Media Miasma

A Mess of Left-Over Pottage

OK, so the MSM are an easy target. But since it is supposed to be the Fourth Estate its ineptitude and irrelevance necessitate that it to be exposed repeatedly. (The good thing, of course, is that modern technology enables "private citizens" to do just that, whereas previously the media itself was its own watchdog--a very unsatisfactory arrangement to be sure. The internet has enabled anyone to become an Afghan mujahideen with a Stinger missile.)

Now that we have assured ourselves that we are not just taking cheap shots, let us duly hold up to ridicule this latest dish of pablum from the NZ Herald. As all our NZ readers will know, people living in Auckland are in the midst of a city-wide election campaign--in fact the first election for a municipality that combines three former cities and a slew of local bodies into one "super city". Consequently, there is a bit more interest in this municipal election than is normally the case. Plenty of issues to be concerned about, one would think.

One Jocelyn Muir and her editors at the Herald have gone straight to the heart of the matter and published a piece on the nutritional nous of the mayoral candidates. We kid you not. Under the headline "Front-runners flunk food test" we read that the Herald has engaged in a coruscating initiative to find out just how the various mayoral candidates understand good nutrition. Is this relevant or what?

Apparently the Herald is struggling to fill space so it has to dream up such faux news as follows:

The candidates were asked, "If you had $10 to spend at the supermarket for your family of six's evening meal on a given day, what would you buy?"

The Weekend Herald asked the Nutrition Foundation, without identifying the candidates, to analyse the meals and say which would be the most nutritious.

The cost of each meal's ingredients was also calculated, bearing in mind the candidates were told they could assume they had salt, pepper, oil and butter at home.

Mesmerising stuff. We are getting right to the heart of Super-City issues now. What would we do without our Fourth Estate?

John Banks, one of the leading mayoral candidates, was slammed by the righteously indignant Herald and the adjudicatory Nutrition Foundation.

John Banks' sandwich pie, excluding the sandwiches, would cost $6.44 - whether there is any additional cost depends on whether a cafe was willing to provide the sandwiches free or or not.

He said he would go to a local coffee shop and ask for any unsold sandwiches they were going to throw out. He would take them home, mix them up and top with eggs, milk, salt and pepper to make a pie of some sort.

The Nutrition Foundation said: "Would not recommend this. Our major concern is about food safety - sandwiches from a coffee shop may or may not be suitable for use after being in a coffee shop all day.

Would be able to buy supermarket own brand bread cheaply, add sandwich fillings and make 'some sort of pie', but this might be more like a dessert than a main meal. Would have very low vegetable content."

Terrible, terrible, terrible. One pictures the knitting needles at the Nutrition Foundation klacking indignantly. Then, pan to the grim brows knitted together as Mz Jocelyn and her editors caucus together, debating how to frame what will surely be the major scoop of the campaign. One gnarled, ante-diluvian sub-editor, rasping out his recommendation between expectorant-interposed puffs on his roll-your-own, argues that Banks be framed as the pro-recycling, environmentally friendly candidate with a common touch, who understands what it means to be poor and survive. But Mz Jocelyn passionately compels her colleagues to frame Banks as the ignoramus of yesteryear. "Don't you get it", she shrills. "In the real world--our world--the world of the metrosexual man, of the SNAG, of the DINKI, nutrition is THE BIG ISSUE. You are what you eat. We can draw a bright line between nutritional nous to IQ." Her colleagues nod sagely. One murmurs something about the science being settled. The decision is clear.

The caucus breaks up and Mz Jocelyn departs with a deep sense of purposeful satisfaction in her bowels. She has made a difference. The world will be a better place as a result of her work. She has unmasked Banks as the one who would sell the whole city down the Manukau for a mess of not just pottage, but left-over pottage. Ugh. She involuntarily shivers. But the moment passes, and once again she basks in the warm glow of knowing that she has saved the world for democracy. Her lecturers in journalism school would be proud of their latest protege.

The editors at the Herald surely are. She has grasped the essence of what it means to be a "make-a-difference" reporter in the noughties.

How the mighty have fallen--into irrelevance.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Millennia of Bumpity Bumpity 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, September 08, 2010

At the point Christ came, the true faith had been kept alive up to that point, after a fashion, among the Jews. I say it was kept because of the many faithful believers among them who were looking in true faith for the Messiah. Jesus Himself said that Israel had teachers who sat in Moses' seat, and who should be respected, at least to a point. I say "after a fashion" for another reason. The downside, obviously, is that the leaders of Israel conspired to have their Messiah executed in a rigged trial. So the state of the world was pretty bad when Christ arrived -- the whole world was under the control of demonic darkness (1 John 5:19), and the Jews had made their peace with this arrangement. The harlot rode the dragon.

When Jesus rose and ascended, His disciples did not return to the upper room and unpack Christendom from the boxes He had left for them there. As has been pointed out repeatedly, Jesus did not give them a turnkey kingdom. The kingdom of God does not arrive as coup de main. The kingdom of God does not arrive like a tsunami. The kingdom of God does not arrive like the 101st Airborne. Jesus said, and He said repeatedly, that the kingdom was a slow growth affair, working through the loaf like yeast.

And now, two thousand years later, when we see that the Christian faith has grown and expanded throughout the world in just the way He said it would, should this be a cause for unbelief?.

In retrospect, we can see the milestones we passed in the journey to the first Christendom, and future historians will be able to point to milestones in our era that marked our passage to the resurgent Christendom. But one of our current problems is that we are a convenience store civilization, and we want the next iteration of our civilization to be obtainable the same way we get coffee at the convenience store. We want to plonk our two dollars on the counter, and walk out of there with the coffee.

If somebody, a madman with a blog, say, says that if Jesus is the Savior of the world, this might necessitate the world getting saved, he is answered with demands that show us the constituent building blocks of Christendom now. We want to knock on them with our knuckles. We want to squirt the mixed metaphor flavor in from the pump jar, and drink the coffee now. We want the world to become Christian the way the devil offered to make it Christian, if only Jesus would bow down and worship him.

