end, but not for lack of oil. The Sheik knew a thing or two about economic development, it would appear.

"Peak Oil" looks a more and more distant risk. Take this as an example (it's not uncommon):

Massive Oil Deposit Discovered in Arctic Region

Norway’s Statoil said Monday it has discovered a large oil reserve in the Barents Sea, its second major oil find in the Arctic region in less than a year.

The state-controlled oil company said a well drilled in the Havis prospect in the Barents Sea proved both oil and gas at an estimated volume of between 200 million and 300 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalents.
Last April, Statoil said it had discovered between 150 million-250 million recoverable barrels of oil equivalents in the nearby Skrugard prospect.

The company has received a huge boost to its reserves in the past year. In August, it announced the biggest find in the Norwegian continental shelf in 30 years with a massive discovery of 500 million to 1.2 billion barrels of oil in the North Sea.

Harmful Utopian Dreams

2012-01-12T07:29:00.002+13:00

Standing Up for Workers

At ContraCelsum we love to see employees win. We get great satisfaction and much pleasure in seeing "workers" (to use the socialist, class-warfare term) get significant rises in income, working conditions, work satisfaction, enjoyment, and so forth. Yet many--far too many--would accuse us of being "anti-worker". Why would that be?

It's because we have a radically different perspective on how workers' pay and conditions should be improved.

We believe the only sustainable, and ethically defensible way to achieve rising incomes for employees is via increasing the demand for employees. There are only three ways to increase demand: firstly, when workers become more and more scarce, and employers have to compete to employ them. Secondly, when the labour force is growing, but the economy is growing still faster, so that supply of labour cannot keep up with demand. When that applies, demand for labour increases across the entire economy and wages rise. Thirdly, an individual employer becomes more knowledgeable, more skilled, more responsible, and more productive so that they are worth more to the business. Therefore, the owner ends up realising the costs of paying him or her more more are less than the cost of replacing them. Paying more to retain them makes rational economic sense. Wanting more of such an employee, leads to a willingness to pay higher wages to retain them.

When income and pay rises under any of these conditions we applaud and rejoice. Of course exactly the same drivers and dynamics apply to all management staff, and ultimately to employers as well.

When we are criticised as being "anti-worker" what the critics really mean is that we are opposed to the way they advocate for increasing the income of employees. It is an argument about means, not ends.

Psycho Milt is having conniptions over at No Minister because the Ports of Auckland has announced it is pushing ahead with employing contractors, in preference to its unionised workforce. Milt sees this as yet another example of pushing workers' pay down (aka, oppressing the workers).

Apparently it's wonderful and celebratory news that yet another workforce will get its pay and conditions pushed down

Milt wants both to preserve the current pay rates of the unionised wharfies, and even increase them. So do we. But it is how we go about achieving that goal which is radically different. For Milt, the matter is relatively easy. You either pass a law forcing the company to do just that. Or the employer decides on its own to pay them more. It is easily done. And we have to acknowledge, Milt's approach has simplicity and directness on its side.

But will it work? Is it sustainable? Can the increasing wage bill be paid? Only if "the whole system" is aligned to sustain such an increase. Firstly, all other ports in New Zealand would need to pay employees at the same rate, and all employees would need to be as equally productive as the workers at Ports of Auckland. Otherwise, some ports would be more productive than others and would charge lower fees to shippers, exporters and importers, thereby attracting more business away from Auckland, reducing its revenue.

Secondly, there would need to be no other potential employees prepared to work for any lower wages than those currently paid to Ports of Auckland workers. If so, the government or someone would have to "close the shop" and prevent anyone else working at Ports of Auckland.

Thirdly, all global shipping companies that do business in New Zealand would need to agree to such a cost impost and not change their routes, destinations or frequency, if the increase in wages at the stroke of a pen were to be sustained. It would need to be illegal, for example, for shipping companies to say to Fonterra, "Look, costs in NZ ports are too high. We are prepared to ship your milk power out of Sydney or Melbourne, but its up to you to get it there."

Now, of course none of these conditions would ever apply--unless the entire global economic system were to become a command and control economy. For Milt's method of increasing wages by fiat ignoring market conditions of supply and demand to be sustainable over time that's what is needed.

Because of the actions of the unions at Ports of Auckland, because they and Milt want to apply the "rising wages by command and control" method, business has declined and workers will now have to be laid off. Get this: who is more anti-worker: Milt or us? His method has turned out to be terribly destructive and harmful to workers. Maybe Milt would like to sit down and explain to those about to receive their redundancy notices that they are going to be much better off as a result of "standing up for workers" using the command and control method.

Who is the real anti-worker here? Since the global command and control economy is a naive utopia and will never exist, those who try to increase the income of employees by command and control methods are the worst enemy of all workers over the longer term.

Letter From America

2012-01-11T21:01:00.000+13:00

The Left’s So-Called Empathy

By Mark Steyn

Reprinted from National Review Online

January 7, 2012 6:00 A.M.

Lest you doubt that we’re headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within ten minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the “crazy things” he’s said and done.

Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America’s political class, but the “crazy thing” Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum’s “taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home,” whereupon he “played with it.”
My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is “not a little weird, he’s really weird.”

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

Not many of us will ever know what it’s like to have a child who lives only a few hours. That alone should occasion a certain modesty about presuming to know what are “weird” and unweird reactions to such an event.

In 1996, the Santorums were told during the pregnancy that their baby had a fatal birth defect and would not survive more than a few hours outside the womb. So Gabriel was born, his parents bundled him, and held him, and baptized him. And two hours later he died. They decided to take his body back to the home he would never know. Weirdly enough, this crazy weird behavior is in line with the advice of the American Pregnancy Association, which says that “it is important for your family members to spend time with the baby” and “help them come to terms with their loss.”

Would I do it? Dunno. Hope I never have to find out. Many years ago, a friend of mine discovered in the final hours of labor that her child was dead but that she would still have to deliver him. I went round to visit her shortly after, not relishing the prospect but feeling that it was one of those things one was bound to do. I ditched the baby gift I’d bought a few days earlier but kept the flowers and chocolate. My friend had photographs of the dead newborn. What do you say? Oh, he’s got your face?

I was a callow pup in my early twenties, with no paternal instincts and no great empathetic capacity. But I understood that I was in the presence of someone who had undergone a profound and harrowing experience, one which it would be insanely arrogant for those of us not so ill-starred to judge. There but for the grace of God go I, as we used to say.

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers — Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death — or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin — and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general. The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites — they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: All those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to “empathize,” look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

Two weeks ago I wrote in this space: “A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future.” Whatever my disagreements with Santorum on his “compassionate conservatism,” he gets that. He understands that our fiscal bankruptcy is a symptom rather than the cause.

The real wickedness of Big Government is that it debauches not merely a nation’s finances but ultimately its human capital — or, as he puts it, you cannot have a strong economy without strong families. Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

The Myth of Social Equality

2012-01-11T07:41:00.003+13:00

Cruel Envy

It's an old saw, but with all the nonsense swirling about calling for equality and the terrible evils of inequality, it's worth repeating. What would happen if we introduced egalitarianism into sport?

The analogy is re-presented by Martin Robinson in the NZ Herald. Yes, it has been said before, but worth repeating, especially because the champions of egalitarianism are lifting their lusty voice everywhere.

Kicking equality myth into touch
By Martin Robinson
Thursday Jan 5, 2012

Reports on the distribution of wealth in New Zealand usually reveal increasing inequality. Rugby is a good example of this widespread trend.

New Zealand rugby players come in all ages, shapes and sizes, and both sexes. Players vary greatly as regards their skill levels, commitment and training schedules. Rewards for players are extraordinarily unequal, as most actually pay to play while a very few are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is this fair or unfair? Should the Labour Party, the Greens or the Occupy Auckland movement campaign for more-equal payment of rugby players? Should the "greedy" All Blacks be forced to hand over some of their colossal income to the more impoverished fellow players? Should the Government intervene to reduce this glaring disparity in rewards?

Reducing the pay of All Blacks and spreading it among the less well rewarded rugby players, even if it is a good idea in theory, poses immense practical problems. Would the All Blacks agree to a significant pay cut? If they did, the team would become a 2nd or 3rd XV of players who were willing to play for the reduced reward. We would never beat the Aussies, and maybe the All Blacks team would disappear. So the equality campaign would have succeeded in narrowing pay differentials, but at the cost of destroying the world's greatest rugby team. . . .

Every family is unequal. Both my brothers are much richer than I am, but I don't envy them or think there is anything unfair about it. I don't regard them as greedier than I am. I am the poor relation. If I had worked harder, invested more wisely and spent less time on holiday, I would have more money in the bank, but they are the choices I made. I don't regret anything so I'm content with our financial inequality. When I met my brother on holiday on the Gold Coast, I stayed in a motel-cum-backpackers while he stayed in the Sheraton. Of course, my attitude could be very different. If I was an envious person, I could deplore the "injustice" of inequality, or blame Rogernomics and the capitalist system. Why should my brother drive around in a BMW coupe while I have a Suzuki? Why should he live in a gated community with a pool while I live in a plain two-bedroom unit? Well, he has earned it and I have not. It's as simple as that. . . .

Every week, a thousand Kiwis are heading to Australia. Is this because Australia is a more equal society than New Zealand? Not one person is going for that reason. They are going because Australia offers more opportunity. Successful societies are the ones that provide the most opportunities, not the ones with the most equality of income or wealth.

The way to reduce poverty in New Zealand is to increase exports, improve workers' skills and productivity, create more wealth and jobs, and then raise the minimum wage. If New Zealand is becoming more unequal, the answer is for us poorer ones to work and save harder and smarter in order to even things up.

* Martin Robinson is a freelance writer living in West Auckland.

Well, actually we have seen it happen--the monumentally stupid idea that everyone should get the same recognition, the same reward because everyone is equal. In children's sport and primary school prizegivings there are now many egalitarians who practise what they preach. Every child is rewarded equally so that no-one is "left out". Everyone eventually earns "Best Player of the Day" in the course of the season. We have watched it. It is naive, puerile.

It is also immensely damaging to children, because the unspoken sub-text is: "Envy rules and rocks". Kids learn it very quickly. It corrodes their souls.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-10T21:12:00.000+13:00

Some Preliminary Thoughts On "Real Marriage"

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, January 07, 2012

[Editor's Note: Mark and Grace Driscoll have written a book on sex and marriage which is stirring up controversy. A summary of the controversy can be found here. Douglas Wilson intends to interact with the Driscoll's book. Here is his first piece.]

Lord willing, as time goes by, I will be interacting more with Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll. But here are some of my basic assumptions going into the discussion.

1. Words written are easier to interact with (and be concerned about) than words unwritten. Pastors like Driscoll frequently get in trouble for things they write and say. This book has been called "dangerous." In the meantime, other pastors rarely get in trouble for things they didn't write and didn't say. But -- and here I am convinced that the Driscolls are exactly right -- a lot of damage has been caused by the church's unwillingness to address certain topics, an unwillingness to bring the whole counsel of God to bear on this subject. Silence is also dangerous.
Sex is volatile. Writing about it can blow up on you. But not writing about it can do the same thing. But the damage that is caused by the sin of silent omission is untraceable, it cannot be pinned on anybody. People are just as hurt and just as damaged, and no pastoral fingerprints anywhere. Nobody is going to lose their job over it.

I am a small town pastor, and I think I have pretty much seen it all. In other settings, I can only imagine . . . and I would rather not. One of the things I have seen (in close conjunction with the sexual messes people get into) is that silence doesn't help anybody.

In short, to reapply something D.L. Moody once said, "I like his way of doing it better than other people's way of not doing it."

2. I am more inclined to hear someone out in a discussion of adiaphora (or whether or not something should be considered adiaphora) if that person has been clear and courageous in those areas where the Scriptures speak plainly. Sexual morality and sexual cultural proprieties are two different things. Someone can fight for the former, and bump into the latter. And someone else can observe the latter assiduously, and fail to defend the former.

Take this example. Observe two Reformed pastors (Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller) of two major churches (Mars Hill and Redeemer) in two major cities (Manhattan and Seattle) who both have a book out on marriage (Real Marriage and The Meaning of Marriage). But in church polity, Keller is a soft egalitarian, and he has been conspicuous in his reluctance to address one of the central sins of Manhattan, which is the sin of sodomy. Mark Driscoll has been conspicuously courageous in how he has addressed the sexual perversions of his city. Now, which pastor is in big trouble? Which one is the controversial one? Which is the controversial one on sexual matters? We are not there yet, but this is the first step in how a people might supplant the Word of God for the sake of our traditions.

Faithfulness on the big issues should win you a ticket to discuss the matters of lesser moment.

3. Stipulate whatever distance you might think exists between what Scripture says about sex and what the Driscolls say about it. That is a distance that would be a lot shorter if our translations hadn't done a lot of tidying up for us. A Victorian Bowlderization taint continues down to the present. Pastor Mark might not get invited to your conference now, but -- truth be told -- neither would Pastor Ezekiel. Actually, we would invite Ezekiel because our inerrancy statement says we have to, but we would probably arrange for him to speak with a video feed on a ten-second delay.

4. All this said, please don't assume that I won't be expressing disagreements with Real Marriage, up to and including significant disagreements. The Driscolls anticipate that, and welcome it. It is only to say that I, for one, appreciate the opportunity that he and Grace have created to talk about these things. The fact that these things would never be talked about in your church does not mean they are not going on. In short, this is a good opportunity-- but only if we receive it as such. The publication of this book is an event that God wants the whole evangelical world to use as an opportunity for sexual stewardship. That won't happen if we try to shout it down.

I agree with the Driscolls that what Scripture commends we should commend. What Scripture condemns we should condemn. I agree that if Scripture doesn't condemn something, we are free to pursue it . . . depending. This last depending is where differences are likely to arise. I believe there are numerous areas where Scripture-based moral reasoning is necessary, but there needs to be a way to do it without legalistic looks of shocked dismay. When that moral reasoning -- on practices not explicitly mentioned by Scripture -- is followed, it has to be followed for what it is, which is casuistry done by fallible teachers. Wish us luck.

When is such moral reasoning necessary? Getting a sweet Jesus tattoo on your calf is not an indicator of poetic gifts. Growing a neck beard and moving to Portland does not make you a screenwriter. Buying a sex toy does not make you a savvy lover. We need a hermenuetic that does more than just read the Scriptures. We need a scriptural hermeneutic that shows us how to read our surrounding culture. But more later.

Sultans of Snide

2012-01-10T07:45:00.001+13:00

Bottom Feeders

Storm clouds are gathering around Rick Santorum--running to win the Republican nominee for this year's presidential elections. Santorum is a Christian who takes the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ seriously. Consequently to the Commentariat and the media, by definition he is stupid, dumb, and dangerous. The spittle is in full spray.

