Property at the Pleasure of the State

Begging To Be Left Some Crumbs

New Zealand has a shockingly bad history of property rights. It stems, in part, from the arrogant hubris of wanting to lead the world in applying Fabian socialist doctrines--socialism without violent revolution--since the end of the nineteenth century. The political and religious culture of the country has looked to the gummint as the solution to all problems, and has welcomed the gummint expropriating property from citizens to pay for it. It's all part of the Faustian bargain.

Couple this with a strong streak of egalitarianism, where I am as good as my neighbour by dogmatic creed. In a materialistic culture (the established religion of New Zealand, where the only reality that matters is, well, matter), being "as good as my neighbour" can only be measured in a materialistic sense--that is, in terms of property. It's the only "currency" that is meaningful.

Materialistic egalitarianism creates a drive for having the same house, car, income, wide-screen TV, health care, and education as others. This leads to a universally held belief in the gummint needing to take property of some and redistribute it to others to make things more equal. Virtually without exception, all people in New Zealand believe in this doctrine--from raving greenie socialists right through to the hardest hard-core of right wing ideologues. The only debate is one of degree or extent. To all intents and purposes, New Zealand is a socialist country by the willing consent of the governed.

"So, what's the problem, then?" we hear you say. If people want it, it must be OK. It has achieved a certain legitimacy, has it not? The problems are legion. Right up at the head of the queue is an inevitable overreaching, smothering, controlling, nannying and smothering government. The arrogations of its power expand gradually and ineluctably: there is no stopping it until the State dominates everything. In the end, the government will tell us how to raise our children, how we are to eat, what we are to think, how we are to spend our time, and what level of private income and property it will tolerate. In a word, the State will progressively decide the value to be imputed to our lives.

Now, it is a truism that such a state will succeed to incompetence; grounded upon greed, envy, and theft, wrapped up in ever expanding corruptions and injustice, the fruit rots from within. Need it be this way? No, but it is inevitable as long as the established religion of secular materialistic humanism remains regnant.

Years ago we were participating in a discussion amongst Christians on creeping apostasy and unbelief amongst certain churches and Christian denominations. One of the protagonists asserted that, like his whiskey, he preferred getting Unbelief straight. Rather the wolf, than the wolf in sheep's clothing. This is a fair point.

There is something sneaky and dirty about a so-called "property rights" political party such as National speaking out of both sides of its mouth. It continues to borrow over $250m per week to keep the government afloat and sustain its egalitarianistic redistribution of wealth. But, of course, it is politically unpalatable to pay for this largesse by putting taxes up. So, it prefers to push the burden and expropriation out into the future. Our children, many yet unborn, will have to pay for it. They will come into the world in debt--born into slavery to the self-indulgence and self-gratifying covetousness and envy of our generation. For the rest of their lives they will have to pay for our indulgence. Slavery indeed.

By "moving to the centre" John Key and his National hucksters have become more than Labour-lite. At least Labour had the "courage" of its socialist convictions and was prepared to tax "rich pricks" to fund its egalitarian madness. Key and his mob have cowardly decided that they would rather tax the silent, the yet unborn, for they can't vote.

But egalitarianism and Fabian socialism is the established religion that grips the hearts and minds of almost all in the country. So, all governments in the foreseeable future will continue to act in disregard of the freedom rights of individuals, will continue to expropriate and steal, and will continue to appeal to envy to garner popular support.

Bring back Helen Clark and Michael Cullen. At least with them we got the poison straight up. There was a modicum of integrity there, non?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Homophobia

Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, March 03, 2010

A correspondent has asked me to comment on the "sin of homophobia." What is my take on that?

In order to address this, we have to ask some questions first. If someone asked us about the sin of eating pork, our follow-up question would be to ask what religion they were concerned with. Judaism? Islam? If they said they were asking about Presbyterians, then the reply would be that eating pork is not a sin. Sins are always defined in relation to God, and the form of worship and life He requires. False sins are, correspondingly, defined in relation to a false god, and the way of life and worship that flows out of that commitment.

In some faiths, sodomy is holy.
In the Christian faith it is unholy -- primarily because it is an assault on the image of God. God created us male and female, in the image of God He created us (Genesis 1:27). Those theologians who say they are all about the Trinity, who at the same time say the homosexual heresy is no big deal, are missing one of the central places where God has decided to reveal His nature and character. Nicea was important, but the great confession was long before Nicea. The foundational creed about the Trinity is a sexual one, and it was first confessed when Adam first knew his wife. The foundational confession about the Incarnation is also a sexual one (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23).

There is a difference between knowledge of the triune God, and being adept with trinitarian jargon. In the ranks of the latter are a number who are, in my view, drifting toward what I like to call a perichoretic atheism. More on that some other time perhaps.

Now when I say that in some faiths, sodomy is holy and in the Christian faith it is not, does this mean "to each his own?" No -- we then have to raise the question (an old-fashioned one, I know) of which faith is correct. Which one is right? Christians confess that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Those who want every faith to be a different path winding up the same mountain are overlooking the fact that Jesus actually prayed about that possibility. He asked the Father to spare Him the passion if there was any other way to do this. The fact that the Father said no, and sent His Son to the cross means that there is no other way. The death of Jesus was not an add-on extra. It was the stone the builders rejected, the cornerstone of the new humanity.

But practitioners of these other faiths will certainly accuse the Christians (who call unholy what they have deemed holy) and say that they are full of "hate." Some of this reaction is understandable (although not defensible). We have said that their holy things are unholy. We maintain said that their gods are wood and stone. This means that they will want to call our rejection of homosexual behavior a name that is pejorative. Hence, we find ourselves dealing with charges of "hate," which is a moral failing, or "homophobia," which indicates we have a condition or a pathology that needs to be looked at -- by an ordained priest in their faith tradition. He, having conducted the investigation, will likely say something like, "Yep. Homophobic to the bone. Let's try the electric shock treatments." But for a Christian who knows His Lord, and his Bible, charges of homophobia will distress him about as much as Islam's view of his last ham sandwich.

Now having dealt with the central issue, we should conclude with a few observations about the ways in which professing Christians can and do sin against homosexuals. But it is crucial to note that the sin, in order to be sin, must be against what God told us in His Word. The Christian serves the true God, and he sins against homosexuals if he treats homosexuals in ways that God prohibits. This means, for example, that Christians sin against homosexuals if they treat them with malice (Ephesians 4:31), guile (1 Peter 2:1), railing (1 Peter 3:9), or anything like that. In short, when God said we were to love our neighbors, not to mention our enemies, this would seem to cover everybody. Christians therefore sin against homosexuals when they do not love them, as God defines and gives that love. But this is not homophobia, a fear of homosexuals. It is actually a lack of fear -- not fearing God.

Making Classrooms Safer

Mene Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

Maria, over at NZ Conservative profiles a recent headline in the Dominion Post to the effect that hundreds of teachers have been assaulted in the classroom. Her comments are apt.

Teachers attacked by the hundred

Hundreds of teachers have been receiving ACC-funded treatment after being assaulted at school.

Principals are shocked by the figure and are demanding immediate action to make schools safer.

~ Front page, Dominion Post, Monday 8 March, 2010

Over the past few decades, New Zealand has been experimenting with a "non-violent" approach to disciplining children. Apparently children can be reasoned with and punishment of the physical sort should never be needed. First the schools were constrained with physical discipline being made illegal in the 80's and then a couple of years back, parents have been likewise constrained in reining in their unruly children.

And now principals are shocked that so many teachers are being assaulted in schools.

