Clive James on Approaching Mortality

The Falcon Growing Old

The falcon wears its erudition lightly

As it angles down towards its master’s glove.

Student of thermals written by the desert,

It scarcely moves a muscle as it rides

A silent avalanche back to the wrist

Where it will stand in wait like a hooded hostage.

A lifetime’s learning renders youthful effort

Less necessary, which is fortunate.

The chase and first-strike kill it once could wing

Have grown beyond it, so some morning soon

This bird will have its neck wrung without warning

And one of its progeny will take its place.

Thinking these things, the ageing writer makes

Sketches for poems, notes for paragraphs.

Bound for the darkness, does he see himself

Balanced and forceful like the poised assassin

Whose mere trajectory attracts all eyes

Except the victim’s? Habit can die hard,

But still the chance remains he simply likes it,

Catching the shifting air the way a falcon

Spreads on a secret wave, the outpaced earth

Left looking powerless. This sentence here,

Weighed down by literal meaning as it is,

Might only need that loose clause to take off,

Air-launched from a position in the sky

For a long glide with just its wing-tip feathers

Correcting for the wobble in the lisp

Of sliding nothingness, the whispering road

That leads you to a dead-heat with your shadow

At the orange-blossom trellis in the oasis.

-- Standpoint, September 2010
Clive James's recent poetical work can be found at his website, here.  

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

The Current Unholy Trinity of Unbelief

The Deep Things of Satan

Douglas Wilson
Sunday, January 10, 2010

This secular age has an unholy trinity, an attempt to counterfeit the place that the triune God holds in the world as it actually is. This, to be distinguished from the world that these bunglers are trying to fashion right in front of us.

Their father wants power, their son wants to be the incarnation of lust, and their spirit wants to muddle everything. And thus we have the collectivist state, the demands of sodomy, and the confusions of postmodernism. These three things conspire together to make, for you, a brave new world. If you want to understand the focus of my writing, there it is. They have their unholy trinity; I have three targets.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Burrowed Into the Woodwork of Puritanism

Church Government - Elders of the Church
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, May 08, 2011

Here is a small necklace of things that should be strung on the same thread, at least in my mind. To the casual observer, it might seem more like a pearl, a washer, a wooden bead, and a small metallic nut, but this is only because that casual observer is not looking at it with the eye of faith.

Let me begin with a requirement laid down by Paul for men in the ministry, a requirement that is unfortunately widely neglected (and  therefore controversial) in conservative circles. He says that part of a minister's qualification is his ability to manage his own household well, and with all dignity, such that his children are submissive (1 Tim. 3:4). In addition, he says further that what is going on in his household is a good predictor of what is going to be happening in the church (1 Tim. 3:5). Paul says elsewhere that this submission extends to submission to the gospel. Not only must a minister's children not be dissolute and rebellious, they must be faithful (Tit. 1:6). Whether or not that last word is rendered as faithful or as believers amounts to the same thing. A minister's children are his first parishioners, and they are the canary in the mine.

Now the necessary qualifications. I make a distinction between ordaining men to the ministry and defrocking them. Qualifications for expulsion should be stiffer than qualification for non-admittance -- but to the extent we want to lean on this, it is perhaps a strong argument for not ordaining men with younger children. A man strong-minded enough to insist on pursuing his call to the ministry when his younger children are two, four, and six should also be strong-minded enough to tender his resignation when his grown children are serving two to four, and four to six, in the state penitentiary.

Forwarded E-mail

In the Interests of Open Democracy

This appeared in our in-box this morning.

Please sign and send on:

 

As a rule, I don't pass along these "add your name" lists that appear in e-mails, BUT this one is important.

It has been circulating for months and has been sent to over 22 million people.
We don't want to lose any names on the list so just hit forward and send it on.
Please keep it going!


To show your support for the MP Hone Harawira and the job
he is doing please go to the end of the list and add your name...

1.  Titewhai Harawira
2.

The Cultic Mind

The Gospel According to Granny Herald

The NZ Herald editorial writers have put the paper's prejudices, ignorance, and Unbelief on display.  The paper has presumed to pontificate officially about what it clearly knows little.  The occasion is a cult-watch organization taking Brian Tamaki of Destiny Church to task over his alleged denial of the resurrection of our Lord.  (Tamaki has denied the allegations.)