We blogged recently about the mockery Santorum is starting to face because one of his children was still born and the parents took the deceased child home so that the rest of the family could grieve and make their farewells. This is being pilloried as a sign of someone of unsound mind. Weird. Kooky.

Blogger Patterico opens up with both barrels at the Sultans of Snide.

It could be because, increasingly, it seems that those in public life — especially Republicans — are seen as fair game for criticism of their most intimate decisions. Sarah Palin has a Down’s Syndrome child and is mocked. Rick Santorum brings home his child that died hours after his birth, and is mocked.
First, let’s dispense with the idea that this is objectively bizarre behavior. Allahpundit links advice from the American Pregnancy Association for parents of stillborn children — a situation very much like Santorum’s, whose child died after two hours of life:
After the tests are completed, you will usually have the choice to spend time alone with your baby. You can find comfort in looking at, touching, and talking to your baby. Most parents find it helpful to make memories of this precious time that will last a lifetime…

With the loss of your baby, your family members will also grieve. Your baby is someone’s granddaughter, brother, cousin, nephew or sister. It is important for your family members to spend time with the baby. This will help them come to terms with their loss. If you have other children, it is very important to be honest with them about what has happened by using simple and honest explanations. It is your decision whether you would like the children to see the baby. Ask for a Child Life Specialist at the hospital; these are trained professionals who can help you prepare your children for the heartbreaking news, and prepare them to see the baby if you wish.
So, not only it is not “weird” behavior, it is recommended behavior that helps the other children deal with the loss.

Patterico concludes that the behaviour of the snide smirkers is indecent. He concludes by railing against those in the Commentariat who would resort to mockery of such personal and private and entirely appropriate actions.

But the problem is not just that some leftists can’t understand the love that some people feel for their unborn children — or for their children who (like Sarah Palin’s son Trig) were born with disabilities. What really infuriates is the contempt they show for parents who make different choices than they would . . . and the smug arrogance with which they pronounce judgment on the most intimate aspects of others’ private lives.

What Robinson has done, and what Colmes did the other day, is indecent. These men would never say such a thing to Santorum’s face. (Or maybe they would — which is possibly even worse.) What sickness has invaded our body politic that people feel free, not only to act the cretin, but to do so on national television while sporting insufferable, supercilious, self-satisfied smirks like those we have seen on the mugs of Colmes and Robinson in recent days?

In short: how dare they? How dare they?!

We have to go back to C S Lewis to answer the question of how such people dare to behave so indecently. In coaching Wormwood on how to conduct the war against God, Screwtape gives the following advice:

"Flippancy is the best of all." Not many people can cut a really good new joke but anybody can be trained to speak as if the good things of this world were ridiculous. "If prolonged," he says, "the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy (God) that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect, and it excites no affection between those who practice it." Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010), p. 152.

The habit of sneering at what is noble or great has become the weapon of choice amongst the godless. It is the preferred humour of the dead. It is the great leveller. It is the favourite chorus among the damned welcoming new entrants to Sheol.

That is the answer to Patterico's question, How dare they? The Commentariat sneers and mocks Christians and flippantly jokes about all they do, say, and believe because they themselves have been reduced to foolishness. Unable to argue, reason, dispute or debate--in short, unable to think--they habitually decline to the lowest form of ad-hominem attack.

Postscript: we understand that Alan Colmes has apologized for his snide mockery of Santorum's family life. We are thankful and believe his public repentance should be acknowledged.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-09T21:36:00.003+13:00

A Dog With Two Tails

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, January 05, 2012

Rick Santorum has said that those who are critical of his so-called "big government conservatism" are wrong, and they are libertarians to boot. Since he is not a libertarian, he rejects the label -- he reasons that if you are a virtual anarchist, then everything is going to look like big government to you. That's true enough, but there is more to it.

As Republicans have done their go-along-get-along thing for the last several decades, an awful lot of territory has opened up between the mainstream Republican right and the libertarian right. This is not the result of the libertarians moving. As the spending has grown, so the distance between the two has grown. There is a lot more distance than there used to be. If you were to show the editorial board of National Review (from 1965, say) what kind of budgets the 2012 conservatives were going to be urging, their temptation would be to sell their magazine and spend all the money at the dog races.

But Santorum's comments to the contrary, there are still conservatives around, not libertarians, who see him as too easy with the checkbook.
For example, Mark Steyn has said that Santorum is a "wee bit too big on the Compassionate Conservatism side." I agree with this fully, and on this point I am roughly where Steyn is.

At the same time, because of where Santorum is on other basic issues, I believe he is worth supporting. But this has to be a hard-headed coalition support, not a simple placard-waving support. He has to get strong support from strong conservatives who are noticeably to his fiscal right. That strong kind of support should come with tea party pressure. A great deal of pressure already exists from the financial exigencies, but there needs to be more pressure on the point from people inside his camp.

After a good showing in an election, politicians are always as happy as a dog with two tails. But this presidential election coming up really is a watershed election. The fiscal realities are grim. Santorum could win every primary left, and be happy about it, and the fiscal realities would still be just as grim.

The only way out is if the conservative standard-bearer rejects, not the label compassionate, but the idea that compassionate government gives things. It does not. A compassionate government, the kind we should be yearning for, praying for, is a government which repents of using its power to take things.

It is a point that Santorum still needs to acknowledge. Somebody should talk to him about it.

Stupid, Crazy, Ignorant and Dangerous

2012-01-09T07:15:00.004+13:00

No Surprises

Secularism represents the most intolerant bigotry in the West. Its megaphone is the media. It consistently casts its opponents--religious believers, usually Christians--as ignorant and dangerous. But that is its only consistency. In all other ways it is hypocritical.

Rodney Stark describes the syndrome:

Recently, the local media expressed approval when the chief of police of Seattle prohibited his officers from wearing their uniforms to take part in a "March for Jesus." The media were equally agreeable when, the next day, the chief wore his uniform to march in the "Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Parade." In similar fashion, protest vigils against capital punishment held outside prisons when an execution is schedules are invariably treated with respect, but vigils outside abortion clinics are not. When animal rights activists berate and abuse women in public for wearing furs, their media treatment is favorable in comparison to that given demonstrations against clubs featuring women wearing nothing. When 1960's leftists are caught after years of living underground in order to avoid punishment for planting bombs or killing policemen, the press encourages and condones very mild or even suspended sentences for such "youthful idealism." But there is no hint of sympathy for those who have bombed an abortion clinic or short and abortionist. . . . The clear standard used by most of the media is that moral engagement is wonderful so long as it is entirely secular. As for religious morality, or indeed any deeply felt religious expressing, nothing could be more misguided or even dangerous. Indeed, the media could not even report the death of Mother Teresa without providing "balance" by soliciting nasty attacks on her sincerity and merit from professional atheists. (Rodney Stark, One True God [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p. 251f)

Stark points out that the worst attacks come from modern deists in churches--those whom we call liberals--whose professional lives have been devoted to denying the authority of the Scriptures and extolling the virtues of disbelief in Christian doctrine. They consistently frame fundamentalists as morons, ignoramuses, rednecks, uneducated, crude and fanatical. They are accused of being hostile to modern values and thought--that is, tending towards a socio-pathic disorder.

These libels are readily picked up and re-broadcast by the media.

Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Weisskopf characterized evangelical Protestants as "poor, uneducated and easy to command." "Fashionable" opinion "knows" that traditional believers, and especially those who conceive of God as an active, all-seeing being who actually hears prayers, are stupid, crazy, ignorant, and dangerous. Ibid., p. 254.

Yup. Stupid, crazy, ignorant and dangerous. That about sums up the attitude and prevailing paradigm of the Commentariat and the media--its easy tool--with respect to conscientious Christians and faithful churches. No surprises there.

The Journey of the Magi

2012-01-07T21:44:00.000+13:00

Nobody Reads Eliot Like Eliot

In September 2009, Bob Toomey uploaded the vid below on You Tube. He commented:

A rare recording taken from a live interview T. S. Eliot did for the BBC, broadcast during World War II. The original audio was pretty bad, but I cleaned it up as best I could. The thing that comes through most clearly is that nobody reads Eliot like Eliot.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Bleeding Out

2012-01-07T07:35:00.000+13:00

Fonterra's Off

We have blogged several times on the crisis confronting the Ports of Auckland. As its unionised labour force hold the company to ransom via the strike weapon, shipping clients are moving their business elsewhere. The Port is in a vicious circle.

Normally when the returns to shareholders are under threat the owners of the business either capitulate to the strike threat (and so kick the can down the road until another day of reckoning) or they get tough and break the union. In this case, however, the owner is the Auckland City Council which is replete with left-wing old-style luddite socialists. Better to have a Port that fails commercially than allow anti-union actions to be taken.

This, from Damien Grant:

It's time to stop port rort
By Damien Grant
Jan 1, 2012
If you want evidence that privately owned firms are better run than those held captive by the state, you need look no further than the Ports of Auckland. Last month, its CEO, Tony Gibson, wrote an embarrassing article in which he admitted that his primary competitor, the Port of Tauranga, was more efficient, more profitable and that despite paying unskilled dock workers $91,000 a year, he was unable to make them do more than 26 hours of work.

Can you imagine the CEO of Westpac writing in the New Zealand Herald that his staff were less productive than those of BNZ, that they were paid too much and he could not get some of them to put in 40 hours? Gibson needs to look no further than the example set by Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas. When his unions threw a wobbly, he grounded the fleet. Joyce showed courage, stared down the union, took some short-term heat but saved his airline. . . .

The Ports of Auckland is owned by Auckland Council, where councillors voted 12 to nine to back the port's management, with left-wing troglodytes such as Sandra Coney and eight others voting to support the union. I'm not meaning to be disrespectful (okay, maybe I am) but working on the docks is not skilled employment. Knowing how to remove an appendix is skilled. Moving a container is something someone with basic literacy and functioning limbs can learn over the course of a few weeks. . .

Gibson should sack the entire workforce and start again. At $91,000, there will be no shortage of applicants, even if he has to fly them in. He will not because his political masters will not let him. . . .

Meanwhile Fonterra, New Zealand's largest exporter by a long country mile, has decided to ship its weekly exports out of Tauranga and Napier, removing them from Ports of Auckland. This from Stuff:

The dairy giant yesterday said it would move its export shipments – worth $27 million a week – from Auckland to Port of Tauranga and Port of Napier from the end of this month till further notice. . . . Shipments of Fonterra products brought in $100,000 in revenue a week for the Auckland port. "The co-operative made this decision to ensure certainty of supply for its international customers," Fonterra customer supply chain general manager Dave Christie said.

Port of Tauranga is going to win big time out of this. And good on it.

Port of Tauranga chief executive Mark Cairns said the opportunity to ship Fonterra's products was a chance to show it could handle the job. "We have been in talks with Fonterra for a long time," he said. "We've been strong competitors with Ports of Auckland for that business and this is just a development along the way." Port of Tauranga is the largest port by cargo volume.

Meanwhile Auckland is learning a thing or two about Marxist class warfare and the hidden costs when local bodies or government owns and operates businesses.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-06T22:22:00.000+13:00

Wonderfully, Conservatively Subversive

Rebecca Cusey

Conservatives have nothing to fear from the controversial and wonderfully subversive Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.” Because the creators, whatever their personal political beliefs, had the artistic integrity to let Thatcher be Thatcher, the film becomes a rousing call to those who believe that “those who can do, must get up and DO.”

The film opens today in New York and Los Angeles, a common practice to make end of year films eligible for the Oscar race, and expands nationwide on January 13. Meryl Streep plays Thatcher, the powerful former leader of Britain who rose from humble roots to lead her country through economic turmoil, Irish Republican Army terrorism, military engagements, and the end of the Cold War.

The controversy stems from the framework of the film,
which depicts Thatcher as a befuddled elderly woman recalling the important events of her life between hallucinatory chats with her deceased husband (Jim Broadbent) and pestering of her living daughter (Olivia Colman). As a portrayal of the onset of dementia, it is brilliant, with Streep fearlessly emitting guttural sounds and half spoken words as emotions chase each other across her face. Confusion transforms into amusement; annoyance, determination, exasperation all flit through her eyes and lips as fast as cloud shadows on a hillside on a summer’s day.

Conservatives have worried that this depiction of a powerful woman wrestling with age casts aspersions on her career and beliefs, as if succumbing to age invalidates what came before. I disagree. Instead, it adds pathos as the former most powerful woman in the world comes to require what can only be described as babysitters. It also does something more: it strips away the details and shows the iron core of Margaret Thatcher.

Even in her confusion, she is all about principle.

At the sight of an Al-Qaeda bombing on television, she stands and declares that condolences must be sent to the victims and England must never negotiate with terrorists. Her muddled brain may momentarily think she still holds the highest office in the land, but – and this is key – her reaction is absolutely correct.

Again and again, the elderly Thatcher reflects the beliefs and determination that made her great despite her failing grasp on current details.

Thatcher inherited her iron core from her father, a grocer who believed, correctly, that the determination of small business and everyday Englishmen would win the day through the horrors of World War II. Freedom means, he taught, that people must be free to work hard and become prosperous, not through hand-outs, but through their own hardiness.

Thatcher translated this obstinacy into every facet of her being. Unions striking and causing garbage to fill the streets of London? Don’t give into their demands. IRA bombing take the life of a friend? Next day, business as usual. Argentina junta invade English territory in the Falklands? Send the might of the British navy to make them rue the day.

The best moment comes when her colleagues urge her to ease back on government cuts –Sound familiar?- that are draining the government coffers and hobbling England’s economy. They feel the cuts are too drastic, that the country is not ready for them. She disagrees. “The medicine is painful,” she tells them, “But the patient needs it to survive. Shall we withhold it?”

We could use a little Margaret Thatcher right about now.

This relentless will was Thatcher’s great strength, but like many leaders before her, her strength became her downfall. The movie depicts accurately how her inability to work with even her colleagues ultimately cost her the job of Prime Minister. It also doesn’t shy away from showing the toll her political ambition took on her family. These are matters of record and, while we may quibble about the details, there is no sense in whitewashing history or reducing a complex figure to a bumpersticker slogan.

The central conflict in the film stems from Thatcher’s struggle to come to terms with her marriage, hence those hallucinatory chats with a dead man. While it’s well done and gripping, there is too much of it. The movie wastes too many valuable minutes on Maggie and Denis, minutes that could have been better spent on history. The Cold War, particularly, is mentioned only in passing. Rated PG-13, the film has some historic footage of violent riots and one brief and totally unnecessary shot of uncovered breasts. There is no sexuality and only a bit of language.

Even with the minor weakness of the film, it is hard to see the tremendously talented Streep completely committed to being Thatcher and not be roused. The Iron Lady’s principles come through loud and clear.
They stand the test of time, even if their proponent has begun to go the way of all flesh.

“The Iron Lady” ranked fourth on our list of the best films of 2011. Check out the rest of the list here.