Why should they be shocked? Is not this just the natural consequence of removing punishment? Now it's the teachers bearing the brunt of increasing violence from children, next it'll be more and more parents.

Somebody in Government really needs to read Lord of the Flies.

We note Lucia's gracious assumption that people in government actually read.

No doubt teachers will find the response of the principals anodyne; it's good that they are standing up for the interests of teachers, and calling for schools to be made more safe--non? But a moment's reflection will tell us that there are only two ways to make the classrooms more safe for teachers. Either pupils need to be controlled or teacher-pupil physical contact needs to be circumvented.

Controlling pupils is an impossibility, given our current upside-down societal madness. Effective punishment and discipline for pupils' disrespect, disobedience or deceit is now a criminal act; long ago the government education system gave up on exercising effective control over pupils. The only thing preventing more assaults upon teachers is that the pupils have not worked out yet that the whole system is a paper tiger. But the Dom Post piece would indicate that they are learning fast.

When the principals call for something to make schools more safe for teachers they must surely be focusing upon the other option--physically removing teachers from danger. Now in this regard we have some precedents--and fortunately they are things which the government can spend money upon--which will go down well. Successive governments have used money-sprinkling as the wonder cure for all educational ills for the past fifty years. Few positive results to be sure--but hope springs eternal in a politician's breast, particularly when it involves spending your money.

The obvious solution to the principals' plea is to rebuilt all classrooms so that the teacher can operate behind a plate glass petition, with a separate, secure entrance. This would ensure that the teacher could enter the classroom without fear, and could conduct the class from within his plate-glass alcove without having to have any actual physical contact with students--thus ensuring his or her safety. It is another application of the kind of thing taxi drivers have been calling for.

We are familiar with this style of architecture--it's called a high security courtroom. To be sure it would be a bit embarrassing that usually separate entrances and protective screens are for criminals, but it has proved effective in protecting the accused.

Then again, on reflection, designing classrooms to look as if teachers were on trial would be an appropriate metaphor for the government education system. It is daily being tried and found more and more wanting.

Dying the Death of a Thousand Qualifications

Healthy Circumspection

Lorne Gunter, writing in the National Post, reflects upon the change in tone and substance of the (formerly) gung ho scientists that had been actively championing the global warming cause.

He writes:

Why does Climategate matter? Who cares whether the climate data on a computer at some obscure English university has been deliberately corrupted?

In one form or another, I have had to answer these questions from dozens of readers in the three months since thousands of e-mails and computer files were leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

There are plenty of ways in which these disclosures have been crucial, but the principal change has been the uncertainty creeping into the remarks of former True Believers. Some of those who for years have insisted the science is “settled,” are now admitting we don’t know all we need to before making trillion-dollar policy decisions.

He reviews the recent carefully qualified statements by Prof Phil Jones in his recent BBC interview, and observes that six months ago, Jones and his colleagues would never have spoken in such carefully qualified and measured tones.

Consider the remarks Phil Jones, the former head of CRU, made last week to the BBC. Prof. Jones, who has stepped down from his directorship of the CRU pending official investigations into the leaks, told the Beeb there has been no “statistically significant” global warming since 1995 — that’s the past 15 years!

It’s true, as some climate alarmist sites have pointed out, that what Prof. Jones said in full was that the warming since 1995 is almost significant, but not quite. The “trend (+0.12 C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.”

Admittedly, that is not the same as a complete about-face by Prof. Jones, but neither is it meaningless. When was the last time you recall an alarmist such as Phil Jones admitting there was any doubt at all about warming in the last decade and a half?

Haven’t we had it drummed into us ceaselessly that the past decade has been the warmest ever recorded? Prof. Jones’s admission to the BBC then is very significant.

If Jones and his fellow zealots had been so careful in the past responsibly to qualify and couch their pronouncements about global warming, the whole UN imbroglio would never have occurred. This is the real significance of Climategate and its wider fallout.

If, instead of bleating for the past 15 years that the sky was about to burst into flame, major climate scientists had been saying the Earth was warming, but not to a statistically significant level, would you have been as worried as you were? Would there have been a Kyoto accord? A Copenhagen summit? Carbon trading schemes? Green taxes? Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth? David Suzuki’s call to throw politicians into jail if they fail to try to stop climate change?

What has caused this substantial change in tone and reduction of the extremist rhetoric? Nothing has changed in the science particularly, apart from exposing the fraudulent nature of some of the more recent IPCC claims. But no new staggering scientific research has been completed.

Prof. Jones even admitted the science of climate change is far from settled. “There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.”

Nothing scientific had changed since the Climategate leaks. No new data or discoveries have been added that would make the former CRU director change his tone so dramatically. So his new willingness to concede doubt must be solely the result of the embarrassing leaks last November.

That’s one of the ways in which Climategate matters: It has made the alarmists far more willing to admit the science isn’t settled.

The real significance of the Climategate e-mails is that it has forced (or shamed) Jones and his international climate clique into being far more scientific in their statements. Now, the irony is that a robust peer review process, had it existed, would have done the same--but as Climategate proves, corrupting the peer review process was intrinsic to the conspiracy itself.

But Climategate has also undermined global warming protagonists in far more damaging ways. Now, at last, scrutiny is starting to come on the base data on which the thesis rests. The very foundations are crumbling.

It also matters because CRU is not just some no-name English university with one of thousands of environmental studies programs in the world. The CRU is one of three main sources of UN climate data.

Think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a three-legged stool supported by the CRU, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kick out one leg and the stool topples, taking everyone standing on it with it.

Reliance on one of these Big Three climate records has been repeated in hundreds — thousands — of academic studies, on everything from the calving of icebergs in Antarctica to the behaviour of Alberta bark beetles, the prevalence of sub-Saharan droughts to disappearing snow on hip Euro ski slopes.

So Climategate also matters because if one of the most critical sources of climate data is suspect, then the conclusions in all the scores of studies based on that data are suspect, too.

The implications are huge and wide-ranging.

Hot on the heels is the presentation of the UK Met Office to yet another scientific talkfest on global warming. It has called for a transparent "do-over" of all global temperature series.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.

If that proposal goes ahead, it will expose the hopeless state of historical temperature series as they now are. It is likely that the slaughter of sacred cows is going to continue for a long time to come.

Degenerate Discourse

Shaky Ground

In the course of argument it is generally true that the weaker one's case, the more likely spite and vituperation against one's opponent will surface--quickly. Academics appear to be especially prone. Or so Theodore Dalrymple argues.

He observes that Richard Dawkins has recently experienced the syndrome.

Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable: that is a lesson that the convinced, indeed militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins, has recently learned. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that he has learned it the hard way, for what he has suffered hardly compares with, say, what foreign communists suffered when, exiling themselves to Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, they learnt the hard way that barbarism did not spring mainly, let alone only, from the profit motive; but he has nevertheless learned it by unpleasant experience.

He ran a website for people of like mind, but noticed that many of the comments that appeared on it were beside the point, either mere gossip or insult. So he announced that he was going to exercise a little control over what appeared on it - as was his right since it was, after all, his site. Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.

The torrent of vile abuse that he received after his announcement took him aback. Its vehemence was shocking; someone called him ‘a suppurating rat’s rectum.’ He replied to this abuse with admirable restraint:

"Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, overreacting so spectacularly to something so trivial."

Some would suggest that Professor Dawkins was experiencing a particularly poetic form of justice, since in his public career he has been known to hurl gratuitous insults, mockery, and scorn at his opponents from time to time, and imply they were lagging behind the higher stages of human evolutionary development, of which he considers himself an avatar. But we digress.

Dalrymple goes on to observe that vituperation appears to be particularly prevalent in internet discourse, and that he himself has suffered it.

