A Little Something Called Context
Atheism and Apologetics - Letter to Mr. Harris
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, November 12, 2010
Howm'I supposed to defend the faith against these swamis of reason when they keep making me wheeze like they do?
Sam Harris, aspiring scientist and indignation impresario, is promoting this project, in order to advance the sweet voice of reason. You can look at a really cool graphic they have put together here. The base line represents all the verses of the Bible, and the red lines all arch, like so many mortar shots, to the location of another verse, with which it is supposed to collide. You can then tell at a glance that the Bible is just full of contradictions. The night sky is lit up with them. A really cool graphic is necessary to illustrate this because today's street smart youth know that iPhone apps have dispensed with the need for actual arguments and textual study, you know, the kind with books.
I took a random sampling of just a couple of their contradictions, and addressed them below. I will perhaps be forgiven if I don't work through them all. You don't need to drink the whole bottle to tell that it's vinegar. So, here are a couple drops from their bottle, in all their glory, and I don't think I am risking contradiction when I say we need to look elsewhere if we are looking for Pinot Noir that goes with the tenderloin.
#208 If a husband believes, is his wife saved also? 1 Cor. 7:14, Acts 16:31 ≠ 1 Cor. 7:16
Can you feel your faith teetering? Well, you oughter, you superstitious rube, because here are the verses themselves, actually quoted.
"For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy" (1 Cor. 7:14).
"And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" (Acts 16:31).
Which are said to contradict . . .
"For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?" (1 Cor. 7:16)
Let's see. The name of this venture in high intellectual attainment is Project Reason. I am thinking that maybe they should rename it as Project Literacy, for that is where (it seems to me) the issue may lie.
Scripture tells us that a believing spouse ought not to leave an unbeliever simply because of that unbelief. You don't need to worry that having an unbelieving spouse will pollute any resultant children, for the unbelieving spouse is sanctified with the result that the children are holy (1 Cor. 7:14). So, go ahead, stay married to that unbeliever if the unbeliever is content to remain married. And then, to throw us off completely, we have an account of salvation coming to the entire household of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:31). Apparently, nobody has taught Sam Harris how doctrine ought to be derived from narrative, along with the corollary of how it ought not to be.
Now, all this is set up as a contradiction to the question posed in 1 Cor. 7:16, which encourages a believing spouse whose unbelieving spouse decides to leave them. We know about this because of an intervening verse, verse 15, a little something that we biblical expositors like to call "context."
"But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace" (1 Cor. 7:15).
So when you look at that poster, with all those red arches proving that the Bible is a tissue of contradictions, just remember that #208 was one of those red lines. Tell yourself that Sam Harris thinks the Bible is unreliable because it tells Christian spouses to stay married to the non-Christian if the non-Christian wants to, and not to worry about it if they don't. Most of us would call this different counsel for different circumstances, but for Sam Harris, it is a contradiction. This, under the banner of Project Reason?
"Put your money in the slot, and push B17 if you want the Fritos. Push D9 if you want the Snickers bar."
"O ho! Can you Christians not see the contradictions?"
"Um, no, actually . . ."
"Let us graph it for you. Let us draw a red line from the Fritos to the Snickers. Now do you see?"
"No."
"Did you go to one of those Christian schools? Did they even have science classes?"
Okay, so maybe that one was a fluke. Let's look at one more before my patience runs out.
#211 Is it OK to make images? Ex. 20:4, Deut. 5:8, Deut. 4:16-18, Dt. 4:23, Deut. 27:15 ≠ Ex. 25:18, 20, Num. 21:8
Now here are the verse, in toto, with a little surplus added. The little surplus is more of that context business.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them" (Ex. 20:3-5a).
"Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: Dt. 5:8-9a)
"Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth: And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath dividedc unto all nations under the whole heaven" (Dt 4:16-19).
"Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee" (Dt. 4:23).
"And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice, Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen" (Deut. 27:14-15).
All of which is said to contradict . . .
"And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat" (Ex 25:18).
"And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be" (Ex 25:20).
"And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live" (Num. 21:8).
Follow that? God told the sons of Israel not to make images that they would bow down to or worship, and this is said to contradict the making of images that they did not bow down to or worship. Heh. Let us illustrate this Accomplishment of High Reason with a parallel argument. It is against the rules of soccer to touch the ball with your hands. Does it follow that it is a contradiction to allow the players to kick the ball with their feet? I don't think so, but of course I am not an aspiring scientist like Sam Harris.
Monday, 15 November 2010
The Canute Award . . .
Just What We Didn't Need
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve (equivalent to our Reserve Bank) must in in the front line to win this year's Canute award. (The Canute award, to our knowledge, does not exist--but it ought to. It should be given to the public official or politician whose hubris has led him or her most spectacularly to attempt to command the impossible.) Bernanke has thought that he can "stimulate" the US economy by throwing freshly printed money at it ($600 billion).
He has run smack into a minor irritant--the bond market. Clearly, thousands upon thousands of creditors to the United States have taken a different view--one based upon their self-interest, quite understandably. They have reasoned that the fiat creation of billions of dollars will be inflationary. More printed money purchasing the same amount of goods and services will push prices up (due to more money competing for the same amount of goods), which is to say, the value of US dollars will go down, which is the most insidious form of theft of all. So, they have started to move out of owing US debt. The US currency has dropped sharply in value (perfectly rationally so) and interest rates have started to rise--the exact opposite of Bernanke's intent.
The US yield curve (a graph summarising interest rates across a range of debt maturities) is now strongly positive--that is, longer dated debt has a higher interest rate. Usually when longer term interest rates are higher, the "market" (that is, millions of lenders) are saying they expect inflation to rise. They expect that in the future money will be worth less than it is today, so they require higher interest to be paid now to compensate them for their anticipated losses in the future. Hence, interest rates rise in an attempt to keep them interested.
Meanwhile prices are rising. According to CNBC,
It would appear as though the market is telling Bernanke that inflation is rising and his quantitative easing is equivalent to throwing gasoline on a smouldering flame. And spare a thought for Mr Obama, economic incompetent-in-chief who has been gravely telling the G20 leaders that "Quantitative Easing" was necessary to get the US economy growing again, which in the end would be to the good of all. How terribly inconvenient that millions of investors and lenders to the US think otherwise and are voting with their feet.
It is poetic justice for all who aspire to be modern day Canute's.
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve (equivalent to our Reserve Bank) must in in the front line to win this year's Canute award. (The Canute award, to our knowledge, does not exist--but it ought to. It should be given to the public official or politician whose hubris has led him or her most spectacularly to attempt to command the impossible.) Bernanke has thought that he can "stimulate" the US economy by throwing freshly printed money at it ($600 billion).
He has run smack into a minor irritant--the bond market. Clearly, thousands upon thousands of creditors to the United States have taken a different view--one based upon their self-interest, quite understandably. They have reasoned that the fiat creation of billions of dollars will be inflationary. More printed money purchasing the same amount of goods and services will push prices up (due to more money competing for the same amount of goods), which is to say, the value of US dollars will go down, which is the most insidious form of theft of all. So, they have started to move out of owing US debt. The US currency has dropped sharply in value (perfectly rationally so) and interest rates have started to rise--the exact opposite of Bernanke's intent.
The US yield curve (a graph summarising interest rates across a range of debt maturities) is now strongly positive--that is, longer dated debt has a higher interest rate. Usually when longer term interest rates are higher, the "market" (that is, millions of lenders) are saying they expect inflation to rise. They expect that in the future money will be worth less than it is today, so they require higher interest to be paid now to compensate them for their anticipated losses in the future. Hence, interest rates rise in an attempt to keep them interested.
Meanwhile prices are rising. According to CNBC,
Prices of cotton, silver wheat, soybeans, corn are all up big this year. Cotton futures are up the most, climbing 90 percent so far in 2010. The price of silver is up 63 percent.and
There might not have been a second round of quantitative easing, if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke shopped at Walmart.
A new pricing survey of products sold at the world’s largest retailer showed a 0.6 percent price increase in just the last two months, according to MKM Partners. At that rate, prices would be close to four percent higher a year from now, double the Fed’s mandate.
The “inaugural price survey shows a small, but meaningful increase on an 86-item grocery basket,” said Patrick McKeever, MKM Partners analyst, in a note. Most of the items McKeever chose to track were every day items like food and detergent and made by national brands.
It would appear as though the market is telling Bernanke that inflation is rising and his quantitative easing is equivalent to throwing gasoline on a smouldering flame. And spare a thought for Mr Obama, economic incompetent-in-chief who has been gravely telling the G20 leaders that "Quantitative Easing" was necessary to get the US economy growing again, which in the end would be to the good of all. How terribly inconvenient that millions of investors and lenders to the US think otherwise and are voting with their feet.
It is poetic justice for all who aspire to be modern day Canute's.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
El Nino, La Nina and Global Temperatures Explained
A Super La Nina is Developing
Historically, these strong La Nina events drop the Earth’s average temperature around one degree Fahrenheit, and the drop comes quickly. As a result, some of the same places that had record heat this summer may suffer through record cold this winter.
La Nina is the lesser-known colder sister of El Nino. La Nina chills the waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and in turn cools the entire planet for one to two years or more. This chilling has the potential to bring bone-numbing cold to many parts of the world for this and the following winter. As a result, world energy demand may spike in the next one to two years as much colder weather hits many of the major industrial nations.
This La Nina appears to be special [1], at least so far. It is well on its way to being the strongest of these events since the super La Nina of 1955-1956. During that powerful La Nina that lasted two years, the global average temperature fell nearly one degree Fahrenheit from 1953 to 1956.
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) measures the air pressure difference between Darwin, Australia, and Tahiti. The lower the value of the index, the stronger the El Nino typically is. The higher the SOI index, the stronger the La Nina. The September SOI value of +25.0 [2] was the highest of any September going back to 1917, when it was +29.7. During that super La Nina, the global temperature fell 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1915 to 1917. The +25.0 September SOI reading is also the highest for any month dating back to the +31.6 value in November of 1973.
The most recent La Nina developed in the spring of 2007, and persisted until the early summer of 2008. The global average temperature fell one degree Fahrenheit in that period of time, equal to all of the warming of the last 100 years! If the trend of this rapidly developing, potentially super La Nina continues, an equal or larger temperature drop can be anticipated during the next one to two years. This La Nina [3] is coming on very fast and very strong. Already it is colder than the six coldest La Ninas of the last 60 years when they were at a similar stage of development.
What about the recent heat we’ve all heard about?
For the last year, the world has been dealing with the warming effects of a strong El Nino. The El Nino warms the ocean waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean and in turn heats the atmosphere. Western Russia melted under a record heat wave this summer, after freezing from record cold last winter. Many parts of the southern United States had record heat this summer, but also shivered under record cold last winter. The persistence of the jetstream to blow in patterns that changed very little for long periods of time contributed to these extremes of temperature. This locked in jetstream wind pattern enhances temperature anomalies by restricting the exchange of air flow from one place to another. What would be hot becomes very hot, and what would be cold becomes very cold.
It is common for the jetstream to behave this way when the sun is in the solar minimum, such as it has been for the last three years. We are emerging from the minimum, but the sunspot numbers are continuing to be very low. Some solar experts say this next sunspot maximum may be one of the weakest in 200 years [4]. As a result, the tendency for the jetstream to blow over parts of the Earth with little month-to-month variability may continue this year. That would result in continued extremes of temperature. The difference would be this time cold areas would be even colder due to the oncoming super La Nina and the falling global temperature.
The El Nino of the last year pushed the global temperature right back to where it had been in the beginning of 2007. The result has been no net warming or cooling since then. In fact, there has been no net warming or cooling since around 1999. Interestingly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 369 parts per million to 387 ppm (parts per million) during this time. This amount is above the level of 302 ppm in 1910, when 20th century global temperature started to rise. Despite this significant rise in carbon dioxide since 1999, there has been no “global warming” [5] during this period.