Reprinted from the blog, Tinsel

Remembering the Dead

2012-01-06T22:06:00.000+13:00

Perspective

Rick Santorum, contender for becoming the Republican Presidential candidate, was smeared last week as being weird, if not a little unhinged. The proof: in the nineties, the Santorum's suffered under the tragedy of a still-born child. Santorum took the dead child home for a couple of hours so that the other children could grieve appropriately and say farewell. Weird, apparently.

Here is an excellent post from Patterico, putting things in perspective. Framing the narrative is everything.

Yesterday’s post about Rick Santorum’s child that died had a comment from reader Leviticus that I think deserves to be read by everyone:
Santorum’s wife gave birth to a child. When she did (and, to my mind, even before she did), Santorum’s other children had a baby brother.
When that baby died, the other children lost their baby brother. What were the Santorums to do? Pretend that the other children never had a baby brother? No. The kids might not have understood at the time, but they would eventually; and, young as they were, they had a stake in the matter, a right to know.
The alternative – the only really acceptable alternative – was to tell them that a child had lived and breathed as their brother, to memorialize him. But it would be difficult to communicate that message to young child with mere words. So, they brought his body home; the words became unnecessary.
Those children will always remember their brother; and thoughts of the mystery, sanctity, tragedy, and brevity of human life will be indelibly stamped on their consciousness – a trait sorely lacking in many modern men and women. What bothers the most calloused members of the pro-choice crowd is the intuitive (though ever unacknowledged) realization that some people really do feel love for a child that they don’t know, for the “simple” reason that it was their own, however briefly – that some people really do respect and realize how sacred that bond is, and that they… don’t.
Well said.

Indeed.

Shaking Baradur

2012-01-06T07:11:00.001+13:00

But As For Me and My House . . .

The human race is troubled, deeply so. Existence is not what it should be. Things are not right. They must be put to right. Who or what will do it? Whilst there may be the occasional Pollyanna who believes in relentless universal goodness, the overwhelming majority of human beings think that things could (and should) be better. Since this is true of most nations and human cultures, we are faced with a dilemma: either we descend into bitterness, or we find a saviour in which we can place our faith and hope that things will improve and eventually be put to rights.

The quest for, and hope in, a saviour of some kind is pretty much universal. Our age is no exception.
The ancient Greeks used to apply the title "Soter" or Saviour to gods, titans, and heroes. It was fairly common. When Augustus assumed the imperial mantle in Rome amongst his many titles inevitably came "Augustus--Saviour" first declared concerning the Roman Emperor in the hellenised Eastern provinces. Augustus accepted the title.

Our age is comprehensively secular in nature. No god exists to be recognized or venerated, we are told. But a saviour-doctrine surely does. If one stands back from the public discourse during elections in the West virtually all political parties contend for voter support by promising that they will be best at running the government or ruling so as to save the country and put things to right. In our secularised world, the government is Soter--something foreshadowed by Augustus and Rome centuries ago. Things have not changed much.

Against all this stands the testimony of God Himself. Yes, the world is deeply troubled and imperfect. But the cause is not a yet-to-be-completed evolutionary process. Nor is it chaos. Nor warring amongst the gods. Nor a lack of philosopher kings. The cause of trouble is human evil, sin, in every human being. The cause of all that is wrong and imperfect is our rebellion against God. The wages of our sin is death. But God has put forth One whose name means (in Hebrew), Saviour. It is the ultimate Soter doctrine. "You shall call his Name Jesus for He will save His people from their sins." (Matt. 1:21)

Herein lies the reason why the Christian Gospel is so offensive to the West. It confronts and strikes at the heart of our culture's pride and arrogance. The West's Soter doctrine and the Christian faith will never agree, never find common cause. They remain diametrically opposed; the warfare will not cease until one is triumphant and the other broken and defeated.

The Christian Gospel also has its Soter doctrine. Once again, it is emphatic, declarative, fixed, and certain. The ambassadors of the Lord Christ declared: "There is salvation in no-one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) The Scriptures declare that Christ alone is the Saviour; no other name has been put forward by God in all heaven and earth to deliver us. Our culture utterly rejects this. It asserts that government will be our saviour. Between these two there can be no final agreement, no working compromise, no ultimate common cause.

When Christians stand and declare, using the words of the Creed, "I believe in Jesus . . . " they are not only uttering the words of Scripture, they are declaring that they believe in God. They side with Him and His truth and His provision of the only true Saviour. But by this very act they are engaged in subversion. By their declaration the very foundations of Baradur are shaken.

"But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." We utterly reject the West's false saviour. We will neither acknowledge it, nor bow down to serve it.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-05T21:37:00.000+13:00

An Iowa Caucus Nano-Margin

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Here are a few observations that conservatives can pack into their suitcases as they leave Iowa. Romney edged out Santorum by eight votes -- a victory so razor-thin close as to make no difference. Eight votes! And the way the expectations world is structured, Romney cannot really claim a triumph here and Santorum can.
In the meantime, Ron Paul came in a strong third -- not as well as I thought he was going to do, but still doing very well. After those "three tickets out," Iowa did what Iowa does well, which was to winnow the field.

Here are some thoughts:

1. As the campaign between Romney and Santorum develops, all historic "no child left behind" Republicans -- among whom I would number both Romney and Santorum -- need to recognize that Obama drove through an opening created by big government conservatives. We are in a big mess and the Republicans have been big time complicit. But we are in a different place now, as in, the money all went poof. Some of those who see it now did help to get us here, and that should be acknowledged. I applaud Santorum's genuine defense of marriage and life and, listening to his tax cut proposals, am moderately hopeful he is on the side of the fiscally sane. But given Romney's continued stout defense of his Romneycare, I don't think Romney is going in the right economic direction at all. There are reasons why the establishment still wants to consider him as the heir apparent.

America under Obama dreaming of America under Romney is a drunk in the gutter dreaming of the days when he could still handle a two-martini business lunch. But what we need to dream of is a detox center.

2. On a related note, last night I saw Sarah Palin give the mainstreamers some really sound advice, which was to start treating the Ron Paul movement with some respect. Some of the furious scolding I have seen directed at them has really been unbelievable -- the kind of snark that only dogs can hear.

Politics is a contact sport, and you expect a few elbows to be thrown. But dirty ball is still dirty ball. I am convinced that all of the Republicans running need to honor Ron Paul where he is right, and differ respectfully where they believe he is wrong. This is another way of saying that all the Republicans need to be affected by him. But if they regard Paul's eventual defeat in the primaries as a "total repudiation" of his message, and do a little victory dance on the supposition that these libertarian thought crimes will now go away, they are making a drastic mistake. As Paul said last night, "freedom is popular."

3. Speaking of drastic mistakes, I believe that Ron Paul should squelch any possible talk of a third party run. Doing what he is doing now really is moving the Republican Party to the right. A third party run would only move the entire country left. I actually believe that Paul will not in fact run as a third party candidate, and the main reason is the untenable position this would put his son Rand Paul in. I am more comfortable with Rand than with Ron, and want to see his tea party influence grow within the Republican Party, which I trust Ron Paul wants also.

All in all, it was a pretty good night.

Chutzpah Indeed

2012-01-05T07:16:00.000+13:00

Very Smelly

The poor old NZ Herald. It claims to be New Zealand's Fishwrap of Record, but these days it is smelling decidedly stinky. When anyone attempts to cloak naked self-interest by conjuring high moral principle the stench of decay usually becomes overwhelming. And so it is in this case.

Our Fishwrap of Record is continuing to beat up on the Crown seeking to recover costs from one over litigious journalist. The "story" has been framed not just as a David versus Goliath struggle (although there has been plenty of that) but more importantly a struggle between individual freedom versus overreaching government power. Now it is democracy itself which is at stake. Wow.

The Fishwrap publicly has not just sided with the little oppressed guy (their reporter) but then wraps the whole package up with "greater good" principle of the government having a duty to face up to legal challenges from its citizens and pay for them! Tomorrow doubtless world-peace will be at risk.

The events being pontificated upon are now a long-gone-news-dead story. An aggressive reporter secretly tapes a private conversation between the Prime Minister and a politician of another political party; the PM refers the matter to the police, and the Fishwrap is injuncted against publishing the contents of the tape. Whereupon, aggressive reporter goes to the High Court seeking summary judgment that the conversation was not private, therefore privacy laws did not apply. The High Court tosses the matter out. The aggressive reporter had incurred $40k worth of court costs (largely due to the Court having to treat the matter with urgency); the Crown seeks $14k in costs.

"Wrong!" fulminates the Fishwrap. How so, asks the Innocent. Surely the Fishwrap stood to gain money from a salacious scoop. There are vital principles at stake here, apparently. Our advice: never get in the way of a MSM organ trying to cover naked self-interest with high principle. The attendant stench will induce inevitable nausea.

Key's claim, that a conversation between two politicians who had invited the news media to a crowded and stage-managed public event was private, was wet but it accomplished what he wanted: it kept secret the details of a matter of important public interest while the election campaign was on.

That alone was offensive to democracy but the latest move has a much worse stench about it, of an executive branch happy to use its power to penalise people who, implicitly or explicitly, ask inconvenient questions.

Go the Little Guy being persecuted by Big Brother. But, says the NZ Herald--let's put this in perspective. It is democracy which is offended. Yes. Democracy itself.

No, the stench here is the Fishwrap trying to make itself righteously indignant appealing to the "bigger principles" all the while wanting to be able to act like the guttersnipe News of the World. Now, we believe firmly that the bigger principle really is the issue of privacy versus illicit publication. The bigger principle is one that brings the media itself into judgment. And that principle is being tested, one way or the other. The NZ Police will eventually conclude their investigation; charges will be laid or not. Society will have an opportunity to consider carefully whether the current law has the balances right. All well and good.

Why, then, the urgency of seeking a summary High Court declaration? Because headlines were at stake. And that has nothing to do with democracy and protecting the little guy or the freedom of the press. And that declaration cost the taxpayers. Costs have to be met by those who instigated the reckless legal action that was motivated, not by ethical or democratic principles, but by the commercial interests of the aggressive reporter. And it also had everything to do with the NZ Herald's commercial interests. Trying to cloak it by arguing high principle is odious in the extreme. Just fess up, declare your interests, and move on. The Fishwrap is embarrassing itself.

Letter From America

2012-01-04T20:15:00.001+13:00

Completely and Unreservedly

Posted by Derek Thomas

(Derek Thomas was a colleague of ours many years ago.)

It was forty years ago today (December 28, 1971) that I became a Christian. My conversion was Saul-like: sudden, unexpected, and decisive. I was eighteen, a freshman at university studying physics and math at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

I was not raised in a religious home. My memory holds only fleeting acquaintance with the church - a "Christening" in my early teens with just my mother, an Anglican vicar and myself present; the ritual of "confirmation classes" and the visit of the bishop followed by rebellion and atheism. By eighteen, I was, like most of my peers, a firm believer in science. The universe was the product of a Big-Bang and everything that exists - Mozart, The Beatles, Rembrandt, Salvador Dali, you name them - came from this primal event. Everything comes from nothing.

Enter John Stott.
In mid-December, 1971, a book arrived in the mail from my best friend. "Read it," an enclosed card insisted. The book was Basic Christianity. Truth is, I had never read a Christian book in my life, not unless J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings counts as one (a book I had read several times). Nor had I read the Bible. In fact, I did not posses a copy.

So I began to read Stott's book over the Christmas break. And a few days later, late in the evening, I found myself on my knees late in the evening in prayer. In the terminology I might have used then, "I asked Jesus into my heart." And he came.

In the opening pages of Basic Christianity, I read, "In essence, Christianity is Christ. Who Christ is and what he has done are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was, and if he did not do what he said he had come to do, then the foundation is undermined and the whole thing will collapse."

That's hardly revolutionary as I re-read it now, but at the time, I had no idea who Jesus Christ was. Of course, I had heard of him. But for me, Christianity was about "being good" - roughly equivalent to the philosophy that says, "so long as it doesn't harm anyone else." That Christianity was about a personal relationship with Jesus was entirely new to me.

As it happens I was "prepared" for such a relationship. I still find it hard to describe what my parents' separation a year previously had done to me. Suffice it to say that I was ready for something, some-ONE, to make sense of it all, to provide some integration and coherence into what increasingly felt meaningless and disjointed.

"Sin" wasn't in my vocabulary. I think it truthful to say that apart from my fleeting acquaintance with the church in my early teens (as quickly abandoned as found), I had never used the word. But there it was, in Basic Christianity. Two chapters entitled The Fact and Nature of Sin and The Consequences of Sin. Citing what are now familiar Bible passages about, Stott made the point that I had never considered: that I was a sinner, that I had fallen short of my own ideals let alone the standards established by God (the Ten Commandments). Sin has separated me from God. "It is this that accounts for the restlessness of men and women today," Stott wrote, adding the (now) famous lines from Augustine's Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."

Somehow, I found Augustine describing me! In less than three days, Stott's book had made me feel miserable. Something was very wrong with my life, with me as an individual. I was a sinner in need of forgiveness as much as a restless, unfulfilled young man in need of a sense of purpose and direction.

And thus it was that I prayed to Jesus and found peace. Yes, immediately and decisively, I found peace in the words Stott cited at the beginning of Basic Christianity: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me" (Matt. 11:28-29).

That was forty years ago today.

As I reflect on it, three things come to mind. First, John Stott insisted in the closing pages of Basic Christianity my responsibility as a Christian to grow. "Everybody loves children, but nobody in their right mind wants them to stay in the nursery. The tragedy, however, is that many Christians, genuinely born again in Christ, never grow up." Expanding, Stott insisted on two areas of growth - growth in knowledge and growth in holiness.

It is typical of Stott that he placed at the head of his concern growth in knowledge and understanding. Within weeks of my conversion I came across Stott's latest publication (published in 1972), Your Mind Matters. I vividly recall reading these words, "one of the most neglected aspects of the quest for holiness is the place of the mind." In Basic Christianity, Stott had urged that in addition to a disciplined study of Scripture, Christians ought to "read good Christian books." Yes, good Christian books, for which we need some discernment and wise guides. Within a week or so of my conversion, I told the local Anglican vicar of my good news and he promptly gave me a copy of Paul Tillich's The Shaking of the Foundations to read. Looking back at it now, it was an attempt to undermine what the vicar saw as a fundamentalist belief in Scripture. God was kind and drew a veil over my mind as I read it. It made no sense to me and a week later I returned it.

Books are essential to Christian growth. And, if there is one disappointment I have as I reflect on over three decades of Christian ministry, it is the declining appetite among Christians for good Christian literature. As a consequence, today's Christianity is less robust.

