Only Fools and Horses . . .

When Our Leaders are Smarter than the Average Bear

We are old enough to remember with painful clarity the control economy of Robert Muldoon. Rob was a man with a few smart ideas, just like the current crop of clever folk in Wellington. He knew that the New Zealand balance of payments was precarious, to say the least. Exports were the trick, and that meant stimulating the New Zealand agricultural sector, along with a few other "Think Big" projects, mainly to reduce our reliance upon overseas fossil fuels. One major project was the supplementary minimum price scheme for agricultural produce. This artificially government subsidised price meant that thousands upon thousands of hectares of scrubland was converted to farms--which were indeed economically viable provided the taxpayer remained the backbone of the farming community. It worked for a time. Not a few farmers got rich as a result--until the whole crazy scheme collapsed.

Now, the worm has turned, and the same National Party that smart Rob led once again governs in New Zealand. Today's crop, just like Rob, are full of smart ideas to get the New Zealand economy right. Central is the much vaunted ETS--our Emissions Trading Scheme--designed to protect our access to international markets for our agricultural produce.

We make the following predictions about the actual effects of this mad hatter's scheme:

1. Agricultural production will decline.
2. Smart farmers will get rich off the back of the taxpayer.
3. An increasing acerage of rural land will go back to scrub.
4. Our free-trade agreements will break down. Instead of enhancing international trade, the ETS will destroy it.
5. Thousands of jobs in the rural sector will be lost.
6. Within two decades New Zealand will be importing dairy and meat from overseas.

The following article which was published in The New Zealand Farmers Weekly (August 2, 2010) explains why the ETS will undermine and weaken New Zealand agriculture.

How can smart people be so dumb?

South Canterbury farmer Murray Harmer is among those struggling with the concept of an Emissions Trading Scheme.

I am a 100% believer in climate change but I’m not naive enough to think that it’s all man-made. I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of the sceptics. So it never ceases to amaze me how some seemingly intelligent people (ie, John Key, David Carter,Nick Smith) can make some extremely dumb decisions - that is the proposed ETS.

In case they haven’t worked it out yet New Zealand farmers are very responsive to market signals - just look at the conversion to dairy over the last 10 years. So when you subsidise one sector (forestry) and penalise another (livestock farming) you are likely to create massive distortion.

There also seems to be a very interesting play on words from the powers that be in the form of the word mitigate. In reality this is just a disguise for the word subsidy.

When I contacted Landcare Research to find out what our unsubsidised carbon liability would be under this ETS they informed me it would be approximately $45,000 a year at a carbon price of $15/tonne. John Key tells us that the average sheep/beef farmer will “only have to pay $3000 pa.” So this must mean that we will be “mitigated” (subsidised) to the tune of $42,000 a year.

Now, it’s not going to take very long for our trading partners to work this out, which could not only put our free trade agreements in jeopardy but will provide an opportunity for countries like Japan, Korea, Europe, UK and US to apply significant tariffs at point of sale for our produce as America did to our lamb in 2002.

David Carter tells us that it is economically viable to plant our less productive areas in trees and claim the carbon credits. If we assume these areas are now carrying only about 5su/ha at a carbon price of $15, does this also mean that if the carbon price doubles to $30/tonne it is economic to convert land that is carrying 10su/ha to forestry? About 90% of sheep and beef properties would fall into this category.

I made a recent inquiry to one of the forestry carbon companies to find out the viability of planting forestry. The information I received was that depending on what part of NZ you lived in you could earn about $425 net/ha/year for the first 10 years rising to about $800 after that. Remember this is money paid for producing nothing and doing nothing so provided you don’t harvest these trees you get to keep the lot.

With the average age of sheep and beef farmers being 58 this looks like a very good retirement plan. With sheep and beef farmers’ incomes being very marginal about $200-$400/ha net or less it could be conceivable that these farmers seize on this and plant trees en masse. For a start, if we plant our farm in pines and become carbon farmers we will be $45,000 better off for doing nothing and producing nothing instead of producing food and clothing for the urban population (dumb).

So let’s look at what might happen. First the farmer with his farm now completely planted in pines would become a carbon farmer with a monthly income for the next 30/40 years. Of course, they would still have a few feral cattle /sheep/pigs/ deer running around in their pine plantation for table purposes. And because they are “feral” they don’t produce methane and they aren’t penalised under the ETS - just as our thousands of trees planted in shelterbelts don’t need carbon dioxide to survive - or so the writers of the ETS seem to think.

Now that we have disposed of these so called polluting sheep/beef and deer from our land along with them go about $10 billion of overseas income and about 150,000 urban jobs. So what are these jobs to be axed: shearers, shed hands, 60% of stock agents, 50% of merchandise employees, 75% of freezing workers, 75% of transport operators, 50% of fertiliser workers, Meat and Wool NZ,50% of machinery sales and service workers, 50% of animal health workers, 25% of accountants, 50% of MAF, 50% of Massey and Lincoln
staff, 50% of AgResearch staff and scientists, 50% of veterinarians, 40% of animal health product manufacturing staff, 50% of farm advisors and staff and many more too numerous to count.

I would also suggest anyone involved in these industries will have good reason to be very nervous. As we see, those scruffy sheep and beef animals not only provide huge amounts of food but also provide thousands of jobs for ordinary NZers. As for the tourist industry, I don’t think we will get many tourists travelling 20,000km to drive through huge pine forests interspaced by a few dairy farms so we can expect a hit here too.

In summary Key, Carter and Smith have literally “dropped” us into a scheme that is likely to spiral out of control with far reaching consequences for all NZers. One of the first signs will be a downgrade in NZ’s credit rating followed by a significant lift in interest rates.

Christendom and Unity

Unity and Diversity Equally Ultimate

Christendom should be one: the form of organisation and the locus of powers in that unity are questions upon which we cannot pronounce.

But within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas--for it is only by the struggle against constantly appearing false ideas that the truth is enlarged and clarified, and in the conflict with heresy that orthodoxy is developed to meet the needs of the times; an endless effort also on the part of each region to shape its Christianity to suit itself, an effort which should neither be wholly suppressed nor left wholly unchecked.

The local temperament must express its particularity in its form of Christianity, and so must the social stratum, so that the culture proper to each area and class may flourish; but there must also be a force holding these areas and these classes together. If this corrective force in the direction of uniformity of belief and practice is lacking, then the culture of each part will suffer.

We have already found that the culture of a nation prospers with the prosperity of the culture of its several constituents, both geographical and social; but that it also needs to be itself a part of a larger culture, which requires the ultimate ideal, however unrealisable, of a "world culture" in a sense different from that implicit in the schemes of world-federationists.

And without a common faith, all efforts towards drawing nations closer together in culture can produce only an illusion of unity.

T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p.157

Islam and the West are Kissing Cousins

Redemption by Law

Islam and the post-Christian West have a great deal in common. Far more than both think. They share the same grand vistas of Unbelief, of denial of the sovereign claims of the Lord Jesus Christ. The upshot is that on almost every issue or contention, the debate between the West and Islam is merely over tactics and tastes. It is never more than an intra-familial debate--although at times heated and hostile.

We were struck again with this as we reflected upon the public march in Manukau City this past weekend against alcohol's easy availability. The NZ Herald blared forth in normal fashion with the "human interest" angle, designed to arouse pity and anger. A couple had tragically lost their daughter in a road accident caused by her drunkenness. The problem: she had become a victim to New Zealand's binge drinking culture.

The 22-year-old alcoholic fell victim to what her parents described yesterday as New Zealand's "widely accepted" binge-drinking culture. Three months ago, her life support was switched off after she was partially flung from the car she was driving drunk in a crash south of Morrinsville.

Now, we do not seek to trivialise in any way the tragic death of this young person. Nor do we wish to parley the grief of the parents into something unimportant or inconsequential. Our heart goes out to them: to lose a child is a heavy, heavy burden.