But God works a different calculus, and He had His only begotten Son hanged on a gibbet instead. What was He doing? He was making the world Christian, but He was doing it His way and on His timetable. But He was making the world Christian (John 12:31). Jesus, by and through His death, cast out the prince of this world. And, by the way, in the original Greek "cast out" does not mean "kept around."

With the vantage of centuries past, we can look back and see that when Ambrose had his famous conflict with Theodosius, this was a great moment in the formation of Christendom. But at the time, I doubt if Ambrose had any idea of what he was doing -- except standing faithfully at his post. And in the development of Christendom, we do not just see the church putting the magistrate in his place. It goes the other way as well. Frederick, Elector of Saxony, protected the gospel when the Church had decided to quit doing that, and opted for attacking the gospel instead.

So how is the process of discipling the nations to be accomplished? With centuries, nay, with millennia of bumpity bumpity

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

What Floats on the Surface of our Hearts 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, September 14, 2010

There are three basic ways to relate the authority of the Church to the authority of the civil magistrate. The first is the route taken by ultramontane jesuits, in which scheme the final authority is held by the church, with the pope at the head of it. The second is that of Erastianism, where it is taught that the state has final and supreme authority over the church. The third is that of Kuyperian sphere sovereignty, where the different spheres function according to the law of Christ, only answering to one another in those areas where Scripture teaches that their concerns overlap. There are of course variations within each party, with different people leaning this way or that, or reacting to the other thing.

But those are the options -- the state gives way to the church, the church gives way to the state, or the church and state figure out where their respective boundaries are.

In arguing for mere Christendom, it would be an easy mistake for some to assume that this necessitates a Protestant form of the first option -- some kind of ecclesiocracy. But in fact, I want to argue that the historic Reformed position is a variation of the third option -- a Kuyperian settlement of some sort. But in describing this above, I mentioned that both sides figured out where the boundaries are, which is trickier than it looks.

One other side comment. These different options can be supported in different ways. For example, a person could argue for the Church having authority over all others because that is the way he has the flow chart set up, or he could urge a system whereby the competitors have, in the Marxist sense, "withered away." The former would be seen with a strong medieval pope and surly princes, while the latter would be seen in an anabaptist eschatology, where the Church wins the demolition derby of history, and is the last vehicle running. For my purposes here, whether it is represented eschatologically or not, it mattereth not.

I want to make two points about all this, one historical and the other . . . not.

The first is that the historic Reformed position is the Kuyperian one, even before Kuyper, and that the radical two-kingdom approach (R2K) is radically unconfessional. Calvin and numerous other Reformers would have found the modern accommodations astonishing.

Let's hear what the gentlemen who wrote the Westminster Confession thought about it.

The civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and sacraments, or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven: yet he hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed. For the better effecting whereof, he hath power to call synods, to be present at them and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God (WCF 23.3, emphasis mine).

They begin by denying the raw Erastian option -- where the civil magistrate is told that he may not administer the Word and sacraments, and he does not hold the power of church discipline. The president may not, in short, preach the gospel, administer the Lord's Supper, or intrude himself into matters of church discipline. That is what he may not do. What may he do? He can keep the peace in the Church, keep the truth from getting fragmented, suppress blasphemy and heresy, enforce the patterns of biblical worship, and see to it that the ordinances of God are kept. In order to enable him to do this, he can call synods of the Church, he can be present at them, and he can ensure that the churchmen stick closer to the text than they might want to. Anybody have the willies yet?

This section of Westminster was modified by the American Presbyterians in the downgrade of 1789. To wit:

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the Church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his Church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretence of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance (WCF 23.3).

Both forms of the Confession acknowledge that the magistrate has authority circa sacra, around sacred things, and both deny that he has authority in sacris, in sacred things. I want to argue that both are basically Kuyperian, although they are obviously leaning in different directions. We might struggle with the original Confession, where it says that the magistrate has the authority to determine that decisions by church synods are in conformity with the Word of God. How is that not taking away with an Erastian hand what was given to the Church earlier in the paragraph with a Kuyperian hand? But we should also have trouble with the American version, where it says that the magistrate cannot interfere with matters of faith "in the least." How is that not sowing the seeds of a latter departure of the civil magistrate from any duty to Christ whatever?

In fact, both forms of the Confession are assuming a continued Christian predominance in civil society, a predominance which did not in fact occur. The British Westminister wanted one denomination of Christians to be selected as the Church of England. The Americans wanted the government (at every level) to refuse to play favorites among Christian denominations, but the Americans wanted the magistrate to do this as Isaiah's nursing father, protecting the Church of "our common Lord." To the extent that Buddhists and Muslims entered their thinking (hardly at all), they would not have wanted any citizen to be persecuted for their faith, but they would at the same time have wanted the civil magistrate to be protective in a special way of the Christian Church, made up of different denominations of Christians.

It is common for people to think, when the original Reformed views of the civil magistrate are brought up, that the American revision fixed "all that." They certainly moderated it, but did so in the conviction that they were describing the magistrate's relationship to a Christian country. Once the pagans and unbelievers arrived en masse, we are back to the problems that Constantine faced.

That is the historical point. R2K thinking is out of conformity with the Reformed tradition, and out of conformity with the confessions. Further, soft anabaptist reformed thought (e.g. James K.A. Smith) is also giving away the store.

Here is the other thought, of a more devotional nature. Party spirit and factionalism can afflict spheres as well as Whigs and Tories, or Methodists and Baptists. This has happened numerous times in history. God has created three basic spheres -- family, the Church, and the civil order. These are all created directly by God, and not by man.

Now humility delights in the prerogatives given to another, and hubris insists that, in the final analysis, things are going to have to go the way of me and my faction. To want the Church to supplant the family and state is just as bad as wanting the state to supplant the Church and family. There are times when eschatology reveals, not the faith of Abraham, but the conceits of Diotrophes. We push our way to the front of the disciples, and ask if we can sit at the Lord's right hand when He comes into His kingdom. It is amazing that after two millennia we are still flunking that particular test.

Kuyperianism is the only option presented to us that guards against the hubris that is always wanting to float up to the surface of our hearts, in whatever sphere we happen to be. As a minister of the Church, I am to delight in the fact that in the kingdom there will be kings and princes way ahead of me. Not as easy as it looks.