The second thing that comes to mind is lack of holiness that still marks my life. "Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ," Peter urges (2 Peter 3:18). Grace and knowledge. Holiness and understanding. The two are intimately related. But how shall we grow? Stott provided three "main secrets of spiritual development" in Basic Christianity, each one summarized by the word "duty": Duty to God, Duty to church and duty to the world around us.

Forty years later I wonder if Stott's publisher would baulk at the word "duty." Some would find it less than "gospel-centered." But discipline was a mark of Stott's life and I am grateful for the impulse he gave me to provide some semblance of structure into the shape of holiness. Truth is, I can name a dozen or more "Christians" who failed to persevere and today make no profession of faith. They began well but did not endure. Some were personal friends whose apostasy grieves me in ways I find difficult to relate.

Can Christians fall away from grace? The answer is yes. True saints will persevere to the end, but the descriptive "true" is crucial in this sentence. Demas, Hymenaeus, Philetus and Judas are notorious examples of believers who began the race but did not finish it. Scripture alludes to Christians in the only way it can - phenomenologically, according to their profession. Thus Paul writes to "the saints" at Corinth, or Ephesus or Colossae without knowing for certain whether they are all "true" believers (let alone, elect).

Why am I still a believer forty years later? The answer does not lie in me but in the grace of God. I would have fallen away a hundred times and more apart from restraining grace and a love that will not let me go. The anonymously written hymn says it all, I think:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
No, I was found of thee.

Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea.
'Twas not so much that I on thee took hold,
As thou, dear Lord, on me.

I find, I walk, I love, but oh, the whole
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee!
For thou wert long beforehand with my soul;
Always thou lovedst me.

The third thing that comes to mind on this fortieth anniversary is a profound sense of gratitude: for the grace that found me and rescued me and continues with me every day. I am grateful for extraordinary providences within weeks of my conversion: an InterVarsity Christian Union wedded to the doctrines of grace, the ministry of Geoff Thomas (his faithfulness continues in the same church forty later!), a young Presbyterian girl from Belfast (whom I met at that Christian Union and married in 1976), and a thousand other things.

I have been re-reading Stott's Basic Christianity this morning. His closing sentence reads like this: "Now he calls us to follow him, to give ourselves completely and unreservedly to his service." Forty years later, it remains my calling. I pray for the grace that will keep me enduring to the end. I want Jesus to have everything there is of me.

Posted December 28, 2011 @ 12:21 PM by Derek Thomas

The World of Marxist Academia

2012-01-04T07:29:00.019+13:00

Unmaking Decent Society

It's a terrible world--at least according to Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at Auckland University. Tim has provided us with his peculiar version of festive cheer, declaiming systemic injustice in New Zealand society. And what is this gross injustice? It is deeply imbedded income inequality. You know--same old, same old. The rich are getting richer and the poorer are not keeping up.

This egregious situation is a threat to what Hazledine nominates as the Decent Society (upper caps are his). According to Hazledine the Decent Society appears to be one where there are no great disparities between the unseemly wealthy and the grinding poor. It is a society where incomes cluster around the median. "Unrestrained, short-sighted greed" is unmaking us all.

Hazledine goes on to give an example of the very thing he is decrying.
Tim is a professor of Economics at Auckland University. (For our US readers, please note that in the English educational system, "professor" denotes not a lecturer or teacher, but the top shebang in an academic department.) He tells us that the Vice-Chancellor's stipend at Auckland University is $640,000 pa. Ten years ago, his predecessor's income was $360,000 pa.

What possible justification could there be for such an obscene, (short-sighted greedy) increase? Tim, an academic expert in economics, soberly tells us that there is "no objective economic reason" to justify this increase, and that the "vice-chancellors' pay should have increased in real terms four times more than pay on the shop-floor", and, more to the point, one presumes, why the current vice-chancellor's pay should be six times the income of a senior lecturer (which he also notes).

Tim, the economics expert, asserts that since there is no objective economic reason to justify these obscene salaries, the only justification that can be offered is "expert testimony" from salary panels, advisers, and consultants. Basically it's a lottery. "Pick a number," Tim tells us. Any number. As long as it is big.

Hold on. Back up the truck. The 2008 "award" for professors at Auckland University (of which Tim is one) was an income of $126,498 pa. At that time, the median income in New Zealand was $67,028 pa. Tim was earning double--double the median income in New Zealand. And pay on the "shop floor" at the minimum wage meant you would be earning $26,000 pa. Our good professor in 2008 was earning nearly five times as much as the poor working stiff in New Zealand. What objective economic reason could possibly justify that kind of income discrepancy? By Tim's lights we would have to say, none. None at all. It's obscene.

Tim's union had just gone into negotiations and picked a number. A big one. No rational economic justification. It's guys like Professor Hazledine, racked with greed and envy, who are complicit in destroying the very same Decent Society they purport to defend. They are part of the problem. They are the problem.

Well, actually they are the problem, but not for the reasons they advance. For Tim's protestations and his fulminations against the salary of his boss prove far too much. They condemn everyone who makes more than the median wage, Tim included. And since envy is so destructive and abrasive, let's all be reminded that Tim's income is way, way above the median wage.

Tim is destroying the Decent Society not because he earns well above the median wage, but because of his economics of personal greed and envy. His arguments are devious, self-serving and hypocritical. He dishonours the very university in which he serves. By rational economic lights he is being paid way, way beyond what he is worth.

Greed and envy when proclaimed from a bully pulpit do enormous damage to decent society. Tim's salary should reflect the damage and dishonour he does to us all.

Letter From America

2012-01-03T20:39:00.001+13:00

Why and How to Read Calvin’s Institutes

Justin Taylor

If you haven’t yet read C. S. Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, I’d highly recommend it.

He wants to refute the “strange idea” “that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.”

Lewis finds the impulse humble and understandable: the layman looks at the class author and “feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him.”

“But,” Lewis explains, “if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.” Lewis therefore made it a goal to convince students that “firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

I suspect this holds true with respect to evangelical Calvinists and Calvin’s Institutes. Are we in danger of being a generation of secondhanders?

Let me forestall the “I don’t have time” objection. If you have 15 minutes a day and a bit of self-discipline, you can get through the whole of the Institutes faster than you think. Listen to John Piper:

Most of us don’t aspire very high in our reading because we don’t feel like there is any hope. But listen to this. Suppose you read about 250 words a minute and that you resolve to devote just 15 minutes a day to serious theological reading to deepen your grasp of biblical truth. In one year (365 days) you would read for 5,475 minutes. Multiply that times 250 words per minute and you get 1,368,750 words per year. Now most books have between 300 and 400 words per page. So if we take 350 words per page and divide that into 1,368,750 words per year, we get 3,910 pages per year.

The McNeill-Battles two-volume edition (for now the generally accepted authoritative standard) runs about 1800 pages total—so you could technically read it twice in one year at just 15 minutes a day!

Three reasons why this book in particular should be a particular object of serious study:

1. The Institutes may be easier to read than you think.

J. I. Packer writes, “The readability of the Institutio, considering its size, is remarkable.”

Level of difficulty should not determine a book’s importance; some simple books are profound; some difficult books are simply muddled. What we want are books that make us think and worship, even if that requires some hard work. As Piper wrote in Future Grace, “When my sons complain that a good book is hard to read, I say, ‘Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.’”

2. The Institutes is one of the wonders of the world.

Karl Barth, the most influential theologian of the 20th century, once wrote: “I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin.”

Packer explains that Calvin’s magnum opus is one of the great wonders of the literary world:

Calvin’s Institutes (5th edition, 1559) is one of the wonders of the world—the world, that is, of writers and writing, of digesting and arranging heaps of diverse materials, of skilful proportioning and gripping presentation; the world . . . of the Idea, the Word, and the Power. . . .

The Institutio is also one of the wonders of the spiritual world—the world of doxology and devotion, of discipleship and discipline, of Word-through-Spirit illumination and transformation of individuals, of the Christ-centered mind and the Christ-honoring heart. . . .

Calvin’s Institutio is one of the wonders of the theological world, too—that is, the world of truth, faithfulness, and coherence in the mind regarding God; of combat, regrettable but inescapable, with intellectual insufficiency and error in believers and unbelievers alike; and of vision, valuation, and vindication of God as he presents himself through his Word to our fallen and disordered minds. . . .

3. The Institutes has relevance for your life and ministry.

It can be read as simply an exercise in historical theology, but it should also be read to further your understanding of God’s Word, God’s work, and God’s ways. Packer writes:

The 1559 Institutio is great theology, and it is uncanny how often, as we read and re-read it, we come across passages that seem to speak directly across the centuries to our own hearts and our own present-day theological debates. You never seem to get to the book’s bottom; it keeps opening up as a veritable treasure trove of biblical wisdom on all the main themes of the Christian faith.

Do you, I wonder, know what I am talking about? Dig into the Institutio, and you soon will.

If you are persuaded, here are a few resources you might want to consider:

As mentioned above, the McNeill-Battles two-volume edition is the most referenced standard edition. The one-volume Beveridge translation is much cheaper, and can also be found online. If you want the cheapest print option and want to get a good feel for the Institutes without reading the whole thing, consider this abridged version by Tony Lane and Hilary Osborne.

But I would recommend the full McNeill-Battles version, along with Tony Lane’s reader’s guide to the Institutes. In the introduction he explains the various options for using it:

The Institutes is divided into thirty-two portions, in addition to Calvin’s introductory material. From each of these an average of some eighteen pages has been selected to be read. These selections are designed to cover the whole range of the Institutes, to cover all of Calvin’s positive theology, while missing most of his polemics against his opponents and most of the historical material. My notes concentrate on the sections chosen for reading but also contain brief summaries of the other material.
Readers have four options:
Read only the selected material and my brief summaries of the rest.
Read only the selected material and use Battles’s Analysis of the Institutes as a summary of the rest.
Concentrate on the selected material but skim through the rest.
Read the whole of the Institutes.
The notes guide the reader through the text and also draw attention to the most significant footnotes in the Battles edition. At the beginning of each portion is an introduction and a question or questions to focus the mind of the reader.

If you want to do more inductive work, or to use Calvin’s work in a small-group or classroom setting, you might want to consider Douglas Wilson’s Study Guide for Calvin’s Institutes. (You can read the preface and a chunk of this online for free.) Wilson explains how this book can be used:

I would suggest reading the appropriate section in Calvin, then looking at the questions in the study guide, and writing down Calvin’s answers in a separate notebook. The reader can then compare his answers with those that are provided in the guide. . . .

Another possible use is for a leader to utilize this guide for a group study. He can assign a reading, give the questions to the participants beforehand, and then use the guide to help conduct the discussion. The same can be done for classroom use.

For those who want to explore certain sections of the Institutes in greater depth, a fine collection of essays can be found in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis , edited by David Hall and Peter Lillaback.

Finally, here is a schedule of reading through Calvin’s Institutes in a year.

Tolle lege!

The Most Real of All Histories

2012-01-03T07:41:00.000+13:00

Beloved for the Sake of the Fathers

In Romans 11, Paul gives the divine plan for human history. It turns around redemption and deliverance of the human race. A key dynamic driving the progress of redemption is the Jewish-Gentile relationship. We learn that a hardness came over the heart of Israel, so that the Gospel could legitimately come to the Gentiles. The latter, coming to reverence the God of Israel and worship His Messiah, make the Jewish people jealous, causing them, in their turn, to desire to return to the God of their fathers. Then, in its turn, return of Jewish people to the Messiah becomes the apex stone of blessedness for the entire world.

In certain periods of history, it has pleased the Lord to return to His ancient people, making the call of the Gospel life from the dead for them. In such times, the veil appears removed. It would seem that one such period of blessedness is occurring in the United States now.
The population of Jews in the United States has been substantially increased in the twentieth century due to migration and flight from oppression in Europe and Russia. Many of these end up becoming Christians. The process appears to be two-staged: firstly, Jewish immigrants become progressively more secularised; then they subsequently become Christians.

This from Rodney Stark:

Moreover, the common wisdom has been that American Jews seldom convert to Christianity--and certainly not Jews raised in secular homes. In fact, only Jews raised in secular homes or in a highly accommodated form of Judaism every convert to anything. Studies of converts do not turn up persons from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds.

As for the claim that Jews rarely convert to Christianity, the results of the National Jewish Population survey conducted in 1990 . . . show otherwise. American Jews currently exhibit a very high rate of conversion. . . . (M)ore than a third of born Jews have abandoned Judaism--16.4 percent have embraced irreligiousness and 1,325,000 (or 19.4 percent) have converted to another faith, nearly all of them to Christianity. (Rodney Start, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p.214.)

One in five descendants of Jewish families coming to faith in Jeshua, the Messiah of Israel and of the whole world. While this currently flies beneath the radar screen, one day it will be shouted from the rooftops, to the joy of the whole earth.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-01-02T20:16:00.003+13:00

And Then, Wham

Money, Love, Desire - Wealth and the Christian
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, December 26, 2011

As news comes in that China is starting to teeter, allow me to take a moment to remind everybody that there are two kinds of money. Given that miscreants are often put in charge of economies, the boundary between the two kinds of money is frequently murky, but it is important to note the two kinds of money anyhow.

Wealth is made up of goods and services. One kind of money, the real kind, is a measuring stick for those goods and services. When men are being comparatively honest, paper money can work for a time,
but the reason conservatives want paper currency to be backed by something the government can't print or whistle up out of nowhere is that they know how difficult it is for men in power to remain comparatively honest for any length of time. They want some kind of firewall, which is what a backed currency is. But even when the anchor for a currency is removed, it is still possible for money to remain a reasonable measurement for goods and services . . . for a time.

Then there is the other kind of money, the kind that rests upon the word of some fool or miscreant, and that only. It has no other backing. This kind of money is disconnected from real wealth -- which is goods and services, remember -- and it maintains that connection only in the hearts of those fool enough to believe the miscreants. With me so far?

As an example of the latter kind of money, if two boys were playing in the backyard, and one of them bets a trillion dollars that his team is going to win the Super Bowl, only an idiot would then add that trillion dollars to the GDP. Nothing was created, no wealth came into being. The only thing that was added was fuel for the second boy's daydreams. That's it; that's all.

Wealth can be destroyed, of course. This is something that hurricanes do, and wars, and floods. That is one kind of economic set-back. But there is another kind of economic set-back, which is what happens when the foolish boy who thought he had a trillion dollars discovers that he doesn't, and moreover, that he never did.
When a lot of people discover this at the same time, there will be economic consequences -- but they do not necessarily result in the destruction of wealth. More often they result in the rearranging of wealth -- barring an asteroid landing on Manhattan, the wealth is all still here. If a lot of people believed the miscreants, then you can have massive reallocation of wealth, which is a different thing altogether. This is what happens when someone makes real commitments on the basis of false promises. If a lot of people have done this, the upheaval will be enormous.