Right now the Pacific Ocean is in the beginning of a thirty year cooler spell called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [6]. There is a strong, potentially super La Nina developing. The sun is still quiet with very few sunspots. When these conditions exist [7], the first two months of the cold season (December and January) tend to be cold from Montana to Iowa to Florida up to the Great Lakes and most of New England. In addition, temperatures tend to be very cold from central and western Canada to Alaska. China could suffer a bitterly cold December and January if historic temperature patterns are consistent with current conditions. Much of central and western Europe are cold in these situations as well.
The second half of the cold season (February and March) typically experiences some changes in the global temperature patterns in these types of winters. For Europe the changes are not good. Bitter cold and snow dominates from western Russia across all of Europe. In other words, what starts as a cold winter in central and western Europe deepens into a severe winter in February and March across all of Europe. The extreme cold eases in southern China but it deepens in the north and northeastern part of the country. In the United States the cold of December and January in the middle and eastern part of the country reverses to mild weather from Texas to Florida up to the Great Lakes and New England. All of the western U.S. is cold and snowy up to the northern Great Plains. What starts as a mild winter out west turns much colder with large amounts of snow while the east gets a break from the cold.
The current La Nina is coming on stronger than any in decades. The world is demanding more and more energy to fuel growth even in hard economic times. This winter may test the world energy supplier’s ability to provide it. The resulting increase in demand could produce a spike in energy costs. This could bring more hardship to people who are suffering through this long and deep recession. It remains to be seen if this La Nina equals or exceeds the super La Nina of 1955/56.
Right now El Nino’s colder sister is on the fast track to generate more temperature extremes and a very cold winter in some parts of the world.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-super-la-nina-and-the-coming-winter/
URLs in this post:
The Super La Nina and the Coming Winter
Posted By Art Horn On October 25, 2010Published in Pajamas MediaHistorically, these strong La Nina events drop the Earth’s average temperature around one degree Fahrenheit, and the drop comes quickly. As a result, some of the same places that had record heat this summer may suffer through record cold this winter.
La Nina is the lesser-known colder sister of El Nino. La Nina chills the waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and in turn cools the entire planet for one to two years or more. This chilling has the potential to bring bone-numbing cold to many parts of the world for this and the following winter. As a result, world energy demand may spike in the next one to two years as much colder weather hits many of the major industrial nations.
This La Nina appears to be special [1], at least so far. It is well on its way to being the strongest of these events since the super La Nina of 1955-1956. During that powerful La Nina that lasted two years, the global average temperature fell nearly one degree Fahrenheit from 1953 to 1956.
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) measures the air pressure difference between Darwin, Australia, and Tahiti. The lower the value of the index, the stronger the El Nino typically is. The higher the SOI index, the stronger the La Nina. The September SOI value of +25.0 [2] was the highest of any September going back to 1917, when it was +29.7. During that super La Nina, the global temperature fell 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1915 to 1917. The +25.0 September SOI reading is also the highest for any month dating back to the +31.6 value in November of 1973.
The most recent La Nina developed in the spring of 2007, and persisted until the early summer of 2008. The global average temperature fell one degree Fahrenheit in that period of time, equal to all of the warming of the last 100 years! If the trend of this rapidly developing, potentially super La Nina continues, an equal or larger temperature drop can be anticipated during the next one to two years. This La Nina [3] is coming on very fast and very strong. Already it is colder than the six coldest La Ninas of the last 60 years when they were at a similar stage of development.
What about the recent heat we’ve all heard about?
For the last year, the world has been dealing with the warming effects of a strong El Nino. The El Nino warms the ocean waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean and in turn heats the atmosphere. Western Russia melted under a record heat wave this summer, after freezing from record cold last winter. Many parts of the southern United States had record heat this summer, but also shivered under record cold last winter. The persistence of the jetstream to blow in patterns that changed very little for long periods of time contributed to these extremes of temperature. This locked in jetstream wind pattern enhances temperature anomalies by restricting the exchange of air flow from one place to another. What would be hot becomes very hot, and what would be cold becomes very cold.
It is common for the jetstream to behave this way when the sun is in the solar minimum, such as it has been for the last three years. We are emerging from the minimum, but the sunspot numbers are continuing to be very low. Some solar experts say this next sunspot maximum may be one of the weakest in 200 years [4]. As a result, the tendency for the jetstream to blow over parts of the Earth with little month-to-month variability may continue this year. That would result in continued extremes of temperature. The difference would be this time cold areas would be even colder due to the oncoming super La Nina and the falling global temperature.
The El Nino of the last year pushed the global temperature right back to where it had been in the beginning of 2007. The result has been no net warming or cooling since then. In fact, there has been no net warming or cooling since around 1999. Interestingly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 369 parts per million to 387 ppm (parts per million) during this time. This amount is above the level of 302 ppm in 1910, when 20th century global temperature started to rise. Despite this significant rise in carbon dioxide since 1999, there has been no “global warming” [5] during this period.
Right now the Pacific Ocean is in the beginning of a thirty year cooler spell called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [6]. There is a strong, potentially super La Nina developing. The sun is still quiet with very few sunspots. When these conditions exist [7], the first two months of the cold season (December and January) tend to be cold from Montana to Iowa to Florida up to the Great Lakes and most of New England. In addition, temperatures tend to be very cold from central and western Canada to Alaska. China could suffer a bitterly cold December and January if historic temperature patterns are consistent with current conditions. Much of central and western Europe are cold in these situations as well.
The second half of the cold season (February and March) typically experiences some changes in the global temperature patterns in these types of winters. For Europe the changes are not good. Bitter cold and snow dominates from western Russia across all of Europe. In other words, what starts as a cold winter in central and western Europe deepens into a severe winter in February and March across all of Europe. The extreme cold eases in southern China but it deepens in the north and northeastern part of the country. In the United States the cold of December and January in the middle and eastern part of the country reverses to mild weather from Texas to Florida up to the Great Lakes and New England. All of the western U.S. is cold and snowy up to the northern Great Plains. What starts as a mild winter out west turns much colder with large amounts of snow while the east gets a break from the cold.
The current La Nina is coming on stronger than any in decades. The world is demanding more and more energy to fuel growth even in hard economic times. This winter may test the world energy supplier’s ability to provide it. The resulting increase in demand could produce a spike in energy costs. This could bring more hardship to people who are suffering through this long and deep recession. It remains to be seen if this La Nina equals or exceeds the super La Nina of 1955/56.
Right now El Nino’s colder sister is on the fast track to generate more temperature extremes and a very cold winter in some parts of the world.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-super-la-nina-and-the-coming-winter/
URLs in this post:
[1] special: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/11/with-a-rapid-onset-the-strongest-la-nina-since-1955-56/
[2] September SOI value of +25.0: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/soihtm1.shtml
[3] This La Nina: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/mei.html
[4] weakest in 200 years: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/icing-the-hype/using_the_ap_magnetic_index_prediction_for_solar_cycle_24_amplitude_predict/
[5] no “global warming”: http://www.climate4you.com/
[6] Pacific Decadal Oscillation: http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
[7] these conditions exist: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/WINTER_201011.pdf
Stranglehold
Money Laundering, Unions, and Politicians
Some folks have been asking the national education unions to "show us the money". Lots of moola is being spent promoting the "spontaneous" orchestrated litany of outrage from the Boards of Trustees of 225 primary schools who are not complying with the Ministry of Education in the matter of national testing. Over $100,000 has been donated to the cause by the Principal's Federation--an educational union--to pay for PR spin, messaging, framing, tilting, and geeing up lazy media in their campaign against government education policy.
Well strike me down and call me a dead parrot, we hear you say. Where did the money come from? It came from you and me. That's right, you read correctly. The taxpayer forks over money to fund the workings of the school Boards of Trustees. The Boards of Trustees have donated to the principal's union, which in turn has used it to engage in a political campaign.
According to Kiwiblog, which has drawn on Whaleoil :
You might ask, How did this come about? Well, it is part of a collective bargaining contract with the Ministry of Education. The principal's union is to be funded by the taxpayer, in Vote Education, via the budget for Boards of Trustees. This came about during the previous Labour Government's reign--during which there was a deliberate objective of funding as much union activity as possible using taxpayer's money. It was payback and payoff time. But the rort has been engineered through clandestine means, with taxpayer's money being laundered through various conduits until everyone either forgets or fails to see that we are all funding unions--who are working against (in this case) us.
This is scandalous. But it illustrates why all state sector unions must be de-registered. State sector unions inevitably engage in graft, fraud, corruption, and featherbedding--as is the case here. Our allegation is that corruption is intrinsic to state sector unions. What we see operating in the education sector unions is not an aberration--it is an inevitability.
Here is how the inevitability of corruption plays out. Unions are interested in two things primarily: increasing income for their hierarchy and members, on the one hand, and stifling competition for their members, on the other. Therefore, they have a vested interest in supporting and voting and campaigning for those politicians and political parties which will bestow more of your money upon them. And they do. Politicians need support, both monetary and organizational resources for campaigning. So a faustian bargain is struck. Unions support left-wing politicians and political parties, who, in turn, pay off their union supporters, using tax payers funds through the government spending budget. As time passes, state sector unions exert more and more control over government policies--regardless of who is occupying the Treasury benches--because they have the money, resources, and strangleholds over the operations of government departments.
This results in a perverse inversion of government where the taxpayers end up increasingly in servitude to state sector unions, and the unions, for their part, operating under the protection of a legislated monopoly, effectively hold us all to ransom. Instead of being public servants they become tyrants, holding all of us to ransom. We become the state servants. They become the masters of us all.
No Western democracy can long endure which allows state sector unions.
Some folks have been asking the national education unions to "show us the money". Lots of moola is being spent promoting the "spontaneous" orchestrated litany of outrage from the Boards of Trustees of 225 primary schools who are not complying with the Ministry of Education in the matter of national testing. Over $100,000 has been donated to the cause by the Principal's Federation--an educational union--to pay for PR spin, messaging, framing, tilting, and geeing up lazy media in their campaign against government education policy.
Well strike me down and call me a dead parrot, we hear you say. Where did the money come from? It came from you and me. That's right, you read correctly. The taxpayer forks over money to fund the workings of the school Boards of Trustees. The Boards of Trustees have donated to the principal's union, which in turn has used it to engage in a political campaign.
According to Kiwiblog, which has drawn on Whaleoil :
Now talking of the campaign against national standards, it is important to stress again that sadly the taxpayer is being forced to fund most of this campaign. Membership of the various principals’ associations is not paid for by the principal, but by the taxpayer through Vote Education.Whaleoil has the documented evidence here.
Whale Oil has some documents showing the extent of the taxpayer funding – around $100,000 from the regional principal associations.
You might ask, How did this come about? Well, it is part of a collective bargaining contract with the Ministry of Education. The principal's union is to be funded by the taxpayer, in Vote Education, via the budget for Boards of Trustees. This came about during the previous Labour Government's reign--during which there was a deliberate objective of funding as much union activity as possible using taxpayer's money. It was payback and payoff time. But the rort has been engineered through clandestine means, with taxpayer's money being laundered through various conduits until everyone either forgets or fails to see that we are all funding unions--who are working against (in this case) us.
This is scandalous. But it illustrates why all state sector unions must be de-registered. State sector unions inevitably engage in graft, fraud, corruption, and featherbedding--as is the case here. Our allegation is that corruption is intrinsic to state sector unions. What we see operating in the education sector unions is not an aberration--it is an inevitability.