For example, I received unpleasant abuse for articles I wrote about Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. I am the first to admit that what I wrote was not emollient, indeed it strongly attacked both these figures to whom some people are strongly attached. But while I might have been mistaken in what I wrote, I do not think I am being partial in my own defence when I say that it was at least rational in the sense that it was based upon evidence culled from what they wrote. I quoted them at some length precisely to avoid the accusation of quotation out of context.

It is not necessary to repeat here what I said about them, but I shall give just one example. I pointed out that George Bernard Shaw never believed in the germ theory of disease (possibly the greatest advance in medical science ever made), regarded it as a delusion, and called Pasteur and Lister – two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, if one is prepared to admit that there can be such – impostors and frauds who had no idea of scientific method, unlike George Bernard Shaw, presumably. This was a preposterous, but not untypical, misjudgement of his, and one which he never recognised as such. Indeed, he went on re-publishing his libels on their memory until quite late in his life.

I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of the judicious mindset that supposes that the truth might be the opposite of what everyone thinks.

From the quality of the replies that I received, you might have supposed that I had animadverted on the moral qualities of the mothers of Latin American sons. No one ever wrote a reply (on these subjects, at any rate) claiming that I had misquoted them, quoted them out of context, misrepresented the totality of their work, overlooked their good qualities etc. I do not think I did these things, but still such replies would have been reasonable. No; I just received abuse, some of it unprintable and quite a lot of it vile.

Now, from whom did the bile eruct? Dalrymple says it was largely and particularly from university professors.

Indeed, much of the abuse, even the vilest, came from university professors. Almost to a man (or woman), they said that what I had written was so outrageous, so ill-considered and ill-motivated, that it was not worth the trouble of refutation. On the other hand, they thought its author was worth insulting, if their practice was anything to go by. I didn’t know whether I – a mere scribbler – should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).

What struck me most about these missives is the sheer amount of hatred that they contained. It was not disdain or even contempt, but hatred.

The question is begged as to why this should be. Dalrymple observes that prior to the internet he used to get critical letters, but few containing the venom expressed via digital electronic media. He suggests it has something to do with the immediacy of the internet. It is hard to sustain venomous ire while sitting down and writing a letter, which in the nature of the case takes longer and forces one to be more deliberate. The features of immediacy and instantaneous release, he suggests, help facilitate ad hominem bile in internet discussion. Maybe.

But one would have thought that the professional stock-in-trade of academics was to critique analytically and that, even if brief, academics who were supposed masters of their subjects and craft, would be both adept at and used to employing pithy rejoinders. But alas, it would seem not. Instead unremitting ad hominem appears to be the order of the day when academics post on the internet.

Dalrymple thinks that the immediacy and relative anonymity of the medium is to blame.

So it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been. It releases people from inhibitions, and allows them to breach psychological barriers. Even wit suffers, for it is far easier to insult than to think of a really damaging, but amusing, witticism. To write to Professor Dawkins that one feels ‘a sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat’ is easier than to explain succinctly why he is wrong, if he is wrong.

Moreover, the fact that one can vituperate using a virtual rather than a real address promotes such verbal intemperance.

But it seems to us that these features may exacerbate, but are not themselves the cause or fundamental explanation for the syndrome. Ad hominem and personal vituperation is the first preserve of weak argument and shaky rational ground. In general academia in the West has claimed for itself (and been granted) virtual infallibility. Having denied God, the West looks for infallibility and certainty elsewhere, and its intellectual elites are it.

As Frank Furedi and others have argued, it has turned to "experts" who are always clothed with the garb of intellectual academia. Conformity to group-think and consensus has replaced argument, debate, and critique as ways of doing business because of the place in society in which academics sit and the functions they are expected to perform. Infallibility and debate do not sit well together. Society prefers certainty, not argument, when it wants to know "what to do". It therefore finds academic consensus much more congenial and consistent with its own narrative of the virtual infallibility of academic experts. It quickly becomes impatient with debate.

Academics, cloistered amongst group think and consensus, can inevitably find it difficult to cope with contrary views, which can quickly become typecast as blasphemous. Ad hominem, easily facilitated by the internet, becomes the response of choice. But what it betrays is that all the "learning", all the "knowledge" is built upon marshy foundations. Repetition and reiteration has been masquerading as truth. When one's familiar prejudices get exposed, vituperation is the reflexive response.

The outpouring of venom tells us far more about the true state of academia in the West than it does about the limitations of the internet.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Homeopathic Poison

Creation and Food
Douglas Wilson
February 28, 2010

Michael Pollan was one of those interviewed for Food, Inc., and while I differ with the whole project, he really seemed to me to be among the sane ones. Couple that with the fact that his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is well spoken of, I thought I should do a series of posts reacting to his arguments. (Although, if his introduction is anything to go on, I suspect that the real differences are in the premises, not in the arguments.)

At any rate, let me begin by quoting him with partial approval. He referred to the "American paradox -- that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating heathily" (p. 3). I want to argue that this is not just an odd juxtaposition, but there is a deep connection between the two. A lesser theme in my writing on this topic is "lighten up, everybody." Just in passing, the disagreement here is that he seems to be confusing unfit with unhealthy.

Pollan points to something I have thought about quite often over the years. As the human race spread out from the region of Eden, they had to eat as they went. And this meant a great deal of intrepid experimentation. Who was the first to fry an oyster? Who was the first to try that mushroom, and then this one? Periodically, one of the fellows would keel over, and the rest of humanity would look at one another and say, "Well. Now we know."

But in order to keep track of this cause and effect business, you have to approach it with the simplicity of the Neanderthal. You eat a particular thing and die within 24 hours. Everybody else takes notes. But modern man has lost his grip on the nature of cause and effect, and likes to do statistical analysis. Modern man is too clever by half. This confusion results in us living 40 years longer than our great grandfathers did, being fully convinced the entire while that we are being poisoned to death. Maybe it is homeopathic poison. For some reason, Pollan tips his hat to this bizarre approach.

"The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.)" (pp. 4-5).

Just as surely? Poisoned people in modern times should not live twice as long as the unpoisoned ones in days of yore. Or so it seems to me.

The second thing I would like to note from the introduction illustrates the controlling nature of our assumptions.

"One of the themes of this book is that the industrial revolution of the food chain, dating to the close of World War II, has actually changed the fundamental rules of this game. Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead" (p. 7).

My initial response to this would be "cool." What a great use of fossil fuel. But the assumption here is that getting energy from the ground to feed people is bad, or at least unnatural. Fossil fuels are "finite and irreplaceable" (p. 7), and so Pollan argues against using them the way we are doing.

But why? First, we don't know that they are irreplaceable, but if they are, we can then figure out some other energy source to use to drive our farm equipment. The hidden assumption that Pollan appeals to is that we "ought" to be using energy from the sun to grow our food, and that we "ought not" to be fooling around with other stuff. But why?

Pollan is advancing his agenda in an era when numerous people simply "know" this. That means that Pollan can use it to get traction. He can reason from this as a premise because many of his readers will happily grant that premise. But I don't want to. What would be wrong, in principle, with combines that are driven by small nuclear reactors? Then we would be getting agricultural energy from the atom, not from fossil fuels, but still not from the sun. Did God ever tell us not to do that?

And closer to home, did He ever say that it would be better for hundreds of thousands of people to die of starvation in the Far East than for us to abandon the sun as the source of all our agricultural energy? As with many other worldview arguments, the real business here concerns where your feet are, what you are standing on, and not necessarily what you say.