The editorial writer, however, apparently disbelieves Tamaki's denial, commending him for being in "good company".

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Seven Thoughts on the Assassination of Bin Laden

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, May 08, 2011

1. Assassination is not necessarily an ungodly tactic. Ehud was a righteous judge in Israel, and he was used by the Lord in the assassination of Eglon (Judg. 3:21). It is not to be condemned out of hand.

2. The biblical response to this kind of thing is not uniform. There is a sense in which we are to say that God does not delight in the death of the wicked (Ezek. 33:11), and that would include the death of this wicked man. Yet there is another sense (not contradictory, but in paradox), in which God delights to execute judgment in the earth. As believers, we do not privilege one over the other. We long for Him to judge the nations with equity (Ps. 98:9), and this means that some people are going down. Lest anyone say that this is an Old Testament mentality, I will just say that the only time in the New Testament when the saints say Hallelujah is when they are watching the smoke ascend from the ruins of Babylon. And so how do we reconcile this love of mercy and this longing for justice?

Coruscating Memories

The Rotten Fruit of Humanitarian Wars

It has become fashionable amongst the Commentariate in the West to speak of a new, enlightened apologia for war. The wars of our future, Tony Blair pretentiously pontificated, would be wars based on "our values". They would not be for grimy things like money, or territory, or national pride, or oil but would be humanitarian wars--taking up the sword to defend the human (aka Western) rights of the downtrodden around the globe. The glorious wars of the future would be those which were not in defence of any national interest. In fact, wars fought over national interests were, by Blair's definition, evil--selfish and self-seeking. Wars fought to defend the underdogs of the globe were to be noble and glorious--and not wars at all--at least not as we once knew them.

One of the reasons the UK (and Europe generally) became so disenchanted so quickly over Tony Blair's dalliance in Iraq was the rapidly growing conviction that the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein had little to do with a war over "our values" and much more to do with oil. In other words, it was an unjustifiable war, on Blair's own term. He became reviled amongst the members of the Commentariate for his hypocrisy. But the seductive attraction of Blair's "vision" lived on.

Fast forward to Libya. Here, at last, would be a noble war fought for no national interests whatsoever--only for the love of one's fellow man, defending him against a bumptious tyrant. Alas, such wars are not new. They have been fought before in the past. The outcomes have been disastrous.

Novelist James Warner illustrates by referring us to the Russian war against Turkey in the 1870, as viewed through the eyes of (Blairite) Dostoevsky and (increasingly pacifist) Tolstoy. Warning: both were professing Christians.The money quotation comes from Solzhenitsyn at the end of the piece.

Hopeless and Helpless

Urban Tragedy

The implicit promise of Unbelief's humanism is that all human problems are solvable, by man. There is nothing that Unbelieving man, applying his power and glory to our human problems, cannot achieve. The future looks unbelievably bright. Except that it isn't.

It needs to be said repeatedly that messianic idealism led directly to World War I. Then the vengeance exacted by the Allies facilitated not a little the rise of Fascism in Germany. Idolatrous humanism has lurched from one deadly disaster to another.

But sometimes humanism takes a more honest look at what is happening on the ground. Bill Moyers in a piece entitled The Straight Dope interviews David Simon, the creator/author of The Wire. The gritty HBO series takes realistic look at life amongst the underclasses in Baltimore.

What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.

Simon's exposure to the underclasses in Baltimore, and the way the system malfunctions amidst them, has enabled him to understand and portray the complexity of mess--a complexity that does not tolerate easy, facile solutions.  There are no top-down, Big Society solutions any more.  The only hope is bottom-up, soul-by-soul, family-by-family.  But, despite its pretensions to deity, humanism cannot redeem the sin-enslaved, human heart.

Simon himself appears to cling to the hope that Marx or neo-Marxism is closer to the truth: that a man's fate is determined by the economic structures that surround him. 

Bill Moyers: I was struck by something that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. You talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel-jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they’d come face-to-face with the question—which is…?
David Simon: “What am I doing here?” You know, a guy coming out of addiction at thirty, thirty-five, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them—we don’t need 10 or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones who are undereducated, who have been ill-served by the inner-city school system, who have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy, we pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it. They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multibillion-dollar drug trade.

The implication is that if society were to change its economic structures, the ghetto would cease to exist. The only viable "free" market operating amongst the underclass is the illicit drug market--and that has been artificially created by prohibitionist public policy.