Here is how the inevitability of corruption plays out. Unions are interested in two things primarily: increasing income for their hierarchy and members, on the one hand, and stifling competition for their members, on the other. Therefore, they have a vested interest in supporting and voting and campaigning for those politicians and political parties which will bestow more of your money upon them. And they do. Politicians need support, both monetary and organizational resources for campaigning. So a faustian bargain is struck. Unions support left-wing politicians and political parties, who, in turn, pay off their union supporters, using tax payers funds through the government spending budget. As time passes, state sector unions exert more and more control over government policies--regardless of who is occupying the Treasury benches--because they have the money, resources, and strangleholds over the operations of government departments.
This results in a perverse inversion of government where the taxpayers end up increasingly in servitude to state sector unions, and the unions, for their part, operating under the protection of a legislated monopoly, effectively hold us all to ransom. Instead of being public servants they become tyrants, holding all of us to ransom. We become the state servants. They become the masters of us all.
No Western democracy can long endure which allows state sector unions.
Friday, 12 November 2010
Booms and Busts Inevitable
Economics Always A Dismal Science
To the secular humanist, chaos or randomness is evil. This, despite the fact that the faith of the secular humanist asserts that chance is the fundamental reality of everything there that exists. The modern world wants to control, to plan, to rule, to regulate. Especially this shows up in matters economic and financial. It frustrates and offends--even as one is offended at blasphemy--that the government cannot control and adequately regulate the market.
Yet economics remains to this day the "dismal science" and this will always be the case. Alex J. Pollock explains why.
To the secular humanist, chaos or randomness is evil. This, despite the fact that the faith of the secular humanist asserts that chance is the fundamental reality of everything there that exists. The modern world wants to control, to plan, to rule, to regulate. Especially this shows up in matters economic and financial. It frustrates and offends--even as one is offended at blasphemy--that the government cannot control and adequately regulate the market.
Yet economics remains to this day the "dismal science" and this will always be the case. Alex J. Pollock explains why.
Is Economics a Science?
By Alex J. Pollock Saturday, November 6, 2010
It would be, if it weren’t for the people.
Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in “Economic Sciences.”
Financial crises keep happening—the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical.
But why should this be? Do we not learn from experience? Does economic knowledge not increase? And how about having computers, vast amounts of data and information, and new mathematical models to guide lending and investing decisions?
Do we not learn from experience? Does economic knowledge not increase?
The former CEO of Household International, first bought by HSBC and then brought low by the subprime mortgage collapse, is said to have bragged that his operation had 150 PhDs to model credit risk. The idea that improved knowledge will keep us out of trouble is not new. “[Benjamin] Disraeli had asserted that the boom of 1825 would not turn to bust because the period was distinguished from previous ages by superior commercial knowledge,” wrote Edward Chancellor in Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, but there was a big bust anyway.
Our 21st-century housing bubble, now deflated, was inflated despite—indeed partially because of—amazing computer power, reams of data, and sophisticated models operated by exceptionally bright analysts informed by Nobel Prize-winning financial theories. These computerized models created a sense of security, just as did the “superior commercial knowledge” of 1825.
As the great investment guru, Benjamin Graham, wrote in his classic, The Intelligent Investor:
The concept of future prospects . . . invites the application of formulas out of higher mathematics to establish the present value of the favored issues. But the combination of precise formulas with highly imprecise assumptions can be used to establish, or rather to justify, practically any value one wishes . . . Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results: but in the stock market [or in the subprime mortgage-backed securities market] the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics, the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions.
Models and Recursiveness
Consider Moore’s Law of Finance, as I call it (after my bond-market friend Mike Moore): “The model works until it doesn’t.” Perversely, the more everyone believes the model, and the more everyone uses the same model, the more likely it is to induce changes in the market that make it cease to work.
Our 21st-century housing bubble, now deflated, was inflated despite—indeed partially because of—amazing computer power, reams of data, and sophisticated models.
In this cycle, the market and the regulators became enamored of the statistical treatments of risk, whereas the most important issue is always the human sources of risk. These human sources include short memories and the inclination to convince ourselves that we are experiencing “innovation” and “creativity,” when all that is happening is a lowering of credit standards by new names.
For example, with the spread of “stated income” loans during the housing bubble, the disastrous previous experiences with “no doc” and “low doc” loans seem to have been forgotten. Such loans are a notable temptation, or even invitation, to a little lying in order to facilitate the dream of buying a house whose price will always keep rising.
Human elements of risk also include optimism, gullibility, short-term focus, genuine belief in momentum or the extrapolation of so-far successful speculation, group psychology or the lemming effect, and, inevitably, fraud.
We should not be surprised that as optimism increases, so does credulity. The father of central banking theory, Walter Bagehot, observed: “The good times of too high price almost always engender much fraud. All people are most credulous when they are most happy . . . Almost everything will be believed for a little while.”
In this cycle, the market and the regulators became enamored of the statistical treatments of risk, whereas the most important issue is always the human sources of risk.
The subprime boom and bust cannot be discussed without considering securitization of subprime pools through tranched, senior-subordinated structures based on mathematical models. The lower tranches of subprime mortgage-backed securities were extremely highly leveraged to credit risk. They were often gathered into collateralized debt obligations and further tranched, thus creating securities hyper-leveraged to credit risk.
Some of these tranches went to buyers who were greatly surprised by the vast losses. This must put us in mind of Stanton’s Law (name after Tom Stanton, author of A State of Risk): “Risk migrates to the hands least competent to manage it.” This is because the more competent can manage their risk by passing it to the less competent.
But there is another possibility: “When genius fails,” (the title of a book about the failure of long-term capital management) the extremely clever may believe too much in their own models and cleverness, then find out they had much more risk and much less science than they thought—and so the fall of famous Wall Street firms. As Bagehot also said, “Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected.”
Belief—For Example, Belief in House Prices
In the bubble, according to the Case-Shiller national house price index, U.S. average house prices increased by an enormous 90 percent from early 2000 to the peak in mid-2006. Then they fell more than 30 percent from the peak, back to about the level of 2003.
Perversely, the more everyone believes the model, and the more everyone uses the same model, the more likely it is to induce changes in the market that make it cease to work.
We are now almost four years into the housing bubble’s deflation. National average house prices have gotten about back to their longer-term trend line. As gravity pulls a thrown object back down, house prices are coming back to their trend.
Indeed, how could anybody believe that the prices of houses do not go both up and down? For that matter, how could anybody believe that the price of anything could not go down as well as up? That is the nature of a price.
Risk and Uncertainty
To forecast and, moreover, control the financial future correctly is literally impossible. This is because of the exceptionally complex and very rapid recursiveness of financial markets and the resultant Uncertainty. This “Uncertainty,” with a capital “U,” means, remembering the classic definition of economist Frank Knight, that you not only do not know the odds of events, but you cannot know the odds.
It is in vain to think that an official “systemic risk regulator” like the “Financial Stability Oversight Council” anointed by the Dodd-Frank Act or anybody else can or could foresee all future financial problems or prevent all future bubbles and busts. Everybody, no matter how intelligent and diligent, no matter how many economists and computers are employed, makes mistakes when it comes to predicting (let alone controlling!) the future.
Because uncertainty is fundamental, sometimes disastrous mistakes will continue to be made by entrepreneurs, bankers, borrowers, central bankers, government agencies, politicians, and by the interaction of all of the above.
Knight wrote: “If the law of change is known, no [economic] profits can arise.” Likewise: “If the law of change is known, no financial crises can arise.” But in economics and finance, the law of change is never known. So change reflecting uncertainty goes on, bringing booms and busts periodically, and Adam Smith’s “progress of opulence” on the trend.
Economics and finance might be science, if it weren’t for people.
Alex J. Pollock is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he spent 35 years in banking, including 12 years as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.
FURTHER READING: Pollock recently completed Boom and Bust, an introduction to financial cycles and human prosperity. He also explained “Error vs. Fraud” in the banking industry and how “It’s Easier to Be Brilliant than Right.” He discussed “TARP and Leviathan,” outlined “The Future of Housing Finance,” says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac create “A Nightmare on Every Street,” and dives into “Comparing International Housing Finance Systems.” (Links to all these found in the original article, published in The American)
A Fatwa Against All Christians
Christians Now "Legitimate Target"
About ten days ago, Al Qaeda operatives invaded a Christian worship service being held in a church in Baghdad. By several accounts they began indiscriminately shooting and throwing grenades at the congregation. Security forces arrived, stormed the church, and dispatched the terrorists--but not without a great loss of innocent life.
France has announced a special asylum programme for 150 Iraqi Christians, with priority being given to those who survived wounded in the attack, according to a report in Al Jazeera. Good on the French.
The same article reports that
But the religious reality represented by Al Qaeda is becoming more evident.
About ten days ago, Al Qaeda operatives invaded a Christian worship service being held in a church in Baghdad. By several accounts they began indiscriminately shooting and throwing grenades at the congregation. Security forces arrived, stormed the church, and dispatched the terrorists--but not without a great loss of innocent life.
France has announced a special asylum programme for 150 Iraqi Christians, with priority being given to those who survived wounded in the attack, according to a report in Al Jazeera. Good on the French.
The same article reports that
Al-Qaeda has declared Christians everywhere "legitimate targets" in the wake of the bloodshed at the Baghdad church.So be warned. Every Christian in the world should now consider that, like Salmon Rushdie, they have a fatwa hanging over their head. Not that it will change anything. We are called to be servants of the Living God, not to be in craven subjugation to the devil.
But the religious reality represented by Al Qaeda is becoming more evident.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
Hypocritical Chutzpah
The Education Unions are Only Being Consistent
We always knew the education unions would resist mightily the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic for government schools in New Zealand. We always knew, as well, that their resistance would be couched in "harmful to children" messaging. And so it has proved to be. Ten percent of primary schools have decided not to comply with the testing regime. It appears as though there has been little or no consultation with parents in their decision. It is becoming more apparent by the day that non-compliance is at the behest and pressure of union functionaries (whether the union of principals or the union of teachers). It is also apparent that behind the unions, the opposition Labour Party is pushing and shoving and agitating.
Now one might be left wondering, Why the brouhaha? The stated reason is that national standards testing will damage children. How come? It will brand up to fifty percent of them as failures. The psychological damage to children, we are gravely told, will be devastating. How asinine is this!
Yes, maybe, but, actually, we well understand their point of view. Government education has long been an operational arm of secular humanism. It has functioned as the church of our established religion. Man is intrinsically good and perfectible. If children are left to mature without harmful influences they will grow up to make their perfection a reality. All evil is externally sourced. Wrongs, harms, evils are environmentally conditioned. Thus, if a child is told that they have "failed" to achieve a certain standard it will likely damage their self-esteem--their sense of worth and worthiness--thus inhibiting their gradual (and otherwise inevitable) evolution to adult perfection. This damage is merely an environmental, even political construct. Standards are man-made. They are nothing more than fashionable conventions of the day. Thus they artificially cut across the nascent perfection of the child and inhibit the child from achieving true self-actualisation. Ergo, national standards testing in primary schools will be damaging to children.
But if national standards are damaging to children, they are equally damaging to teachers. If a teacher is exposed as having failed to teach his or her charges so that can meet and even surpass the required standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic, great damage will be done to the teacher as well. The teacher will be told by the system that he or she has failed.
Now, we need to be fair here. New Zealand's dominant culture and overwhelming established religion is secular humanism. The Living God does not exist. Man charts his own destiny and is evolving ever higher. The beginning and end of all referents for truth is Man himself. What the educational unions are doing, how they are thinking, and their political agitating is entirely consistent with the entire state education system. The unions are the true sons of the system and the religion upon which it is based. Therefore they can hardly be condemned by their co-religionists--at least not without breathtakingly hypocritical chutzpah.
Our challenge to all the secular humanists who are advocating for national standards and are expressing outrage against the union actions is to at least be honest. The educational unions are being far more consistent with your religious beliefs than you are. State schools have to reflect the established religion of the day; the educational sector has taken the religion of secular humanism and has diligently applied it to its doctrine of the child, its doctrine of the teacher, and of its understanding of truth, and to its doctrines of pedagogy and so forth. The end result is a growing failure to read and write and do maths. But don't blame the unions, and don't blame the system. Focus instead upon the wretchedness of your established religion upon which they are based and which they consistently reflect.