It is the particular use of the story that we object to. The blatant sub-text is that the social problem of alcoholism and binge drinking in New Zealand can be dealt with or prevented by prohibition. Granted--not total prohibition--but relative prohibition. If the government were to pass laws restricting the sale and availability of alcohol to teenagers then the problem would reduce. An adjacent sub-text is the notion that an evil force exists to promote drinking--namely the complex of brewing companies, supermarkets and liquour retailers, and the hospitality industry, all of whom benefit commercially from the sale of liquor. They extract filthy lucre from the suffering of helpless victims, a modern manifestation of the vile inkeepers, Monsieur and Madame Thernadier from Les Miserables.

"The government ought to do something" is the ubiquitous nauseating refrain of the West. The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ sings "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," and the people of the land sing "Onward parliamentarians, redeem us from all evil".

And it is here that the West and Islam begin to kiss passionately. Both believe redemption and sanctification is by law. Pass enough laws and promulgate sufficient restrictions and all evil will be banished from the land. Islam is just a bit more consistent and serious about it than the self-indulgent, sybaritic West--that's all. But we are rapidly getting there.

In Islam alcohol is an evil--so it is totally banned. When alcohol consumption becomes a problem in New Zealand, we immediately turn to the same type of solution: redemption through laws and bans. It is just that we argue for partial prohibition and increasing restrictions. It is a matter of degree, not substance.

The West hates the burqha and the virtual imprisonment of Islamic women, objecting to their "chattelisation". Yet the rationale is eerily akin to that employed to restrict the sale of alcohol because far too many people in New Zealand are getting drunk and committing stupid, if not criminal acts. Islam argues that lust for women outside of marriage is evil: the cause of the evil is not what arises in the heart of men, but the occasion of temptation--which is the sight of a woman. To a heart inflamed with lust, even the smallest part of the human anatomy can be eroticised and an occasion for lust--an ankle, a finger, or an ear. To, to "protect" their women, Islamic justice calls for the complete covering of the women. However, what is really at work is an external, legalistic attempt to stop men sinning. Men who lust are victims of circumstances, just as was the poor young woman who lost her life in the NZ Herald story. Change tthe circumstances, cover the women and men (not women) are protected from lust.

Redemption by law; attempting to make people holy by changing external circumstances. This is the "gospel" of Islam. It is nothing other than slavery and tyranny. It is also the "gospel" of the West.

Islam and the Unbelieving West have a great deal in common (which is why the West believes it can reason with Islam to a middle position). This approach truly makes sense and is completely understandable. But it also means that the West's opposition to Islam is feigned. It is not a clash of world-views at all, but a mere inter-denominational rivalry. Salvation by law and sanctification through regulating externalities is so deeply held in both traditions that, in the end, both will form an unholy axis to turn upon the Lord Jesus and His church.

Feminisation of the Church

Heading Off the Sweetest Boy . . .

Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, August 06, 2010

"At the same time, because of sentimentalism and pietism, the definitions of piety have become increasingly feminized. The definition of what constitutes devout piety has drifted into feminine territory, and ministers have labored to keep up with the shifting expectations. The sweetest and gentlest boy in the church is the one who is told repeatedly while growing up that he really ought to consider seminary. The boy who garnered seventeen black eyes and three broken arms while growing up is never told that by anybody" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 42).

A Bitter Brew

. . . it is often . . . anti-imperialists who, being liberals, are the most complacent believers in the superiority of western civilisation, and at one and the same time blind to the benefits conferred by imperial government and to the injury done by the destruction of native culture. According to such enthusiasts, we do well to intrude ourselves upon another civilisation, equip the members of it with our mechanical contrivances, our systems of government, education, law, medicine and finance, inspire them with a contempt for their own customs and with an enlightened attitude towards religious superstition--and then leave them to stew in the broth which we have brewed for them.
T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p.167

Afghanistan, anyone?

A Great Hymn, and Its Background

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

Dane Ortlund

O Love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee
I give thee back the life I owe
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be

O Light that foll’west all my way
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee
My heart restores its borrowed ray
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be

Stabilizing lines, especially for those in darkness.

Do you know the story behind it?

At age 20 George Matheson (1842-1906) was engaged to be married but began going blind. When he broke the news to his fiancee, she decided she could not go through life with a blind husband. She left him. Before losing his sight he had written two books of theology and some feel that if he had retained his sight he could have been the greatest leader of the church of Scotland in his day.

A special providence was that George’s sister offered to care for him. With her help, George left the world of academia for pastoral ministry and wound up preaching to 1500 each week–blind.

The day came, however, in 1882, when his sister fell in love and prepared for marriage herself. The evening before the wedding, George’s whole family had left to get ready for the next day’s celebration. He was alone and facing the prospect of living the rest of his life without the one person who had come through for him. On top of this, he was doubtless reflecting on his own aborted wedding day twenty years earlier. It is not hard to imagine the fresh waves of grief washing over him that night.

In the darkness of that moment George Matheson wrote this hymn. He remarked afterward that it took him five minutes and that it was the only hymn he ever wrote that required no editing.

O love that will not let me go. Heartening hope for you and me.

Here’s the last stanza.

O Cross that liftest up my head
I dare not ask to fly from thee
I lay in dust life’s glory dead
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Life on the Inside

Conrad Black's Interesting Prison Portrait

Canadian publisher, Conrad Black is out of the pen. He was released on bond due to legal appeal processes now underway. He has continued, amongst other things, to write for the National Review. He gives us this discouraging reflection of the US prison system and the legislative paradigm in which it operates. It is a mess. This is not just a US problem. The root of it is bone-headed wrongness of the prison system as the model of criminal punishment per se.

Until governments come to understand that restitution to victims and those harmed must be the centrepiece of any criminal justice system (rather than a nice-to-have tack-on) we will not be able to build a more Christian system. The system should not be focused primarily upon punishment for the vast majority of criminal acts. Rather, it should exact restitution, not retribution. Once restitution has been completed, the perpetrator or wrong-doer is free--under no further obligation, except not to offend again. It is not a case of paying one's debt to society, but to those harmed. (Incidentally, we believe that reforming the criminal justice system along enlightened, biblical lines will not occur until the overwhelming majority of people believe that ultimate justice lies in the hands of the Living God, the Judge of the heavens and the earth. Only then will man be willing to cede his claims to exact vengeance, and leave "room" for the vengeance of God.

But, back to Conrad Black's account:

In my 28 months as a guest of the U.S. government, I often wondered how my time in that role would end. I never expected that I would have to serve the whole term, though I was, and am, psychologically prepared to do so, now that I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years.

Most evenings as a captive, I telephoned my wife, Barbara, at between 11 and 11.30 p.m., just before the telephones were shut down for the day. I did so on Monday, July 19. Her opening gambit was “What have you heard?” and I dimly replied “Nothing special.”

“You haven’t heard?”

Thus did I learn, as the emails had been down in the entire compound for five days, that my appeal bond application had been granted. Half an hour later, when I was in bed using my night light to do a crossword puzzle, two fellow residents approached, a few minutes apart, to say that they had heard of it on the BBC World Service.

Tuesday was a day of feverish to-ing and fro-ing, as bond was discussed and arranged, and terms debated, and the local personnel of the Bureau of Prisons strove to keep up with the paperwork as my status inched, line by line, on their computer screens, toward the gate.

As a matter of principle, I refused to pack up anything until I was assured of actually leaving. To pack up belongings and then have to unpack them would have been insufferably demeaning. I made only very cautious replies to inquiries about leaving “Soon, I hope.”

The court appearance to fix terms was in Chicago on the morning of Wednesday, July 21, where I was represented, with his customary agility, by my outstanding counsel, Miguel Estrada.

By prearrangement, I called my wife at shortly after 11 a.m. Again, she began “What have you heard?” “Nothing,” was my dynamic response, which surprised her, as there were already extended television accounts of the Chicago proceedings. “You leave today. Bail of two million dollars has been posted (by my dear and generous friend Roger Hertog), A car is coming to collect you at about 3. I’ll see you tonight.”

Barbara was in Toronto and it was our 18th wedding anniversary. She couldn’t make her reservation on Air Canada because she could see on television the driver she had arranged to pick me up marooned outside the gates of the prison complex. He had no authorization to prove he was ordered for me and not simply a ruse of the press. Faxes flew back and forth delaying her departure.