Bill Moyers: I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
David Simon: Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.

It is the unintended consequences which rack secular humanism.  You either do it God's way or not.  If not, the consequences of the solutions will end up far worse than the original problems.  Simon claims that the war on drugs is lost--it's just that no-one will admit it.  He also pines for an economic system that would deliver more jobs--hoping that if there were just more jobs around, the underclass would not need the drug trade to survive. Really.  Humanism cannot but cling to its superficial verities and hopes--even when it knows the complexities and has seen the systemic evils.  Somehow, these are not seen as the fruit of what is in the heart of man.  There remains some other, external cause.  Change the system.  It will be different this time.

Bill Moyers: After all these years do you have the answer?
David Simon: Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it as fast as I could into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the urban equivalent of FDR’s CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps—if it was New Deal–type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome. The drug war is war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.
Bill Moyers: There’s very little the police can do.
David Simon: You talk honestly with some of the veteran and smarter detectives in Baltimore, the guys who have given their career to the drug war, including, for example, Ed Burns, who was a drug warrior for twenty years, and they’ll tell you, this war’s lost. This is all over but the shouting and the tragedy and the waste. And yet there isn’t a political leader with the stomach to really assess it for what it is.
Bill Moyers: So whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?
David Simon: Certainly the underclass. There’s a reason they are the underclass. We’re in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor; we are not a manufacturing base. People who built stuff, their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore. Unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture, and, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me.

The last great white hope: education.  If we just poured all that money into education of the underclass, we would begin to claw ourselves out.  Question:  education requires a fundamental aspect of mind on the part of the student or trainee--a willingness to forego satiation and consumption now for some future (probably long time ahead) benefit.  It requires hope and faith.  What makes the humanist so sure that folk in the underclasses actually have such hope, faith, and willingness to self-sacrifice and self-deny?  

Without a supernatural, divinely wrought fundamental change of heart such willingness to sacrifice is unlikely.  Simon is far more realistic than most.  But not nearly realistic enough.

The story is told  that Charles Spurgeon, the eminent nineteenth-century London preacher was interviewing a lady--a maid--who wanted to profess her faith and join the Church. Spurgeon pressed the household serving woman for evidence that Christ had changed her.  She blushed and said, "Well, now I sweep under the mats."  A little thing perhaps--but it contains the very world of Christ's redeeming work.  Or the needed perspective is illustrated by the account of the lad near Sandfields (Dr Lloyd-Jones's first pastorate) who was telling his teacher about the fine meal he had just enjoyed at home--gravy, potatoes, meat, cabbage, even rice pudding.  How come, the teacher wanted to know?  The boy's father had recently been converted--and whereas he had previously spent his wages on drink in the local pub, he was now bringing them home for his family. Small things, but a world of difference.(Iain Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), p.220f.

Simon's focus has been on the systemic nature of vice and evil in underclass society, the malfunction of civil authorities, the education system, the politicians, and the police.  It is not any one person's fault.  It is the system.  Most people in the system mean well, but the system corrupts them all. He is looking for systemic change, from the top down.  He gives us his profession of faith: "I am very cynical about institutions and their willingness to address themselves to reform. I am not cynical when it comes to individuals and people."  He lacks the perspicacity, or perhaps courage, to face up to the reality that systemic change will merely result in replacing one malfunctioning system with another.  As Jeremiah declaims: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.  Who can know it."  (Jeremiah 17:10)  Evil lies in the heart of man, and the system is but an extension of sinfulness.  Change man, one soul at a time, and in time systemic evils wane.  This is the rock that breaks the idolatry of humanism into a thousand shards.

But Simon, the modern humanist, sees things in the exact reverse.  Folk are fundamentally good; the system is corrupt and perverts them.  If we could only change the system, the basic goodness and decency in human beings would emerge from underground, blinking in the light.  This is his false religion talking.  But in the end, from his perspective, he knows there is no hope of the system ever changing.  Not really. 

Bill Moyers: But I don’t think these good individuals you talk about—the individual who stands up and says, “I’m not going to lie anymore”—I don’t think individuals know how to crack that system, how to change that system. Because, as you say, the system is self-perpetuating.
David Simon: And beautifully moneyed. I don’t think we can. And so I don’t think it’s going to get better. Listen, I don’t like talking this way. I would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. I don’t believe it, but I’d love to believe it, because I live in Baltimore and I’m an American. I want to sit in my house and see the game on Saturday along with everybody else. But I just don’t see a lot of evidence of it.