The Wonder of the Created World

Living on God's Roller Coaster

The Psalms celebrate the glories of the creation and, therefore, of the Creator. We, however, in our materialistic and naturalistic world often regard the whole thing as deja vu and somewhat boring. It is hard in our non-imaginative world to empathise with the exuberant explosions of wonder and praise from the soul of ancient Hebrew prophets. They, after all, lived in a pre-scientific age: we, for our part, are have matured beyond such childish squeals of joy.

Not so fast. The challenge Christians face is to deal with their own jaded souls. If we do not see the wonder and exult in the glory of the creation, how will the Unbelieving world ever see the error of its utilitarian, mechanical ways?
We recently read N. D. Wilson's Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009). It is a remarkably original work. It helps us to see once again the wondrous glories of the world God has created and sustains, and leads us to delight and exuberant laughter, to wonder, love, tears, and praise.

Wilson uses the motif of a carnival whirly-gig ride as a metaphor of our planet. Visiting the carnival over the course of four seasons, he overwhelms us with stream-of-consciousness images, concepts, truths, facts, data, and colours that makes the reader feel, once again, as a child dancing with joy before the greatness of our God. But this is not so much a natural science monologue as a clashing, colliding kaleidoscope of people made alive in Christ interacting daily with the manifold complexity of God's world. It is a breathtaking ride.

Here are a few notes from the carnival ride. Firstly, the opening lines:

What excuses can I possibly make for this book?

Alcohol was not directly involved. I do not (to my knowledge) have brain disease. I've never used drugs. But that's not entirely true. Spring is a drug to me. So is Christmas. Love, poetry, wind, smells, lightning, children, ants, very small beetles--all drugs in their own way.

It's not my fault. Those things made me write this book. Those things and a few others, both sweet and sour. (p.ix)

On the sheer abundance and pluriformity of the world:

Winter--the spinning begins. Snow is so overused. One sentimental, overly structured ice flake might have some value. But God never seems capable of moderation or of understanding the basic concepts behind supply and demand. He constantly devalues His own products. Give me one flake, a cool room, and a magnifying glass and I will admire its artistry. But right now, I'm sitting by my window on a Christmas night, staring out at winter wastefulness in the extreme. Miles of clouds, clouds larger than states, have turned into crystal stars that now streak silently past my window to their deaths. . . .

Try counting the flakes. Really count them. I'll step outside for a quick estimate. Let's be conservative. Assuming that we're in the middle of this storm and it only stretches ten miles in each direction (Ha, says the weatherman), and assuming that the storm is a tiny one hundred feet tall . . . then we are looking at about . . . 11,151,360,000,000 flakes in the air above a small patch in Idaho at one particular moment on Christmas night at the end of the year 2007. Just this storm, this tiny little slice of winter could divvy out seventeen hundred flakes to every person on this planet. . . .

But how can we possibly value these things when their maker slings them around like so much trash. Actually, I've never seen anyone sling this much trash. Doesn't He realize that people will curse this tomorrow? That they'll shovel it and salt it and SUV it into gray slop? Doesn't He know that my daughters are going to roll in it, melting thousands of flakes with their flushed cheeks and tens of thousand with their tongues?

Dogs are going to pee on this stuff in the morning. They're probably getting down to it right now.

So begins a new year, a new solar lap. (pp.9-11)

But this is far more than a BBC wonder's-of-nature programme. Wilson refuses to treat man as an intruder in an otherwise perfect created order. The career of man in the carnival is intrinsic to its wonder and glory. He skilfully weaves eschatology into creation's complexity as part of the awe-inspiring symphony in which we all play instruments.

Running my hands over the smooth faces of Cape Cod gravestones, I am once again gazing at the inconceivable night sky, watching numberless water molecules rushing past me in a stream, staring out my window trying to count snowflakes.

I am small. I couldn't begin to remember them all, and yet I yearn to. Each of these stones marks the final page of a novel, a page with nothing but FINIS, centered and lonely. Only a good novel can make me enjoy the final page. With the best of them, especially with the best of them, that last page is bittersweet.

I want to meet every one of these dead fellow cast members of mine I want to feel their grips and watch the lines around their eyes when they smile. How many died peacefully, happy with their end, always knowing that it would come at sea? Or maybe they were surprised that it hadn't, amused that those remaining behind would actually have a body to plant.

Spring sun and spring rain mixed us our weather while my wife and I spent those days wandering on the cape. I watched the tomb-sea, thinking about the coldness of that death, wanting to be given a number, wanting to know how many dead it held, how many continents held more. . . .

The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter.

Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood. . . .

Through the long cold, I wait for Spring. I watch for it, but I never see the moment of its arrival.

The sun warms me, reminds me.

Be grateful, it says. I have broken the Winter.

On the south side of my house, the crocuses are up in bunches. They are the most greedy for spring, the first to notice and explode.

Daffodils will follow soon.

After them will come the sailors. (p. 66,67,88.89)

Wilson interacts with Unbelief's desperate attempts to avoid the Creator. Here is his memorable pen portrait of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ in 1888. Along with many other things, he had this to say about pity: "Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life is so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect."

One year later, Nietzsche entered into madness. True or false, the story is that he was overcome by the sight of a horse being whipped. Unhinged by pity. He wouldn't die until 1900. For a decade he was kept alive and maintained through his insanity, strokes and incapacitating illness. At the age of fifty-five, partially paralyzed, unable to speak or walk, he discovered what life waited for him beyond the grave.

And finally, his advice on how we should live our years in this awe-inspiring, kaleidoscopic, whirling journey.

Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life that you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shekinah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.

But we cannot hope to reach the final chapter by dreaming, by holding our collective breath and staring at unshaded acrylic escape paintings. The only road to that final chapter began at the garden and led into the wilderness. It runs through these chapters. Live now. Relish the tensions, the challenges, and laugh at the petty pains. (pp. 154,5)

Get the book. You will find yourself reading it over and over, again and yet again. And maybe you will discover that you, too, have a soul like that of ancient Hebrew poets.

Entitlement Mentality

Entitlements Breed Contempt

Mark Steyn argues that Western democracies will reach a tipping point: beyond that point there is no way back. Greece is at that point. Some US states are well on their way. All Western democracies are on the downward slide to one degree or other. It is possible that a few spectacular failures will help the rest to wake up and face the cold winter of financial ruin before it is too late.

When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay

Welfare always breeds contempt.


While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids.

In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book America Alone, I put the then–Social Security debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public-pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words, head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn’t going to have a 2040 — not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.

Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Which is true enough. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the point Greece is at.

Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that. Public-sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months’ work: For many of them, the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece. The European Union has concluded that the Greek government’s austerity measures are insufficient and, as a condition of bailout, has demanded something more robust. Greece is no longer a sovereign state: It’s General Motors, and the EU is Washington, and the Greek electorate is happy to play the part of the UAW — everything’s on the table except anything that would actually make a difference.

In practice, because Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland are also on the brink of the abyss, a “European” bailout will be paid for by Germany. So the aforementioned Greek deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, has denounced the conditions of the EU deal on the grounds that the Germans stole all the bullion from the Bank of Greece during the Second World War. Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects: How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off.

Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Angela Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it’s over 40 percent. And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there’s precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year of Greeks who retire at 58.

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire. Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway.

The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

How Cap and Trade Works Out

Fighting For The Last Breath

When men rebel against God, He ordinarily punishes them by giving them lots of rope, whereupon they duly asphyxiate themselves and endure a long, slow, kicking, agonizing, self-inflicted expiration. (Romans 1: 25-30) But, their final defiance, wheezed out for all to manage to hear it, is, "At least I did it my way."