Evangelical Reductionism, Part II

The Significance of Noah and the Flood

To avoid a truncated, reduced, watered down, thin, gruel-like faith, Christians must embrace all the teaching of the whole Bible. In our day, particularly amongst evangelicals, the Old Testament is often confined to cupboard, only to be taken out and dusted off when a few simplistic exemplary lessons are required. So, David teaches us the virtue of courage when he faced Goliath--so we should be as courageous as David. Daniel teaches us the martyr's spirit when threatened with the lion's death, so we should be as faithful as Daniel amidst persecution--and so forth.

For many, that is about as much of the Old Testament they will ever know. Because so much of the Bible's teaching has been banished from their lives, human imaginings and speculations fill the gaps. The result is a watery, syncretistic faith--a tasteless admixture of truth and error. Evangelical reductionism remains a serious shortcoming.

One way to deal with it is to be exposed to the significance and meaning of the "meta-narrative" of Scripture, which is the account of God's redemptive purposes being wrought upon the earth. As we pay attention to this, suddenly the significance of all of Scripture is brought into clear sharp relief. For example, when we understand the redemptive significance of Noah and the flood, Noah and his family become our fathers and mothers in faith. We are related to them in the one redemptive line. Suddenly they speak to us and can shape our lives accordingly.

Michael D Williams, in his book Far as the Curse is Found (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 2005) shows us how in the events of Noah and the flood God speaks to us.

Human Sin and Divine Judgment

Genesis tells the story, many commentators have noted, of the pervasive spread of sin in the world. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, they took the fruit of their disobedience with them. After sin broke into the Garden (Gen. 3), it broke out into the whole world (Genesis 4—11) Adam's sin leads to a sorry picture. God warns that “sin is crouching at the door” (Genesis 4:7). Only one generation away from the Garden, man engages in fratricide. Cain murders his brother Abel and reaps divine punishment for not being his brother's keeper (Genesis 4: 8—16). By the seventh generation, Lamech can boast of his many murders (Genesis 4: 23—24). The flood (Genesis 6—7) is occasioned by the intermarriage of the “sons of God” with “the daughters of man”. This may refer to the confusion of the two seeds first introduced in Genesis 3:15: the faithful seed (the Sethites) is threatened through accommodation and assimilation by the godless seed (the seed of Cain). After the flood, sin again increases upon the earth until finally at Babel man says, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).

Thus the trajectory from the Garden to Babel moves from the illicit promise of moral autonomy in the serpent's lie to a full-blown culture of godlessness in which every human energy is employed in “the ultimate act of rebellion—the total denial of God in the absolute assumption of self-sufficiency. This is sin in totality, with finality.” (B Davie Napier, From Faith to Faith [New York: Harper and Row, 1955], p. 56.)

Lamenting both the extensiveness of sin (it has corrupted all things) and its intensiveness (it had inclined very human thought towards evil), God determines to wipe out the human race, to wash away the stain of sin and cleanse his creation. (Genesis 6: 5—12) . . . .

Sin Affects All Creation

First, the flood graphically demonstrates the scope of sin's spread and power. Man's sin so touches creation that God must address not only us but the world as well when he deals with sin. Sin and judgment, and thus also redemption, can never be limited to some alleged private or personal sector of life. Sin is not a matter of the heart, but from the heart all of life is affected.

When the covenant mediator fails, no relationship works right. Man's failure to function as divinely intended brings debacle upon the entire created order. Called to be a blessing, has instead become a curse. The threat to life that man introduces extends to every creature and every relationship. The animal world lives in fear of man, and the creation that was meant to be man's ally is now his enemy. The conditions of the Edenic peace have been broken, and the whole of creation groans in travail. Because man, the covenant mediator, has fallen, he has rendered himself incapable of fulfilling his calling of walking with God, serving his fellow human beings, and stewarding God's creation.

Sin requires God's Judgment

Second, the historical reality of the flood warns sinful man of the surety of judgment (II Petger 3: 3—6) Later biblical writers employ the flood as the model for God's future judgment (Zephaniah 1:2; Matthew 24: 36—41) . . . . It is not an arbitrary act of divine wrath but rther the righteous judgment of God upon a sinful race. The orderliness and beauty of God's original creation and intention for man in the world have been undone by the disobedience of man. The creation order established by God is everywhere flaunted, for “all the people on earth had corrupted their ways” (Genesis 6:12). The just order and divinely instituted constitution of creation is breached, and violence is upon the face of the earth (Genesis 6:13).

Sin Breeds Corruption

Third, the consequences of sin are not accidental. Sin invariably breeds corruption. In the judgment of the flood God to some extent blots out the human stain of sin and begins anew, giving man a second chance in the world. But this second chance only confirms the effect that sin has upon man and the world. While the ark delivers Noah and his family from the judgment of the flood, the root disease that brought on the flood was also a passenger in the ark. When the boat docks, Noah beholds a world very much different from the one produced by the sin in the Garden. But it is not an utterly different world, for there remains a point of continuity: the fallen human heart. The sin problem has not been done away with. A sinful world comes from fallen people. A sinful culture comes from fallen people, even born again fallen people. (Williams, pp. 85--87)

Evangelical Reductionism

An Antidote to Syncretism

For far too many evangelical churches and institutions, the Old Testament is virtually irrelevant. This scandal has robbed the Church of much power and faith. Stripping away the New Covenant from the Old allows an easy intrusion of pagan ideas and concepts into the faith, so that many evangelicals are guilty of syncretistic theology.

We focus upon evangelicals here not because other traditions are blameless in this regard. Far from it. The Roman Catholic tradition is sadly rife with syncretism, as is the Orthodox tradition. But evangelicals ought to know better. One of the Protestant fundamentals is Sola Scriptura--the Scriptures alone. However, in many evangelical circles Sola Scriptura has been glossed to become "Sola New Testament" which means, in effect, that Sola Scriptura is undermined, if not destroyed--for, as we have observed--remove the Old Testament from bearing authoritatively upon all that we do and think and the vacuum will be filled with pagan nostrums.