Finally, the only way to get to Palm Beach that night, just before midnight, which she was able to do, was to charter from a well-wisher at a knock-down rate, (basically the cost of aviation fuel), a very tired and sluggish medevac plane without a washroom.

In the Coleman Low Security compound, there are 1,800 residents and it is a little universe terminally addicted to gossip about the custodial system and especially the goings-on of the group confined there. By this time there were large numbers of journalists and photographers clustered at the gate of the Coleman complex and ongoing television coverage watched with some bemusement by my fellow residents in the television rooms of the residential units.

A steady stream of well-wishers from all factions of the compound came to say goodbye, as I put my books and papers and a few clothes items into cardboard boxes. (The only article of clothing that I took that was not among the few things I had bought myself was the nondescript brown shirt bequeathed to me when he left by the don of one of the famous New York gang families).

The Mafiosi, the Colombian drug dealers, (including a senator with whom I had a special greeting as a fellow member of a parliamentary upper house), the American drug dealers, high and low, black, white, and Hispanic; the alleged swindlers, hackers, pornographers, credit card fraudsters, bank robbers, and even an accomplished airplane thief; the rehabilitated and unregenerate, the innocent and the guilty, and in almost all cases the grossly over-sentenced, streamed in steadily for hours, to make their farewells.

Most goodbyes were brief and jovial, some were emotional, and a few were quite heart-rending. Many of the 150 students that my very able fellow tutors and I had helped to graduate from high school, came by, some of them now enrolled in university by cyber-correspondence.

Veterans of even 20 years in the federal prison system could not recall anyone being bailed in mid-sentence like this, and particularly not on the heels of unanimous Supreme and Circuit Appeals Court decisions.

I was overwhelmingly enthused to leave, especially in these circumstances, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s rewriting of the open-ended statute that had been used against me, a catchment, as the chief justice of the U.S. said at our hearing, for anyone a prosecutor takes against.

It had been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society. I saw at close range the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42% of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.) A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison, and the targeted substances are more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war.

I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one.

And I had heard the vehement allegations of many fellow residents of the fraudulence of the public defender system, where court-appointed lawyers, it is universally and plausibly alleged, are more often than not stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of clients they represent rather than for their level of success, and they do usually plead their clients to prison. They provide a thin veneer for the fable of the poor citizen’s day in court to receive impartial justice through due process.

And I had the opportunity to see why the United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), how the prison industry grew, and successfully sought more prisoners, longer sentences, and maximal possibilities of probation violations and a swift return to custody.

Before I got into the maw of the U.S. legal system, I did not realize the country has 47 million people with a criminal record, (most for relatively trivial offenses,) or that prosecutors won more than 90% of their cases. There, at Coleman, I had seen the courage of self-help, the pathos of broken men, the drawn faces of the hopeless, the glazed expression of the heavily medicated, (90% of Americans judged to require confinement for psychiatric reasons are in the prison system), and the nonchalance of those who find prison a comfortable welfare system compared to the skid row that was their former milieu. America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.

Of course, I was glad, jubilant, to leave, (though a return is not an impossible result of the pending rehearing), but also grateful for many of the relationships I had formed; enlightened by my observation of American justice on the other side of the wall; and happy to have got on well in an environment very foreign to any I had known before.

My departure was processed quite cordially and the personnel even conducted us to a back exit, through a padlocked gate, far from the media, and shook hands and waved as I slipped the bondage of the U.S. government. It had been 28 months and 18 days since I arrived. The send-off was more congenial than the reception and the ride back to Palm Beach was on the same roads over the same flat, scrubby landscape of strip malls and bungalows as the approach. It seemed more verdant and welcoming on the way back. The drive was contemplative and uneventful.

I was delighted to be back in my home, which the prosecutors had tried to seize for years. For the first time since I was last there, I enjoyed pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men. I had a glass of wine, and waited for Barbara, to celebrate the happiest of all wedding anniversaries.

National Post

A Failed State

Porous Borders

The United Nations has an appellation for countries that are so broken down that they can no longer maintain law-and-order and their citizens are subject to marauding thugs and gangs. The UN calls them "failed states". Haiti is a failed state. Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Chad are also listed.

Whatever the criteria employed to identify a state as failed, we would argue that inability to control and protect state borders has to be right up there as one of the leading indicators of becoming a failed state. The inability of the US to protect its borders--in particular, to seal its southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants--bespeaks "failed state".

Now, of course, the US has the wealth and technological capability to seal the border, so that only legitimate immigrants and appropriately documented people enter the country from the south. But it lacks the will to do so. This lack of will--this lack of nation-wide conviction that controlling one's borders is a fundamental, essential duty of government--is symptomatic of a serious malaise.

Now, to be sure, we hold the view that the US, along with every other country in the world, has the resources and capability to support a much larger population than it does presently. Controlling the borders is not the same as reducing or stopping immigration--but it means that whatever immigration or guest-worker programme is the declared policy of the day, the federal and governmental authorities can and do apply the policy. The government must keep the laws it makes and ensure that the law is enforced justly and fairly.

At the moment, the US has a stated immigration policy which it is unwilling to apply. The law is a farcical joke, at least on the southern border. The porous line of demarcation between the US and Mexico means that drugs can enter the US without effective interdiction; Mexican criminal gangs operate freely on both sides of the border; and standover and extortion tactics are able to be used effectively against vulnerable human beings who are in the country illegally.

The fact that the US will not control its own borders increasingly makes it a laughing stock. It risks being seen as a vacillating, weak, inept, and internally riven country. Its enemies are emboldened.

President Obama has emphatically insisted upon the power of linkages in global perceptions. He, for example, has propagated the idea that the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay arouses such hostility amongst Muslims that it provokes terrorism against the US. Close Guantanamo, and terrorist acts will subside. Maybe so. However, it is not difficult to make another linkage: the porous southern border is a large flashing sign of US indecision, cowardice, and weakness.

There are intelligence reports that Islamic terrorist sleepers have identified the southern border as the entry point of choice. For them, it is a no-brainer.

The Value and Importance of Enemies

One Needs the Enemy

T. S. Eliot writes:

As individuals, we find that our development depends upon the people whom we meet in the course of our lives. (These people include the authors whose books we read, and characters in works of fiction and history.) The benefit of these meetings is due as much to the differences as to the resemblances; to the conflict, as well as the sympathy, between persons.

Fortunate the man who, at the right moment, meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment meets the right enemy. I do not approve of the extermination of the enemy: the policy of exterminating or, as is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival of culture. One needs the enemy.

So, within limits, the friction, not only between individuals but between groups, seems to me quite necessary for civilisation. The universality of irritation is the best assurance of peace. A country within which divisions have gone too far is a danger to itself: a country which is too well united--whether by nature or by device, by honest purpose or by fraud and oppression--is a menace to others. In Italy and in Germany, we have seen that a unity with politico-economic aims, imposed violently and too rapidly, had unfortunate consequences upon both nations. Their cultures had developed in the course of a history of extreme, and extremely sub-divided regionalism: the attempt to teach Germans to think of themselves as Germans first, and the attempt to teach Italians to think of themselves as Italians first, rather than as natives of a particular small principality or city, was to disturb the traditional culture from which alone any future culture could grow. (T. S. Eliot, p.133.)

And, one may add, it helped provide a fertile ground within which fascism could sprout and flourish.

Starving Leviathan

Deficits Can Be an Effective Lever

Don't let a good crisis go to waste. This has been the view of the Obama White House as it used the credit crisis in the US as a pretext for a massive expansion of government spending and record multi-trillion deficits. But the crisis is working in the other direction as well. All over the US at state, municipal and local levels deficits have ballooned--largely due to falling tax revenues, coupled with a legacy of decades of rampant state and local government spending on itself.