When cultures and nations rebel against God, they, too, self-asphyxiate. We see a classic example of this in the complete folly of cap-and-trade. Now that these regimes are coming into existence in the West, we are getting to see how they are working out. The rope is tightening; breathing is becoming more painful.

James Delingpole tells us how the hopey changey cap-and-trade thing is working out for Britain, in a piece entitled, Time to Get Angry.

Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy.

Corus is owned by Tata Steel of India. Recently, Tata received “EU-carbon-credits” worth up to £1bn, ostensibly so that steel-production at Redcar would not be crippled by the EU’s “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. By closing the plant at Redcar – and not making any “carbon-emissions” – Tata walks off with £1bn of taxpayers’ money, which it will invest in its steel-factories in India, where there is no “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”.

How unbelievably stupid is that. The Indian carmaker is paid 1bn sterling by European taxpayers to shut down the last significant steelmaking plant in Britain, which it then uses to fund its steel making, carbon emitting plants in India. This is the European Emissions Trading Scheme at work.

And this is the kind of thing that our government is going to be inflicting upon New Zealand shortly. Let the long, lingering asphyxiation commence. But here are some more examples from the self-asphyxiating, suicidal United Kingdom.

Gordon Brown has secretly blown another £60 million of taxpayer’s money the nation can ill-afford to spend on “buying carbon credits from the Third World for the use of government buildings and other official purposes – so that our civil servants can continue to benefit from the CO2 emissions needed to keep their offices warm and lit.”

Before we go on, recall that "buying carbon credits from the Third World" means sending taxpayers' money to other countries. But it gets worse:

Thus we pay billions of dollars to the Asian countries for the right to continue emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases here in the West, including the £60 million contributed by British taxpayers to keep our civil servants warm. As a result we enrich a small number of people in China and India, including Maurice Strong, who now lives in exile in Beijing, having been caught out in 2005 for illicitly receiving $1 million from Saddam Hussein in the “Oil for Food” scandal. He played a key part in setting up China’s carbon exchange, to buy and sell the CDM credits administered by the UNFCCC – of which Strong himself was the chief architect.

The net result of all this trading and jiggery-pokery is that, after billions of pounds and dollars have changed hands, with a hefty commission for those bankers and other carbon traders along the way, there is no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions whatever. But at least our political class can continue to work in warm offices and fly righteously round the world on our behalf – while the rest of us foot the bill.

This is precisely the kind of nonsense that John Key and Nick Smith have foisted upon New Zealand with our own version of national self-asphyxiation. Our arrogance and folly have known no bounds, so the Living God laughs at us (Psalm 2: 4-5) and doles out the suicide rope.

In New Zealand, John Key piously and unctuously confessed his faith recently:

I think human induced climate change is occurring. We can have a debate about the speed and the impacts but my own view is that it is occurring.

He said this as he doled out another $50m of our money.

Since the Prime Minister is a believer it behoves him to choke all he can get his hands upon. And he will, making it more expensive and difficult for every person in this country to live and breath as his misanthropic ETS comes into force--except for those who will be enriching themselves of course, clipping the ticket, as our property is confiscated and sent offshore.

One wonders how long the people will remain supine or whether a genuine revolt will emerge--sort of like the last desperate thrashings before death. The thing most tragic of all is that we deserve it, for we have set our governments and our politicians up as demi-gods. And they, for their part, have believed their press.

Ever the Scriptures warn us that God is not to be mocked and the He will ensure we reap what we have sown . . . until we repent, and kiss the feet of the Son. Then His mercy will flow down like a great river.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Nobody Names Their Kid Jeshurun Anymore

Written by Douglas Wilson
March 2, 2010
First published in Blog and Mablog

I have been a subscriber to National Review since I was a junior in high school or thereabouts, and so that means I have been reading those guys for around 40 years. I think this should give me the right to say something. Well, first, I should say thanks. I owe them all a great deal.

Having said that, let me move on to the cover story in the current edition, a piece called Defend Her: Obama's Threat to American Exceptionalism, written by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.

First, let me set the pieces on the board. American conservatism is not Toryism, fighting to protect long-established aristocratic privileges. This leads to an obvious question.

"What do we, as American conservatives, want to conserve? The answer is simple: the pillars of American exceptionalism. Our nation has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth."

And we begin to get gummed up almost immediately. Many of the things that Lowry and Ponnuru point out about the American personality are quite true (at least for the present), and on that level, I found myself agreeing with most of the article. But this language of exceptionalism grates -- let us call it our American grateness.

Our nation is still freer (for the most part) than most other nations in the world. True enough. But not all. The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom puts us at #8, right after Canada. That's not even in the medal round. We did better in hockey than we are doing in freedom. We are now ranked as "mostly free," and for those just joining us that is not a good thing. Ahead of us are Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, and Canada. So are those nations ahead of us allowed to begin speaking of "Irish exceptionalism," or "Australian exceptionalism"? Would it grate on our ears if they started to do that? Would we suddenly see the difficulties with the expression?

On top of this, there is the small matter of history. True, we are freer now than the English are. But the Englishmen of several centuries ago were freer then than we are now. So why are we exceptional in this, and they aren't? When they are freer, better, stronger militarily, and so on, is it to be chalked up as a fluke? And when we become the hegemon the credit goes to our own wonderful selves? The language of American exceptionalism doesn't pass the smell test.

So what is the creed of American exceptionalism?

"Exact renderings of the creed differ, but the basic outlines are clear enough. The late Seymour Martin-Lipset defined it as liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics. The creed combines with other aspects of the American character -- especially our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force -- to form the core of American exceptionalism."

In their description of the American personality, I certainly recognize a lot of my own reactions and impulses in there. I see the same thing in my friends around me -- even those who think they have transcended the whole business.

And I also know that by objecting in the way I am, I can just be pointed to as yet another textbook example of American cussedness -- and I guess I would plead guilty. But having an ornery cussedness streak is not a creed. It is not Scripture. It is not a flaming torch to light up all those other benighted nations. It is not a gospel.

These things that we have (and we do have them) are blessings. They are gifts. Other nations have had them before we did, and they threw them away by offending Heaven, just as we are currently doing. There is nothing exceptional in this at all. Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. Nobody names their kids Jeshurun anymore, but they sure could.

"The retreat from American exceptionalism" led by Obama (and lots of other Americans) is one that Lowry and Ponnuru lament, and are trying to stand against. I wish them well, but they really have misdiagnosed the problem from top to bottom. We will not be saved by our American "religiousness." Religiousness didn't bleed and die for us, and religiousness was not raised from the dead on the third day. Religiousness can go to blazes where it belongs.

The article concludes with this:

"But Americans are right not to want to become exceptional only in the 230-year path we took to reach the same lackluster destination as everyone else."

Sir John Glubb once wrote a small booklet called The Fate of Empires, and I referred to his review of western history in my recent book Five Cities That Ruled the World.

"Cities, like the men and women who live in them, have life spans, and that life span is approximately 250 years. John Glubb pointed to this seemingly obvious truth, but one that is still routinely missed: 'Any regime which attains great wealth and power seems with remarkable regularity to decay and fall apart in some ten generations'" (p. xviii).

Whatever you might want to say about it, it is not an exceptional achievement to die right when your insurance company predicted you would.

Misty Eyed Animism

The Semi-Deification of Whales

The International Whaling Commission is discussing a proposal that Norway, Iceland and Japan be allowed to resume their traditional whale harvesting activities and replace "scientific" whaling with gastronomic whaling. At the same time, says the Commission, it wants to reduce the number of whales killed annually to less than the current 3,000.