So here is the final note. The "lost" money that we will all be lamenting sometime in the near future is money that we never had, that never existed. Unfunded pensions come to mind, as do unfunded entitlement programs. The news stories that cover them will describe them all as "lost trillions," but it would be better to describe them as "newly-discovered as non-existent from the git-go" trillions. What has actual existence would be the politicians who made all the promises that were actually accepted and believed by the saps who elected them.

Only Christ holds the future. Only Christ governs compound interest. Only Christ can tell you to lay up treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal, and where this kind of legalized plunder has no place. These economic bubbles that are bursting all around us are actually revelatory of a basic theological problem. When men believe the state is God, they come to believe that this state should have the prerogatives of Deity. They want to say of their god, and do say of it until they are let down in some grotesque fashion, that they know not what the future holds, but they know what holds the future. And then, wham.

It's an Accident

2012-01-02T08:04:00.001+13:00

A Mere Drop in an Ocean of Chance

Harper's Magazine, in the December 2011 edition, carried an "emperor has no clothes" piece by Alan P Lightman entitled The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith.

The crisis of faith is occurring amongst the high priests of scientism--that religion-cum-philosophy which asserts that only matter exists and the study of matter alone reveals truth and knowledge. And it is the high-priests of scientism who are in crisis. The high-priests, of course, are the theoretical physicists. And the crisis is one of existence being so random that ultimately nothing has meaning.

Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

Now this is not at all surprising to the Christian. All Unbelieving rational thought ends up in a rational-irrational dichotomy, which is precisely where the theoretical physicists are today. Lightman explains how they work:

Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy.

So far, so good. But a problem arises when the same phenomena can "explain" many different universes. Or, when endless universes have to be conjectured to exist in order to "explain" our own. Actually, the existence of many different universes (a multiverse) is a giant cop-out. The more sub-atomic physics confronts the inordinate complexity of matter, the more it leans over into irrationalism. The conjecture that there must be many universes is the last desperate throw of the Unbelieving rationalist. Meaninglessness rules.

However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

How on earth did theoretical physics get to this point? It is a cautionary tale--one we have seen many times before in Unbelief. Theoretical physics worked out that this universe is a "near run" thing. Change just one parameter, even slightly, and life could not exist.

. . . the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this finetuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist.

Enter the Intelligent Design rationalists. See--they argue--the parameters and the variable are so precise and fine, the existence of a "Designer" is demanded as a scientific hypothesis. If you won't go with us down this road, then you must be deeply prejudiced. You must have an axe to grind, they argue. Now Intelligent Design is just a throwback to rationalistic eighteen and nineteen century Deism. But Unbelief has taken such a brute grip upon the modern mind that even that cannot be contemplated.

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

No, a far more congenial conjecture that the existence of a Designer is that there has to be an endless number of universes, and at least one has randomly developed to the point where life could happen.

Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

Now this appears to ward off the threat of coming face to face with the Living God. Anything rather than that. But at what cost? Irrationalism. It has to be embraced with a vengeance, despite the fact that it makes everything--yes, everything--meaningless in the end. Rather that, than courageously face up to the Living God. How truly the Scripture has spoken: "the fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God' ".

The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”

Unbelieving scientism reasons that if "science" can explain some phenomenon in the creation, there is no need for God. Of course the dichotomy is false, but that hasn't stopped Unbelief nursing its bitter rebellions. Multiverse theory "explains" away the data, but the cost is a rising tide of irrationalism. Unbelieving rationalism would rather kill off its children and make itself sterile than bow the knee.

Put it another way--irrationalism has to be welcomed into the world of theoretical physics in order to preserve its rationalism, its belief in its Unbelief. Without grasping the nettles of meaninglessness and irrationality, theoretical physics can offer no meaning at all about anything. The only way it can explain rationally the natural order is to assert that meaninglessness and irrationality rules.

Back to the intelligent fish. The wizened old fish conjecture that there are many other worlds, some with dry land and some with water. Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

As always, things in Unbelief eventually come to a pretty pass--both predictable and pathetic.

Anti-Christian National Cleansing

2011-12-31T21:56:00.001+13:00

In Egypt, Christians endure their ‘Kristallnacht’

Charles Jacobs
Republished from Big Peace

Recently Jews in synagogues around the world heard an ancient prophesy about a time of tribulation for the Christians. In the haftarah, the Prophet Obadiah hears G-d warning the Edomites (traditionally a Jewish term for the people who eventually made up the Christian world): “Behold on that day… Your mighty ones to the South will be broken… every man will be cut off by the slaughter…”

How eerily reflective of the moment: Within just the last couple of weeks, the Washington-based Christian Solidarity International (CSI) issued a “Genocide Warning” for Christians and other religious minorities across the Middle East, and launched a petition urging President Barack Obama to speak up.

The “Arab Spring” seems to be rapidly springing shut on Middle East Christians, most clearly in Egypt
where Islamists scored a landslide victory in the first of a three-stage parliamentary election there. The Muslim Brotherhood – whose goals include world conquest in the name of Allah, and whose motto is “Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” – gained 40 percent of the vote, and the Salafists – who are said to be even more radical – garnered 25 percent. And that’s just in the big cities. As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick surmises, the results will only get worse as results trickle in from the more religious hinterland.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s yuppies – the grand hope of dreamy Westerners – Twittered and Facebooked themselves a pathetic 15 percent of the vote. They will likely fade away, be absorbed or be wiped out.
While Israel fears for its peace treaty with the Arab world’s biggest country, Egypt’s Copts face a more immediate crisis. This Christian minority, which numbers some 11 million, was established in the land of the pharaohs long before the Islamic conquests. For the Copts, the “Arab Spring” is already a deep, deep, cold winter – and Obadiah’s words might seem a contemporary foreboding.

On December 7, Cynthia Farahat, a Coptic writer and human rights activist, testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the plight of her people. Farahat’s colleague Michael Mosad was one of the Christian men crushed by a military vehicle during the October 9 Maspero massacre, triggered by Copts protesting the burning of their churches by Islamist thugs. Farahat told the commission:

His legs were nearly severed from his body. As [Michael’s fiancée] sat next to him …soldiers gathered … brutally beating and kicking his motionless body. Vivian threw her body over his to protect him … but military officers beat and cursed her; they called her an infidel, ‘Christian sons of dogs,’ and worse–

Bothaina Kamel, a Muslim TV personality who hid inside a television station during the protests, heard the soldiers and the policemen yelling “Allahu Akbar” as they brutally beat the protestors.

Kamel told the commission she was able to get out of the building only by claiming she was a believing Muslim. She said that she had been warned that the military was inspecting people’s hands, as many Copts had tattoos of crosses. She said to leave the building, she had to trudge through the blood of Christians whom the soldiers had beaten to death.

Gordon College is a Christian school between Salem and Rockport. A few weeks ago I spoke there at a commemoration of Kristallnacht, Germany’s night of broken glass, the first mass assault on Europe’s Jews and the harbinger of the Shoah. I told the Christian audience how good it was to feel Christian support for Jews in these times, and that even some of the most stubborn of my people were now appreciating Evangelical support for Israel. I also said that we felt this blessed support came from a spirit of Christian altruism. But given the news from the Middle East, concern for others is surely not the only reason Christians need to support Israel.

I asked how many in the audience of 250 knew of Anne Frank. Almost every hand shot up. Then I asked how many had heard of Ayman Labib. I got a mass blank stare. Ayman was a 17-year-old Egyptian Christian who just weeks ago was beaten to death by his Muslim classmates as teachers watched because he refused their demand to remove his cross necklace.

I asked how many knew about the Maspero massacre, which had left at least 24 Copts dead and 270 injured. And whether they knew that since January, there had been more than 70 attacks on Christian churches or institutions in Egypt.

While tonight you commemorate a Jewish pogrom, I told them, Christianity has just suffered its own “Kristallnacht” … and I have yet to see much of a Christian response.

Christian persecution is spread throughout the Middle East, I told them. Christians are under siege in Iraq. In Syria, they are clasping tight to Bashir al Assad as a sort of protector, and will be completely vulnerable if – or when – he falls. The Lebanese Christians are threatened by Hezbollah, and the Sudanese Christians lost millions to the Jihad over the last two decades. Christians (and Jews) have been thoroughly “cleansed” from Saudi Arabia already.

In discussions that followed at Gordon, the Christians lamented that they lacked the sense of family that the Jewish people have. “Look at what you did for one Jew, Gilad Shalit. We don’t feel that way about other Christians.” The global jihad, I said, might change that.

Meanwhile, the group Children of Holocaust Survivors, I’m proud to report, is ringing the alarm bells – on Facebook and Twitter – echoing the Christian Solidarity International genocide warning. And I am hearing rumblings of Christians coming awake.

I urge my readers to respond to this real, mounting humanitarian crisis by visiting www.csi-usa.org.

Baby Farming

2011-12-31T07:16:00.004+13:00

A Dirty Little Secret

One of the worst experiences of my working life was practising law as a staff solicitor for a law firm in South Auckland. Part of my role was to make applications on instructions from CYFS staff for care orders, guardianship orders and adoption orders for children under the care of the government.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with my part, not just as a professional doing my job, but as a human being.

Sadly, my experience was that the primary motivator for most of the adults involved with these children was money.
Money to the psychologists for their reports, money to the lawyers for their documents and court appearances, and ultimately money for the people in whose care these children were placed.

Not one of the people who were putting up their hands to take on the care of these children, in all the files I worked on, were self-supporting. All were beneficiaries.

The care orders--or if one is being cynical, the control of these young lives--were simply a means to a notch up on the benefit ladder, a means to quicker state housing, and a means to ensure continued access to taxpayer-funded systems supposedly in place to ensure the wellbeing of children.

The calibre of these people was, to be brutally honest, often so inadequate I would hesitate to leave my pets in their care, let alone a child.

The "whanau" preference, as set out in legislation, is failing miserably. Sadly, the best thing for many children at risk, brown skin or white, is to get them as far away from their "whanau" as possible, until such time as those children have had the opportunity to experience life without abuse, violence, poverty and welfare dependence. Without that opportunity they do not stand a chance, and neither do their children, or their children's children.
Carmel Claridge, Kohimarama
Letters to the Editor
NZ Herald

Deadly Vegetarianism

2011-12-30T20:08:00.000+13:00

Ordering the vegetarian meal? There’s more animal blood on your hands

Mike Archer argues that vegetarianism kills more animals than a diet of meat eating.

The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare. But if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

Renowned ethicist Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals.

It takes somewhere between two to ten kilos of plants, depending on the type of plants involved, to produce one kilo of animal. Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would seem to some to make more sense to focus our culinary attentions on plants, because we would arguably get more energy per hectare for human consumption. Theoretically this should also mean fewer sentient animals would be killed to feed the ravenous appetites of ever more humans.

But before scratching rangelands-produced red meat off the “good to eat” list for ethical or environmental reasons, let’s test these presumptions.

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

* at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
* more environmental damage, and
* a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?

Agriculture to produce wheat, rice and pulses requires clear-felling native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of Australian animals and plants per hectare. Since Europeans arrived on this continent we have lost more than half of Australia’s unique native vegetation, mostly to increase production of monocultures of introduced species for human consumption.

Most of Australia’s arable land is already in use. If more Australians want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed. This will require a net increase in the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and other threats to biodiversity and environmental health. Or, if existing laws are changed, more native vegetation could be cleared for agriculture (an area the size of Victoria plus Tasmania would be needed to produce the additional amount of plant-based food required).

Most cattle slaughtered in Australia feed solely on pasture. This is usually rangelands, which constitute about 70% of the continent.

Grazing occurs on primarily native ecosystems. These have and maintain far higher levels of native biodiversity than croplands. The rangelands can’t be used to produce crops, so production of meat here doesn’t limit production of plant foods. Grazing is the only way humans can get substantial nutrients from 70% of the continent.

In some cases rangelands have been substantially altered to increase the percentage of stock-friendly plants. Grazing can also cause significant damage such as soil loss and erosion. But it doesn’t result in the native ecosystem “blitzkrieg” required to grow crops.

This environmental damage is causing some well-known environmentalists to question their own preconceptions. British environmental advocate George Monbiot, for example, publically converted from vegan to omnivore after reading Simon Fairlie’s expose about meat’s sustainability. And environmental activist Lierre Keith documented the awesome damage to global environments involved in producing plant foods for human consumption.

In Australia we can also meet part of our protein needs using sustainably wild-harvested kangaroo meat. Unlike introduced meat animals, they don’t damage native biodiversity. They are soft-footed, low methane-producing and have relatively low water requirements. They also produce an exceptionally healthy low-fat meat.

In Australia 70% of the beef produced for human consumption comes from animals raised on grazing lands with very little or no grain supplements. At any time, only 2% of Australia’s national herd of cattle are eating grains in feed lots; the other 98% are raised on and feeding on grass. Two-thirds of cattle slaughtered in Australia feed solely on pasture.

To produce protein from grazing beef, cattle are killed. One death delivers (on average, across Australia’s grazing lands) a carcass of about 288 kilograms. This is approximately 68% boneless meat which, at 23% protein equals 45kg of protein per animal killed. This means 2.2 animals killed for each 100kg of useable animal protein produced.

Producing protein from wheat means ploughing pasture land and planting it with seed. Anyone who has sat on a ploughing tractor knows the predatory birds that follow you all day are not there because they have nothing better to do. Ploughing and harvesting kill small mammals, snakes, lizards and other animals in vast numbers. In addition, millions of mice are poisoned in grain storage facilities every year. . . .

Some of this grain is used to “finish” beef cattle in feed lots (some is food for dairy cattle, pigs and poultry), but it is still the case that many more sentient lives are sacrificed to produce useable protein from grains than from rangelands cattle. . . .

Replacing red meat with grain products leads to many more sentient animal deaths, far greater animal suffering and significantly more environmental degradation. Protein obtained from grazing livestock costs far fewer lives per kilogram: it is a more humane, ethical and environmentally-friendly dietary option.
So, what does a hungry human do? Our teeth and digestive system are adapted for omnivory. But we are now challenged to think about philosophical issues. We worry about the ethics involved in killing grazing animals and wonder if there are other more humane ways of obtaining adequate nutrients.

Relying on grains and pulses brings destruction of native ecosystems, significant threats to native species and at least 25 times more deaths of sentient animals per kilogram of food. . . .

The challenge for the ethical eater is to choose the diet that causes the least deaths and environmental damage. There would appear to be far more ethical support for an omnivorous diet that includes rangeland-grown red meat and even more support for one that includes sustainably wild-harvested kangaroo.

Thanks to many colleagues including Rosie Cooney, Peter Ampt, Grahame Webb, Bob Beale, Gordon Grigg, John Kelly, Suzanne Hand, Greg Miles, Alex Baumber, George Wilson, Peter Banks, Michael Cermak, Barry Cohen, Dan Lunney, Ernie Lundelius Jr and anonymous referees of the Australian Zoologist paper who provided helpful critiques.