Suddenly the cupboard is not only bare, it has been pawned. Now the drive is on to cut, cut, cut. As we would expect the local solutions are diverse and some quite novel. Some cities and towns, according to the NY Times, are giving away surplus public land: they have reasoned that development by the private non-government sector at least offers the prospect of more tax revenue down the track, and in the meantime the maintenance costs for the city go down.

Around the nation, cities and towns facing grim budget circumstances are grasping at unlikely — some would say desperate — means to bolster their shrunken tax bases. Like Beatrice, places like Dayton, Ohio, and Grafton, Ill., are giving away land for nominal fees or for nothing in the hope that it will boost the tax rolls and cut the lawn-mowing bills.

Lesson for New Zealand: stop funding the government via debt. If we don't we will end up selling, or giving away national parks and surplus government land. (This, by the way, would be a good thing. Far too much land has been locked up by the state for minimal return, but we would rather avoid the fiscal debt crisis in the first place.)

Other cities are virtually giving away vacant lots or foreclosed properties. Dayton, Ohio for example:

In Dayton, officials are offering thousands of vacant, foreclosed or abandoned properties under certain conditions for nominal fees — $500, in many cases, to cover the cost of recording fees or $1,200 if the city must initiate tax foreclosure proceedings. The prospect of city savings on mowing fees alone is enormous: each year, Dayton spends $2 million to cut grass on the properties.

Lesson for New Zealand: municipal council taxes and rates could be frozen or reduced by the councils giving away land and buildings which currently are not used and yet cost the ratepayers to maintain. Don't try to sell them: just give them away as long as the transactional costs are covered. It will be better for all of us in the longer term.

In the UK the government is starting to take an allegedly hard look at state funded Non-Government Organizations ("NGO's".) The NGO sector has fed Leviathan on concentrated steriods over the past twenty years. They have been a curse. The idea has been a favorite of modern statism: the government facilitates the establishment of a quasi-independent NGO which then does research and undertakes advocacy in particular areas. Inevitably this state-funded advocacy ends up advocating more and more government spending and involvement.

Most of the advocacy groups operating in New Zealand today are government funding: most relentlessly call for more and more regulation and state expansion. (The Law Commission is a classic example: it has become the leading vehicle for advocating expansions of state powers in the liquor trade. How did that happen, you may ask? How, indeed? Another example is Forest and Bird--which has effectively controlled the Department of Conservation for years.)

Well, in the UK, the "NGO" model is now under the gun. Forthcoming in the Budget will be the biggest spending cuts in the history of the UK government--it is claimed. Questioned in Parliament recently as to which NGO's were "under the cosh" a Conservative is reported to have growled back, "All of them." Let's hope so. Actually, we believe this is the right idea. If the government were to try to "pick losers" amongst NGO's, rather than defunding all of them, it would unleash a chorus of outraged howls of unfair discrimination and of the government devaluing the particular causes being represented in the out-of-favour NGO's. If they are all cut, no-one NGO can claim the government is anti-X, whatever X might be.

Lesson for New Zealand: NGO spending is non-essential and unnecessary. It does not deliver front line government services. It leads to an exponential expansion in government over time.  Cut it now. Starve the beast.

Universal Culture

A Universal Culture Depends on a Universal Religion

T.S. Eliot:

. . . in the relations of any two cultures there will be two opposite forces balancing each other: attraction and repulsion. Without the attraction they could not affect each other, and without the repulsion they could not survive as distinct cultures; one would absorb the other, or both would be fused into one culture. Now the zealots of world-government seem to me sometimes to assume, unconsciously, that their unity of organisation has an absolute value, and that if differences between cultures stand in the way, these must be abolished.

If these zealots are of the humanitarian type, they will assume that this process will take place naturally and painlessly: they may, without knowing it, take for granted that the final world culture will be simply and extension of that to which they belong themselves. Our Russian friends, who are more realistic, if not in the long run any more practical, are much more conscious of irreconcilability between cultures; and appear to hold the view that any culture incompatible with their own should be forcibly uprooted.

The world-planners who are both serious and humane, however, might--if we believed that their methods would succeed--be as grave a menace to culture as those who practise more violent methods. For it must follow from what I have already pleaded about the value of local cultures, that a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all. We should have humanity dehumanised. It would be a nightmare. But on the other hand we cannot resign the idea of a world-culture altogether. . . .

(W)e must aspire to a common world culture, which will yet not diminish the particularity of the constituent parts. And here, of course, we are finally up against religion . . . . Ultimately antagonistic religions must mean antagonistic cultures; and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled.

T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, pp. 135,136

Maori Language Week

The Harmony of the Universal and the Particular

T. S. Eliot in Christianity and Culture writes on how a nation, as part of a cluster of nations, can achieve real and lasting peaceful unity. Many who write upon such themes veer toward one of two extremes: either peace will be achieved by the suppression of differences (which are seen as the root cause of quarrels), or it will come through universal isolation and fracturing (where everyone is concerned exclusively with their own business). Eliot, however, argues that true lasting unity and peace can only be achieved if people are loyal both to general corporate values, while at the same time being loyal to the local and particular.

He writes:

The unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious, and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities. Here I have to do with diversity of region. It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family. (T. S. Eliot, Culture, p.125)

This view captures an essential, Christian construct: the equal importance of the universal and the particular. This distinctly Christian doctrine is derived from the being and nature of God Himself. Our God is triune: within the Godhead, the particulars--namely the three Persons of the Godhead--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--are equally ultimate with the oneness of God. Thus, in the Being of God Himself, the one and the many are equally ultimate.

Unbelieving thought, captured by the machinations of a finite creature, will always drive toward either making the "many" absolute, or the "one". We see this tension everywhere in our modern Unbelieving culture. The libertarian or the anarchist absolutises the individual, seeing the collective as intrinsically dehumanising and destructive. The statist absolutises the one state. All diversity, when presented, exists only at the good pleasure of the social collective--provided it is within the bounds of the tolerable. So, the oneness of the collective squashes all diversity under the blanket of what is deemed politically correct.

The Christian position stands in sharp contrast to all Unbelieving ideologies and thought. "Oneness" and the "manyness" mutually co-inhere throughout the creation. Eliot illustrates this Christian distinctive by pointing to the essential power of local, regional languages to enrich a wider universally used language.

The question we may ask about such a language as Welsh, is whether it is of any value to the world at large, that it should be used in Wales. But this is really as much as to ask whether the Welsh, qua Welsh, are of any use? not, of course, as human beings, but as the preservers and continuers of a culture which is not English. The direct contribution to poetry by Welshmen and men of Welsh extraction, writing in English, is very considerable; and considerable also is the influence of their poetry upon poets of different racial origins. . . . But it must be remembered, that for the transmission of a culture--a particular way of thinking, feeling and behaving--that for its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language--not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one: otherwise the spread of education will extinguish it.

The literature written in that language will not, of course, make any direct impact upon the world at large; but if it is no longer cultivated, the poeple to whom it belongs (we are considering particularly the Welsh) will tend to lose their racial character. The Welsh will be less Welsh; and their poets will cease to have any contribution to make to English literature, beyond their individual genius. And I am of the opinion, that the benefits which Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers have conferred upon English literature are far in excess of what the contribution of all these individual men of genius would have been had they, let us say, all been adopted in early infancy by English foster-parents." (Eliot, Culture, pp. 129--131)

In the light of this, let us make a few comments upon Maori Language Week. The preservation of the Maori language (and, therefore, culture) is commendable--as is the languages of all cultural groups in New Zealand (Polynesian, Asian, Middle-Eastern and so on). But this is something which must come from within Maoridom itself. We believe that Maori has probably made a classic blunder in attempting to make the language an official language, as if bilingualism would somehow contribute to the oneness and unity of our society.

Hanging the language upon the hook of co-governance, which in turn is based upon a spurious notion of Treaty "partnership" will fail to achieve the aims. In the long run it will bastardize the language--as is happening now. Maori is so full of neologisms that it is becoming increasingly swamped by a phonetic tsunami of English transliterations or clumsy verbal manufactures for English equivalents. Consequently its ability to preserve and transmit Maori culture is being lost.