This has provoked a storm of predictable outrage from green mystics who "an immediate rejection of any plan that would validate the killing of whales." (NZ Herald, 25 Feb, 2010) This is an interesting development insofar as the political theatre it will create.

Now as everyone knows, the "scientific" whaling regime has been a "legal" loophole that has allowed Norway, Iceland and Japan to continue to put whalemeat on their plates, as they have done for centuries. But, it has been generally tolerated insofar as the rubric "science" provided a bit of a propaganda smokescreen and the world preferred to operate on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But now things are going to become more overt. The International Whaling Commission is considering whether actually to approve and regulate the killing of whales so that they may be eaten.

That will set the cat among the proverbial pigeons, for many in our modern spiritually mushy world regard whales as semi-human, if not semi-divine. Whilst our culture remains indulgent and relaxed towards killing 18,000 unborn children-bearing-the-image-of-God a year, killing whales, let alone eating them, is a definite and certain evil. This doctrine is animalism at its worst. (Once again it shows how religion and food are inextricably connected. Tell us your doctrines of food, and we will have a fair crack at being able to define your religion.)

Now, to be sure, we believe very strongly that no species should be made extinct by the wilful or careless imperial terrestrial reign of human beings, God's sub-creators. If God created such things, we had better not extinguish the species, without incurring His wrath. Whales, therefore, ought to be protected from extinction in the same way that any other wonderful species, such as cockroaches or mosquitoes, ought not to be extinguished.

Therefore, moratoriums or other restrictions upon whaling to prevent the species being killed off in toto seem an eminently sensible thing to do. But putting whales into a mystical semi-human category that would see their killing and eating as intrinsically evil, is itself not just loopy, but is wicked in its own right. Maudlin appeals to Maori myths and animism simply illustrate the point, Whalerider notwithstanding.

But, we understand that minke whales, which were of particular concern, have now recovered strongly and fears of extinction have faded.

An interesting question is what would be the best means to control the killing of whales going forward so as to preserve all whale species and ensure their survival? We acknowledge the difficulty with open seas administration and binding agreements. However, there is plenty of evidence now that if it were possible to create international property rights in whales, to be owned by commercial whaling companies, and administered through a quota system, the survival and management of the species would be likely well ensured.

We know that the quota system in New Zealand for management of our fisheries has been an unqualified success (apart from the alleged dubious illegal practices of certain fishing magnates and companies which will remain nameless). We have just seen another evidence of this with the opening of the Bluff oyster season. The administrators have announced another low catch season in protection of the oyster beds. The fishermen strongly support the restrictions and self-police them with commendable vigilance. Why? Because they all own quota property rights over the beds and catches, and the value of their property will reduce over time, if not erode entirely, if the oyster beds are not sustained indefinitely.

The more healthy and populated the oyster beds now and in the future, the more valuable one's quota property becomes. Every commercial fisherman has a vested pecuniary interest in the sustainability of the beds and in the careful scientific research into their health and monitoring of them.

The establishment of property rights allowing their monetisation and sale does wonderful things for the protection and care of the natural environment in general and of animal species in particular. If it could ever be established, it would be hugely successful for the preservation and prospering of whales.

But, in our animistic topsy-turvy Western world this would be horribly offensive to many--if not the majority--whose maudlin sentimentality over animals is killing out them and all too many of us. Witness the stridently aghast refusal to terminate the killer whale in Florida which just recently killed its third human being.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Americanitas

Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, February 24, 2010

There are a number of things that are circulated on the foxnewsright that do to my soul what an Athens full of idols did to the apostle Paul. One of the central ones, as readers of this space well know, is that I think there is enough sadness in the world without Republicans going around talking about American exceptionalism. The most recent sampling of a near cousin to this kind of thing was a comment by Jeb Bush when he said that Obama's policies were "not American." Obama's policies are idiotic, sure, but last time I checked, we weren't having to import any of that. We generate enough in a month or two -- just in my part of the country -- to keep New York lit up for a couple years.

There was an old ethos, that of Americanitas, that was a real part of the first Christendom, and those who held it knew that one's nationality should no more be a basis for praise or blame than the possession of ten toes should be. But Americanism, a false religion designed to appeal to people who are not especially clever, has banished this older Christian confession in its peculiar American form. In other words, faithful Americanitas was chased to the border, largely by Americans. Not by Russians, not by Chinese, nor by any other furriners.

If you see folks talking about these things on the teevee, or you read what they write about it, and they all seem extremely clever, please remember that nobody seems to understand that you can't float between Heaven and Hell unless you know how to fly. And if you can't fly there is only one way to go, and that is where we are going, at an approximate rate of 9.8m/s2. Satan, Chesterton observed, fell by the force of gravity.

So however earnest they may be in their opposition to Obamaman, whenever somebody trots out this exceptionalism business, thinking Christians need to fall upon that claim with merry shouts. However sound they may be on how a health care system should work, any given advocate of this bizarre doctrine of exceptionalism seems to me to be, in the immortal words of Wodehouse, "nature's final word on cloth-headed guffins."

This exceptionalism talk really needs to expire with a low gurgle.

The Twilight Years, Part VII

Few Things More Dangerous

In this series of posts, we have been reflecting upon Britain in the Inter-War years, as recounted by Richard Overy in his intellectual history account of that period entitled, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009).

Overy is concerned to document the sense of profound pessimism which gripped Britain for over two decades. The Cassandra chorus was led by the intellectual, educated elites of the day: historians, scientists, psychologists, economists, literary cognoscenti, buttressed by newspapers and radio, who were able to persuade the great majority that times were treacherous indeed and that civilization was coming to an end.

In our modern world we see flashes of this from time to time. The portended calamity over climate change (the end of the world as we know it) is one very modern example, but there have been others. We have been warned by ecologists of the terrible threat to the human race from overpopulation, from Islamic terrorists, from "peak oil", from global economic collapse, from asteroids--and so on. But one of the significant things about Britain in the Inter-War period was that pessimism took hold--it became the prevailing belief.

One of the lessons to be drawn from Overy's account is that when a secular humanist society falls from its manic to its depressive phase, the dangers are genuine enough. But the dangers come not from the supposed threats (which are usually due to unfounded fabrications by alarmist academics), but from the solutions and remedies proposed.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, we are told. And so, during the Inter-War years, sections of British society openly courted fascism and communism as a higher and better way. This is not an exaggeration. Hitler and Mussolini were generally believed to have achieved marvellous things in pulling Germany and Italy out of collapse respectively. Since, as was generally believed, Britain lay in a state of terminal decline and imminent threat, there was much that Britain could learn from National Socialism.

But far more commonly was it believed that much could be learned from Stalin. The Soviet Union was seen as a shining light set upon a hill, a beacon towards which Britain should move as it sought to shuffle off its Slough of Despond and move toward a better and brighter future.

Overy writes:

It is easy with hindsight to mock the apparently wilful blindness of the left (and not just the left) in Britain to the realities of the Soviet system. It can be understood only as a measure of the disgust felt about British failings and the apparent absence of other means to express that revulsion. If there was a growing progressive demand in the 1930's for a New Jerusalem, the Soviet Union gave evidence that the Promised Land was a possibility. (Overy, pp. 289f)

While Overy offers the presence of despair as an apologia for the attraction and fascination with the Soviet Union, we do not. Rather it illustrates the dangers when despairing humanists grope for solutions within their dark caverns.