Ozymandius Revisited

2011-12-30T08:42:00.002+13:00

Lessons From an Antique Land

Drawing lessons from the past can be a risky business, fraught with over-simplification and naivety. But the task is nevertheless inevitable, necessary and right. If you believe, as all Christians do, that God's glory and wisdom is displayed in His handiwork and that His handiwork includes both creation and providence then history not only reveals God's glory, it must be seen as intrinsically instructive--for those who have eyes to see.

Historians have often noted the rapid spread of Islam in the 6th century. Some even imply that it was miraculous. Others, demonic. Muslim apologists point to it as a sign of Allah's pleasure.

Some things are clear.
Firstly, the newly-Islamic Arab raiders were welcomed by the local populations, particularly in Syria. Byzantine rule--maintained by a few garrisons--had become odious in the eyes of local people. The local population joined with the Islamic invaders, welcoming them, and joining together to drive the Byzantine Greeks from their lands. Likewise in Egypt, the local populations joined forces with the Islamic Arabs to destroy the power of Byzantium.

Why did Providence allow such a wholesale apostatising in such a short time? The reason is that the Christian faith was pushed into the Middle East by the power of the Empire. And the Byzantine Empire was untrustworthy, nefarious, devious, and ruthless. In the eyes of the local populations, Christianity became associated with the perfidy of Constantinople. Those who foolishly attempt to promote and defend the Gospel and the Christian faith by the oppression of the sword will end up judged by the Prince of Peace. It was the Byzantines who destroyed Christendom in Arabia, Syria, and Egypt; the Islamic forces were merely the mopping up instrument.

Thus, according to Alfred Guillaume (Islam [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956], p.18)

the Greeks paved the way for their own downfall. [The declension of Constantinople] was the logical outcome of the shameful treatment of Arab Christians by their orthodox rulers. Their policy was as foolish as it was wicked. (T)hey stood for tyranny and injustice in the eyes of the Arabs, and through them Christianity was associated with perfidy. (Ibid., p. 18f)

The Gospel and the sword are inimical. The sword can never be the instrument of the evangel. When men foolishly attempt to deploy the sword to advance Christendom, as a substitute for the preaching of the Gospel and the patient, persistent teaching of the Scriptures, being laid upon the hearts of disciples, the light of the Gospel is withdrawn.

Christianity in the sixth century in the Middle East was riddled with monophysitism; theologically its doctrines and teachings were much closer to the Islamic Allah than to the triune God. The only way God has given to deliver people from such errors is the faithful teaching and preaching of holy Scripture. The Greeks tried a "smarter way": it destroyed both them and the Christian faith in the Middle East.

As one eastern despot once said: "look on my works, ye mighty and be afraid."

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2011-12-29T20:40:00.000+13:00

Just Me Being Silly

Culture and Politics - A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 15, 2011

[We have often observed that most of the worst egregious statist overreaches ever inflicted upon New Zealand have come from the National Party--the "right of centre" party. Think Occupational Health and Safety, Resource Management Act, Children and Young Persons Service, and the Emissions Trading Scheme. Partisan fools are somehow less aggrieved when "our people" are the ones putting us under the cosh. This betrayal and folly is not restricted to New Zealand. Doug Wilson reflects on just such a stupid move by Republicans in the United States. Ed.]

Yesterday the House approved the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Senate is likely to do the same today. There is a possibility that the president will sign it, but he might veto it, and things have come to a pretty pass when I am hoping that Obama will protect us from the Republicans.

What the bill does is grant the government indefinite detention powers over someone accused of terrorist activity, even if that person is an American citizen and the whole thing went down on American soil. Correction -- we know the accused is an American citizen. What we don't know is whether anything actually went down on American soil. All we have is the government's word that it did, and on the strength of that word, somebody can be whisked away, locked up, and nobody needs to prove anything. Ever.

Now let me be reasonable here. I understand the tangled legal issues when an American citizen heads over to Yemen in order to start his DeathtotheGreatSatan.com. I understand the legal issues when an American tries to light the fuse on his sneakers mid-flight while yelling inspirational phrases from the Koran. I get the fact that there is a difference between true enemy combatants and a shoplifter at the mall. So I do believe that the libertarians falsely underestimate the threat that bona fide Islamic terrorism poses to us.

But I do not believe that the libertarians underestimate the threat that our overweening government represents to us. Scale of 1 to 10, how concerned am I that Muslim terrorists are going to successfully do something really bad to me or to my family? Oh, 1 or 2. Same scale, how concerned am I that the federal government is going to do something really bad to me or to my family? More like a 6 or 7, and I am not counting the bad things they are engaged in doing right this minute.

Surely the government will use this power responsibly and wisely, right? Right . . . who would oversee this whole thing? What department would be responsible? Ah . . . the same guys who came up with Fast and Furious? No problem then. I drop my objections. I can see now that I was just being silly.

Completely Unexpected

2011-12-29T07:50:00.001+13:00

We Did Not See This Coming

Sectarian violence has broken out in Iraq before the dust had settled from the departure of the US army. Shi'ite, versus Sunni, versus Kurds, with a dash of Iran, and possibly Al Qaeda. Sixty people dead from terrorist bombs.

The reverberations will continue for a while. It shows into high relief, yet again, that governing elites and the Commentariat of the West neither understand religion nor see its vital significance in human action. One reason for this is the West's self delusion that it has risen above, evolved beyond religion. Its demeanour is to look down from a lofty height, dismissing all religions as something mature people grow out of when they start thinking for themselves. The West sees itself as a-religious.
It is in denial. The West remains deeply religious, committed to the ultimacy of Man, of His rights, and the works of super-erogation which collective Man--the State--can achieve.

But because the West denies its own religiosity, it loses sight of the intractable power of religion to guide and control human action--whether for good or ill. The religious atheism of the West blinds it to the all-shaping power of religion, the ultimate beliefs nourished in every human heart. Consequently, it reflexively and habitually overlooks the controlling and conditioning power of religion everywhere in the world. Nowhere is this more the case than in its view of Islamic countries.

Its hard to credit how stupid the West is. Because it lies to itself about its own deep religiousness and its religion's power over the Western soul, it is blind to the power of religion elsewhere. It ignores it as a material factor, even as it tries to impose its own secular religion upon the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than the public orgy of self-congratulation when the US recently withdrew from Iraq. That country, we were told, is now free. It has self-government. Whilst it is not perfect, it is well on the way to higher things. The sub-text was that Iraq was becoming Westernised, secularised. Ironically, the thunder in the background was not the rolling of celebratory drums, but the explosions of bombs in Baghdad.

Why do we at this blog regard sectarian violence as inevitable in that country until either one faction obliterates the others, or the country breaks apart? Because religion holds its iron grip upon human action. And in this case, the religion is Islam.

Since the chattering classes in the West have not noticed the religion of Islam is one of command, control, and suppression, their expectations of how things will "pan out" in Islamic countries is naive at best, delusional at worst. Alfred Guillaume (Islam [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956]) explains what happened when Muhammad fled from Mecca, where he was persecuted, to Medina where he gained a far greater measure of control.

From the first it was evident that Muhammad believed that his message was for all Arabs--and perhaps for all mankind--and it had now become clear they could be made to listen only by force. There could be no compromise with idolatry. Therefore it followed that all those who refused to believe in Islam must be quelled. Idolaters whose very existence was an insult to the one true God would have to accept Islam or the sword; other monotheists would have to acknowledge their inferiority by paying a special tax. This became the established principle of Islam . . . . It was put into effect in the whole of the Arab empire in the century that followed. (Ibid., p. 40)

As sects developed in the Islamic religion, whenever a sect came to be viewed as idolatrous or contrary to the prophet's teaching, its suppression by force and violence by other sects inevitably followed. You could not claim to be a believer in Allah and a follower of Muhammad without suppressing all idolatry by force, and punishing those who had apostasized from the true path into idolatrous practices. The clash between Sunni and Shi'ite is a clash between two groups who regard the other as idolatrous and as engaged in apostasy. Suppression by means of the sword is obligatory. Thus is the Islamic religion, and, like all religions, it controls the hearts and actions of its adherents.

Those who naively think that sitting around a negotiating table discussing differences and seeking to find a middle way will be effective in bringing Shi'ites and Sunnis together is ignorant of Islamic teaching, or of the controlling hold of religious beliefs over the human heart--of all humans. If the Islamic religion had a doctrine of tolerance it would be different, but it does not. One cannot be developed without denying the very authority of the prophet--which would be to self-immolate Islam.

Of course sectarian violence will rack Iraq, until one group gains dominance and suppresses the others, or the country splits apart into smaller entities. That the West refuses to see this tells you more about the blindness of our own established religion than it does about Iraq.

And do we think Afghanistan will be any different, once the West comes to its senses and withdraws? Only fools and horses would believe so.

Small "C" Conservatism

2011-12-28T20:08:00.003+13:00

Losing Our Soul

We at this blog are "small-c" conservatives. The past, what we have inherited, represents the sovereign, providential governance of the Living God over His creation as He brings His glorious purposes to pass. In respecting and studying and analysing our past, we see the glory of God writ large. We see redemption. We encounter the grounds of all life and hope.

Hence, we find novelist P D James to be right on the button in this quotation:

We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul.

Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold.

Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.

—P.D. James, “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” in The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future: A 350th Anniversary Celebration, ed. Prudence Dailey (Continuum, 2011), p. 51.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

The Koran Cannot Be Its Own Interpreter

2011-12-28T07:58:00.016+13:00

Perpetual Internecine Conflict

We have been re-reading Alfred Guillaume's Islam (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956). It is well dated now and in many ways serves as a curio. The author's hope for the future of Islam based upon certain modernising efforts he had observed in his lifetime has now been well and truly dashed by events in our generation. But in other ways, Guillaume's volume remains relevant.

Some things stand out. Islam's epistemological foundation is deeply compromised. The text of the Koran is arranged in an arbitrary fashion,

. . . on the purely mechanical plan of putting the longest chapters first and the shortest last . . . (Ibid., p.58)

so that there is no certainty about which particular passages correspond to what time in the life of Muhammad.

. . . scholars, eastern and western alike, have been busy for centuries in trying to determine to what period of the prophet's ministry a particular sura belongs. The problem is further complicated by the inclusion of verses which must have been spoken at Medina in suras which begin in Mecca. (Ibid.)

Why might this be a fatal problem?
Well, the Koran itself teaches (and almost everyone in the Islamic world holds) that a large number of verses are superseded or abrogated by later revelations. But there is no way of knowing for certain which are the older and which the later revelations. The apparent contradictions in the text remain insuperable. Other authorities outside the text of Koran must be relied upon to determine which texts have been abrogated, and which are the later and, therefore, perpetually authoritative. These other authorities are, therefore, necessarily higher and the Koran is a subsidiary and lesser authority. The Koran, in other words, cannot be its own interpreter in any infallible or certain sense. It is a wax nose, subject to later traditions and opinions. Those traditions function practically as Islam's highest authority.

Authority in Islam devolves to the imams, which means that the meaning, intent, and application of the Koran is whatever an imam says it is, which is to say that one who desires to be a faithful and true Islamic believer really has no authority higher than that of the particular teacher or teachers he has chosen to follow. There is no infallible certainty on which passages of the Koran abide, and which have been abrogated. And there are thousands of subsequent contradictory traditions to choose from either to ignore or justify accepting a particular teaching.

One consequence is that Islam will always devolve to be at war with itself. The only way to restrain the inevitable internecine conflict is for a particular interpretation or sect to maintain political control by force and suppress all contrary sects and teachings. Until the next revolt, or suicide bomb, or invasion. The only way Islam can survive over the long term is for its adherents not to take it seriously. Which is to say, Islam can succeed only to its own destruction.

How the Kingdom Comes

2011-12-27T21:29:00.001+13:00

Transformation Through Conversion

"I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and possess the land." (Exodus 23: 30)

God told the Israelites that their Biblical culture would come "little by little". It did not come suddenly, or overnight. It came gradually. The covenantal society . . . can only come about the same way. That is, if it is to survive, it must come about from the bottom up. . . . It can only successfully come about (and stick) if it takes holy at a grass roots level through evangelism.

The expansion of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome serves as an example.
Jesus says at the beginning of Acts, "You shall receive My power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth." (Acts 1:8) This verse summarises the spread of the Gospel from one part of the world to the rest. It began in Jerusalem, and ended up in Rome. The method was little-by-little evangelism, just like the land of Canaan.

Yes, Acts parallels the Book of Joshua. Joshua is the account of the conquest of the land; Acts is the story of the conquest of the world. But there is one striking contrast. Joshua took the land by use of the sword, even though it played a secondary role. None of the Apostles used the sword to spread the Gospel. Why the difference? Joshua, although a type of Jesus Christ, was under the Old Covenant. The Old Covenant was a covenant of the flesh, graphically portrayed in the sacrament of circumcision. And, if anything, the Old Testament teaches that the kingdom of God could not be established by the flesh, meaning the sword. The garden of Eden was sealed off by a "flaming sword" (Genesis 3: 24), prohibiting re-entrance. Man could not return to that particular garden by a carnal weapon because his sword could not stand against God's.

Even David, a great man of God, was unsuccessful in creating God's Kingdom. He was a man of war, so was not allowed to build the Temple (I Kings 5:3). . . .

The New Covenant Kingdom is created by the Spirit. God has conquered Jericho by His might, to be sure. But the Holy Spirit had not come in all of His historical fulness. Christ had not yet come in history. Israel needed to use the sword, but Israel ultimately failed. The Church succeeded. In Acts, the Spirit of God went forth and created the beginnings of a Christian world from the bottom up.

The instrument the Spirit used was evangelism, witnessing.

Ray Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion by Covenant (Tyler, Tx: Institute for Christian Economics, 1978), p.202f.

Lest We Forget . . .

2011-12-27T07:04:00.001+13:00

Obsequious, Adoring and Useless

This is the state of the current NZ Labour Party, according to one of its stalwarts, Chris Trotter.

Mr Shearer inherits a party in which rank-and-file members have sunk to the level of what one wit describes as “MP fan clubs”. At its upper levels, the party is caught in the grip of a sclerotic, self-selecting oligarchy based in Labour’s insular and largely unaccountable sector-groups. In effect, Mr Shearer’s Labour Party is rapidly disabling itself. His first and most urgent priority is to kick it back into life.

This, more than anyone else, is the legacy of Helen Clark. She represented capture of the party by left-wing academics, career bureaucrats, homosexuals, and unionists. Most of them had never done a day's work in the real world in their lives.
It recruits its MP's through the "youth wing". It grooms them, soirees them, feeds them, sends them to various confabulations of the Socialist International, and panders to their egos. Then it selects them as MP's and tries to ram them down the throat of the electorate. They spend most of their time paternalistically telling voters how they understand them, feel for them, stand up for them--but failing to connect because the electorate senses the disingenuousness.