Having said all that, as Christians we would prefer that national standards go ahead and they are properly employed, both to help young pupils and to rank teachers. We also hope that national standards will reflect fundamental competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reason we take this position is a religious one. The Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth has ordained and commanded that language and numeracy are part of the DNA code of His entire creation--of all that He has made. We cannot serve Him, nor can we fulfil our responsibilities in any sphere without reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since even unbelievers serve His purposes and are His (unwitting, even unwilling) servants, numeracy and literacy are fundamental to human life and society. Therefore, everyone needs to learn to read and write and compute, which means that they need to be taught.
But the pervasive influence of our established and official Unbelief leads us to doubt that the national standards policy will survive. The established religion is just too strong, too pervasive, and too consistently interwoven throughout the fabric of the state school system--as you would expect it to be. So, here is how we expect it will play out: the educational unions will continue their dissent and campaign of opposition. Ninety percent of schools will comply with the new government testing programme. The educational establishment will ostensibly embrace national standards, then morph them until they become moribund. Firstly, they will call for national standards in more than just reading, writing, and maths. ("National testing is good. It's just too narrow and restricted. We need to extend it to other equally important subjects", etc.) Secondly, they will tweak the standards to reduce their meaning and usefulness. ("Language testing must reflect the diversity of our multi-cultural society. We need reading and writing tests in 'bro-talk' and 'txting' and other wonderfully vibrant lingual dynamic evolving lingual developments."). Testing in arithmetic will extend to IT skills and competency, computer use, keyboard facility, and so on.
Within five to seven years the national standards will be as meaningless as NCEA is today.
They used to say, "You can't fight City Hall". You cannot fight the educational establishment because it is such a consistent operational expression of the overwhelming, dominant established religion of our day--secular humanism. It will always win--until secular humanism itself is discredited and disgraced, and our people repent of their folly and return to "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."
In the meantime, Christian schools and universities are the only viable long term alternative.
We always knew the education unions would resist mightily the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic for government schools in New Zealand. We always knew, as well, that their resistance would be couched in "harmful to children" messaging. And so it has proved to be. Ten percent of primary schools have decided not to comply with the testing regime. It appears as though there has been little or no consultation with parents in their decision. It is becoming more apparent by the day that non-compliance is at the behest and pressure of union functionaries (whether the union of principals or the union of teachers). It is also apparent that behind the unions, the opposition Labour Party is pushing and shoving and agitating.
Now one might be left wondering, Why the brouhaha? The stated reason is that national standards testing will damage children. How come? It will brand up to fifty percent of them as failures. The psychological damage to children, we are gravely told, will be devastating. How asinine is this!
Yes, maybe, but, actually, we well understand their point of view. Government education has long been an operational arm of secular humanism. It has functioned as the church of our established religion. Man is intrinsically good and perfectible. If children are left to mature without harmful influences they will grow up to make their perfection a reality. All evil is externally sourced. Wrongs, harms, evils are environmentally conditioned. Thus, if a child is told that they have "failed" to achieve a certain standard it will likely damage their self-esteem--their sense of worth and worthiness--thus inhibiting their gradual (and otherwise inevitable) evolution to adult perfection. This damage is merely an environmental, even political construct. Standards are man-made. They are nothing more than fashionable conventions of the day. Thus they artificially cut across the nascent perfection of the child and inhibit the child from achieving true self-actualisation. Ergo, national standards testing in primary schools will be damaging to children.
But if national standards are damaging to children, they are equally damaging to teachers. If a teacher is exposed as having failed to teach his or her charges so that can meet and even surpass the required standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic, great damage will be done to the teacher as well. The teacher will be told by the system that he or she has failed.
Now, we need to be fair here. New Zealand's dominant culture and overwhelming established religion is secular humanism. The Living God does not exist. Man charts his own destiny and is evolving ever higher. The beginning and end of all referents for truth is Man himself. What the educational unions are doing, how they are thinking, and their political agitating is entirely consistent with the entire state education system. The unions are the true sons of the system and the religion upon which it is based. Therefore they can hardly be condemned by their co-religionists--at least not without breathtakingly hypocritical chutzpah.
Our challenge to all the secular humanists who are advocating for national standards and are expressing outrage against the union actions is to at least be honest. The educational unions are being far more consistent with your religious beliefs than you are. State schools have to reflect the established religion of the day; the educational sector has taken the religion of secular humanism and has diligently applied it to its doctrine of the child, its doctrine of the teacher, and of its understanding of truth, and to its doctrines of pedagogy and so forth. The end result is a growing failure to read and write and do maths. But don't blame the unions, and don't blame the system. Focus instead upon the wretchedness of your established religion upon which they are based and which they consistently reflect.
Having said all that, as Christians we would prefer that national standards go ahead and they are properly employed, both to help young pupils and to rank teachers. We also hope that national standards will reflect fundamental competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reason we take this position is a religious one. The Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth has ordained and commanded that language and numeracy are part of the DNA code of His entire creation--of all that He has made. We cannot serve Him, nor can we fulfil our responsibilities in any sphere without reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since even unbelievers serve His purposes and are His (unwitting, even unwilling) servants, numeracy and literacy are fundamental to human life and society. Therefore, everyone needs to learn to read and write and compute, which means that they need to be taught.
But the pervasive influence of our established and official Unbelief leads us to doubt that the national standards policy will survive. The established religion is just too strong, too pervasive, and too consistently interwoven throughout the fabric of the state school system--as you would expect it to be. So, here is how we expect it will play out: the educational unions will continue their dissent and campaign of opposition. Ninety percent of schools will comply with the new government testing programme. The educational establishment will ostensibly embrace national standards, then morph them until they become moribund. Firstly, they will call for national standards in more than just reading, writing, and maths. ("National testing is good. It's just too narrow and restricted. We need to extend it to other equally important subjects", etc.) Secondly, they will tweak the standards to reduce their meaning and usefulness. ("Language testing must reflect the diversity of our multi-cultural society. We need reading and writing tests in 'bro-talk' and 'txting' and other wonderfully vibrant lingual dynamic evolving lingual developments."). Testing in arithmetic will extend to IT skills and competency, computer use, keyboard facility, and so on.
Within five to seven years the national standards will be as meaningless as NCEA is today.
They used to say, "You can't fight City Hall". You cannot fight the educational establishment because it is such a consistent operational expression of the overwhelming, dominant established religion of our day--secular humanism. It will always win--until secular humanism itself is discredited and disgraced, and our people repent of their folly and return to "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."
In the meantime, Christian schools and universities are the only viable long term alternative.
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
The Jig Is Up
The Green Bubble Is about to Burst
By S. Fred Singer
Republished from American Thinker
There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the "smoking gun" that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist.
It has become increasingly clear that any observed warming during the past century is of natural origin and that the human contribution is insignificant. It is doubtful that any significant warming is attributable to greenhouse gases at all.
Once the public accepts these scientific conclusions, it should have immense consequences for policy. It will mean that the impact of rising CO2 levels is negligibly small, as has already been concluded by the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), a group of scientists skeptical of the U.N.-supported IPCC. It would also mean that wind energy, solar energy, and other "non-carbon" energy sources are not needed and are in fact counterproductive. It would remove the need for alternative fuels such as ethanol (which might please many true environmentalists). It would also mean that carbon trading, cap and trade, and fanciful schemes for carbon capture and sequestration would all end up in the dustbin of history.
One may expect a huge outcry and serious and protracted opposition from those who have built their careers on global warming hype and who have made investments in alternative energy or are looking for immense profits from carbon trading. Yet the scientific facts must win out in the long run -- even against the financial interests of favored groups, wind farm profiteers, ethanol refiners, carbon traders, and the investment firms and banks that have placed hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients' money into green projects.
Nothing has been learned from European disastrous experiences, it seems. As Bjorn Lomborg (a firm believer in AGW) reports, Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by €47 billion in subsidies. The lasting legacy is a massive debt and lots of inefficient solar technology sitting on rooftops throughout a fairly cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1% of its total energy supply. Denmark's wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialized nation. Spain has finally discontinued its solar subsidies as too costly; as Prof. Gabriel Calzada reports, the program actually caused a net loss of jobs.
Having successfully exploited domestic subsidies, Europeans are now looking at the United States as the new "land of opportunity." A recent example (described in the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 26, 2010) is the world's largest solar-thermal power plant, on 7,000 acres of Federal land in the desert of southern California. The $6-billion project is a venture by two German companies, and it may be eligible for a cash subsidy of nearly one billion dollars in taxpayer money. Even after these subsidies, the cost of the electricity generated will be 30 to 70 percent more expensive than electricity generated by natural gas, the dominant electricity-generating fuel in California.
In addition to direct subsidies, the companies are seeking federal loan guarantees and, no doubt, an array of benefits from the State of California. Solar Trust of America, a joint venture between Germany's Solar Millennium AG and privately held (mostly by Arab oil money) Ferrostaal AG, is awaiting approval from the Energy Department for a federal loan guarantee for the first two of its four planned units. Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. are working with Solar Trust to obtain project-equity and tax-equity investment.
The White House claims that the federal cash subsidy will create three hundred permanent jobs (at about $3 million per job!). The nature of the jobs is not specified, but one may assume that there will be much need for sweepers to remove dust and dirt from about 7,000 acres of solar mirrors. Not exactly "high-tech," is it?
By S. Fred Singer
Republished from American Thinker
There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the "smoking gun" that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist.
It has become increasingly clear that any observed warming during the past century is of natural origin and that the human contribution is insignificant. It is doubtful that any significant warming is attributable to greenhouse gases at all.
Once the public accepts these scientific conclusions, it should have immense consequences for policy. It will mean that the impact of rising CO2 levels is negligibly small, as has already been concluded by the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), a group of scientists skeptical of the U.N.-supported IPCC. It would also mean that wind energy, solar energy, and other "non-carbon" energy sources are not needed and are in fact counterproductive. It would remove the need for alternative fuels such as ethanol (which might please many true environmentalists). It would also mean that carbon trading, cap and trade, and fanciful schemes for carbon capture and sequestration would all end up in the dustbin of history.
One may expect a huge outcry and serious and protracted opposition from those who have built their careers on global warming hype and who have made investments in alternative energy or are looking for immense profits from carbon trading. Yet the scientific facts must win out in the long run -- even against the financial interests of favored groups, wind farm profiteers, ethanol refiners, carbon traders, and the investment firms and banks that have placed hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients' money into green projects.
Nothing has been learned from European disastrous experiences, it seems. As Bjorn Lomborg (a firm believer in AGW) reports, Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by €47 billion in subsidies. The lasting legacy is a massive debt and lots of inefficient solar technology sitting on rooftops throughout a fairly cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1% of its total energy supply. Denmark's wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialized nation. Spain has finally discontinued its solar subsidies as too costly; as Prof. Gabriel Calzada reports, the program actually caused a net loss of jobs.
Having successfully exploited domestic subsidies, Europeans are now looking at the United States as the new "land of opportunity." A recent example (described in the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 26, 2010) is the world's largest solar-thermal power plant, on 7,000 acres of Federal land in the desert of southern California. The $6-billion project is a venture by two German companies, and it may be eligible for a cash subsidy of nearly one billion dollars in taxpayer money. Even after these subsidies, the cost of the electricity generated will be 30 to 70 percent more expensive than electricity generated by natural gas, the dominant electricity-generating fuel in California.
In addition to direct subsidies, the companies are seeking federal loan guarantees and, no doubt, an array of benefits from the State of California. Solar Trust of America, a joint venture between Germany's Solar Millennium AG and privately held (mostly by Arab oil money) Ferrostaal AG, is awaiting approval from the Energy Department for a federal loan guarantee for the first two of its four planned units. Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. are working with Solar Trust to obtain project-equity and tax-equity investment.