Denizens of the British progressive intelligentsia duly trooped to Soviet Union to see the miracle first hand. Almost all came back with glowing reports. All saw what they wanted to see, and proved easy dupes for Soviet propagandists. Like credulous infants they were. Beatrice and Sydney Webb published in 1935 a comprehensive study of the Soviet Union entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? They willed themselves to see only good. For example, Sydney compared leather jackets on sale for four pounds in London with those in the Soviet Union which sold for the equivalent of sixty pounds: his conclusion? People in the Soviet Union are able to spend more freely! (Overy, p.292) Apparently this erstwhile economist refused to admit the darker truth that severe shortages were making clothing far too expensive for Soviet citizens. There is none so blind as those who will not see.

Webb was aware that certain Britons and Americans were claiming that there had been over 6 million deaths to famine but he reported that he could see no evidence of it.

“The cult of personality, whose existence they could hardly have missed they attributed to Stalin's remarkable successes and the 'traditional reverence' of the Russian people for an autocrat which the 'ruling junta', as they called it, indulged for stability's sake. Stalin was trapped by it, they argued, but not its cause.” (Overy, p. 239)

The Webbs's work sold in large numbers--which is to say it was generally believable. George Bernard Shaw described it as a masterpiece. The suffocating statism of Gordon Brown is a direct descendant of its nineteen thirties progenitor

The bottom line is clear. When the whirlwinds of despair, crisis, and calamity arrive, secular humanists know only one type of solution and one type only: a vast expansion of the powers of the State (as the corporate manifestation of Man himself) to control and command to make changes and put things right. The consequences of all such “solutions” are worse, far worse than the problems they are meant to solve.

Beware when a secular humanist culture becomes depressed and desperate. The cure will be many times worse than the disease.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

The Hubris of American Exceptionalism

Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, February 25, 2010

In an earlier post, I wrote about American exceptionalism with something less than enthusiasm. But this kind of point, however simple it is at the center, still needs to be nuanced around the edges. Some of this is a summary of what I have written elsewhere, so bear with me and here goes anyway.

American exceptionalism is objectionable because it is a false religion, a false faith. It is a smooth and attractive idol, and probably the idol most likely to ensnare conservative evangelicals. The apostle John's warning should be kept in mind at all times (1 John 5:21). David Gelernter has seriously suggested that we treat Americanism as one of the world's great religions. Other treatments of the subject are less adoring, but no less problematic. The problem is that Americanism is seen as a source of ideals, an artesian well of ethics, a fountainhead of standards. This is not just nonsense, it is damned nonsense. I speak metaphorically only, but purveyors of this doctrine need to be splashed around in the village pond for a bit.

To object to American exceptionalism (for I am an American objectionalist) is not to maintain that there is nothing unique about Americans or American history. It is to say that there is nothing religiously unique. We are sinners like everybody else, we need God's grace like everybody else, we are thoughtless when prosperous like everybody else, and peevish when not prosperous like everybody else. Take off an American's boots, and you will find ten toes. Son of a gun.

Now one of the unique things that is striking about the wisdom of our founders is that they knew this. The constitutional arrangement they made for us presupposes that we are just like everybody else. The founders did not trust Americans with the kind of power that Obama wants, the kind that Congress wants, the kind that the Supreme Court wants, the kind that the Republicans want, the kind the Democrats want, and the kind that most American voters have hitherto wanted to surrender to the aforementioned. The founders knew that Americans were good, old-fashioned me-firsters, and so they built enough booby traps in the constitutional arrangement to make it look like the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie. They did this to trip up those sneaky, grasping, mendacious Americans -- especially the kind that are tempted to run for Congress.

Reflect on what Madison said in Federalist #51.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The founders knew that we were in no way unique, and that really was unique. As long as we kept that Calvinistic humility in place, we were greatly blessed. And there is nothing wrong with acknowledging and rejoicing in that blessing. We need to return to it.

So American gratitude is something else entirely. That is not what I am shooting at when I go after exceptionalism. Acknowledgement of God's great blessing is not just okay, but is rather mandatory. But note how it works.

Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (Deuteronomy 8:11-14).

If anyone could believe in exceptionalism, and have actual verses to point to, it would have been the Hebrews. And yet note that God warns them of this pattern, which is as old as dirt. He included them. Nothing is as ordinary and boring as nationalistic hubris. Displays of this sin with the stars and stripes waving in the background are just as obnoxious and just as wicked as when anybody else does it -- and everybody else has done it. Read a book, somebody!

When you are on the top of the world and on the top of your game, you can go the Ozymandian route -- you can descend into madness like Nebuchadnezzar -- or you can pour out your thanksgiving to the God of heaven. If you choose the latter route, it is because you have recognized that you and your entire nation breathe through your nostrils. And if you want to use that breath to thank Him, you must mention His name, and you have to use the name of His Son in order for Him to hear you. Do it like they taught you in Sunday School.

Liberals are ungrateful whiners. They are ungrateful because they don't think there is anything to be grateful for. They are surrounded by unbelievable blessings, greater than any people in the history of the world have known, and they avoid the grace of gratitude by complaining about the pollution, the fact that we stole it from the Indians, the additives in the bread, and the fact that it is all propped up by CIA assassinations overseas. No need to thank anybody for the meal if you think the cook poisoned it.

Conservative exceptionalists (who conserve nothing but this most scarlet of sins) are ungrateful because they deny what the 100th psalm says -- they insist that it is "we ourselves" that set this bright and shining light on the hill. There was an old guy up there praying, but we chased him off. Said his name was Winthrop. Then we really got the fire going, for all the world to see! Bring your huddled masses yearning to be free! These so-called conservatives aren't grateful because they think they did it all themselves. No need to thank anybody for the meal if you think you're the cook.

Left and right, united in their ingratitude. One is mopey in that ingratitude, hair in his eyes, and the other is sleek and fat, with eyes like Wall Street grease, but they both share a true common bond. They do not honor God as God, and they do not give Him thanks.

Most of the outrage from the idolatrous right that was directed against the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for his "God damn America" sermon was not because of the typical leftist loopiness that caused Wright to say it, but the fact that he even had a category in his mind for saying it. But let me tell you this -- people who don't have a category in their minds for the wrath of God are prime candidates for that wrath. When the sky and oceans have fled away, and the nations are assembled before the great, white throne, will there be any fools who will be elbowing their way to the front of that great and terrified assembly? Will there be any fools on that day who have no category in their minds for the concept of judgment? A nation that slaughters over a million kids a year is a nation that really needs to stop and reflect. That reflection, if it takes a right turn, might become repentance.

So what is this sin of exceptionalism? It is here: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deuteronomy 8:17).

Back to the Good Old Days

Citizen Policing Lives On

Our fathers used to tell us that the good old days were the days of wooden ships and iron men and that the pansy modern world had reversed things.

In this vein, it is good to read stories from time to time like the one below, when a gunman began shooting at a Denver school recently:

Heroic Teacher Describes Tackling Shooter

A math teacher at Deer Creek Middle School said he didn't know if it was "courage or stupidity" that was driving him when he approached and then tackled the man who shot two students at his school on Tuesday.

"I grabbed him by the front. And then we were kind of dancing around for a while and I don't really remember how we got on the ground," said David Benke at his home in Littleton Tuesday night.

Benke, 57, told CBS4 he was on parking lot duty as school was letting out when he heard the first gunshot, which he said sounded like a firecracker going off inside a trash can.

That's when he spotted the man police say was Bruco Strongeagle Eastwood.

"I started walking over there pretty quickly," he said.

As Benke approached he says he saw the man fire a second shot with his weapon.

"I saw that the guy had a rifle and then, unfortunately, he got another round off. I was walking towards him and then I realized that it was a bolt action rifle and that he wasn't going to be able to load quickly enough, and so I grabbed him," Benke said.