One evidence of this unbiblical reductionism is the tendency amongst evangelicals to limit its attention to defending the historicity of the Old Testament historical narrative. Beyond that the redemptive narrative and history is hardly ever consulted.

Michael D Williams, in his book Far as the Curse is Found, (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 2005), illustrates this point with reference to Noah and the Flood.

Some episodes within the biblical drama get no respect. The Genesis story of Noah and the flood certainly falls into that category. It's a Bible story, something we tell our children. Its color, detail and action keep the kids quiet in children's church, but poor old Noah never quite makes it into the sanctuary.

Believers of a more liberal bent consider the story of Noah a myth, not completely to be believed, full of too many questionable elements. Evangelicals, by contrast, if they concern themselves with the story at all, attempt to prove that the flood actually happened, that it is not a myth but historical fact. Thus we conservatives approach Noah in much the same way that we approach Eden, namely, with the primary interest of refuting the liberal denial of historicity.

As important as defending the Bible's historicity is—and it is crucially important—if historicity is our fundamental concern, we will miss the point of the narrative. Not only the event but also the meaning of the event is important. There is a message in the story.

Moses could have concluded in the Genesis story any number of things from the ancient past. But Genesis does not tell us everything that happened in human history before Israel went into Egypt. We find not a word about where Can and Abel got their wives, no references to dinosaurs or continental drift, nothing about many peoples and cultures that existed before the election of Israel. If Moses had meant merely to chronicle the distant past, the great gaps in his story would become difficult to explain. Obviously, Moses selected events from the early history of humankind that were important to the larger story he wised to tell: the story of God's redemption.

The question to ask when we read a biblical narrative is not merely What happened? but What was God doing? Why is this episode part of the grand biblical narrative? How does this small story contribute to the larger story o f God's redemptive intention in the world? The story of the Noahic flood speaks volumes if we will but listen.

Sandwiched as it is between the creation and fall narratives and the calling of Abraham, the Noah story develops and graphically underscores for the believer the fatherly character and redemptive concern of the God with whom we find ourselves in covenant, and the implications and impact of our involvement with him and in the world. Set in the larger context of the historical unfolding of God's redemptive mission, the story acquaints us more profoundly with God, creation and man, and human sin, judgment, and grace. It confirms what God cares about, what he is up to, and how he goes about it, and what he has for humans to be and do. There is so much more to the story that its historicity. And the story is much more than an isolated event. (Williams, pp. 83—85)

In a second piece we will post a summary of some of the real significance of the divine and human events with respect to Noah and the flood, as expounded by Williams.

Too Complex to be Run by Bureaucrats

I, Market Economy

Central planning never works.
Jonah Goldberg
September 8, 2010
National Review Online


No one in the world knows how to make the computer monitor you are looking at (and, if you’re reading this on your phone, iPad, or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either).

Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.

This is hardly a new insight. In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

The pencil tells the story of its own creation. The wood comes from Oregon, or perhaps California. The lead, which is really graphite, is mined in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The eraser, which is not rubber but something called “factice,” is “made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.”

To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about something called “cloud computing.” In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number-crunching doesn’t actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.

Do a Nexis search and you’ll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a “revolutionary” advance in information organization. And in one sense, that’s obviously true. But in another, this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman’s head. So are the intangible but no less real lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and contained in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution to my daughter’s second-grade curriculum.

More relevant, the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner.

The latest proof of Hayek’s insight can be found not only in the economic winter that goes by the label “recovery summer,” but in the crown jewel of the stimulus known as “cash for clunkers,” which subsidized car purchases that would have happened anyway. That’s a major reason the auto industry just had its worst August in 27 years. Meanwhile, lower-income buyers are seeing used-car prices soar thanks to the artificial scarcity created by destroying perfectly good “clunkers.”

But that’s a small point in the grand scheme of things. According to progressives, the financial crisis discredited “market fundamentalism” and created a burning need for a more cooperative society where “we’re all in it together.” It’s an ancient argument, with many noble intentions behind it. But it rests on a misunderstanding of one simple, astounding, irrefutable fact. The market economy is cooperative, and more successfully so than any alternative system ever conceived of, never mind put into practice. Admittedly it doesn’t feel that way, which is why everyone wants to find a better replacement for it. But they never will, for the same reason no one can make a pencil.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Irrational Exuberance

Housing Bubbles and Cool Calculations

We are all aware that kiwis have willingly deluded themselves into thinking that residential housing is a yellow brick road to wealth. Actually, for a long, long time they have been quite right. But it is unsustainable. It is pyrrhic prosperity. Smart folk will be very aware of this and will be planning accordingly.

Now, in these matters timing is always critical. As Keynes once observed, "the market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent". In other words, an investment market or asset may be way, way out of synch with fair value, but a return to reasonable prices may take years, decades, even generations. If you get exposed by betting the family farm or the household silver on the "market" pirouetting nimbly from irrationality to rationality--without considering that it may take decades to happen--you are speculating. Don't complain if the markets fail to perform within your required time frame.

Residential housing investment is a case in point. Let's be clear on what a rational market in residential housing would "look like". In case you missed it, a residential house is, well, a house, a building. And buildings depreciate over time, as does all plant and equipment. Houses eventually need maintenance and repairs. They wear out. They have to be replaced. This means that a ten year old house should be worth less than on the day it was first built. In general terms the land on which the house is built could be expected to appreciate in value over time because there is a finite and limited supply of land. There is only so much of it in NZ. Moreover, land never wears out (unless you are living in an area subject to coastal erosion).

So, a rational housing market should see the land on which the house is built increase in value over time, due to limited supply, while the house built upon the land decrease in value over time. But this is not the experience of New Zealanders in general. They have an expectation that whatever one pays for a house today, it will be worth more in three to five years time. This is a cultural axiom beyond dispute. It is a financial nostrum which only a fool would deny. Consequently, New Zealanders believe that housing is "safe" in financial terms. They are prepared to take considerable financial risks to own it. Even if they have to mortgage up their lives, in the end it will pay off as their house rises in value over time.

But it remains a fools paradise. Inflation--caused by a general increase in the supply of money--obscures the real fall in value of houses over time. A ten percent rise in market value of a house might actually be a five percent decline in real value by the time inflation is taken into account. Inflation is annoying in that it sends the wrong price signals that obscure real value.