His false religion ignores universal human depravity.  Evil is deflected away from where it truly belongs--from man, the sinner to the corrupt "system"--leaving him without hope.  He has seen enough of the system to know close up and first hand that it is too pervasive, too powerful, too smothering. But the Truth remains: "if any man is in Christ he is a new creation: the old has passed away; behold, all things have become new"  (II Corinthians 5:17).    But as long as Simon clings to his naive humanism, he will never have ears to hear this--which is his, and our only real hope.

When humanists are sufficiently naive, superficial, and blindly stupid to attempt to wreak changes in "the system" to "make things right", then the damage is likely to become ingloriously monumental.  Think the Somme--lest we forget.
 

Sunday Sermon

Wilson's Exposition of I Samuel


Sermon: Samuel I | Intro and Background from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

It's Freedom, But Not as we Knew it, Jim

Speech Rights in the Maelstrom of Unbelief

Is free speech an important civil right? Sure is. Does this right derive from the Living God, or from human convention? In other words, when the state stops people from expressing a view or opinion is there a divine warrant for the law, or is it tyranny? Actually, it all depends. On what? On a cluster of considerations and cases.

Firstly, there is the general principle that human beings are made in the image of God and speech is an intrinsic part of that image bearing. If one were to conceive of the human race unfolding without sin--that is, the Fall having never occurred--there would be absolutely no restrictions on speech, for all speech would have been holy, just and good. When Adam named the creatures, he was able to do so perfectly. His speech was perfectly reflecting the very image of God Himself.

Secondly, since the Fall human speech has become terribly corrupted. Here is James's summary: "The tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell." (James 3:6) Since the Fall, human speech has become the engine of evil and corruption.

Thirdly, the state has no general authority from God to restrain human speech, despite the fact that much of it is evil. The state is not a redeemer. The state cannot remove human sin. It cannot make people righteous. If the state, in an attempt to make all human speech more righteous, began to exercise unrestricted control over what people say, it would have warrant to go still further--to control the evil thoughts that express the evil words. These prerogatives belong to Christ alone, and have not been delegated to the state.

Fourthly, any authority the state has to interdict human speech must be restricted to those few occasions when speech is threatening the life and limb of others. Hence, Oliver Wendell Holmes famous illustration: free speech does not give one the right to stand up in a crowded theatre and yell, "Fire!" for the sheer mischief of it, leading to the death or potential death of fellow congregants crushed in the ensuing panic.

Fifthly, all public speech enciting people to break the law of God and turn upon fellow citizens, stripping them by force of their rights to their life, liberty, property, and lawful pursuit of happiness would be legitimately the domain of the state to restrict in some measure and prosecute. Speech which impedes peoples' lawful rights and activities is also a legitimate target for restriction: hence, public slander has been a form of speech which traditionally has been proscribed.

In the post-Christian West, free-speech rights which developed out of the Christian doctrines expressed above, are not unexpectedly eroding. Take away the foundations and the edifice crumbles. You cannot maintain the liberties produced by Christian beliefs about man, God, sin, evil, and governance upon non-Christian ground.

In the past few decades traditional free-speech rights have morphed in the post-Christian West. Focus has gone on what would constitute reasonable harm and damage to others. Speech can be restricted if it damages and harms other people. What constitutes harm? Well, emotional upset for one. Speech which makes people enraged and angry, for another. Speech which offends is now restricted.

In other words, free speech liberties and rights are rapidly disintegrating. Offence, in the end, is in the ear of the hearer. This fits with our modern "enlightened" views of the state. The government in Western Unbelief has become our great redeemer, to preserve us from evil and make us all good. No wonder the state will move aggressively to control our speech. Unbelief, having denied the Living God, stupidly looks for its deity in other places. Almost invariably its eye alights upon the perceived locus of supreme power--the state. The people demand that the state control speech. Is it not a legitimate function of deity? Too late we discover that all idol gods are base and cruel. Tyranny grows; liberty erodes.

A free speech case has recently hit the headlines in New Zealand. A protester burned the New Zealand flag during an Anzac Day celebration. The courts convicted her of "offensive behaviour". But no longer.