"What I noticed was that he was trying to manipulate the action of the rifle and that I had time to grab him before he could get another shot off. I didn't even think about whether he had a pistol or anything like that.

Benke, who is 6-foot-5, then wrestled the man to the ground and said another teacher, Norm Hanne, also jumped on him. Yet another employee, Becky Brown, grabbed the rifle and took it inside the school, Benke said.

When he and Hanne had the gunman on the ground and were struggling to restrain him, they said the man was threatening to sue them. They said the suspect was thrashing around as they were trying to calm him down.

Benke is the father of three children. He was once a finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year and was teaching in Gilpin County when the shootings at nearby Columbine High School happened in 1999.

Cindy Stevenson, superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools, and Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink both praised Benke and the actions of the other teachers on Tuesday.

A Facebook page was also created called "Dr. David Benke Is A Hero!!!!" for people to praise thank Benke for his heroism.

Now, let's imagine this might have happened somewhere in New Zealand, rather than in Denver, Colorado.

1. The police would likely have warned the public from taking matters into their own hands, and admonished the three teachers not to be so foolish in future, reprimanding them for setting a bad example, especially to impressionable children.

2. The two male teachers would be charged with common assault. The female teacher would be charged with theft of a firearm.

3. Legal aid would be offered to the victim, Bruco Strongeagle Eastwood to enable him to sue his assailants.

4. ACC would issue yet another warning against anyone taking undue risks.

5. The teachers union would cancel the membership of the three teachers for bringing the profession into disrepute and setting pupils a very bad example of attempting to solve problems with gratuitous violence.

6. The Teacher Registration Board would suspend the registration of the three teachers, pending a full investigation.

7. OSH would take legal action against the school for failing to ensure a safe work environment.

8. The school would set up a Facebook page inviting the public and the community to leave notices of humiliation and correction for the three teachers.

9. The Greens would call for the banning of all guns and for urgent action to combat global warming which they would allege is causing escalating violence in society.

10. The Maori Party would issue a statement blaming white colonisation for, well, everything.

11. Dissident Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira would congratulate the gunman for using his firearm to draw public attention to his grievances, and would invite him to come to NZ on the Parliamentary expenses budget to address disgruntled Kaipara Harbour fishermen, to show them how it was done.

Gradually Sinking In . . .

Errors, Errors Everywhere

We have posted several times on the implications of inaccurate, massaged, and manufactured global temperature data. It completely undercuts the integrity of scientific claims for evidence of global warming.

Now, it seems that the implications are starting to dawn on some of the editorial and feature writers in the main stream media, as a recent editorial in the Washington Times attests.

EDITORIAL: More errors in temperature data


Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate-change official, announced his resignation yesterday. Good riddance. The bureaucrat's departure is no surprise because his pseudo-scientific global warming religion was proved to be a hoax on his watch.

The list of problems central to the global warming fraud just doesn't seem to end. As if hiding and losing data, the numerous errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the suppression of academic research that disagrees with global warming weren't bad enough, now comes word that basic ground-based temperature data may have been biased towards incorrectly showing temperature increases.

Joseph D'Aleo, the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org, are well-known and well-respected scientists. On Jan. 29, they released a startling study showing that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures drove up the average measured temperature. The stations eliminated were in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea and more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts provide some amazing graphs showing that the jumps in measured global temperature occurred just when the number of weather stations was cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.

Unfortunately, all three terrestrial global-temperature data sets (by NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of East Anglia) really rely on the same measures of surface temperatures. These three sources do not provide independent measures of how the world's temperatures have changed over time. The relatively small differences that do arise from these three institutions result from how they adjust the raw data.

The findings by Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts also explain some puzzles that have bothered researchers. For example, land-based temperatures have been rising while satellite-based measures haven't shown the same increase since 1990. Their answer is that at that point in time, the elimination of weather stations produced a false measured increase in temperatures that didn't affect the satellite readings. There is no evidence (yet) that this effort was consciously designed to increase recorded temperatures, but that is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that fanatics about man-made global warming want to spend trillions of dollars based on conclusions from faulty data.

As the frigid winter days pass and the scandals mount, it becomes clear that claims of man-made global warming aren't based on scientific methods at all. The hysteria is based on fraud.

A recent article in the Times Online also reported on the growing scepticism about the reliability of the temperature record.

February 14, 2010
World may not be warming, say scientists
Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said

Whenever warming alarmists assert that temperatures are rising we must continue to ask, How do you know? Satellite temperature data are by far and away the most reliable--but we have a relatively short run series since satellites are a relatively new invention. Global land based temperature data is a mess. It is possible that the raw can be recovered to some extent and the survivorship, warming bias stripped out--but even then, it is unlikely to be sufficiently robust from which to derive highly probable, reliable scientific conclusions.

Banning Christ from the Classroom

Teaching in Nebuchadnezzar's Schools

Idols Every Which Way
Scott Kennedy

Last week, while on practicum for my graduate diploma in primary teaching, I taught a lesson on bullying. The text I used was a cautionary tale called “Don’t be a bully Billy”, which tells the tale of a young bully Billy who treats his classmates nastily until he gets sucked up into a spaceship by an alien – English literature at its finest. In the lesson I was attempting to communicate to the 5 and 6 year old children why they shouldn’t bully. In the end the angle I adopted was that “Bullies don’t have friends.”

A couple of days later as I was mulling over my first week of practicum and in particular this lesson I had an epiphany. I understood in a powerfully new way the religious nature of a state education. State education is not some benignly neutral environment in which children learn bare facts.

In teaching that lesson on bullying I could not make reference to the God of the Bible and his expectations of human behaviour. Rather I taught as if he did not exist, and instead appealed to the children’s desire for friendship to help them avoid bullying. I removed Jesus from his place as the one who is before all things and the one in whom all things hold together, and instead set up the false god of ‘peer acceptance’ for the children to worship. While the result may be a reduction in bullying, the children have been taught that there is satisfaction to be found in someone or something other than Jesus Christ, namely peer acceptance. This is a lie of the devil. He is constantly seeking to trick people that they can find satisfaction, true meaning and abundant life in something or someone other than Jesus Christ.

You see, many people make the mistake of thinking that state education is neutral because it keeps religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity from being promoted in the classroom. This seems a fair assumption. The state is not giving any religion an opportunity to ‘proselytise’. Young impressionable minds are protected in an environment that will not lend support to any one religion. This leaves schools in a position to teach the supposedly neutral bare facts of life:- maths, reading, writing and perhaps more controversially history and science.

But this is a fallacy. You see, when we remove Jesus Christ from the classroom we are effectively denying that he is Lord of all. We are banishing the Creator from our classrooms and then expecting that we can make sense of his world without reference to him. There are no ‘bare facts’. The facts belong to Jesus and any attempt to interpret his world whilst ignoring him is folly. The facts cannot be interpreted correctly by those who deny the one who owns all knowledge.

Christian education is not about saying a prayer or two and inserting a Bible verse in your lessons. It is not about mentioning God here and there as one might sprinkle salt and pepper on ones meal. A true epistemology (theory of knowledge) must recognise that all knowledge belongs to Jesus Christ – who John describes as the one without whom nothing was made that has been made. A truly Christian schooling will have its curriculum, methodology and practice saturated with Jesus Christ.

All this thinking has left me with two dilemmas. The ethical dilemma for me as a Christian teacher starting out in the state system is how can I teach without denying my Lord Jesus Christ and setting up idols in his place in the classroom? The ethical dilemma for the Christian parent with children in the state system is how can we keep our children from seeing our Lord Jesus Christ as irrelevant in their lives when he is ignored and replaced with idols in their classrooms?