The White House claims that the federal cash subsidy will create three hundred permanent jobs (at about $3 million per job!). The nature of the jobs is not specified, but one may assume that there will be much need for sweepers to remove dust and dirt from about 7,000 acres of solar mirrors. Not exactly "high-tech," is it?
Interesting Snippets
Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before We Sleep
Every generation seems to hold the pretentious view that it is the biggest, the brightest, and the best. It is one of the deceits and conceits of a culture riddled with evolutionism. Within Christian circles this crops up in a number of ways--most often in the idea that we are in the "end times"--by which is meant the Final Advent of our Lord is just around the corner.
David Chilton reflects upon this persistent Christian canard:
Every generation seems to hold the pretentious view that it is the biggest, the brightest, and the best. It is one of the deceits and conceits of a culture riddled with evolutionism. Within Christian circles this crops up in a number of ways--most often in the idea that we are in the "end times"--by which is meant the Final Advent of our Lord is just around the corner.
David Chilton reflects upon this persistent Christian canard:
The third presupposition, of course, is that we are living in the last age of the Church (again, we should note that these people are too often unable to think of themselves as living at any time other than the climax of history). This presupposition is erroneous. The prophecies of the glorious condition of the Church, to be fulfilled before the return of Christ, are far from their accomplishment. We probably have thousands of years to go before the End. We are still in the early Church! And, while it is fashionable for modern Christian intellectuals to speak of our civilization as "post-Christian", we should turn that around and make it Biblically accurate: Our culture is not post-Christian--our culture is still largely pre-Christian.Chilton cites at this point, William Temple:
The earth will in all probability be habitable for myriads of years yet. If Christianity is the final religion, the church is still in its infancy. Two thousand years are as two days. The appeal to the "primitive church" is misleading; we are the "primitive church" . . .David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Fort Worth: Dominion Press, 1987), p. 56,57.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Principalities and Porkers
Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Here are some quick takeaways from the election.
1. Now the Republicans are on the hot seat. We move from campaign rhetoric, which always gets the juices flowing, to the actual business of governance. Two test cases for you to watch. The first is that certain Republican principalities and porkers are in line (seniority-wise) for plum spots in new line up in the House of Representatives. If they get them, this is evidence that the GOP didn't get it. A second example, this one in the Senate. If Lisa Murkowski (did I spell that right?) wins her write-in bid, she was clearly the choice of the people of Alaska. But she wasn't the choice of the Republicans of Alaska. So if she gets all her old perks back from her Republican pals in the Senate, then this will be further evidence that the Republicans think that going on the wagon means five drinks instead of six.
2. Over the course of the next year or so, you will be told ad nauseum that the nation is suffering from endless gridlock. The American people, it will be said, want things to "get done." Well, I might want to ask, what things? If I am tied up on the deck of a pirate ship, with a bunch of fellow hostages, and a fight breaks out among the pirates, with one faction wanting us to walk the plank, and the other faction wanting to run us all through, I cast my vote for gridlock. As in, yay, gridlock.
3. Of course, the jostling for 2012 began immediately. It seems to me that unless Obama demonstrates some of the flexibility of Clinton, who was President Gumby, he is done. Turn the oven off. Further, he does not appear to me that he has the capacity to do that kind of thing at all, what the pundits call pivoting. Further still, I think that things could get so bad for him that he decides not to run again, like Johnson, or he gets a serious primary challenge, from someone like, say, Hillary. On the Republican side, Sarah Palin had a very good night on Tuesday. If she decides to run, it seems to me that the nomination is hers to lose. I am not cheerleading here. I'm just sayin'. . .
Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Here are some quick takeaways from the election.
1. Now the Republicans are on the hot seat. We move from campaign rhetoric, which always gets the juices flowing, to the actual business of governance. Two test cases for you to watch. The first is that certain Republican principalities and porkers are in line (seniority-wise) for plum spots in new line up in the House of Representatives. If they get them, this is evidence that the GOP didn't get it. A second example, this one in the Senate. If Lisa Murkowski (did I spell that right?) wins her write-in bid, she was clearly the choice of the people of Alaska. But she wasn't the choice of the Republicans of Alaska. So if she gets all her old perks back from her Republican pals in the Senate, then this will be further evidence that the Republicans think that going on the wagon means five drinks instead of six.
2. Over the course of the next year or so, you will be told ad nauseum that the nation is suffering from endless gridlock. The American people, it will be said, want things to "get done." Well, I might want to ask, what things? If I am tied up on the deck of a pirate ship, with a bunch of fellow hostages, and a fight breaks out among the pirates, with one faction wanting us to walk the plank, and the other faction wanting to run us all through, I cast my vote for gridlock. As in, yay, gridlock.
3. Of course, the jostling for 2012 began immediately. It seems to me that unless Obama demonstrates some of the flexibility of Clinton, who was President Gumby, he is done. Turn the oven off. Further, he does not appear to me that he has the capacity to do that kind of thing at all, what the pundits call pivoting. Further still, I think that things could get so bad for him that he decides not to run again, like Johnson, or he gets a serious primary challenge, from someone like, say, Hillary. On the Republican side, Sarah Palin had a very good night on Tuesday. If she decides to run, it seems to me that the nomination is hers to lose. I am not cheerleading here. I'm just sayin'. . .
Nanny State is Back . . .
Puffing Big Clouds of Smoke
Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.
The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)--for the good of others.
The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of "never let the facts get in the way of a good story". They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda--lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.
Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats' figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely "politically convenient", he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.
The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.
The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish--pure and simple. Crampton concludes:
So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!
When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted. To achieve total abolition of tobacco the individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it's a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The "we-have-a-plan-for-you" bureaucrats are hard at work.
But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.
Hat Tip: Kiwiblog
Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.
The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)--for the good of others.
The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of "never let the facts get in the way of a good story". They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda--lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.
Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats' figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely "politically convenient", he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.
The ministry's latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear. Rather, it's a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.
The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.
Here's how they derived the figure - number reckoning revealed courtesy of an Official Information Act request and extensive correspondence with the ministry.Therefore, you have to compare the full life-cycle costs to the public health budget of smokers and non-smokers.
After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group. The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.
But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs. It's easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs. Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. We know that.
And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy. But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.
Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking. We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.In other words, smokers save the public health system money! And, oh, by the way. We have not begun to factor in the huge costs to the country of longer living non-smoking people who commence receiving New Zealand (taxpayer funded) Superannuation at 65, and continue long into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Far, far cheaper to see people killed off by smoking at 45. So, if the anti-smoking bureaucrats want to argue fiscal costs to cloak their nannying, beware the double-edge of the sword you hold.
And, perversely, the deadlier cigarettes are, the greater will be this bias. The younger smokers are when they die of smoking-related illnesses, the greater will be the measured cost difference between smokers and non- smokers because a smaller proportion of comparable nonsmokers would be incurring end-of-life costs.
The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish--pure and simple. Crampton concludes:
. . . be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.
So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!
When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted. To achieve total abolition of tobacco the individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it's a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The "we-have-a-plan-for-you" bureaucrats are hard at work.
But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.
Hat Tip: Kiwiblog
Monday, 8 November 2010
More Commentary on the US Mid-Terms
The Midterms: Lessons Learned and the Way Forward
Sarah Palin
National Review Online
Have an intelligent message, and fight for your right to be heard.
Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda.
Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.
The first lesson is simple: Set the narrative. This year it wasn’t too difficult to tell the story of the election: It was about stopping an out-of-control Congress and an out-of-touch White House. In races across the country, Republican candidates ran on the message that the Left was bankrupting America with budget-busting spending bills that mortgage our children’s future, burden the private sector with uncertainty, and cripple our much-needed job growth.
The story of the next cycle, though, remains to be written. Its content depends on what Republicans do next. Just as in the 1980s, there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes, now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote them out in the next election. If that happens, the story of 2012 may well be that of the GOP going the way of the Whigs. No, the American people are expecting us to be bold and big in our economic reform to allow the private sector to create jobs and soar!
In the coming weeks, there will be those who lament that some of us endorsed conservative Republicans over liberal ones in blue-state races. It’s a good debate, and one I’m willing to have. First, we must keep in mind that there is no guarantee that any Republican will win in a deep-blue state (as evidenced by the exit polls in Delaware showing that the liberal Republican would have lost too). But even more to the point, we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In 2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more useless stimulus packages. If you think such a candidate will be with us when it comes time to vote down an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you’re living on a unicorn ranch in fantasy land.
In the coming weeks there will also be a debate about the viability of particular candidates. Anyone with the courage to throw his or her hat in the ring and stand up and be counted always has my respect. Some of them were stronger candidates than others, but they all had the courage to be “in the arena.” The second lesson of this election is one a number of the candidates had to learn to their cost: Fight back the lies immediately and consistently. Some candidates assumed that, once they received their party’s nomination, the conservative message would automatically carry the day. Unfortunately, political contests aren’t always about truth and justice. Powerful vested interests will combine to keep bad candidates in place and good candidates out of office. Once they let themselves be defined as “unfit” (decorated war hero Joe Miller) or “heartless” (pro-life, international women’s rights champion Carly Fiorina), good candidates often find it virtually impossible to get their message across. The moral of their stories: You must be prepared to fight for your right to be heard. . . .
The last, and possibly most important, lesson is that a winning conservative message must always be carefully crafted. If candidates are going to talk boldly on the campaign trail about entitlement reform and reducing the size of government, they must be prepared to word it in such a way as to minimize the inevitable fear-mongering accusations of “extremism.” We are quickly approaching a fiscal turning point where these crucial reform discussions will be mandatory. We need to speak about them in a way that the public will embrace. During his first run for the presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan found out that election campaigns aren’t necessarily the best settings for quasi-academic discussions about issues like Social Security reform. So for his next campaign, he resolved to build his platform out of tried and tested policies like tax cuts. Successful candidates in the next election cycle will have to test and develop similar policy platforms that address the crucial issues of entitlement reform and shrinking government in a way that the voters will find pragmatic and even attractive.
If we manage to do these things, there is no reason why we can’t look forward with confidence to winning in 2012. I have said all along that this election must be seen in conjunction with the next. Ultimately 2010 must be viewed as just the first battle in a much longer fight that leads to November 6, 2012, and beyond. We cannot fully restore and revive America until we replace Obama. The meaning of the 2010 election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,” and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us. But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew, revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic, pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding beacon of freedom.
Till then, I hope that commonsense patriots will join me in applauding the real heroes of this election year: the Tea Party Americans. In 2008, we were told that we had to “move beyond Reagan.” Well, some of us refused to believe that America chose big-government European-style socialism. American voters elected a politician who cloaked his agenda in the language of moderation. Once the mask was removed, Americans rejected his “fundamental transformation.” The Tea Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.
— Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president.
Sarah Palin
National Review Online
Have an intelligent message, and fight for your right to be heard.
Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda.
Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.
The first lesson is simple: Set the narrative. This year it wasn’t too difficult to tell the story of the election: It was about stopping an out-of-control Congress and an out-of-touch White House. In races across the country, Republican candidates ran on the message that the Left was bankrupting America with budget-busting spending bills that mortgage our children’s future, burden the private sector with uncertainty, and cripple our much-needed job growth.
The story of the next cycle, though, remains to be written. Its content depends on what Republicans do next. Just as in the 1980s, there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes, now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote them out in the next election. If that happens, the story of 2012 may well be that of the GOP going the way of the Whigs. No, the American people are expecting us to be bold and big in our economic reform to allow the private sector to create jobs and soar!