Valerie Morse was convicted of offensive behaviour after setting the flag alight in an anti-war protest in Victoria University's law school grounds, opposite the Cenotaph, during the 2007 Anzac Day dawn service. Her conviction was upheld by the High Court and Court of Appeal. But in a decision released yesterday, the Supreme Court said earlier rulings had mistaken the meaning of offensive behaviour in the Summary Offences Act.

So, the Supreme Court found something in the law which the lower courts overlooked. Firstly, let's consider the reasoning of the lower courts.

Wellington District Court judge Oke Blaikie found offensive behaviour to mean behaviour capable of wounding feelings or arousing real anger, resentment, disgust or outrage in the mind of a reasonable person. He considered a tendency to disrupt public order was not required.

This is nonsense--but an apt illustration of how free speech rights are being eroded in the West. Firstly, there is the abstraction of a "reasonable" person. A person considered reasonable is one whom society regards as such. One man's reason is another man's idiocy. If this mythical "reasonable" person takes offence or is made angry by the speech of another, then the speech rights of the offending person can be circumscribed and restricted. It will all come down to toleration of that speech which the state considers to be reasonable.

To illustrate: blasphemy against the Name and honour of God and His Messiah is deeply offensive to earnest Christians, causing real anger, resentment, disgust and outrage. But is this reaction reasonable? Does a Christian have good reason to be so offended? No--because New Zealand is a secular materialistic society, and as such, it does not regard such religious doctrines as worthy of reasonable people. Under such an approach, a reasonable person will be whomever the government (reflecting probably the majority of citizens) determines. Restricting speech because it offends others--even though they be deemed by the good pleasure of the state to be reasonable-- is a severe erosion of the historical liberties we have enjoyed.

So, did the Supreme Court revert to the more free, Christian position with respect to free speech? No. It came out with an equally pernicious doctrine.

But the Supreme Court thought otherwise, ruling unanimously that offensive behaviour must give rise to a "disturbance of public order". Because the district court proceeded on a wrong basis of law, the conviction was thrown out

This, we are told is a new precedent.

However, Auckland University law professor Bill Hodge said yesterday's decision appeared to set a new precedent, giving protesters more right to freedom of expression under the Bill of Rights. "You can now burn the New Zealand flag any time, anywhere you like, because I can't think of a time any more sensitive with the right people in the right place than Anzac morning in our nation's capital while the morning ceremony is ongoing.

Laying aside the emotive connotations of flag burning, Bill Hodge has missed the real point. The real revolutionary doctrine "discovered" by the Supreme Court is that speech can be restricted if it disturbs public order--for then it is proved to be offensive. This highlights just how far speech in New Zealand is now restricted. If we were to stand up and declare publicly that homosexuality is a gross sin and that unrepentant, unbelieving homosexuals will not enter the Kingdom of God, one's speech could be legitimately proscribed provided people rioted in anger at our remarks.

As we have noted, since offensive is in the ear of the hearer, all that is required to stop speech is to generate a reactive public disturbance. In the old days, free speech liberties meant that the rioters would be indicted and punished for breach of the peace. Nowadays, it is the speaker who is indicted for breaching the peace. It becomes easy to shut opponents down if one is prepared to show how offended one is at their remarks by disturbing public order.

Rioting, chanting, offended Islamics can shut down all criticism of Muhammed and Allah and Islamic people. It all depends on whether they choose to take offence and express their anger in a breach of the peace. Unionists can shut down critics if they man the barricades in outrage. If they riot against offending strike-breakers, the government will now, by law, arrest the strikebreakers for offensive speech. How about the now widespread antics of anarchists smashing glass and people in the streets? If they can coherently identify what it is that offends them so, the government will move to take the offensive speech and speakers away.

In the final analysis, all it would take, it would seem, is an enraged person yelling, "Shut up, or I'll kill you" and the state will move rapidly to shut the provocative speaker down. Welcome to the wonderful world of non-Christian, secular free speech rights.

Fair Question

Statutory Rape an Exclusively Male Crime?

In New Zealand we have a 28 year old Facebook predator who has reportedly serially groomed teenagers for sex. So far the perp is free as a bird and the authorities appear to be turning a blind eye. Keeping Stock has a question:

This is one disturbed woman, in our always-humble opinion. But what disturbs us even more is the seeming lack of action by the Police so far.