According to Trotter the Labour Party's membership has consequently fallen to around 6,000--just slightly more than the Greens. It has no money--not surprising really.

Let's never forget that this is why Clark pushed so hard--even to the point of breaking the law--to ensure state funding of political parties. That move, had it been successful, would have ensured the Labour elite's control of the party and possibly government in perpetuity, funded compulsorily through the taxation system. It's the only way Clark knew how to operate. If money did not come via the state, she was totally at sea, lost, adrift. It was all she and her cosseted colleagues knew and know. Rarely--if ever--have we seen such naked self-interest pursued so ruthlessly and illegally.

Thankfully, the common-sense of the "man in the street" found this kind of behaviour odious--which is why the "common man" was despised by Clark and her ilk as an ignorant, brutish bum.

Can the new Labour leader, Shearer revitalize the Labour Party? Unlikely. He, himself, is a perpetuation of the same elite--having been employed by the UN for years. He is an insider in culture, experience, and mentality. It is highly unlikely that he will have the necessary perspective to take the axe to his own Party in order to revitalise and rebuild it. Were he to attempt such a heroic task, his greatest enemies will be his cosseted parliamentary colleagues and their adulating staffs.

Free From the Dictates of Men

2011-12-26T19:14:00.000+13:00

Christian Liberty

Practical Christian Living - Dealing With Sin
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, August 23, 2010

The way others are to view your liberty is not the same way that you should view your liberty.
Other Christians should let you do what you want unless the Bible forbids it. That’s how we guard against legalism.

But you should use your liberty differently—you should be asking what the reasons are for doing it, and not what the reasons are for prohibiting it.

First Glimpses

2011-12-26T08:32:00.000+13:00

The Hobbit

For those of you who missed it, here is the first trailer of The Hobbit.

It looks like there will be plenty of integration with the Lord of the Rings.

Christmas Meditation

2011-12-25T20:57:00.002+13:00

A Theology of Christmas Gifts

Liturgy and Worship - Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, December 17, 2011

INTRODUCTION:
One of the most obvious features of our Christmas celebrations is the gift-giving. How are we to understand this as Christians? What are the pitfalls? Are all the pitfalls obvious? Because our lives are to be lives of grace, and because charis means grace or gift, this is something we have to understand throughout the course of our lives, and not just at Christmas. But it has to be said that the machinery of our consumer racket does throw the question into high relief for us at this time of year.

THE TEXT:
“And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh” (Mt 2:11).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT:
The first Christmas gifts were given by the magi to the young child Jesus. This happened sometime within the Lord’s first two years of life. Because three kinds of treasures are mentioned—gold, frankincense, and myrrh—it is often inferred that there were three wise men. There may have been, but we don’t know. What we do know is that the gifts were very costly.

SOME BACKGROUND:
Gentile wise men from the East sought out Jesus and they worshiped Him. The established rulers in Israel did not—in fact, Herod played the role here of a treacherous Pharaoh, going on to kill the young boys in the region of Bethlehem. We know what gold is, but what are frankincense and myrrh? They are both aromatic resins, harvested from different kinds of trees. Frankincense was often burned for its smell, and hence the smoke could signify prayer, ascending to God. Myrrh was used in burials (John 19:39), and Jesus was offered some mixed with wine on the cross, which He refused (Mark 15:23). It was associated with death. From the context of the magi’s visit, and the association with gold, we may infer that these were high end gifts. All three of these gifts were very expensive—in these verses, Matthew calls the gifts treasures.

NO EITHER/OR:
The relationship between God and your neighbor is not an either/or relationship. When it becomes that, it is the result of a sinful kind of dualism.
In any context where grace is necessary and called for, you can of course sin . . .
·   Through being a grump and begrudging the giving of gifts at all (John 12:5).
·   You can also sin by giving to your neighbor instead of to God (Rev. 11:10);
·   By giving to God instead of to your neighbor (Mark 7:11).

The way through, the real alternative, is to give to God by means of giving to your neighbor (Esther 9:22). Your neighbor bears the image of God. How can you give to God, who dwells in the highest heaven? You reach up by reaching down, or by reaching across. No gift given here in the right way goes missing in the final tally (Matt. 10:42). With every form of unrighteous mammon, you have the opportunity to extend grace to your fellow creatures, in the hope that they will receive you into glory (Luke 16:9). But every gift given here in the wrong spirit is just thrown into the bottomless pit, that ultimate rat hole (Luke 12:34; Jas. 5:3).

We see our relationship to God mirrored in our relationship to our neighbor. The state of the one reveals the state of the other. “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). When the two great commandments are discussed, we are told that the second great commandment is “like unto” the first (Mark 12:31). The Scriptures are explicit on this point. “No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 Jn 4:12). “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 Jn. 4:20).

WHAT THIS DOES NOT MEAN:
This does not mean that we are to charge about aimlessly, buying and giving gifts willy-nilly. The grace of God is not stupid, so don’t give pointless gifts just to have done something. The grace of God was freely given, so don’t let a racket run by unscrupulous merchants extort money from you that you don’t have. At the same time, merchants are a form of grace to you. How does God get that daily bread to you (Matt. 6:11)? So don’t identify crowds with a racket. Crowds do provide an opportunity for pickpockets, but Jesus loved crowds and He fed them. He gave them gifts (Matt. 14:21).

COLD WATER & THE UNSPEAKABLE GIFT:
The best gift we can give one another at Christmas time is the best gift we can be giving to one another all the time—and that is the gift of gospel-saturated grace. Gospel means good news, and as I mentioned earlier how God keeps track of cold water gifts, we should always connect this with gospel. What has God given? Let us give the same way, and in the same spirit. “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country” (Prov. 25:25).

The Son of God from Heaven is the gospel from a far country. He is the gospel Himself; He is the good news. And we know that His contagious form of life has taken hold of us when we start gracing each other the same way that He graced us. Notice how the great vertical gift and horizontal gifts must be understood together.

“For the administration of this service not only supplieth the want of the saints, but is abundant also by many thanksgivings unto God; Whiles by the experiment of this ministration they glorify God for your professed subjection unto the gospel of Christ, and for your liberal distribution unto them, and unto all men; And by their prayer for you, which long after you for the exceeding grace of God in you. Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift” (2 Cor. 9:12-15).

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2011-12-24T20:18:00.001+13:00

Reflections on Christopher Hitchens

Occasional Services - Memorial Homilies
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, December 16, 2011

Scripture says that it is better to go down to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter (Ecc. 7:2). The reason given in that passage is that this enables the living to "lay it to heart." The death of Christopher Hitchens should in the first place remind us of our own mortality. We should lay it to heart. As Donne so memorably put it, "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Every funeral is our own. These are issues that affect every last one of us.

Those who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ must always remember that the good news of Christ is set against the backdrop of the bad news -- we are all of us sinners, and we all need cleansing and forgiveness. Christopher Hitchens did not need to come to Christ to have his arguments refuted (although that would have happened). He needed to come to Christ to have his sins forgiven.

There will be a CanonWIRED clip out shortly, in which I caution Christians against two errors -- and both of them are errors of speculation. The possibility of last minute conversions must never be turned into actual last minute conversions. No one is wished into Heaven. There have been too many unbelievers preached into Heaven at the funeral, and we ought not to give way to the false tenderness of that impulse. At the same time, the likelihood that Christopher never called on Christ should not be turned into a hard-line dogmatic statement, followed by "good riddance." No one is wished into Hell either. We ought not to greet the news of Christopher's death the way he greeted the death of Jerry Falwell's, for example.

The bad news is that we are all under judgment. The good news is that the one who has faith in Jesus may be forgiven. We must unashamedly declare these terms to the whole world -- but declaring the terms of judgment (which Scripture requires us to do) is not the same thing as playing the Judge ourselves. We leave the soul of Christopher Hitchens (and he did have a soul, despite all his arguments) in the hands of God, who will do nothing but right.

All of this is of course consistent with the affection I had for Christopher. Our prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.

And the Point Is . . .

2011-12-24T08:47:00.000+13:00

The Meaning of Christmas

Great stuff from a congregation in the UK. (Just love the Aussie classicist.)

That's Christmas (Short Film) HD from St Helen’s Church on Vimeo.

Letter From America

2011-12-23T20:10:00.000+13:00

Merry War on Christmas!
I can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan.
December 17, 2011

Mark Steyn

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

Christmas in America is a season of time-honored traditions — the sacred performance of the annual ACLU lawsuit over the presence of an insufficiently secular “holiday” tree; the ritual provocations of the atheist displays licensed by pitifully appeasing municipalities to sit between the menorah and the giant Frosty the Snowman; the familiar strains of every hack columnist’s “war on Christmas” column rolling off the keyboard as easily as Richard Clayderman playing “Winter Wonderland” . . .

This year has been a choice year.
A crucified skeleton Santa Claus was erected as part of the “holiday” display outside the Loudoun County courthouse in Virginia — because, let’s face it, nothing cheers the hearts of moppets in the Old Dominion like telling them, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus — and he’s hanging lifeless in the town square.” Alas, a week ago, some local burghers failed to get into the ecumenical spirit and decapitated him. Who are these killjoys? Christians intolerant of the First Amendment (as some have suggested)? Or perhaps a passing Saudi?

Our friends in Riyadh only the other day beheaded Amina bin Salem (so to speak) Nasser for “sorcery,” and it would surely be grossly discriminatory not to have some Wahhabist holiday traditions on display in Loudoun County. (The Islamic Saudi Academy, after all, is one of the most prestigious educational institutions of neighboring Fairfax County.) Across the fruitcaked plain in California, the city of Santa Monica allocated permits for “holiday” displays at Palisades Park by means of lottery. Eighteen of the 21 slots went to atheists — for example, the slogan “37 million Americans know a myth when they see one” over portraits of Jesus, Santa, and Satan.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned the city of Santa Monica in this space since my Christmas offering of 1998, when President Clinton was in the midst of difficulties arising from his mentoring of a certain intern. My column that year began:
“Operator, I’d like to call Santa Monica.”
“Why? Just ’cause he’s a little overweight?”

Crickets chirping? Ah, how soon they forget. Perhaps Santa Monica should adopt a less theocratic moniker and change its name to Satan Monica, as its interpretation of the separation of church and state seems to have evolved into expressions of public contempt for large numbers of the citizenry augmented by the traumatizing of their children. Boy, I can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan. Or does that set their hearts aflutter quite as much?

One sympathizes, up to a point. As America degenerates from a land of laws to a land of legalisms, much of life is devoted to forestalling litigation. What’s less understandable is the faintheartedness of explicitly Christian institutions. Last year I chanced to see the e-mail exchanges between college administrators over the choice of that season’s Christmas card. I will spare their blushes, and identify the academy only as a Catholic college in New England. The thread began by asking the distribution list for “thoughts” on the proposed design. No baby, no manger, no star over Bethlehem, but a line drawing of a dove with a sprig of olive in its beak. Underneath the image was the following:

What is Christmas?
It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future.
It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal,
and that every path may lead to peace.
Agnes M. Pharo

The Agnes M. Pharo? A writer of such eminence that even the otherwise open-to-all-comers Wikipedia has no entry for her. Still, as a purveyor of vacuous pap to America’s credentialed class for all-purpose cultural cringe, she’s hard to beat. One unfortunate soul on the distribution list wandered deplorably off message and enquired whether the text “is problematic because the answer to the question ‘What is Christmas?’ from a Catholic perspective is that it is the celebration of the birth of Christ.” Her colleague patiently responded that, not to worry, all this religious-type meaning was covered by the word “blessings.” No need to use any insufficiently inclusive language about births of Saviors and whatnot; we all get the cut of Agnes’s jib from the artfully amorphous “blessings.”

When an explicitly Catholic institution thinks that the meaning of Christmas is “tenderness for the past, vapid generalities for the present, evasive abstractions for the future,” it’s pretty much over. Suffering no such urge to self-abasement, Muslim students at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., recently filed a complaint over the lack of Islamic prayer rooms on the campus. They find it offensive to have to pray surrounded by Christian symbols such as crucifixes and paintings of distinguished theologians. True, this thought might have occurred to them before they applied to an institution called “Catholic University.”

On the other hand, it’s surely not unreasonable for them to have expected Catholic University to muster no more than the nominal rump Christianity of that Catholic college in New England. Why wouldn’t you demand Muslim prayer rooms? As much as belligerent atheists, belligerent Muslims reckon that a decade or so hence “Catholic colleges” will be Catholic mainly in the sense that Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is still a cathedral: That’s to say, it’s a museum, a heritage site for where once was a believing church. And who could object to the embalming of our inheritance? Christmas is all about “tenderness for the past,” right? When Christian college administrators are sending out cards saying “We believe in nothing,” why wouldn’t you take them at their word?

Which brings us back in this season of joy to the Republican presidential debates, the European debt crisis, and all the other fun stuff. The crisis afflicting the West is not primarily one of unsustainable debt and spending. These are mere symptoms of a deeper identity crisis. It is not necessary to be a believing Christian to be unnerved by the ease and speed with which we have cast off our inheritance and trampled it into the dust.

When American municipalities are proudly displaying the execution of skeleton Santas and giant Satans on public property, it may just be a heartening exercise of the First Amendment, it may be a trivial example of the narcissism of moral frivolity. Or it could be a sign that eventually societies become too stupid to survive. The fellows building the post-Western world figure they know which it is.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Prophetesses of the Age

2011-12-23T08:53:00.003+13:00

It's Not My Fault

As chutzpah goes, this was as big as it can ever get. A despicable woman had systematically tortured and abused her children in the worst way--including ripping off toe nails and pouring salt and boiling water on the wounds--and justified herself by saying it was the fault of the state. The government had not helped her enough.

This grand effrontery was taken up publicly by the woman's lawyer, Lorraine Smith:

At her sentencing yesterday, the mother's lawyer Lorraine Smith criticised Mr Key and Ms Bennett, from whom her client sought help with her daughter months before police discovered the badly abused girl. "The Prime Minister and the Minister of Social Development failed both [the girl] and her mother. "CYF was not engaging with the family at all."

To correct the record, we would lay down a few more accurate observations justly arising from this cowardly monstrous behaviour:

Firstly, it illustrates that human depravity is alive and well on Planet Earth. The one group of people who will have mixed emotions about the woman will be Christians who well know that the same depravity on display lurks in their own hearts. This does not lead to excusing the woman in any way. Rather, it involves an attitude spoken about by songwriter Eric Clapton, "Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself."

Secondly, it exposes the feminist lie, so often promulgated in the eighties and nineties heyday of feminism, that men were more violent and depraved than women. We were told that women were more sensitive, caring, loving, nurturing--well, more human really--than men. An evidence was the preponderance of men in jails. No, women are not more deadly, but as deadly as males. Depravity is not gender specific. All men and women, descending from Adam by ordinary generation, are born in sin, under sin's reign and dominion. That is why we all desperately need a Saviour, the Saviour.