In the coming weeks, there will be those who lament that some of us endorsed conservative Republicans over liberal ones in blue-state races. It’s a good debate, and one I’m willing to have. First, we must keep in mind that there is no guarantee that any Republican will win in a deep-blue state (as evidenced by the exit polls in Delaware showing that the liberal Republican would have lost too). But even more to the point, we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In 2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more useless stimulus packages. If you think such a candidate will be with us when it comes time to vote down an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you’re living on a unicorn ranch in fantasy land.
In the coming weeks there will also be a debate about the viability of particular candidates. Anyone with the courage to throw his or her hat in the ring and stand up and be counted always has my respect. Some of them were stronger candidates than others, but they all had the courage to be “in the arena.” The second lesson of this election is one a number of the candidates had to learn to their cost: Fight back the lies immediately and consistently. Some candidates assumed that, once they received their party’s nomination, the conservative message would automatically carry the day. Unfortunately, political contests aren’t always about truth and justice. Powerful vested interests will combine to keep bad candidates in place and good candidates out of office. Once they let themselves be defined as “unfit” (decorated war hero Joe Miller) or “heartless” (pro-life, international women’s rights champion Carly Fiorina), good candidates often find it virtually impossible to get their message across. The moral of their stories: You must be prepared to fight for your right to be heard. . . .
The last, and possibly most important, lesson is that a winning conservative message must always be carefully crafted. If candidates are going to talk boldly on the campaign trail about entitlement reform and reducing the size of government, they must be prepared to word it in such a way as to minimize the inevitable fear-mongering accusations of “extremism.” We are quickly approaching a fiscal turning point where these crucial reform discussions will be mandatory. We need to speak about them in a way that the public will embrace. During his first run for the presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan found out that election campaigns aren’t necessarily the best settings for quasi-academic discussions about issues like Social Security reform. So for his next campaign, he resolved to build his platform out of tried and tested policies like tax cuts. Successful candidates in the next election cycle will have to test and develop similar policy platforms that address the crucial issues of entitlement reform and shrinking government in a way that the voters will find pragmatic and even attractive.
If we manage to do these things, there is no reason why we can’t look forward with confidence to winning in 2012. I have said all along that this election must be seen in conjunction with the next. Ultimately 2010 must be viewed as just the first battle in a much longer fight that leads to November 6, 2012, and beyond. We cannot fully restore and revive America until we replace Obama. The meaning of the 2010 election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,” and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us. But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew, revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic, pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding beacon of freedom.
Till then, I hope that commonsense patriots will join me in applauding the real heroes of this election year: the Tea Party Americans. In 2008, we were told that we had to “move beyond Reagan.” Well, some of us refused to believe that America chose big-government European-style socialism. American voters elected a politician who cloaked his agenda in the language of moderation. Once the mask was removed, Americans rejected his “fundamental transformation.” The Tea Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.
— Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president.
Reflections on the US Mid-Term Election
One Last Shot at Redemption
The analysis and prognostications are starting to come in from the US mid-term election. The dominant narrative from Obama and the left is that the shellacking of the Democrats, which descended down to state governorships and congresses, was due to frustration over the economy. This is a self-consoling blameshift. It allows the left to excuse the defeat. The narrative runs as follows: obviously the economy is bigger than the government. The powers of government are limited. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could under the circumstances. Ordinarily the economy would be turning upwards by now, but this recession was particularly bad because of Bush's destructive machinations. So voters, knowing that things were not so good, took their frustration out upon the ruling party via the ballot box. In two years time things will be very different.
This narrative was enunciated in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other left-leaning media.
Paul A Rahe comments upon the liberal narrative:
Now, it would be naive indeed to argue that all who voted against the government were therefore signing up for the ideological and philosophical principles lying behind the Republican positions. But many commentators remain strikingly tone deaf--and one can only conclude--wilfully so, to the conservative, limited government ideology articulated by the Republicans and particularly the Tea Partiers. When the topic of Sarah Palin was raised on a liberal chat show just recently, Woopi Goldberg actually said she did not know what Palin stood for and what policies she was advocating. Is this wilful deafness, or a gratuitous slur, or what? Politeness requires that one reject the option of a gratuitous slur. It seems that Goldberg screens out what Palin has been talking about.We believe this is typical--what the comics would call a "derangement syndrome".
One liberal commentator has the gumption to face the truth. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, analyses the Democratic defeat this way:
Here we come to the nub of the matter. Independents outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans respectively. And those who are independent are predominantly conservative.
But there is a big "if" in all this. What was a landslide for Republicans this week could turn just as completely against them within two years, if that party fails to accept the re-conservatising of the party. In order for this to happen deeply entrenched and privileged Republicans are going to have to change or go. This, in turn, implies that Marco Rubio, elected to the US Senate from Florida, is right. He claims that conservatives do not like "big government". They do not like deficits. They do not like high taxes. They do not like federal government intruding into local and state affairs. They abhor troughing and government sleaze. They have been disgusted with the Republican party because that party for years now has been little more than democrat-lite. Rubio said on election night that it was not a Republican victory or triumph. Rather it was the voters giving the Republican party one last chance to be true to its stated principles. If it fails now to be truly conservative, the party will disintegrate, and eventually be no more.
Time will tell.
The analysis and prognostications are starting to come in from the US mid-term election. The dominant narrative from Obama and the left is that the shellacking of the Democrats, which descended down to state governorships and congresses, was due to frustration over the economy. This is a self-consoling blameshift. It allows the left to excuse the defeat. The narrative runs as follows: obviously the economy is bigger than the government. The powers of government are limited. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could under the circumstances. Ordinarily the economy would be turning upwards by now, but this recession was particularly bad because of Bush's destructive machinations. So voters, knowing that things were not so good, took their frustration out upon the ruling party via the ballot box. In two years time things will be very different.
This narrative was enunciated in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other left-leaning media.
Tuesday’s election was indeed a “shellacking” for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news. It was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again.
Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.
Paul A Rahe comments upon the liberal narrative:
To believe this, one would have to be convinced that the voters were unaware that the Republicans were committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to extending the Bush tax cuts, and to reducing federal expenditures to the level of 2008. To argue its truth, one would have to ignore the Pledge to America – which is, of course, what our President and our erstwhile newspaper of record did.
This was, in fact, an election fought regarding first principles. Knowing that, the Democrats desperately sought to localize the conflict, and where they succeeded in demonizing individual Republican candidates, they won. In most districts, however, the results turned on national public policy. Over the last two years, the Democrats have been united for and the Republicans united against a set of measures that the voters were well aware of, and no legerdemain practiced on the polling data can obscure this fact. To say, as E. J. Dionne did in The Washington Post yesterday, that, “in fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents,” is to avert one’s gaze from the obvious.
Now, it would be naive indeed to argue that all who voted against the government were therefore signing up for the ideological and philosophical principles lying behind the Republican positions. But many commentators remain strikingly tone deaf--and one can only conclude--wilfully so, to the conservative, limited government ideology articulated by the Republicans and particularly the Tea Partiers. When the topic of Sarah Palin was raised on a liberal chat show just recently, Woopi Goldberg actually said she did not know what Palin stood for and what policies she was advocating. Is this wilful deafness, or a gratuitous slur, or what? Politeness requires that one reject the option of a gratuitous slur. It seems that Goldberg screens out what Palin has been talking about.We believe this is typical--what the comics would call a "derangement syndrome".
One liberal commentator has the gumption to face the truth. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, analyses the Democratic defeat this way:
Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.
To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.
Here we come to the nub of the matter. Independents outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans respectively. And those who are independent are predominantly conservative.
The 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.
But there is a big "if" in all this. What was a landslide for Republicans this week could turn just as completely against them within two years, if that party fails to accept the re-conservatising of the party. In order for this to happen deeply entrenched and privileged Republicans are going to have to change or go. This, in turn, implies that Marco Rubio, elected to the US Senate from Florida, is right. He claims that conservatives do not like "big government". They do not like deficits. They do not like high taxes. They do not like federal government intruding into local and state affairs. They abhor troughing and government sleaze. They have been disgusted with the Republican party because that party for years now has been little more than democrat-lite. Rubio said on election night that it was not a Republican victory or triumph. Rather it was the voters giving the Republican party one last chance to be true to its stated principles. If it fails now to be truly conservative, the party will disintegrate, and eventually be no more.
Time will tell.
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Not the Clerk of Session
Theology - Ecclesiology
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, November 04, 2010 1:31 pm
I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully.
The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching always comes down to the point of decision. Good preaching is aimed at the will; all good preaching aims at conversion. If the people are not converted, they need to be. If they are, then a message aiming at true conversion will encourage them, not beat them up. As Luther put it, we are called to a lifetime of repentance.
Good preaching reminds every Christian soul that we live before the God who sees and knows the heart, and who will sift those hearts in the great day of judgment. The problem arises when the need for true conversion is moved from the declaration of the gospel to the membership interview. The former declares the truth with the understanding that only God can see the heart. The latter, in the name of God seeing the heart, pretends that the minister and elders can see the heart.
If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this. The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the “not known to be regenerate” away from the Table?
These questions go back to the Halfway Covenant, in the years before the time of Edwards. Now in the popular understanding, the Halfway Covenant was a downgrade of spiritual standards. In reality, it was an attempted upgrade, an upgrade that failed, one that backfired. This is how.
In Calvinist churches on the Continent, membership was based on 1. a profession of faith in Christ and 2. an outwardly obedient life. For the first, you told everyone you believed in Jesus. For the second, you didn’t spend all your time in saloons and shooting out street lights. Here is John Calvin: “we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us” (Institutes, Vol. 2, pp. 1022-23).
But by about 1636, some American churches had begun requiring some more than this (not something less). They wanted a testimony from each prospective member, a testimony relating their personal experience of salvation. The same would go for someone wanting to be a "full" member, in the sense of coming to the Table. Without that personal testimony, they were denied. But they had been baptized. And so what happened when they grew up (which happens more quickly than you might think) and married, and wanted their children to be baptized? What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and who could join any Calvinistic church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.
The minister before Edwards was his maternal grandfather, Rev. Stoddard. Now Stoddard was in some respects a proto-liberal. Don’t make too much of that, but it should be noted. He was right about some things. He said, for example, “No man can look into the heart of another, and see the workings of a gracious spirit.” He leaned against the Halfway Covenant, adopting open communion in 1677. He believed that communion was a converting ordinance, and he was opposed to the idea of church covenants as being judicial in nature. He was therefore against church discipline generally. There he was wrong, and Edwards was right.
Edwards was right that church membership brought with it certain judicial responsibilities, and he was very cautious in how he tried to bring the Northampton church back to a tighter line. But he was at heart a revivalist, which meant that the tighter line was still drawn in the wrong place, at the point of membership interview.
A distinction should therefore be kept sharp between the preaching of the Word, and the shepherding of souls. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, but this does not mean that a minister can see hearts. When it comes to the division of soul and spirit, the Scriptures are sharper than a sword. But at the same point, fallible ministers can be as sharp as a pound of wet liver. But the fact that he cannot see this or that heart exhaustively should not prevent him from preaching the Word searchingly.
We lean the opposite direction, to protect ourselves against the errors of that other guy, who is leaning the other way. Some men see tyrannical pronouncements over the hearts of others in membership interviews, and so they refuse to declare the authoritative word of God from the pulpit -- unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Other men know that they should declare this searching word from the pulpit, and they therefore assume to themselves the same prerogatives in the pastor's study. Oh, the vanity of man! When Scripture says that "all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do," the "him" there does not refer to the clerk of session.
Theology - Ecclesiology
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, November 04, 2010 1:31 pm
I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully.
The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching always comes down to the point of decision. Good preaching is aimed at the will; all good preaching aims at conversion. If the people are not converted, they need to be. If they are, then a message aiming at true conversion will encourage them, not beat them up. As Luther put it, we are called to a lifetime of repentance.