But a far more significant factor distorting the housing market in this country, making it an irrational bubble, is the artificial limits upon the supply of housing. It is this which has worked more than any other factor to create a distorted, protected, housing market. The supply of houses has been artificially restrained not by a shortage of timber or other construction materials, but by local and central government restrictions upon house building. The Resource Management Act and local government town plans have restrained the supply of houses, reducing their supply, thereby jacking up prices of existing houses. This in turn has led to the nostrum that houses always rise in value. In the living memory of most people they have.

So, when you bet the family silver on a house you are probably going to be OK. Unless you are the one caught when the bubble bursts. But what would cause the bubble to burst?

A real depression. A really serious economic depression, lasting ten or so years, goes through phases. The first is the rapid contraction due to firms laying off staff and going bankrupt. Unemployment rises, spending falls, and credit contracts. The fall of demand and the turning off of the money-spigots means that prices fall, cash is king, bargains can be found. This is the first phase.

The second phase is the contraction of central and local government. Tax revenues drop sharply; limits upon government borrowing are reached; and government spending cuts begin.

It is at this point that local municipal governments start to wake up and smell the sewage. First up they realise that they have swathes of land which they had bought up in the halcyon days for one grand project or another. It is lying vacant; there is no revenue for the council being generated. Secondly, as indigent people are forced out of their houses, they "inherit" a bunch of houses due to non-payment of local government rates.

It gradually dawns on local bodies that a growing housing stock is a good thing. Querulous greenie voices fade to whimpers. Local bodies become pro-development and a building boom commences. But, every new residential house completed, lowers the value of the existing housing stock. Depreciation--a rational economic force--kicks in. A more sane and stable housing market develops--but one which sees the artificial wealth which people believed they held in ever appreciating residential property ebbs away. This is the third phase of a really serious depression.

Everyone is poorer. The fourth phase is when it dawns on the entire populace that the only way wealth can be created and sustained is to produce marketable goods and services at a profit. In other words, we have to work and earn our way out of economic recession. Then--and only then--a sustainable recovery begins.

In New Zealand, folks can makes lots of money from housing. If you are one of them, just keep reminding yourself that you have been fortunate and that it will not last. Warn your children.

Here's a good rule of thumb. Assume that the life of your current house is fifty years. Then it will be bulldozed and a new one constructed on the site. Look at your original QV statement and subtract the unimproved land value. The residual is the house value. If the house is ten years old, consider it depreciated by 20 percent. In other words the economic value of the house is worth one fifth less than its original sale price, if it is ten years old.

Such calculations will serve to keep you economically rational when you consider the residential housing market.

Whence Comes our Help?

We will Lift Up Our Eyes to the Gummint

We have said repeatedly that the dominant idolatry of the West is the bowing down in heart and mind to the government. Now all idols are constructed from out of the hearts and minds of men, so all idols actually resemble the creature, rather than the Creator. Idolatrous government is no exception: after all, the modern democratic state is really the corporate expression of the people.

The people generally have no patience or truck with those who argue for a much reduced and limited role for gummint. When problems arise, everyone to a man (it would seem) lifts eyes to Wellington and expects (and demands) the gummint to "do something". Christians, by contrast, lift their eyes to God, when comes our help.

When governments are formed by those on the left, the statist idolatry becomes more overt and pronounced. It also becomes more stupid, foolish, and impotent. It is an abiding characteristic of the Left that they cannot execute properly. Now, this is not to say that right-of-centre governments escape: it is rather that the left tends to believe fervently in the omni-competence of government and run at the folly at full throttle.

An overwhelming and lasting impression of the Obama administration for us will be its incompetence. The current President, it seems, really does buy into the idea that the government makes the difference and that all things can be put to right through legislation and tax-exacted or debt created spending. It would make grimly amusing reading to list all the historic achievements Obama has declared he will accomplish, by starting this programme or enacting that regulation--only to have the whole thing collapse before his eyes. The sad thing is that he and his colleagues really seem to believe this stuff.

One of the latest examples is the White House's proposed new spending initiatives to "get the economy moving". Remember how Obama announced and pronounced that he and his administration would fundamentally transform America and create a new economy which would be based upon green jobs. Billions would be spent, but billions would be created as a result. He declared it with the emphatic certainty of a true believer. Now it warrants not a mention. It is as if Obama has been stupid enough to think that the mere pronouncement would create out of nothing; that his words would call forth the reality. How incredibly naive. He really does worship the idol.

Obama's new economy, the one based upon "green energy", now lies in the dustbowl of history. The Washington Times writes:

Noticeably absent from President Obama's latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through "green" energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration's original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful.

The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects - combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. - appear to have killed the administration's appetite for pushing green projects as an economic cure.

After months of hype about the potential for green energy to stimulate job growth and lead the economy out of a recession, the results turned out to be disappointing, if not dismal. About $92 billion - more than 11 percent - of Mr. Obama's original $814 billion of stimulus funds were targeted for renewable energy projects when the measure was pushed through Congress in early 2009.

It turns out that most of the money to create ex nihilo millions of "green jobs" went overseas. Wind farms were the craze at the time: it turned out that the world's cheapest producers of turbines were in places like China.

Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, said much of the green stimulus funding was "squandered." "Large grants to build green buildings don't generate many new jobs, except for a few architects," he said. "Subsidies for windmills and solar panels created lots of jobs in China," but few at home.

In one of several embarrassing disclosures for the administration, a report last fall by American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 11 U.S. wind farms used their grants to purchase 695 out of 982 wind turbines from overseas suppliers.

And the jobs "created" in the US are completely dependant upon ongoing government subsidies. In other words, they are not economically sustainable.

Despite the massive infusion of government funding in recent years, renewable technologies have captured only a tiny share of the energy market and remain heavily dependent on government funding to be viable. Because of the need to constantly renew government funding, private investors remain skittish about committing to new projects.

Mr. Sherraden said the problem with job leakage overseas promised only to get worse, because governments in Europe and Japan - which in years past spent lavishly on renewable energy - now are drastically cutting back their green subsidies as they try to pare enormous budget deficits.