Thirdly, it shows where our culture and established religion are heading. Cowardice prevents our people from facing up to the truth about our moral condition. Ever since the Garden of Eden, man has sought to shift the blame from himself on to others or circumstances. When indicted by God after his rebellion, Adam lamely said, "The woman Thou gavest to be with me, she . . . ". For her part, Eve did precisely the same, "The serpent . . . " Fast forward to this very hour. Both the depraved mother and her lawyer agree: it was not her fault. "The government we have over us failed . . ."

Here is the problem. Our culture systematically and formally and ideologically agrees with the woman's proposition. Everyone is now a victim. The government, the Great Redeemer, is at consequently fault and blame for everything wrong. The monstrous mother and her lawyer are actually prophetesses. They proclaim the spirit of the Age. It is arguably a bigger act of chutzpah not to acknowledge them as such.

When Social Development Minister, Paula Bennett reacted so powerfully and viscerally rejecting the allegations that the government had failed the "poor woman" we doubt not that the vast majority of the country's viscera moved in approbation. It was the mother that had failed that child.

But a sometimes emotional Ms Bennett vehemently dismissed Ms Smith's claims yesterday. "That child was so deeply failed by those parents that were supposed to protect her," she said. "So it's fine to sit back now and try to blame someone else or a government while in the meantime you are dehydrating, starving and beating your child.

"I don't stand up and take responsibility for that. She should stand up and take it herself."

Bennett was asserting something not often heard today: that parental responsibility trumps government authority over children almost every time--until parents start abusing their children, and then the state--as the ministry of justice to punish evildoers--legitimately intervenes. Nevertheless, despite the gut-reaction of both Bennett and the nation as a whole--she presides over one of the largest ministries of government which implicitly denies and undermines parental responsibility.

It asserts that social development (including parenting and family life) is the responsibility and purview of the State--a proposition our forefathers would have found bizarre. If she were consistent with the very responsibilities and existence of her office, she would have agreed with the allegation of failure. So, sadly the abusive mother and her lawyer have a point, albeit it noxious and poisonous and ultimately false.

Finally, we are thankful that the Judge in sentencing the woman pulled no punches. He categorically asserted that there was nothing, no mitigating circumstances, no government failures, no background of abuse suffered by the mother that could justify what he called, "sustained abuse, amounting to torture.'' The buck stopped with the parent. If only our perverted, blame-shifting culture consistently thought the same.

Something Different

2011-12-22T20:09:00.002+13:00

An Unusual Maiden Parliamentary Speech

Alfred Ngaro is the first Cook Islander to grace the NZ Parliament. Yesterday, he gave the first Address in Reply speech to the Parliament. It is worth listening to. His description of his background, his hard working parents, the strength of family life, their Christian faith, and his commitments to family and community are both laudable and encouraging.

We hope that he will not succumb to the insidious lie of the omni-competence of Government to fix all things and be the Saviour of the people, for that is the corruption of Parliament itself. So many of his predecessors have been suborned. We hope that Mr Ngaro will be made of better stuff.

It is encouraging to see such people becoming MP's. We could do with an entire chamber of them.

Hat Tip: Keeping Stock

Beyond Reasonable Credence

2011-12-22T07:28:00.000+13:00

Body Mapping and Blood Splatter

Life imitating entertainment. That's what is happening in court rooms everywhere these days. Turn on the TeeVee on virtually any night and you will have three or four forensic crime shows to watch. Within short order you will become a relative expert on data matching, blood splatter patterns, bullet rifling, and finger-printing. It's all comforting because the innocent are always vindicated, the guilty are always caught, and it is hard-evidence, fact-based. Science, after all, gives certainty. Many would say, the only certainty in this mad world.

Ah, sorry. It all a figment of the febrile imagination of TeeVee moguls and their minions. But it is having a significant impact on law courts and juries. It's got the Aussies worried.

Gary Edmond, a University of NSW law academic who has researched expert evidence over the past four years, wrote in a paper in the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences earlier this year: ''A good deal of the opinion evidence produced by forensic science and medicine appears to be unreliable or of unknown reliability, and obtained in conditions that make few, if any, sustained attempts to minimise known risks and dangers.''

In 2009, the peak body of US scientists, the National Academy of Sciences, released a report that found only DNA testing among the broad range of forensic sciences was sufficiently grounded in science to regularly and accurately identify a suspect. (And even then serious concerns remain about DNA evidence, including the ability to wrongly convict people on tainted or rigged samples).

The flip side is that almost every other field of forensic science - the science used by expert witnesses in court to establish guilt or innocence - does not have the same level of scientific rigour. The pall cast by the report hangs over areas that have developed a TV-inspired mythos of infallibility: blood spatter examinations, bullet rifling and even fingerprinting.

''What we see on TV is a super science,'' says Richard Kemp, a University of NSW psychologist who is studying the way juries react to expert evidence. ''And that is so at odds with the reality of what is occurring. You want scientists doing science, which on the whole is really dull. It doesn't make for good TV.''

Convictions are starting to fail in Courts of Appeal where the conviction has been based on speculative forensic "science". The SMH article reviews one such appeal:

When a sledgehammer-wielding robber broke through the front doors of the Willoughby Hotel early one January morning in 2008, his balaclava-clad image was captured by a security camera. Fewer than 30 minutes later the same robber, still bearing a sledgehammer and still wearing a balaclava, was photographed stealing just over $13,500 at the P.J. Gallagher's Irish Pub in Drummoyne.

Twenty-three months later, a Tempe man, Raymond George Morgan, was found guilty in the District Court of two counts of robbing more than $58,500 in the heists and sent to jail. The security cameras helped convict Morgan of the crimes when an expert witness linked him to the scene of the crimes through a science used in court known as ''body mapping''.

Earlier this month Morgan won a retrial because the expert's evidence was rejected by the Court of Criminal Appeal. The court found the body mapping was ''simplistic'' and did not use one measurement. In the appeal court's view, the ''science'' of body mapping used in the case of Morgan was wearing no clothes. So much for all those toned and svelte CSI forensic investigators running around on television each week.

Morgan's robbery convictions have been overturned at a time when increasing concerns are raised about ''junk science'' appearing before the courts: unreliable expert evidence leading to contaminated criminal trials. At its worst, such evidence could result in innocent people being sent to jail. At the very least, such evidence could tilt trials unfairly.

We live at a time when Man is demanding epistemological certainty. Infallibility is an inescapable concept and creatures cannot function without it. Either they will submit to the infallibility of God Himself, or they will endeavour to manufacture it amidst the endeavours of the creature or the creation.

The over-egged claims of the TeeVee forensic shows are just one more example. Yet they are deceptively potent--because sooner or later viewers end up on a jury where they will be required to decide guilt or innocence on the basis of forensic science. If they are predisposed to believe that the science is always infallible, always right injustice and false convictions could become endemic.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2011-12-21T20:49:00.001+13:00

Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, and Kim Jong Il

The Rage Against God
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, December 19, 2011

On the death of Kim Jong Il, one wit tweeted that he liked to think that God had let Havel and Hitchens decide who would be the third one to go. That's funny, but if ideas have consequences, and they do, then there are a few other considerations.

We often say, when someone passes away, that they have "gone to their reward." But given atheism, what is that reward exactly?
It is exactly the same for Havel, Hitchens, and Kim Jong Il. All three have now entered into nothingness, which is to say that, given atheism, there are no rewards for anything -- good, bad or anywhere in the middle.

Havel was an anti-communist hero, Hitchens was a courageous but infidel journelist, and Kim Jong Il was a murderous and genocidal thug. They all graduated from this class called earth, and they all got exactly the same grade. Is that justice?

Well, no, the atheist could reply. He grants there is no justice after this life. He might add, somewhat lamely, that this is why it is so important for us to work for justice here and now.

Okay, I'll bite. Let's work for justice here and now because there is no justice in the universe? Nothing ultimately matters and so we must redouble our efforts to act like it does? All things are meaningless, and so we should make sure this thing here is meaningful? This is like maintaining that all triangles have three sides, except for this one here in my personal life, which has five, and which I find comforting. For people who put so much stock in "reason," you would think they would spend a more little time meditating on what deduction actually entails.

Think of it this way. Every day of his life that passed, Kim Jong Il was one day closer to getting away with everything. In the Christian universe, the day of his death was the day of his final capture and arrest. When a wicked man dies, his hope perishes (Prov. 11:7, ESV). The day comes when his life is required of him (Luke 12:20). But in the atheist universe, the day of his death was the day of his final and irrevocable escape.
This should not be a difficult truth to grasp, but sometimes God points straight at it so that we might stumble over our normal evasions. The mortality rate here on this planet is 100 percent, just like a century ago.

Nothing about that has changed. Nothing unusual happened to Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, or Kim Jong Il. It is just that these three deaths, in this proximity, make us think about what we should be thinking about all the time. It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment (Heb. 9:27).

But if there is no judgment, as some maintain, then we should make our peace with that, and stop being so judgmental now. Kim Jong Il was just one more case study to be filed by some relativistic anthropologist under "Different Strokes."

Principled Assassination

2011-12-21T06:44:00.005+13:00

"Good on ya', Bro'"

Passing into the folklore of Western civilization is the heroic attempt by some, including the Desert Fox, to assassinate Adolf Hitler. They failed. But we have honoured their moral judgment and their courage. All of which serves to prove that assassination, when attempted for right reasons and true moral principles, can be a worthy deed.

When John Key was first elected Prime Minister of New Zealand we were told his nickname was Smiling Assassin--earned from his time as an international currency trader with Merrill Lynch. Three years have passed and and it is time to reassess the moniker. We can testify to lots of smiling. That much is true. But not much assassination. Definitely not true.

His predecessor, Helen Clark gave every indication that when it came to the "sense of humour" department she was a shingle short.
But when it came to assassination she was prodigious and prolific, ruthless and quick. Cross her once, and you had better make a will. Cross her twice and you could write your own obituary. Three times, and you would be dead before you finished reading it. We suspect in part this was due due to Clark's pique or spite. John Key has neither. He often shows himself as the kind of guy who takes a shot across the chops, grins, says, "Good one, bro' ", whilst inviting his assailant to have another crack.

But one thing Clark had in spades was a steely commitment to an ideology that motivated much of what she did. That is why the Labour Party now is in the doldrums. Clark's management style had much to do with command and control by ideological compatible allies. She stacked the Labour Party with them and reshaped the Labour Party so that it became a cadre of its leadership--a top-down, ideologically rigorous, command and control fiefdom. The subsequent problems are twofold: firstly, it could not survive Clark's departure; secondly, Clark's ideology was offensive and extreme to the lights of most New Zealanders. Consequently, the Labour Party remains today a "gaggle of gays and self-serving unionists"--ideologically pure, but so out of touch with the public it risks becoming permanently irrelevant.

Clark's ideological purity, however, has left another lasting legacy. She also stacked every government department and every quango she could with people after her own image. These people now fly below the political radar screen but continue to have an inordinate influence over the country. Political correctness remains alive and well as a result. Key, for whom ideology is a foreign idea, neither notices nor cares. He appears not see it because he does not think in ideological categories.

As a result, he is doing the country a grave disservice. Take the Human Rights Commission, for example. This from Stuff:

Golliwog wrapping paper has appeared on the shelves of a popular chain store. Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres said the paper, retailing for $2 at Look Sharp stores, was likely to cause offence.

"I would prefer if they withdrew products like that from sale," he said. "Often in New Zealand we don't realise what a controversial history they have in other countries."

Controversy in other countries should control what a business sells to its customers in New Zealand. Helen Clark continues to influence us from the political graveyard. Because she made appointments based on ideology, her world-view continues to be imposed on us all. The State continues to be our nanny. We are continually lectured on how to dress, think, act, and behave correctly by the lights of a self-appointed elite who want to make the world in their own image. We are smothered with their "good advice".

How we long for some good old fashioned assassinations. If you do it at the right time, for the right reasons it can be a very salutary thing--or so history would appear to tell us. John Key has lived up to the smiling "bit" of his nickname. How we wish the "assassin" part had proved true, at least a bit. A big ideological clean-out is desperately needed in New Zealand. But there's the rub. Key, being apolitical and non-ideological, is just not likely to see it.

It would be salutary to have all those smothering government agencies that exist for the sole purpose of making us better people to be staffed by cheery, happy chaps in the image of the Prime Minister. Having the Human Rights Commission led by people whose habitual response was, "Good on ya' bro'. Have another crack," would be a breath of much needed free air.

Chilling Revelations

2011-12-20T19:33:00.000+13:00

How Long, O Lord

Below are a series of clips manifesting the depth of depravity of the monstrous regime in North Korea. They present testimony from defectors and escapees. It's a dirty secret that no-one likes to talk about in the West.

Praying the Imprecatory Psalms on behalf of those suffering is by far and above the best and most potent response Christians in the West can make.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

They Are Only Christians

2011-12-20T07:32:00.000+13:00

Complicit Silence of the West

We have been watching media commentary upon North Korea, post the death of Kim Jong Il. The overarching, meta-narrative is that North Korea is a paranoid country, ridden with fear. The sub-narrative is that no-one should do anything to make it more paranoid.

Several observations can be made on this pop-psychoanalysis of North Korea's regime. Firstly, it is paternalistic. Like much that passes for psychology these days, it looks down from a great height upon a lesser people, regarding them as children, immature, wilful, and troubled. Secondly, it produces a "don't scare the horses" approach to the regime. But one thing tellingly missing is a clear statement that the regime is evil. Such ethical categories don't really fit in the polite salons of diplomacy, old boy.

We are gratified to be able to reproduce this article from The Guardian/Observer newspaper. This needs to be read. You surely won't find it being discussed in the chardonnay sipping soirees of the Commentariat. this article was first published in 2004.

Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag
A series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 - one of the country's most horrific secrets

In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.

Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime. Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country. 'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'

His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'

Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.'

Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: 'It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].'

The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.

Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.

With North Korea trying to win concessions in return for axing its nuclear programme, campaigners want human rights to be a part of any deal. Richard Spring, Tory foreign affairs spokesman, is pushing for a House of Commons debate on human rights in North Korea. 'The situation is absolutely horrific,' Spring said. 'It is totally unacceptable by any norms of civilised society. It makes it even more urgent to convince the North Koreans that procuring weapons of mass destruction must end, not only for the security of the region but for the good of their own population.'

Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: 'For too long the horrendous suffering of the people of North Korea, especially those imprisoned in unspeakably barbaric prison camps, has been met with silence ... It is imperative that the international community does not continue to turn a blind eye to these atrocities which should weigh heavily on the world's conscience.'

Later today we will post a series of YouTube clips of interviews with regime defectors.