If Maori language is worth preserving at all--and it is--it would be to preserve and keep alive Maori culture, history, and tradition (shorn of the evil of course--which is true of every language reflecting pagan roots and beliefs). But, that requires that the Maori language be intensely Maori! not a bastardized polygot of verbal confusion in a foolish attempt to modernise the language and make it quasi-universal. Above all we need Maori poets and writers steeped in the beauties of their own language who can also write powerfully and fluently in Maori, and who can teach Maori literature and arts to Maori. 

We also need these cultural icons to write in English so that we can all be enriched by Maori culture and made the better for it.

A Good Argument, with an Achilles Heel

Ban the Burqa

Claire Berlinski has written a powerful article, arguing that the burqa should be banned.  It is good as far as it goes.  She has insightful things to say about islamist beliefs which require the veiling of women.  Unfortunately, the argument has no foundation in the post-modern, post-Christian west.  Without being grounded in Christ and His Kingdom, arguments against the burqa devolve into prejudices in favour of "our" culture, as against "theirs".  JT


(From the August 16 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW)


Istanbul — I moved here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her: “If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real.

Why had she decided to cover herself? I asked. As a teenager, she told me, she had experienced a religious revelation. She described this in terms anyone familiar with William James would recognize. She began veiling to affirm her connection with the Ineffable. “Every time I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see a religious woman looking back. It reminds me that I’ve chosen to have a particular kind of relationship with God.”

Seen thus, the covering of the head is no more radical than many other religious rituals that demand symbolic acts of renunciation or daily inconvenience. I have heard Jews describe the spiritual rewards of following the laws of kashrut in much the same way. It is inconvenient, they say, and seemingly arbitrary; it demands daily sacrifice. But a Jew who keeps kosher cannot eat a meal without being reminded that he is a Jew, and thus the simple act of eating is elevated to a religious rite.

One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.

But that was when I could still visit the neighborhood of Balat without being called a whore.

The French National Assembly’s recent vote to ban face-covering veils including the burqa — which conceals even the eyes — is the latest such measure taken by governments across Europe. In April, the Belgian parliament became the first to ban the burqa; shortly afterward, police in northern Italy fined a woman for wearing a niqab, which covers the entire face save for the eyes, appealing to a 1975 law prohibiting the covering of the face in public. Conservative backbencher Philip Hollobone has called for a burqa ban in Britain. Last week in Spain, a measure to ban the burqa was narrowly defeated. The broad term for veiling, curtaining, or covering is hijab, and all forms of it, even those exposing the face, have been banned in French public schools since 2004.

Let’s be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against religious freedom and freedom of expression. They stigmatize Muslims. No modern state should be in the business of dictating what women should wear. The security arguments are spurious; there are a million ways to hide a bomb, and one hardly need wear a burqa to do so. It is not necessarily the case that the burqa is imposed upon women against their will; when it is the case, there are already laws on the books against physical coercion.


The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

All true. And yet the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized. The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand up now against veiling — and the conception of women and their place in society that it represents — within a generation there will be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk comfortably or safely.

Recently, on a New York Times blog, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum not only argued against the ban, but proposed that those who wear the burqa be protected from “subtle forms of discrimination.” It was a perfect example of a philosopher at the peak of her powers operating in a cultural and historical vacuum. “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum writes, was

that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest — derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing.

Nussbaum is absolutely wrong. There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe. In the benighted Islamic suburbs of Paris, as Samira Bellil writes in her autobiography Dans l’enfer des tournantes (“In Gang-Rape Hell”),

there are only two kinds of girls. Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school. . . . Those who . . . dare to wear make-up, to go out, to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as “easy” or as “little whores.”

Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

The association of Islam and crime against women is seen throughout Europe: “The police in the Norwegian capital Oslo revealed that 2009 set yet another record: compared to 2008, there were twice as many cases of assault rapes,” the conservative Brussels Journal noted earlier this year. “In each and every case, not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant.” These statistics are rarely discussed; they are too evocative of ancient racist tropes for anyone’s comfort. But they are facts.

The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.


The cancerous spread of veiling has been seen throughout the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. I have watched it in Turkey. Through migration and demographic shift, neighborhoods that once were mixed have become predominantly veiled. The government has sought to lift prohibitions on the wearing of headscarves, legitimizing and emboldening advocates of the practice. Five years ago, the historically Jewish and Greek neighborhood of Balat, on the Golden Horn, was one in which many unveiled women could be seen. It is not anymore. Recently I visited a friend there who reluctantly suggested that I dress more modestly — while in his apartment. His windows faced the street. He was concerned that his neighbors would call the police and report a prostitute in their midst.

Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus — an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think.

At its core, the veil is the expression of the belief that female sexuality is so destructive a force that men must at all costs be protected from it; the natural correlate of this belief is that men cannot be held responsible for the desires prompted in them by an unveiled woman, including the impulse to rape her. In 2006, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric, delivered a sermon referring to a recent rape victim thus:

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside . . . without cover, and the cats come to eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

His remarks caused a firestorm of denunciation and the usual insistence that this sentiment did not represent the true nature of Islam. But the only unusual thing about his comments was that they were made in public. If you believe these views are atypical of the Muslim community, spend five minutes in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. No need to cherry-pick; just Google “hijab” and look at the first results that come up. A typical entry:

What kind of dignity a non-believer has by the way; they conduct their life and expose themselves. They have removed the shield of protection, that modesty of Hijab and left themselves unprotected and that is the cause for the assault, which takes place once every ten seconds in rape and murder around the world. But those true Muslims who observe proper Hijab are protected from such assaults and not one [case of] this type is ever heard of.

A faraway, fire-eyed Saudi cleric? No. This site is hosted in Norway. The site’s moderator is one Espen Egil Hansen, and the managing director is someone by the name of Jo Christian Oterhals.

Some other comments:

Any woman who perfumes herself and passes by some people that they smell her scent, then she is a Zaniyah [adulteress]. . . . Examining the various conditions about the hijab one can clearly recognise that many of the young Muslim women are not fulfilling these conditions. Many just take “half-way” measures, which not only mocks the community in which she lives, but also mocks the commands of Allah. . . . The hijab fits the natural feeling of Gheerah, which is intrinsic in the straight man who does not like people to look at his wife or daughters. Gheerah is a driving emotion that drives the straight man to safeguard women who are related to him from strangers. The straight MUSLIM man has Gheerah for ALL MUSLIM women. In response to lust and desire, men look (with desire) at other women while they do not mind that other men do the same to their wives or daughters. The mixing of sexes and absence of hijab destroys the Gheera in men.

These insights were posted on the official website of the Islamic Society of the University of Essex. As they suggest, the veil is a legitimization of murderous jealousy. It sanctions the impulse of primitive men to possess the very sight of their women entirely to themselves. There is no nation on the planet where the veil is the cultural norm and where women enjoy equal rights. Not one. Nor is there such a thing as a neighborhood where the veil is the cultural norm and yet no judgment is passed upon women who do not wear it.

Like all freedoms, religious freedom is not absolute. It is said in the United States that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and this principle is applicable to any open society. It is one thing to say I should be perfectly free to worship Baal, another to say I must be free to sacrifice children to him. Donning a burqa is not an outrage on the order of killing a child, but it is surely an outrage on just that order to permit a culture that views women as slaves to displace one that does not. We are all by now familiar with the demographic predictions: Europe’s Muslim population is growing; many cities will soon have Muslim majorities. If the conception of Islam that the veil represents is allowed to prevail in Europe, these cities will no longer be free.

It is difficult to form a position on this issue that reconciles all of the West’s legal precedents and moral intuitions. It is probably best that the burqa be banned immediately on “security” grounds, even if we all know deep down that the case is spurious; for such a ban to make perfect sense, it would have to extend to all loose clothing, suitcases, capacious handbags, beer bellies, and shoes. Yet in some cases, hypocrisy is the least awful of options; bans thus justified may be the best way of expressing a society’s entirely legitimate revulsion without setting a dangerous precedent of legislating against a targeted religious group.