With the United States left as the only major developed country still flooding the market with government funding, competition from overseas suppliers promised to be more fierce than ever, Mr. Sherraden said. "It is impossible to guarantee that clean-energy stimulus is not leaked abroad," he said. "We have to recognize that we are funding job-creation programs in Germany, Spain, Japan and China."

You don't say.

And the amount of energy now being produced by these wonderful new green technologies called into existence out of nothing by the Word of the One? Diddley squat.

Even if the green-energy funding is viewed as a long-term investment to replace dwindling reserves of oil rather than as pure economic stimulus, advocates have greatly exaggerated the benefits, said Kerry Lynch, senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. "For all the hype over wind and solar, the reality is that they contribute very little to our energy supply," she said, saying that wind accounts for less than 1 percent of total U.S. energy production and solar power for just one-tenth of 1 percent. "Together, they could power the country for all of three days a year."

Ah, the stupidity and idiocy of it all. But those who worship the idol always have a comeback. "Sure, we did some things wrong. Sure billions have been wasted. Sure, green energy is no sustainable at the moment. But, next time we will do it better. Next time things will be different." One thing the West, in its present enslavement, will never, ever do. It will never tolerate any criticism of the idol, of the reigning god, of the established religion. The state remains ideologically omni-competent. "We will lift up our eyes to the gummint, whence comes our help." It is the great credo of the age. To suggest otherwise would be blasphemous.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Warholian Christians 

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, September 09, 2010

There are, of course, some observations to be made from the Koran burning in Florida on Saturday. But for the farce to be given full justice, we really need more time. That limitation confessed right up front, here are just a few thoughts.

The first point is that Andy Warhol lives. The media response to this was not calculated to discourage such things. "Jeepers," the pastor must be thinking, "that sure worked." He got the U.S. Attorney-General, the Vatican, Muslims in Kabul, and the President of the United States to condemn him and his wayward flock. I wonder what's next. Who around here thinks that this united-world-opinion-response will be taken by the outliers as a disincentive?

Second, what are Christians to make of this action of burning a book, a book that we all believe to be a bundle of falsehoods? While there is book burning in the New Testament (Acts 19:19), the people there were burning their own books in repentance. The situation would only be analogous to this one if ex-Muslims were doing this instead of a small group of Warholian Christians. To do this to the sacred literature of others is quite a different thing. In that same chapter, we see a couple of other interesting things about the ministry of St. Paul in Ephesus. He was not just behind the preaching that led to the burning of the occult matterial. He was also, it says, "friends" with the Asiarchs (pagan officials with a priestly role), and as his friends they requested that he not enter the colliseum (Acts 19:31). Where others saw riots, the apostle saw preaching opportunities. And Paul is defended by pagans who were able to point out that neither he nor his companions had blasphemed the goddess (Acts 19:37). Their opposition to the goddess had been more potent than that.

Third, our reaction to a bad rhetorical move on the part of these Christians should not make us recoil into "Internation Interfaith Dialogue and Group Hug Day." Islam remains a false religion. Many Muslims were in fact distraught over the Koran-burning but, then again, many Muslims are also distraught that my wife drives a Tahoe. The fact that this was a blundering move should not make us all think that peace and harmony are the twin breezes that fill Islam's sails.

Fourth, this incident, showing vastly inconsistent responses to equally outrageous behavior by various outliers, whether Muslim or Christian, is simply revealing the bankruptcy of secularism. To paraphrase the poet, the center is not holding. Compare the different responses from our secularist leaders to the Ground Zero Mosque and this Koran burning. Nobody in charge knows how to answer the question, "By what standard?" Why is this pastor not a candidate for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities? Don't you guys know performance art when you see it? In our secularist age, equal weights and measures are an alien concept.

And last, just as I was getting ready to post this, Pastor Jones in Florida announced that the Korans would not be burned, and that the NY imam doing the mosque thingy was considering backing down also. This looks like a face-saving gesture, but we shall see. The crisis continues, and the thick plottens!

Dramatic Public Gestures

The Real Versus Trifles

Amidst the international brouhaha over koran burning we see some Christians (Warhol Christians, Douglas Wilson calls them) seeking to make a grand public gesture to "put the world to rights". The more the rest of the world, from the chattering to the rabid classes, protest and prognosticate, the more the folk see justification for their grand gestures; the more they are joined by more bandwagon Warhol Christians. It's all sad, really.  The only entertaining thing about it is to see the chattering classes in such a bother. 

So now we have a slew of folk, it would seem, who have decided to burn korans in public. Stupid, self-defeating, unhelpful. But there you have it. Things like that happen in a free society. Here are some links to a few of the folks who have decided to get in on the act. Springfield Pastor Plans To Burn Quran; Westboro Baptist Church to burn Qurans if Dove doesn't.

OK, so we accept that some of these folk are likely self-serving, publicity seeking, and venally inspired. But there will be others who really do believe that God's Kingdom can be advanced by such "grand gestures" which is a perversion of the truth.

The Kingdom of God comes like leaven leavening the whole loaf. It comes by means of an insinuating Spiritual influence and power that transforms from the inside out. The Kingdom of God ordinarily takes a lifetime to come in the lives of individual people. It requires generations of godly influence to come to substantial institutional form. The notion that the Kingdom can be advanced by some grand histrionic act is risible. It betrays that the purveyor of the histrionic act has little understanding of the depth, profundity, and thickness of the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God involves doing God's will upon the earth as it is in heaven. And God does not do histrionic acts in heaven. Neither must we upon the earth. The Kingdom of God is far too holy, weighty, substantial, glorious, and real to be served by such piffle.

A Sad Affair

The Global warming ETS Rort

Jack Shallard

Political manoeuvrings will tomorrow once again triumph over science, common sense, and citizens when the ETS is enlivened to do something it cannot do. Once again our politicians have run roughshod over the citizens of this country. They have again failed to give due credence to the views of the people and are charging ahead like the proverbial bull in a china shop when most countries are pausing and taking a breath to re-assess. The spirit of democracy! What happened to it? It seems to be about as broke as the Greek economy.