Imagine this scenario: a 28-year-old MAN grooms teenage GIRLS via Facebook, and initiates sexual relationships. We have every expectation that the Police would act quick-smart to stop the behaviour, and if laws have been broken, to make an arrest. So what is the difference here?

Fair question. Are the NZ Police sexist in their application of statutory rape law in this country? Is there one law for males, and another for females?

There have been hints that the woman in question is mentally disturbed. The implication is that her alleged offending is therefore not to be taken seriously. One has hitherto held the opinion that it is the courts which make such determinations, not the police. But maybe times are changing.

Even worse, it appears a national women's magazine (Woman's Day) has done a celeb-adoration style story on this perp. Maybe they want to portray her as an archetypical twenty-first century feminist who has successfully mastered electronic social-networking. You know--serious socio-political analysis. The kind of pablum that has made Woman's Day a "must read" for every non-thinking woman.

Quip of the Day

"The SEALs killed Bin Laden and we got the 72 versions." 

A comment left on Patterico's Blog:

The Propaganda Begins

National School Testing A Lame Duck

Regular readers of our blog will know that we have remained sceptical of the New Zealand government's showcase reform--the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic in our primary schools. This is not because we are opposed to such testing in principle. Rather, it is because the imposition of national testing upon an unwilling state school system is unlikely to succeed. The government has been naive and simplistic in seeking to graft national testing on top of an intellectually bankrupt state education system.

Australia has such a national standards testing system--code named NAPLAN. It is based in part upon similar initiatives in the United States. Criticisms are now beginning to surface. A recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald began with the headline: "NAPLAN-style testing has 'failed' US schools". Catch the drift.

The first criticism: the tests narrow down the curriculum to focus upon literacy and numeracy. Now in many human activities focus upon essentials is regarded as a virtue. But not in modern education. The only essential is the pupil in the prevailing state approach of "child centred learning". The framing of tests as "narrowing down" the curriculum is consistent with post modern and neo-Marxist theoretical constructions of education, together with the prevailing pedagogical idea of allowing children to construct their own curriculum.

National testing is seen to be forcing children into a constrained, imprisoning, mental and social straitjacket. In fact, however, everybody really knows that the rest of the curriculum is worthless and inaccessible if the pupil cannot read, write, or figure. You don't even get on the board to begin to play without these vital pre-requisites. But without reframing education into a more traditional and historical context, and publicly rejecting modern pedagogical inanity, the government will lose the ideological war. In New Zealand, the government has given little indication that it even understands that an ideological war needs to be fought. It appears to have concluded that introducing national standards is a relatively minor tweak--an administrative, operational detail. Far from it. It cuts at the vitals of the dominant modern educational paradigm.

The second criticism in the SMH article is that national testing creates perverse incentives for teachers.

Schools and individual teachers have been judged and rewarded financially for improving student test scores and punished for poor ones. This led to many of the best teachers abandoning schools in the disadvantaged areas, with some teachers accused of teaching to the test and others of helping children cheat to improve results.

What? Have not the educational unions been assuring us, proclaiming loudly from the rooftops, that teachers are dedicated professionals, of exemplary character? Now we are finding that they are not--and this puts NAPLAN in jeopardy. There are now signs in the Australian education system that Aussie teachers are as unethical as their US counterparts.

In Australia, there are signs of teachers "teaching to" the NAPLAN tests, helping students cheat and decreasing student participation rates. While the basic skills literacy and numeracy tests were designed to help teachers identify children with learning difficulties needing assistance, they are now being used as a competitive measure of school performance on the federal government's My School website. Many parents use the scores as the basis for choosing a school.

Better then to scrub the whole thing, right? Nah. When a company--any company--puts incentives for staff in place, it risks creating perverse behaviours--ripping customers off, selling them things they don't really need or want, manipulation of the system, lying and false reporting--etc. Should incentives be tossed out? No--but gaming the system must become a discipline offence--a breach of contract, something that could result in termination. Teachers, principals and schools need to know that unethical behaviour and gaming of national tests will result in breaches of contract and terminations. That would go a long way to stomping out gaming.

Is the Ministry of Education in New Zealand ready for this? They give no sign. National testing for literacy and numeracy in state schools is not a minor tweak, an easily-facilitated-add on. It goes entirely against the grain of modern pedagogy and the state education system in this country. Without a root-and-branch reform it will never be allowed to take hold. Top-down reforms no longer work, because the vested interests, the ideological educrats, have far too strong a hold.