Headscarves cannot at this point be banned. It is politically impossible, and it is also too late: The practice is too widespread. But the decision to wear them should be viewed much as the decision to wear Klan robes or Nazi regalia would be in the United States. Yes, you are free to do so, but no, you cannot wear that and expect to be hired by the government to teach schoolchildren, and no, we are not going to pretend collectively that this choice is devoid of a deeply sinister political and cultural meaning. Such a stance would serve the cause of liberty more than it would harm it: While it is true that some women adopt the veil voluntarily, it is also true that most veiling is forced. It is nearly impossible for the state to ascertain who is veiled by choice and who has been coerced. A woman who has been forced to veil is hardly likely to volunteer this information to authorities. Our responsibility to protect these women from coercion is greater than our responsibility to protect the freedom of those who choose to veil. Why? Because this is our culture, and in our culture, we do not veil. We do not veil because we do not believe that God demands this of women or even desires it; nor do we believe that unveiled women are whores, nor do we believe they deserve social censure, harassment, or rape. Our culture’s position on these questions is morally superior. We have every right, indeed an obligation, to ensure that our more enlightened conception of women and their proper role in society prevails in any cultural conflict, particularly one on Western soil.

When government ministers such as the British environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, legitimize the veil by babbling about the freedom and empowerment the garment affords, they reveal a colossally dangerous collapse in Europe’s cultural confidence. Instead, campaigns designed to discourage veiling should be launched. If the state is entitled to warn, say, of the unhealthful effects of cigarette smoking, it is surely also entitled to make the case against the conception of women that veiling represents.

Banning the burqa is without doubt a terrible assault on the ideal of religious liberty. It is the sign of a desperate society. No one wishes for things to have come so far that it is necessary.

But they have, and it is.

— Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too, and There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. This article first appeared in the August 16, 2010 issue of National Review.

The Sum Total of Human Misery--Yet

The Unexpected Good

J R R Tolkien writing to his son, Christopher during the dark days of World War II

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days--quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice.  If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!  And the products of it all will be mainly evil--historically considered.  But the historical version is, of course, not the only one.  All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects".  No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis.  All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success--in vain, preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.  So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives.  (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, a selection edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien.  London: HarperCollins, 1981, p.76)

 How powerfully these themes present themselves in The Lord of the Rings!  What a profound hope and belief in the Providence of King Jesus.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Dregs of the Last Christendom

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, August 02, 2010

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has given an important speech on the threat posed to us by Sharia law and the encroachments of Islamic fundamentalism. He was right to do so, but like so many, the ground where he wants to stand in this fight is ground that gives way under his feet. Sharia law is "abhorrent to Western values." So? Who cares about that?

The Islamists are driven by what Allah has revealed. The answer to this is not what the people of the West think at the present moment. If you want a good example of the voice of that god, then take a gander at the House of Representatives. A transcendental appeal, even if it might be false, appears to outrank a horizontal appeal that is known by everyone to be false.

Here is the basic problem. Why should we resist the encroachments of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography?

Western values only have value if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or womens' rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we say that Western values simply means "our values," then why should those outrank "their values"? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs.

"Western values" as an appeal works only if it is a coded references to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.

The problem is illustrated by secular or atheistic Zionism, which is racism, straight up. If you make a theological argument for Jews in the land of Palestine, that argument is based in the will of God and not in the inherent right of a certain DNA imprint to hold the rights to a certain bit of territory. Even if that theological argument is wrong, the appeal it makes is not to race (Dt. 7:7-8). But if there is no God, and hence no theological argument, all you have left of your Zionism is race. "I can have this, and you cannot have it, because I am a Jew and you are not." Zionism of that sort, Zionism with no God, is racist pure and simple. Of course, if there is no God, there is nothing wrong with such racism, and nothing wrong with answering it in kind, but that is another point for another day.

In the same way, Western values are a bundle of wind, a bunch of nothing. The postmodernists have pointed out to us that there are different communities out there, and they all have their values, and so now these communities careen around in our global village like so many bumper cars. Who's to say?

Western values are only to be preferred in a conflict like this if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton's adage -- if you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.

Now there have been times, times of unreflecting youth, when a people with their false little democratic gods on a shelf might successfully stand against another people with their false allah-god up in the air. Sometimes Jupiter prevails over Mithra and sometimes it goes the other way. That kind of thing has been done, and it has actually been done by the people of the West to the Muslims. Think of the Western democracies of the early twentieth century carving up the Middle East like it was a pie. Yes, it has been done.

But that was before the rot of postmodernism set in, the reductio that made all our crackerjack thinkers realize (some of them reluctantly) that our great Kantian sky hook wasn't actually bolted to anything, and one man's guess was as good as another's.

So this means, in short, there is now no way to defend the West without rejecting, root and branch, the last one hundred years of Western intellectual history. That's fine with me, and all my modest proposal entails is that we undertake to defend the West by rejecting the last two hundred and fifty years of Western intellectual history. I am willing to defend the next Christendom, and am in fact eager to do so. I am not willing to take my stand on the basis of the dregs of the last Christendom.

A Real Bad Idea

Kindness Is Killing Us

As New Zealand languishes in the economic doldrums we are finding that our emperor-government has no clothes on. Its economic policy--that is, its statist recipe to get the country out of recession--has been "spend, borrow, and hope". It has spent with vigour, borrowed relentlessly, but hoped in vain.

At root here is a fundamental ideological and religious divide. The Bible prohibits the government becoming embroiled in economic activity. It is to own nothing. It is to fund itself by taxation. It's sole area of delegated competence and activity is to ensure that both civil and criminal justice is administered.

But we live in a society which long ago rejected God. We had a better idea. The view which prevails today is "smarter than the average bear" and suggests that governments have unlimited potential to tax in order to do "good things"--which include owning and operating businesses, subsidising businesses, passing laws to favour business activity, controlling vast swathes of territory and resources, and exacting and redistributing property from one group of citizens to another.

The only political debate to be found within this dominating zeitgeist is the degree of state involvement in the economy. The Left favours more; the Right slightly less. The more a Left government extracts and confiscates, the more a Right government does, only slightly less. Thus, the pundits that have assessed the current National government as Labour-lite are on the money, if you would excuse the pun. The current government is stuffed full to the brim of politicians who believe that Government can make a positive difference. It is an ideology widely endorsed by the public, with relentless enthusiasm. It will not entrust itself to Almighty God, so it ends up entrusting itself to Government. "In Government we trust" is our prevailing and established religion.

The costs and devastation wrought by this rebellion against God are high and pervasive. The kind benevolence of this soft-despotism smothers everything. The kindness that kills is deadly.

There is an abundance of economic evidence that government cannot create wealth, it can only destroy it. Therefore, if we are to move ahead and claw ourselves out of this recession the best thing the government can do is get out of the way. What follows, we believe, is the right economic prescription:

1. Cut government taxes every year gradually and relentlessly for the next ten years.

2. Cut government spending. The current government complex consists of thousands of quangos wasting money in "go gooding", nannying, and smothering. Get rid of them; all of them. Save millions upon millions of dollars. All the current government has done is pared back the budgeted increase in spending--it has not cut spending in real terms at all. Labour-lite indeed.

3. Relentlessly dismember the thousands of bureaucratic rules and regulations that make every employer and worker weighed down with pseudo-government responsibilities. The endless bureaucratising of life has not stopped under the Key Government--it has relentlessly pushed on, becoming much worse. It is both insidious and deadly.

4. Gradually and systematically reduce all entitlement spending and claims, making the most vulnerable the last. Working for Families has to be the first to go.

Then, get out of the way and let people work themselves out of the economic doldrums.

Will the current government do any of this? Of course not--because it does not understand the issues. Its members truly believe that government is good, and that bigger government is better and that biggest government is best. Its naive stupidity is painful to watch. Because it does not understand the problem, it is condemned, and it condemns us, to its exacerbated replication.