Good preaching reminds every Christian soul that we live before the God who sees and knows the heart, and who will sift those hearts in the great day of judgment. The problem arises when the need for true conversion is moved from the declaration of the gospel to the membership interview. The former declares the truth with the understanding that only God can see the heart. The latter, in the name of God seeing the heart, pretends that the minister and elders can see the heart.
If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this. The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the “not known to be regenerate” away from the Table?
These questions go back to the Halfway Covenant, in the years before the time of Edwards. Now in the popular understanding, the Halfway Covenant was a downgrade of spiritual standards. In reality, it was an attempted upgrade, an upgrade that failed, one that backfired. This is how.
In Calvinist churches on the Continent, membership was based on 1. a profession of faith in Christ and 2. an outwardly obedient life. For the first, you told everyone you believed in Jesus. For the second, you didn’t spend all your time in saloons and shooting out street lights. Here is John Calvin: “we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us” (Institutes, Vol. 2, pp. 1022-23).
But by about 1636, some American churches had begun requiring some more than this (not something less). They wanted a testimony from each prospective member, a testimony relating their personal experience of salvation. The same would go for someone wanting to be a "full" member, in the sense of coming to the Table. Without that personal testimony, they were denied. But they had been baptized. And so what happened when they grew up (which happens more quickly than you might think) and married, and wanted their children to be baptized? What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and who could join any Calvinistic church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.
Church members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, where they give up themselves and their children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be baptized (Halfway Covenant, 1662).
The minister before Edwards was his maternal grandfather, Rev. Stoddard. Now Stoddard was in some respects a proto-liberal. Don’t make too much of that, but it should be noted. He was right about some things. He said, for example, “No man can look into the heart of another, and see the workings of a gracious spirit.” He leaned against the Halfway Covenant, adopting open communion in 1677. He believed that communion was a converting ordinance, and he was opposed to the idea of church covenants as being judicial in nature. He was therefore against church discipline generally. There he was wrong, and Edwards was right.
Edwards was right that church membership brought with it certain judicial responsibilities, and he was very cautious in how he tried to bring the Northampton church back to a tighter line. But he was at heart a revivalist, which meant that the tighter line was still drawn in the wrong place, at the point of membership interview.
A distinction should therefore be kept sharp between the preaching of the Word, and the shepherding of souls. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, but this does not mean that a minister can see hearts. When it comes to the division of soul and spirit, the Scriptures are sharper than a sword. But at the same point, fallible ministers can be as sharp as a pound of wet liver. But the fact that he cannot see this or that heart exhaustively should not prevent him from preaching the Word searchingly.
We lean the opposite direction, to protect ourselves against the errors of that other guy, who is leaning the other way. Some men see tyrannical pronouncements over the hearts of others in membership interviews, and so they refuse to declare the authoritative word of God from the pulpit -- unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Other men know that they should declare this searching word from the pulpit, and they therefore assume to themselves the same prerogatives in the pastor's study. Oh, the vanity of man! When Scripture says that "all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do," the "him" there does not refer to the clerk of session.
Another Empty Shibboleth
The Non-Possibility of Not Legislating Morality
We hear repeatedly that the state has no business legislating morality. This is errant nonsense. Every piece of legislation, every fabric of the law necessarily involves enforcement of some moral doctrine or view or ethic. To suggest that only "value free" laws are acceptable is, itself, a deeply value inherent position; to codify that position into law necessarily involves enforcing that particular value and its value system upon the community.
Micah Watson, visiting fellow at Princeton University, has written a short essay exploding the popular canard that the law cannot enforce morality and that morality should not be legislated.
Once we have got beyond the inane shibboleth that morality ought not be legislated, and morality cannot be (successfully) legislated because laws which enforce morality will always be ignored, we get to the far more helpful and constructive discussions. Among these are:
* Since all law is the enforcement of morals and an implicit system of morality, whose morals and ethics and what system is applicable and appropriate?
* Where can the distinctions be drawn between sins and crimes (the latter being extreme immoral actions which require state sanction and punishment?
* When does an act become public, rather than private, making it subject to public law (aka, public morality)?
* What wrongs and immoral acts are outside of the purview of the sanction of the state, such that no law ought to be written interdicting them, and how ought such questions to be decided?
Debate and research over these issues is far, far more fruitful and constructive.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor
We hear repeatedly that the state has no business legislating morality. This is errant nonsense. Every piece of legislation, every fabric of the law necessarily involves enforcement of some moral doctrine or view or ethic. To suggest that only "value free" laws are acceptable is, itself, a deeply value inherent position; to codify that position into law necessarily involves enforcing that particular value and its value system upon the community.
Micah Watson, visiting fellow at Princeton University, has written a short essay exploding the popular canard that the law cannot enforce morality and that morality should not be legislated.
Why We Can’t Help But Legislate Morality
by Micah Watson
November 4, 2010
All legislation is moral. The sooner we recognize this fact, the better.
“You can’t legislate morality” has become a common turn of phrase. The truth, however, is that every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve. Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. Those who think such a chimerical understanding is possible could hardly be more wrong. For, in fact, the opposite is true: You cannot not legislate morality.
It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?
The “good” here in question is not merely the product of passing fads or idiosyncratic preferences. When something is wrong, it is not wrong merely because it offends someone’s personal taste. The governing authority’s power to pass and enforce laws takes account of the beastly side of human nature while holding that some wrongs are so fundamental that they demand a robust and coercive response. If there are truly deeds that are gravely morally wrong, then it follows that there must be an authority established to command that such deeds be avoided and to punish the transgressors who commit them.
As Hadley Arkes has argued, if it is wrong to torture other human beings, then we do not content ourselves with mere tax incentives to encourage citizens to stop. We know that the wrong of torture requires that this choice be removed altogether from the domain of what is acceptable. You can enjoy the symphony, a NASCAR race, or the latest offering at the movies, but the logic of morals and law removes the option of torturing your neighbor for your weekend’s entertainment—even if your neighbor annoys you.
Of course, some choices will fall within the discretion of a polity’s citizens. Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our moral understanding. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he noted that Douglas’ professed ambivalence about whether states voted for or against slavery showed that he did not think slavery belonged in that category of actions that are truly morally wrong. If you don’t care which way a state votes on slavery, then you clearly don’t view it as a horrendous moral evil. Rather, you treat it like a state lottery: it is fine if the people want it and vote for it, and it is fine if they don’t.
The logic of morals, then, means that there can be no right to do a wrong. Built into the notion of wrong is the corresponding truth that an authority is right to punish perpetrators of the wrong. The idea that government can act as a neutral arbitrator between competing notions of the good life is ultimately incoherent because the idea itself promotes an underlying conception that this arrangement will lead to the best state of affairs.
It is a historical irony that the most famous attempt to sever the connection between law and morality illustrates the enduring link between the two. This attempt was made by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1897 address at the graduation of Boston University Law School, “The Path of the Law.”
Holmes argued that high-minded moral concepts only detract from a clear understanding of what law is and what it should do. Holmes proposed to completely eviscerate moral considerations from our understanding of law. “For my own part,” he said, “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” To understand law, Holmes declared, we must adopt the point of view of a “bad man” trying to avoid getting in trouble rather than start off with idealistic concepts of moral improvement and the good life.
Unfortunately for Holmes’ argument, his denial of the link between law and morality can only be made by invoking the language of morals and law. To understand the law, he suggests, is to look at the law as the bad man does. But this raises a question: How, might we ask, are we to truly understand what it means to be a “bad man” and what it means to be a “good one”? Is it not telling that Holmes’s very attempt to expurgate morality from the law itself depends on making a moral distinction? If Holmes is using the terms “good” and “bad” merely as descriptive statements about how some men see themselves (the bad men looking to keep out of trouble, and the good men thinking that they are beholden to some external morality), then he is doing more than attempting to separate morality and law; he seems to be denying morality altogether. Yet he explicitly denied any moral skepticism in his address.
But if Holmes is using the normative words as truly normative, then he cannot help but back himself into the logic of morals by requiring us to make a judgment about good and bad men. That is, he requires us not merely to make moral judgments distinguishing between “goodness” and “badness” (and thus better and worse, right and wrong) but also to associate “badness” with those who do not see a link between morals and law. Whatever his intentions might have been, Holmes winds up illustrating the link between the logic of morals and the logic of law.
To legislate, then, is to legislate morality. One can no more avoid legislating morality than one can speak without syntax. One cannot sever morality from the law. Even partisans of the most spartan libertarian conception of the state would themselves employ state power to enforce their vision of the common good. Given this understanding, the term “morals legislation” is, strictly speaking, redundant. The real question is not whether the political community will legislate morality; the question is which vision of morality will be enforced and by what sort of government.
Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay on morals legislation in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.
Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.
Once we have got beyond the inane shibboleth that morality ought not be legislated, and morality cannot be (successfully) legislated because laws which enforce morality will always be ignored, we get to the far more helpful and constructive discussions. Among these are:
* Since all law is the enforcement of morals and an implicit system of morality, whose morals and ethics and what system is applicable and appropriate?
* Where can the distinctions be drawn between sins and crimes (the latter being extreme immoral actions which require state sanction and punishment?
* When does an act become public, rather than private, making it subject to public law (aka, public morality)?
* What wrongs and immoral acts are outside of the purview of the sanction of the state, such that no law ought to be written interdicting them, and how ought such questions to be decided?
Debate and research over these issues is far, far more fruitful and constructive.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor
Friday, 5 November 2010
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
A Brief Theology of Designated Gifts
Church Government - Elders of the Church
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
So let us begin by defining terms. Financial support of the Lord’s work can be divided into two categories--tithes and offerings. With the tithe, the amount is specified by the Lord (10% of the increase, by definition), and then three broad categories are authorized as proper recipients of this tithe. Those three categories are the priests and Levites (Mal. 3:10), the poor (Dt. 14:28-29), and the tithe festival (Dt. 14:22-27). In addition to the tithe, we have the category of offerings, which were a function of votive fulfillment or of simple generosity. Hence the common phrase, “tithes and offerings.”
Since in Israel the poor were remembered every third year, there are two understandings of the tithe. Some see three tithes, one of them paid every third year, which would be a total of just over 23%. Others, like myself, take this as three legitimate places where the one tithe (a total of 10%) would go.
Offerings can either be “above and beyond” gifts to regular recipients of the tithe, or they may be generous gifts to projects that would not normally be funded by the tithe at all. Since offerings are not required, it is lawful for them to go anywhere it is lawful for money to go.
So translated into modern terms, the tithe can go to the church and its ministries, to the poor, or to some kind of Thanksgiving festival. How much of the tithe should go to the poor is not to be determined by the ministers, and how much should go to the ministers is not determined by the party planners. All this is determined by the one who has the responsibility before God to give the tithe in the first place. Now, this would obviously be just as true (if not more so) if someone determined to give an offering to any one of these three. If a man has the authority to give a financial gift to pay for playground equipment in a city park, then how much more does he have the authority to give it all to the poor, or all to Bible translation work? So in the Bible, both tithes and offerings are what we would call designated gifts.
We can see this more clearly if we ask to whom does the tithe belong? The scriptural answer is that the tithe is the Lord’s. It belongs to Him. The tithe is “holy to the Lord” (Lev. 27:32), and it is the responsibility of the tither to see to it that the recipient of the tithe really is holy. In a time of apostasy and declension, when the priests and Levites are corrupt, it was not a problem for a tither to redirect his tithe to recipients who were worthy. This is what happened, for example, with Elisha and his followers. They were not “official,” but they were holy men and dedicated to the Lord. Schools of the prophets were parachurch ministries, and yet a man from Baal-shalisha brought his tithe to them (2 Kings. 4:42-44). God was with them, and the tithe can be given wherever the Lord is.