When future generations look back on the ETS scheme, it is almost certain to go down in history as stupid, as will the people who promoted it. It is addressing the wrong issues and doing it the wrong way. It is based on far more hearsay than validated science. It will have as good as no impact on man-made global warming. And it will create unnecessary costs and tax people needlessly, for no measurable gain on a global scale.

Science used to be science. It depended on objective observation, testing, re-testing, and verifying of non-manipulated data in an independent environment by people of integrity. But the political world has stolen science for its own nefarious ends. It has commercialised, politicised, and manipulated it to support its own political agendas. It has taken objective truth out of science and replaced it with subjective preference. It's time to give science back to scientists without intimidating them to give the answers politicians want for their political agendas. But masses of genuine informed independent scientists around the world haven't been listened to.

In the US alone, over 31,000 US scientists, including over 9,000 PhDs have signed the Global Warning Petition Project. This essentially says CO2 is a good thing and ETS is a bad thing. The site is worth a serious visit. This is what they have signed up to: here and here. The petition states:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

This petition was inaugurated in 1998 and refreshed in 2007/2008. It began soon after the December 1997 Kyoto meeting that Al Gore participated in. It collected a lot of support in 1998/ 1999, then quietly but consistently until it was refreshed in 2007/ 2008 and leapt to over 31,000 scientifically qualified supporters. Now, it takes a lot of work to round up that many scientists, especially when for the most part they cannot sign online but must fill in and post a form. So there are probably many more petition supporters in the US; in fact, probably most informed independent scientists.

This whole new global warning cult: Is it a fiasco, or a fraud, or a rort? Or all three? A fiasco is a ludicrous failure. It will certainly end up like that, if it hasn't already. A fraud is a deceptive falsehood or misrepresentation aimed at gaining an unjust advantage. It certainly contains elements of this. A rort is a dishonest manipulation, akin to fraud. It is often associated with political expediency or manipulation. So it certainly also qualifies as a rort.

The fiasco is so crazy it is hard to believe it has actually been happening. And to think that a few mischievous and misguided people and nations tried to impose some horrendously costly and stupid formulae on everyone else is beyond comprehension. That is, provided you study the facts rather than being naively misled by the hype and misinformation. Misinformation! This has almost become a global sport!

With that introduction, the proponents will now be itching to leap in with teeth bared and vitriolic daggers drawn, but probably with very few substantiated facts. Make no mistake; most sensible people are green at heart, but in a factual and sensible way; not in the deluded and political way so often represented by off-the-rails greenism.

To start with, anyone in his or her right mind knows only too well that we have to do something drastic about environmental pollution. Of course we have to address water quality, air quality, petrol fumes, plastic throw-aways, smog, chemical waste, battery waste, and all the other nasties. No question about it. But we have certainly been very slow at getting around to it. And lots of vested interests are getting in the way of real progress. There is no question we have a heap of work to do in this area and we should get on with the job and do it. We must do all we can to reduce energy consumption, reduce dumping in environmental landfills, clean and purify our water courses, and so on.

But to significantly link this with cosmic global warming, so-called, is where it goes right off the rails. Our responsibility is to look after our local environment, but it is sheer arrogance for us to think we can have any real impact on the global and cosmic scenes. Time honoured changes in global patterns are in the cosmic realm. They always have been and always will be. They are God‟s territory and he is in control of his creation. Does He not command the winds and the waters and they obey Him? Environmental pollution and the impact man can have on global warming are simply two different things that should not be confused.

The real debate is not about renewable energy or pollution, or even how we can save the planet. We all agree these are good things to work on. Nor is it about whether carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas. It is about whether man's actions on such things as emission trading schemes can prevent climate change. And they cannot. The impact of an emissions trading regime will be so infinitesimal the whole thing is a very costly disaster!

The green fraternity has time and again fallen into the trap of building its theologies on a superficial approach but failing to understand the underlying facts and impacts. So it has hatched lies that have been sold off as truth. It has created a perception that CO2 is a nasty pollutant when in fact it is a great and green-friendly essential ingredient for life. It is colourless, odourless, non-toxic, and absolutely essential for life. It is also an essential ingredient of soft drinks and beer, like it or not. It is a critical component of plant growth and actually makes the planet greener. We need it in abundance in the future to get the plant growth we need to feed people around the world. Reduce it, and we will reduce our ability to feed starving nations.

Genuine groups around the world have been uncovering facts with a far greater ring of truth. The Climate Sceptics in Australia  work from the premise the leaders of Australia should base their decisions on facts rather than moods. Hard to argue against. And they do set out a lot of useful information that resonates as being seriously factual.

The integrity of the work done by these climate sceptics far exceeds that of Al Gore and his cohorts. His claims and his „science fiction‟ movie (An Inconvenient Truth) are seemingly riddled with extravagant versions of the truth; we might call this a close affiliation with lies! His war cry has been that the “science is settled” and there is an overwhelming “consensus” in favour of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His opponents treat this as a rather pitiful lie. They point out that no such “consensus” or “settled science” exists.

He, his supporters, and publicity people at the United Nations, have frequently claimed that only a few sceptics remain. Highly untrue. Another lie. It is hard to find even a handful of independent supporters whose work has been peer reviewed and carries a credibility banner. The support for his hypothesis is largely from people who are funded by vested interests, not independent, whose work has not been independently peer reviewed, and whose methodology is designed to agree with the predetermined hypothesis. They even bully that no further discussion of the science is warranted before legislative action is taken to heavily tax, regulate, and ration hydrocarbon energy. Perhaps this lack of verifiable evidence is why Al Gore has consistently refused to debate the issue with several people who have challenged him to put the facts on the table.

Rather than expose the truth, Gore tries to bluff it by assuring us that "the debate in the scientific community is over." Has he told the scientists? Apparently not! Since when can you close down scientific research anyway? This arrogant manipulation has sown the seeds for a science awakening. Many perceptive scientists want to claim their discipline back from the political world, including cult greenism, and refresh its objective purpose.

Yes, the world‟s surface temperature does vary up and down over the centuries, but all within a limited range. And the weight of reliable scientific evidence seems to indicate it is moving up gradually, but that it hasn‟t gone above the average of the last 3000 years as yet, as far as we can tell. So there is no evidence that there is an overheating issue.