Now, of course none of this could be done without having an honest and candid discourse with New Zealand voters. "This is what the problem is; there is where we must head; this is what we will be doing next . . ." We read once that when President Clinton was forced into his big "pivot" by a Republican controlled congress, he moved successfully to put limits upon welfare entitlements. Just the fact of having the President of the United States say clearly and forcefully to beneficiaries, "You have to get a job" proved to have a remarkably salutary effect. Note the very different shade of meaning in the discourse--not, "you deserve a job", or "we will ensure that jobs are available", but the discourse of responsibility--something that you, the people, must do. It proved very powerful.

Our current government is too scared to have this conversation with the people. Its predominant focus and concern is upon getting re-elected next time. But for goodness sake--if you found the clarity of mind and courage to put this forward and the people rejected you, so what? Labour would be returned to government and things would just get worse more quickly. But, then, at least we would have a chance to repent of our folly, which would be evident even to the most obtuse statist.

It is not to our least advantage that National is destroying our economy with its smothering statism, rather than Labour. Destruction is destruction, no matter how you cut it.

Clear Speech

A local speech on a local issue is likely to be more intelligible than one addressed to a whole nation, and we observe that the greatest muster of ambiguities and obscure generalities is usually to be found in speeches which are addressed to the whole world

T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1948), p.163.

And that, dear friends, explains a good deal about the United Nations.

Mercury Rising

New Zealand on Mount Carmel

Politicians are slow learners, as are the people. In New Zealand the people willingly look to the government and their politicians as their gods. The politicians give glad consent to the notion. Long ago our people decided that the God of our fathers had no place in the Brave New World that Enlightened Evolved Mankind was busy creating. But a deity there must be; we cannot live without it. So statism, or government as god, has become the default faith of our secular Unbelief.

All problems--and in a fallen world their name is Legion--must be addressed and solved first and foremost by government. Are people unemployed? The government must ensure employment. Are people starving? Politicians must ensure they are fed. Can Johnny not read? Government must shower your money on his failing teachers. Is the climate changing? Our omnipotent politicians must engineer a comprehensive change in economic arrangements to be a faithful witness to the world. And all the people laugh and cheer.

Politicians are inevitably religious. Virtually all share the belief that with strokes of a legislative pen they can create out of nothing. They can make a difference (or, more to the point) they can fulfil their calling as Great Redeemers.

All this is nonsense, of course. But the government-as-god church is full of credulous believers. The devotees can get really angry when their gods do not perform as expected.

So now we know that unemployment is on the rise again. This was not supposed to happen. Here we are, with our government-as-god blithely borrowing $250m a week to sustain its "buying-us-time-while-we-right-the-ship" strategy, and the ship is not co-operating. There is now an uneasy murmur and stirring to be seen amongst the congregation. What is our government-god doing? Does our Prime Minister--aka High Priest--really have a plan that will work? Does he have a plan at all? Are the gods angry at us? Should we be getting angry at them, since we created them, and we own them, after all.

He Who sits in the heavens laughs at us (Psalm 2:4). What sort of laughter is this? It is the derisive scoffing at puny upstarts who deserve every bit of merciless mockery they receive. No doubt there will be many in the government-as-god congregation who would be greatly offended at the idea of the Living God scoffing and mocking at them. Why, the very idea of mocking those who believe their own press of being semi-divine is not just downright offensive, it is getting close to blasphemy, non? "You Christians have a horrible God. He laughs at us, you say, when we are struggling. We thought you Christians proclaimed a God of love. Hypocrites! How dare you defame our idols. How vile of you to impugn the church of the government-as-god, let alone its High Priest and ministers."

Imagine for a moment that the prophet Elijah was amongst us. It's not too much of a stretch really, since many of the conditions present in Israel in Elijah's day have their parallel here. Ahab and Jezebel busily propagating and promoting a false religion. Altars and places of veneration to false gods set up in every place. The servants of the Living God mocked and reviled. And then comes Elijah's great confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. When those false prophets were leaping about, cutting themselves, yelling and shouting--all in the vain effort to get their god to do something, Elijah took up the tones of the God of the heavens and the earth.

And it came about at noon, that Elijah mocked them and said, "Call out with a loud voice, for he is a god; either he is occupied or gone aside, or is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened." I Kings 18:27 (The phrase "gone aside" is a reference to Baal needing to relieve himself.)

It was cutting--but the truth, nonetheless.

These are perilous times. A gnawing doubt is beginning to rumble in the gut of the government-as-god congregation. God will continue to mock us for as long as we reject Him, and remain devotees of our false national religion--that our government is as god amongst us, as we, the people, are semi-divine.

"And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made."

Where has all the Oil Gone?

Histrionic Alarmism: Who will Rid us of These Pestiferous Fools?

It's now mainstream. Time Magazine has run a piece on the Gulf oil spill by Michael Grunwald that presents the case for it being a storm in a teacup. The real disaster has been the Federal Government's handling of it and the economic damage it has caused as a result of suspending deep sea drilling. But as they say in the trade, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. . . .

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor, says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska's Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I've ever seen that were actually black. "It comes back fast, doesn't it?" van Heerden said.

Grunwald's conclusion:

Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups all have obvious incentives to accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So do the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines; those oil-soaked pelicans you saw on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the healthy ones I saw roosting on a protective boom in Bay Jimmy. Even Limbaugh, when he wasn't downplaying the spill, outrageously hyped it as "Obama's Katrina." But honest scientists don't do that, even when they work for Audubon.

"There are a lot of alarmists in the bird world," Kemp says. "People see oiled pelicans and they go crazy. But this has been a disaster for people, not biota."

Hone Harawira Has a Point

The Old Has Passed Away

Hone Harawira--Maori Party MP--is widely known for his racist views. His coarse public ranting against "whitey" has got him into trouble more than once. His deeply tattooed, narcissistic idea of Maori being the victims of a white injustice which continues to this day is self-destructive. Such views are enslaving. You cannot help feeling sorry that he is chained in the thralldom of such idiocy.

He has been in the news in the last few days over his enunciation of the Harawira doctrine of marriage. Hone would not like his children to marry any white people. Now there is one aspect to this which is right on the money: parental consent to the marriage partners of their children is a worthy tradition and should be upheld.

It is a tradition which has long held sway in the Christian Church. But in the new humanity, being created in Christ, the rest of the Harawira marriage doctrine reflects the blindness and ignorance of an aeon long passed its use-by date. It is part of the sinful, old world which is passing away. The new humanity is united under the headship of Christ: every dividing wall has been broken down and taken away.

With respect to marriage, the concern which overwhelms all others is that Christians be not yoked together with Unbelievers. Race is irrelevant--as irrelevant as eye-colour, or hair colour. It is not a factor to be considered at all. It is true that cultural differences have some impact--but only insofar as the couple have to be aware that if they come from different cultures, their household cannot be divided against itself and a new, blended culture will have to emerge within the marriage. But that is simply part of two becoming one. Cultural differences are just one aspect of what will need to be adjusted and modified as the new home is formed.

In the anger, bitterness, and fractiousness of the old world, race matters. In the new world it does not. It is a beautiful thing to see interracial marriages in Christ. It is a powerful manifestation of the truth that in Christ there is no Greek and Jew, barbarian and Scythian, no slave and freeman--but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Levee Gonna Break

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, July 23, 2010

Whenever there is a craze about something or other, it is not long before that craze is referenced in the public life of a society. If it is a big deal, then at some point it will blow up on television, news sites, or youtube, and then late night comedians start talking about it, and then some congressman introduce resolutions to have this be national hula hoop week.

The craze may be of the pet rock variety, or it might be something far more important -- like people wanting lower taxes. But once the movement sets in, and it is okay for a lot of people to attach themselves to it publicly, then there is no mechanism in place to keep that "thing," whatever it is, out of public life. People don't work that way. People don't live like dualists, however much they may have been taught to talk like dualists.

Except with the Christian faith. There has been an attempt, remarkably successful so far, to build a huge epistemological dike that will keep the ocean of evangelical faith out of our dry little secular lowlands. Now people naturally function the same way with the gospel of Christ as they do with the other things they believe, but the hatred that our lords and princelings have for the Lord complicates things. Since it is Christ we are talking about, and because there are many of our eyes-like-grease elites who "will not have this man rule over us," they have labored to create a construct that will keep Christ far away from anything that matters.