We believe that the only way to move forward is to introduce a national voucher system--which would have the effect of putting parents back in the driving seat as the clients of the system. Now, this would also mean that some children (of uncaring, irresponsible parents) will likely fail. But rest assured, parents would be far more demanding than Ministry of Education educrats. Each school would have, under a universal voucher system, to justify its existence and its achievements to a free-to-choose marketplace of parents, who would become the customers and clients of the system. Not only would some children fail, but some schools would inevitably fail--unless and until they pulled their socks up.

A national voucher system would help disenfranchise the teacher unions. But even such a radical gordian-knot reformation of the system cannot be allowed to stand alone: to succeed it must be supported by other reforms, such as abolishing teacher registration (by which the current establishment controls the supply of teachers and has far too much say in who enters the profession.)

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Need for a Sense of Smell

Money, Love, Desire - Wealth and the Christian
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, May 06, 2011

I recall one place where N.T. Wright said that the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher were "evil." As a good portion of the Western world is now in the process of running out of money, this set up an interesting train of thought.

Is it "evil" to be broke, to run out of money? Presumably not, because it was for the sake of such broke people that Wright was taking his stand against the likes of the Iron Lady. But that means it is not evil for a whole nation to wind up neck deep in the poverty bouillon. Right? With me so far?

Now if it is not a sin to be poor, how could it be a sin to anticipate that you are going to be poor? Or is it only a sin if you, like Thatcher, take steps to prevent it?

As the modern state continues on in a frenzy of spending (a practice bound to land on the less fortunate and defenseless eventually), it is perilously easy for tenderhearted Christians to advance the cause of economic illiteracy, and all in the name of Jesus. And even though it is part of their qualifications for high ecclesiastical office, such illiteracy is not limited to bishops.

But when we get to the level of "thou shalt nots" and "thus saith the Lords," we had better be sure we are correct. Otherwise, we will be like the printers of the early "wicked Bible," who accidentally left the "not" out of the seventh commandment. Yesterday, I saw one of those wicked Bibles on display at the Cambridge University Library. If such a mistake were to be made today with regard to the eighth commandment, there are too many church officials who would not call it wicked, but would rather hail the arrival of a more compassionate economic policy.

In contrast to this ganglion of self-deception, the Tea Party protests have done a great deal of good, at least thus far. We have seen streets filling up with citizens concerned about massive pillage, theft, dishonesty, and fraud. But some Christians may have stayed home because that kind of thing might ruin their testimony and all -- who knows where taking a stand against dishonesty might lead? Perhaps to denominational headquarters and mission agencies, and it is therefore best to let sleeping dogs lie.

It is interesting to me to note that association with Tea Party types, some of whom are libertarian pagans, is morally problematic for some Christians. A continued and much closer association with the statist pagans who mail out the entitlement checks presents no apparent problem at all. This is because the statist pagans have a big pile of swag that they dispense hither and yon, much of it to Christians whose sense for self-justifying rationalization is much better than their sense of smell.

Credibility Gaps

Economic Policy By the Numbers

The Economist has carried an interesting piece on the reliability of national economic data. It claims that the US "botoxes" its own data. If you take away the ministrations of the cosmetic data masseurs the situation in "these United States" appears much worse than the official statistics are letting on.

The Economist compares differences in the way Europe presents its official data statistics with the way those same measures are compiled in the United States. It turns out that these differences make the US appear much less saggy and wrinkly. The first comparison: public sector debt. Now this has become a focus in recent months. How much public government debt can a nation bear before it collapses in a screaming heap of public fury storming the barricades? We have seen such eructations of wrath in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. But not the US. Why? In part because the measurements of public debt in the US disguise the actual levels of public indebtedness.

Take public-sector debt. The definition used in Washington, DC, is “federal government debt held by the public”, which stood at 62% of GDP at the end of 2010. But if you instead use Europe’s preferred measure—general government gross debt, which also includes the borrowing of state and local governments and Treasury securities held by other government bodies, such as the Social Security Trust Fund—it jumps to 92% of GDP. That is on a par with Portugal’s level of public debt. Likewise, America’s budget deficit of 8.9% of GDP last year would have been 10.6% using Europe’s preferred measure.