In considering this, we need to remember the fundamental distinction between sins and crimes. A sin is defined by Scripture, but unless Scripture also assigns a public penalty that can be assigned by human authority, it remains solely a sin, and not a crime. This means that scripturally speaking, failure to tithe is a sin, not a crime. There is no record in Scripture anywhere of a penalty levied against a non-tither by anyone other than God Himself. God is the enforcer of the tithe, and He does in fact enforce it (Mal. 3: 8-9). The tithe is God’s tax. He collects it, He keeps track of it, and He has no need of an IRS to do His work for Him.
The task of the authorized recipients of the tithe is in gracious expenditure, not in legal collection. The church should use the tithe to minister, not to collect additional tithes. The poor should use the money given them. The attendees at the Thanksgiving festival should eat and drink the tithe, and do nothing else with it. But there is always pressure on the church to drift away from being a tithe recipient and into being a tithe gatherer. There is a deep problem with this, as we shall see.
The giver of the tithe is trusting God. “How do I know that God will bless the remaining 90%?” So also must the recipient of the tithe learn to trust God. “How do we know if God will continue to finance the work we have to do, unless we lean on the givers a little bit?” The whole point of the tithe is to demonstrate our total and complete trust in God. There is no arrangement of ecclesiastical finances under which trusting God becomes unnecessary.
The principle is that the tither has a great deal of latitude when it comes to the amount a particular recipient might get. But we should not misunderstand what is meant by latitude. He can’t use the tithe to buy himself a new flat screen television, for example, but he does have the authority to decide whether to give it to the poor, or to the Levites, or to poor Levites, or to throw a party for the Levites. Further, he can determined to give 10% here and 90% there, or the other way around. The entire system of tithes and offerings in the Bible presupposes the discretion of the giver. “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver (2 Co 9:7).
Everything else being equal, those who are taught and ministered to by a particular church should support that church (Gal. 6:6-10), but this does not mandate that all his tithe must go to that church. He could give half his tithe to his local church, and give the other half to his cousin on the mission field, and not be doing anything contrary to what the Bible requires. The common (and erroneous) notion that the storehouse of Mal. 3:10 is referring to the church, and nothing but the church, is what might be called a self-serving doctrine. The storehouse was simply a tithe-barn, built to handle the tithes that would in fact some in.
This does not mean that every local church has an obligation to process all the tithes and offerings of its members, regardless of where the tithe recipients might be (a third cousin of a member’s nephew, now serving with YWAM, say). But it does mean that if a local church is committed to a particular minister or ministry, then they should be open to what might be called a tithe-feedback loop. They should be open to designated gifts for their ministers or ministries. A closed door to designated gifts means that a church is deciding to not allow themselves access to important information that can come from Spirit-led giving. Once that information is closed off, the decisions (which still have to be made) will be made in accordance with some policy or other. And thus it is that churches become bureaucracies.
In conclusion, three applications.
Give, and it will be given to you again (Luke 6:38). This is a foundational Christian principle. The foundational Christian principle is not “make sure others give,” or “make sure others give the right amounts or in the right way.” Parishioners should in fact be taught how to give the right way, but they should be taught this largely by example (Heb. 13:7,17). With regard to generosity, there are two principles we must keep in mind. The first is that we are commanded to give freely because we have received freely. Further, as we give freely, more will be given. Give and it will be given to you. The second principle is that if we have any concerns about how the people (for whom we are responsible) are giving, we should look first at how we are giving. Are they tight-fisted? Well, are we? The second principle is that leadership is fundamentally by example. Suspicion with regard to their gifts will result in them giving to us suspiciously. There is no better way to set envy in motion than this. There is no better way to fight envy than by setting an example of open-handed generosity.
Second, churches and established ministries should be constantly on guard against their temptation to try to manage the Spirit. But the Spirit blows where He wishes (John 3:8), and this is not always kind to our budget cycles. The Spirit works through donations as much as through prayer. To assign the Spirit’s work to some kind of upper level, and to keep our financial principles down below according to “accepted accounting principles” is a form of gnosticism. Keeping an area where we can “manage it” is yet another form of not trusting God, which was addressed earlier.
And last, financial accountability is crucial. It is essential (2 Cor. 8:18-20). Openness to the Spirit’s leading in donations is not code for “no accountability.” Rather, it recognizes that accountability assumes the answer to a particular question, one that we should all ask more regularly than we do. That question is by what standard? Biblical accountability does include some elements that every bookkeeper learns while getting a business degree at Babylon State U. Honest weights and measures are something that even unbelievers want, and Scripture requires that as well (Prov. 20:10). So there is overlap. But biblical accountability also requires open-hearted, open-handed generosity (Matt. 10:8). This kind of generosity is not setting accountability aside; it is one of the central things we are being held accountable to do.
And in order to cultivate this kind of open-handedness, both in and out, we are to be focused on what we want to give, and be completely open to any Spirit-led saint who wants to help us give it.
Church Government - Elders of the Church
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
So let us begin by defining terms. Financial support of the Lord’s work can be divided into two categories--tithes and offerings. With the tithe, the amount is specified by the Lord (10% of the increase, by definition), and then three broad categories are authorized as proper recipients of this tithe. Those three categories are the priests and Levites (Mal. 3:10), the poor (Dt. 14:28-29), and the tithe festival (Dt. 14:22-27). In addition to the tithe, we have the category of offerings, which were a function of votive fulfillment or of simple generosity. Hence the common phrase, “tithes and offerings.”
Since in Israel the poor were remembered every third year, there are two understandings of the tithe. Some see three tithes, one of them paid every third year, which would be a total of just over 23%. Others, like myself, take this as three legitimate places where the one tithe (a total of 10%) would go.
Offerings can either be “above and beyond” gifts to regular recipients of the tithe, or they may be generous gifts to projects that would not normally be funded by the tithe at all. Since offerings are not required, it is lawful for them to go anywhere it is lawful for money to go.
So translated into modern terms, the tithe can go to the church and its ministries, to the poor, or to some kind of Thanksgiving festival. How much of the tithe should go to the poor is not to be determined by the ministers, and how much should go to the ministers is not determined by the party planners. All this is determined by the one who has the responsibility before God to give the tithe in the first place. Now, this would obviously be just as true (if not more so) if someone determined to give an offering to any one of these three. If a man has the authority to give a financial gift to pay for playground equipment in a city park, then how much more does he have the authority to give it all to the poor, or all to Bible translation work? So in the Bible, both tithes and offerings are what we would call designated gifts.
We can see this more clearly if we ask to whom does the tithe belong? The scriptural answer is that the tithe is the Lord’s. It belongs to Him. The tithe is “holy to the Lord” (Lev. 27:32), and it is the responsibility of the tither to see to it that the recipient of the tithe really is holy. In a time of apostasy and declension, when the priests and Levites are corrupt, it was not a problem for a tither to redirect his tithe to recipients who were worthy. This is what happened, for example, with Elisha and his followers. They were not “official,” but they were holy men and dedicated to the Lord. Schools of the prophets were parachurch ministries, and yet a man from Baal-shalisha brought his tithe to them (2 Kings. 4:42-44). God was with them, and the tithe can be given wherever the Lord is.
In considering this, we need to remember the fundamental distinction between sins and crimes. A sin is defined by Scripture, but unless Scripture also assigns a public penalty that can be assigned by human authority, it remains solely a sin, and not a crime. This means that scripturally speaking, failure to tithe is a sin, not a crime. There is no record in Scripture anywhere of a penalty levied against a non-tither by anyone other than God Himself. God is the enforcer of the tithe, and He does in fact enforce it (Mal. 3: 8-9). The tithe is God’s tax. He collects it, He keeps track of it, and He has no need of an IRS to do His work for Him.
The task of the authorized recipients of the tithe is in gracious expenditure, not in legal collection. The church should use the tithe to minister, not to collect additional tithes. The poor should use the money given them. The attendees at the Thanksgiving festival should eat and drink the tithe, and do nothing else with it. But there is always pressure on the church to drift away from being a tithe recipient and into being a tithe gatherer. There is a deep problem with this, as we shall see.
The giver of the tithe is trusting God. “How do I know that God will bless the remaining 90%?” So also must the recipient of the tithe learn to trust God. “How do we know if God will continue to finance the work we have to do, unless we lean on the givers a little bit?” The whole point of the tithe is to demonstrate our total and complete trust in God. There is no arrangement of ecclesiastical finances under which trusting God becomes unnecessary.
The principle is that the tither has a great deal of latitude when it comes to the amount a particular recipient might get. But we should not misunderstand what is meant by latitude. He can’t use the tithe to buy himself a new flat screen television, for example, but he does have the authority to decide whether to give it to the poor, or to the Levites, or to poor Levites, or to throw a party for the Levites. Further, he can determined to give 10% here and 90% there, or the other way around. The entire system of tithes and offerings in the Bible presupposes the discretion of the giver. “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver (2 Co 9:7).
Everything else being equal, those who are taught and ministered to by a particular church should support that church (Gal. 6:6-10), but this does not mandate that all his tithe must go to that church. He could give half his tithe to his local church, and give the other half to his cousin on the mission field, and not be doing anything contrary to what the Bible requires. The common (and erroneous) notion that the storehouse of Mal. 3:10 is referring to the church, and nothing but the church, is what might be called a self-serving doctrine. The storehouse was simply a tithe-barn, built to handle the tithes that would in fact some in.
This does not mean that every local church has an obligation to process all the tithes and offerings of its members, regardless of where the tithe recipients might be (a third cousin of a member’s nephew, now serving with YWAM, say). But it does mean that if a local church is committed to a particular minister or ministry, then they should be open to what might be called a tithe-feedback loop. They should be open to designated gifts for their ministers or ministries. A closed door to designated gifts means that a church is deciding to not allow themselves access to important information that can come from Spirit-led giving. Once that information is closed off, the decisions (which still have to be made) will be made in accordance with some policy or other. And thus it is that churches become bureaucracies.
In conclusion, three applications.
Give, and it will be given to you again (Luke 6:38). This is a foundational Christian principle. The foundational Christian principle is not “make sure others give,” or “make sure others give the right amounts or in the right way.” Parishioners should in fact be taught how to give the right way, but they should be taught this largely by example (Heb. 13:7,17). With regard to generosity, there are two principles we must keep in mind. The first is that we are commanded to give freely because we have received freely. Further, as we give freely, more will be given. Give and it will be given to you. The second principle is that if we have any concerns about how the people (for whom we are responsible) are giving, we should look first at how we are giving. Are they tight-fisted? Well, are we? The second principle is that leadership is fundamentally by example. Suspicion with regard to their gifts will result in them giving to us suspiciously. There is no better way to set envy in motion than this. There is no better way to fight envy than by setting an example of open-handed generosity.
Second, churches and established ministries should be constantly on guard against their temptation to try to manage the Spirit. But the Spirit blows where He wishes (John 3:8), and this is not always kind to our budget cycles. The Spirit works through donations as much as through prayer. To assign the Spirit’s work to some kind of upper level, and to keep our financial principles down below according to “accepted accounting principles” is a form of gnosticism. Keeping an area where we can “manage it” is yet another form of not trusting God, which was addressed earlier.
And last, financial accountability is crucial. It is essential (2 Cor. 8:18-20). Openness to the Spirit’s leading in donations is not code for “no accountability.” Rather, it recognizes that accountability assumes the answer to a particular question, one that we should all ask more regularly than we do. That question is by what standard? Biblical accountability does include some elements that every bookkeeper learns while getting a business degree at Babylon State U. Honest weights and measures are something that even unbelievers want, and Scripture requires that as well (Prov. 20:10). So there is overlap. But biblical accountability also requires open-hearted, open-handed generosity (Matt. 10:8). This kind of generosity is not setting accountability aside; it is one of the central things we are being held accountable to do.
And in order to cultivate this kind of open-handedness, both in and out, we are to be focused on what we want to give, and be completely open to any Spirit-led saint who wants to help us give it.
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