This project of theirs, impossible to achieve when the ocean levels are normal, has been accomplished by dint of ceaseless labor. The secularists have done their part with their unremitting efforts to keep the church/state dike in good repair, and evangelical preachers have done their part by preaching in such a muffled way as to keep the ocean at levels low enough to make this possible.

But if God grants us a reformation in preaching, and if we start planting churches of Word and sacrament in the power of the Holy Spirit, then the dike need not be repealed -- it will just give way. If the river starts to rise, like it is supposed to, then we may reapply these prescient words from Dylan.

If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break,
If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break,
Everybody's saying this is a day only the Lord could make

Rivers of Blood . . .

Which Yoke?

We believe, as we have often expressed, that a day is coming when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea. We believe that the Great Commission--to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and all men becoming disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ--will actually be fulfilled in history. We believe in the conversion of the Gentiles. We believe that Christ will reign from heaven until all His enemies have been placed under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death. This is the trajectory along which the Kingdom of God is heading.

There is, however, a false religion, a satanic perversion of Christian teaching, which also believes in world-wide triumph.

I believe that one day Britain, and indeed every part of the world, will be governed by and under the authority of the Muslims implementing Islamic Law.

“And it will happen. It may come peacefully. But it may come through a holy war that will see rivers of blood on the streets.

--British Islamist cleric, Anjem Choudary

This is Islam's version of the future: totalitarian rule of the whole earth by the imposition of sharia law. If it does not come about peacefully (that is, by people surrendering to it) then it will be imposed by bloodshed.

So, two world-views of history's trajectory. One view is the truth; the other is false. Christ will eventually dismember and breakdown Islam, heart by heart, soul by soul, converting Islamists from the inside out. They will willingly and freely take the yoke of Christ upon themselves: the yoke of Him who is gentle and humble of heart. The end result will be joy without measure for the whole world.

The false view, Satan's Islamist "gospel", cannot covert the heart from darkness to light, for he is and remains the Prince of Darkness.

The West once reverenced the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now it is being handed over to Islam. It still has a choice of yoke: either the gentle yoke of our Lord, or the harsh, slavish imposition of Islam. Either the yoke of joy and peace and forgiveness of sins, or the yoke of bloodshed and oppression and tyrannical subjugation.

Either way, it will wear the yoke. Which yoke will the West choose? So far, the West is as the lamb going up to slaughter.

The Buck Stops at Our Desks

Change That We can Believe In

Whilst a soul can be regenerated and converted in an instant, building Christendom take generations and many lifetimes. As it was with the first Christendom, so it will be with the next. There is no magical bullet. There is no quick fix.

We see this reality all the time (even if we may rarely stop to think about it). Many know that at a certain point in time--an instant even--they were first converted. They were conscious of believing personally in the Living God for the first time. C S Lewis testified that one day he got on the bus whilst not a Christian; but by the time he alighted, he was. He had been transformed. Many of us can give similar accounts.

But, whilst we had passed quickly from death to life, for the rest of our lives we labour to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. Transformation comes slowly, often amidst fearsome battles, with great struggle. Old habits die, but they die hard. God has ordained it so. The same is true with re-building Christendom--it takes a long, long time. God has ordained that it should be so. Why? Partly because whether speaking of the individual or an entire culture, the transformation required is comprehensive; it is root and branch stuff. If it were to be achieved instantaneously the very fabric of the creation would have to be torn apart. Gradual change allows the continuing of human life upon the planet. Grace restores Nature, it does not obliterate it.

This is what Jesus indicated when He gave the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13: 24--30). The landowner forbade his servants ripping out the tares because of the harm and destruction it would cause to the wheat. The christianising of a culture is such a deep, complex work it takes generations to accomplish, much as the great medieval cathedrals required multiple generations to complete the task.

Once again, our own experience testifies to this. All of us have inherited life habits and patterns from our parents, for good or ill. These have been ingrained in us without thinking. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. This reality applies when a culture is disintegrating and devolving from Christendom just as much as when a culture is reforming gradually into a new Christendom.

Above all else the coming reign of the Kingdom of God requires comprehensive Christian self-government and self-rule--by the overwhelming majority of the population. But self-government necessitates that we each take responsibility for those things with which God has charged us: personal sanctification, holy families, holy worship, the education of our children, faithful labour, faithful church service, thrift and laying up an inheritance for our grandchildren, taking care of the needy--all of these require a lifetime of habits and diligence--inherited from our parents and grandparents.

Christendom is not built by getting a few laws changed--although law will certainly be changed as a result of Christendom growing stronger. We betray just how much statism has infected us when we fall into the trap of thinking that the repeal or change of a law or two will ensure Christendom's future. It will not.

Root and branch change is Christendom's modus operandi. As the leaven leavens the whole loaf, changing a few laws will seem like the most obvious and natural thing to do at the time. But if the leaven has not yet done its work, even the simplest change to the most egregious and ungodly laws is usually a mountainous task, far beyond our capability and resources at the time.

Peter FitzSimons Clarifies

Those Useless Sub-Editors

Peter FitzSimons was explaining several days ago how the Wallabies were going to romp to victory over the All Blacks. This morning in the Sydney Morning Herald, he, ummm, clarified his position! FitzSimons at his best!

Oh, come off it. One time in your life, one time in your life, you haven't made a complete dickhead of yourself by publicly proclaiming the Ten Reasons the Wallabies would thump the All Blacks, only to subsequently see them go down by a near record score? All while wearing the absurd affectation of a red bandanna?

I know I have.

And the worst of it is I didn't really mean to. For when I went back to compare what I had written with what was published, I was horrified to see that what I had originally written was actually right on the money, and it was just the bloody subeditors that changed the meaning. Here, thus, finally, is the original, unexpurgated version.

Ten reasons we're gunna be flogged like a convict caught with the governor's wife.

1. While it is against the natural order of things for a group of New Zealanders to beat a group of Australians at anything, you only have to see how Julia Gillard went from playing full-forward with the Western Bulldogs to being Prime Minister - all in the space of three weeks - to see that stranger things have happened.

2. George Bernard Shaw once said German composer Richard Wagner ''has some wonderful moments … but some terrible half- hours!" and as the same may be said of the Wallabies over the past few Tests, there is every chance that will happen again.

3. The All Blacks are on fire. Some blowhard know-nothings say there is no way they can possibly play better, ever, than they did against the Springboks in their past two Tests, but form like that doesn't die overnight.

4. Our forward pack is going to get belted! Yes, they've moved forward from the days of having a collapsing scrum and a dud lineout, but they're still probably a week off being able to BELT THOSE MONGRELS STUPID!

5. We're out of our depth. When you lose a player the likes of Quade Cooper at five-eighth, it doesn't matter when you have a genius the calibre of Matt Giteau to move into that position, it never happens immediately. By next Saturday in Christchurch the new combination should be on fire, but I fear it won't happen immediately.

6. Drew Mitchell. He worries me. Yes, he's talented, but he's also hot-headed. If you really want to know what I think, I fear he's going to threaten my record for being the only Wallaby sent from the field in a match against the All Blacks.

7. Richie McCaw. He is the most damaging player in the world, and has never been stronger than right now. I think he will tear us apart in the second half. Plus he has the luck of the All Blacks.We're Australians. They're Kiwis. They're a lot luckier than us. Fair dinkum, how long is it since the ball bloody well bounced our way in a Bledisloe Test? EVERY freaking time, they get the rub of the green and we get a hole in the bloody donut. There is no reason to expect that will change.

8. History shows that the All Blacks are never stronger than a year out from the World Cup, and that is exactly where they are now.

9. The Kiwis want it more. We Australians have so many things to boast about, we lose track. Those poor bastards only have the All Blacks, so they ride it harder.

10. The Wallabies are cleverer. The most important match is not this first match, but the NEXT THREE, when our blokes will be BAAACK to tear them apart, after having lulled them into a false sense of security by allowing them to rack up 49 points. Remember, you heard it here first!