This whole thing is seen as a scientific scandal of astronomic proportions. The unbelievably sloppy work of the CRU and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has been totally discredited now it is known they got their data from ropey sources, as has the fantasy work of the AWG (Anthropogenic Global Working Movement). The climate change movement is littered with scientists who have bailed out once they have started to understand the facts. Many have bailed from the crazy suggestions that CO2 will fry the planet. Even Professor Phil Jones, of Climategate fame, has acknowledged that there has been no "statistically significant" warming in the last fifteen years, and acknowledges his records aren't something to be proud of.

Predictions based on computer models are not predictions or computer models at all. They are simply, as one authority put it, alternative scenarios and arithmetic outputs. And when the data falls apart, they are worse than useless. Have people really forgotten the formula: garbage in equals garbage out? The result of fallacious models based on unsubstantiated evidence has lead to hugely extravagant statements about the collapse of the earth's physical attributes. Do you really believe the world's glaciers are melting so fast that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035, as claimed in a benchmark report issued by the IPCC about two years ago? And didn't the scientists behind the warning this year admit that this assertion was simply based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal published some eight years before the IPCCs 2007 report? And are Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea at such a rate that we can be sure they will never be at least substantially replaced? And do you really believe we can actually reverse this trend anyway?

Is it possible a clear message was sent to the Copenhagen summit earlier this year? Didn't Copenhagen, and surrounding areas, get cold and snow beyond any normal expectation while the summit was on? And wasn't much of the United States snow-bound beyond normal expectation at the same time?

The University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Law and Economics recently conducted a cross examination of global warming science by using appropriate evidential cross examination techniques. It concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fails to stand up to scrutiny.
The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the reports [of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”

Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favour of a predetermined policy preference.”

The 79-page document effectively eviscerates the case for man-made global warming.

Here are some words from a few other authorities that show we should wait and learn. How about the reported statements of Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

And the testimony of Professor Tim Patterson, Carleton University paleoclimatologist: "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame." Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Enough said. They haven't listened. And the frightening part is not a hand full had the nous or integrity to say, “Wait!” And now we will have to live with the pointless costs and administration of one of the most moronic decisions you could imagine in your wildest nightmares.

Jack Shallard
Rotorua
30 June 2010

Governed by a Dead Man

How Obama Thinks

Dinesh D'Souza, 09.27.10,
Forbes Magazine.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago Nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.

Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).

The Religious Foundations of Modern Science

An Embarrassment to Moderns

The following piece is found in Stephen Prickett's volume, Narrative, Religion and Science.

That Newton . . . was actually a platonic mystic who had spent as much time working on such posthumously published works as The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) or Observations on the Book of Daniel and St John (1733) as he had on his scientific experiments, was largely unknown to the eighteenth-century public, and would have been almost inconceivable to many of his later admirers. . . .

We are so familiar with what Lyotard would call the "vulgar" myth of Newton's "discovery" of gravity--the story of the apple falling, etc.--that we somehow accept as obvious the sheer mystery of the phenomenon described. It takes works like Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers or Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law, to defamiliarize gravity, and to make us realize afresh the sheer peculiarity of the fact that mass should attract mass, and that bodies should exert a pull on one another, not just in East Anglian apple orchards, but stretching invisible and undetectable tentacles across millions, even billions of miles in inter-stellar space. It happens without physical contact, without emissions, rays or any other know or hypothetical links.

We believe in it not because it is even remotely credible to our imaginations, but because it is mathematically calculable and predictable to the highest degree of accuracy that our instruments permit. Small wonder that Newton himself was so cautious about his own findings, constantly using phrases such as "it is as if . . . " in his private letters to his friend Bentley.

As we sometimes need reminding, the foundations of modern science lie not in . . . Aristotelian empiricism . . . but in the ironic sense of a hidden reality behind Platonic and even Hebrew mysticism. The importance of these Greek and Hebrew assumptions behind the growth of Western science can scarcely be over-estimated. Comparison with what was, until recently, a much more technically advanced civilization illustrates the difference. China's failure to develop a theoretical science to match its advanced technology has long intrigued historians. Joseph Needham, the greatest Western interpreter of Chinese science find the explanation in the comparative metaphysics of the two societies. In China,

the highest spiritual being known and worshipped was not a Creator in the sense of the Hebrews and the Greeks. It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no guarantee that other rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their own earthly languages the pre-existing divine code of laws which he had previously formulated. There was no confidence that the code of Nature's laws could be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.

. . . . Some historians of science have been baffled by the fact that the great Sir Isaac Newton, the apparent epitome of Enlightenment rationality, should actually have spent at least half his working life in trying to interpret biblical and other ancient prophecies. Yet to make sense of Newton at all, we have to accept that these researches into biblical prophecy were not, as it were, an endearing eccentricity, the private "hobby" of an otherwise eminent scientist and mathematician, but, for him, as much a valid part of his work in discovering the true nature of things, as the Principia and the Opticks.

Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony 1700--1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 58--60.

Letter From America

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck

Russell D Moore

— Sunday, August 29th, 2010 —

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.

The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.

Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, of course, is that Mormon at the center of all this. Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.

It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.

Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements.

Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Is. 8:12–20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” the powers are comfortable.

This is, of course, not new. Our Lord Jesus faced this test when Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory. Satan did not mind surrendering his authority to Jesus. He didn’t mind a universe without pornography or Islam or abortion or nuclear weaponry. Satan did not mind Judeo-Christian values. He wasn’t worried about “revival” or “getting back to God.” What he opposes was the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected for the sins of the world.

We used to sing that old gospel song, “I will cling to an old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.” The scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial indicates that many of us want to exchange it in too soon. To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.

Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 John. 4:1-3).

The answer to this scandal isn’t a retreat, as some would have it, to an allegedly apolitical isolation. Such attempts lead us right back here, in spades, to a hyper-political wasteland. If the churches are not forming consciences, consciences will be formed by the status quo, including whatever demagogues can yell the loudest or cry the hardest. The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the kingdom of God and the latest political whim.

It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.

And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.