Ninety-two percent of GDP. In other words the lenders to the US Treasury are actually living in cloud cookoo land. They have willed themselves to believe that things are just not that bad--and the official statistics provide a cover for those willing to be duped.

The second example is the way productivity is measured. The US prides itself on how much more productive its work force is--as compared to Europe. It would appear that the average US worker produces more goods and services than his European counterpart. Really? No--it's all botox.

Official figures also flatter America’s relative performance on productivity growth. The headline figures compiled by America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics are based on output per man-hour in the non-farm business sector. The European Central Bank tracks GDP per worker across the whole economy. By excluding the less efficient public sector, America’s productivity growth is bumped up.

Not so rosy, then.

The third area of data-augmentation is GDP growth--the measure of how much economic growth is occurring within an economy. It turns out that the American data suffers from a dose of irrationally exuberant cheerleading. Much in the initial GDP figures are estimations. They are always revised much (years) later when all the actual data comes in. It transpires more often than not that US economic growth figures are revised--downwards, once the actual data comes in. European statisticians appear to be far more conservative in their initial estimates, and have a track record of far fewer downward revisions.

A third cosmetic treatment is the way quarterly GDP figures are published. European press releases give the increase in GDP during the latest quarter—a rise of 0.9%, say. But Americans annualise quarterly growth, so an identical increase would be announced as a more impressive-sounding growth rate of 3.6%. Much more important, European economies’ initial estimates of GDP growth tend to be more cautious than those in America. Kevin Daly, an economist at Goldman Sachs, estimates that during the ten years to 2008, America’s quarterly GDP growth rate was, on average, revised down between the first and final published estimates by an annualised 0.5 percentage points. In contrast, GDP figures in the euro area were revised up by an average of 0.3 points. (Emphasis, ours)

Why is this important? Well, the media and the economic chattering classes always focus upon the initial (estimated) number, not the much later revised number--which is very old news indeed.

This matters because financial markets and the media focus heavily on the first estimate, but largely ignore revisions several years later.

The politicisation of numbers and data to reflect national pride? To support an incumbent government? To keep the lenders happy so that the party can go on? Probably all of the above. Let's party on while Rome conflagrates.

The dismal science and practice of macro-economics relies on national data statistics. When the data is fudged or manipulated, resulting in a more optimistic picture, we have something akin to the king debasing the nation's gold and silver coins to fund his ambitions. It was theft then. Is it any different now? Oh, wait. We forgot. The Federal Reserve is busy printing money (aka debasing the currency) in order to fund the US government's exponentially increasing debt. And its smoothing the passage of this debasement, in part, with shonky statistics.

There are lies, damned lies and macro-economic statistics. He who trusts them is foolish indeed.

Can They Be Making This Stuff Up?

The Most Adept Administration In Living Memory?

Maybe, who knows? But Michelle Malkin's blow-by-blow of the Obama Administration's pirouettes around the execution of Osama Bin Laden must make the White House the front-runner for "Best Ballerina of all Time".


The Fog of Fog
By Michelle Malkin
May 6, 2011

The official White House account of Osama bin Laden’s demise has seen more slapdash cosmetic surgery over the past week than your average “Real Housewives” reality-show star. President Obama’s allies attribute the bungled “narrative” (their word, not mine) to the “Fog of War.” But each passing day — and each new set of hapless revisions — shows that what really ails the administration is the Fog of Fog.

Errors happen. Miscommunications happen. Confusing the name of which of bin Laden’s myriad sons died (Hamza, not Khalid), for example, is no biggie.

But the hourly revamping of key details of Sunday’s raid suggests something far beyond the usual realm of situational uncertainty that accompanies any military operation. The Navy SEALs did their job spectacularly. The civilians tasked with letting the world know about the mission, however, have performed like amateur dinner theater actors in a tragi-comic production of “Rashomon-meets-The Blind Men and the Elephant-meets-Keystone Kops.”

Incapable of straightforward answers, Team Obama’s clarity-challenged civilians have led nauseated news-watchers through more twists and turns than San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

Take your Dramamine, and let’s review.

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight.
On Sunday night, Obama dramatically told the world that “after a firefight,” our brave men in uniform “killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
Embellishing the story the next morning, White House deputy national security adviser John Brennan said at his briefing that bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. … And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know. … It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight.”

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight.
The day after Brennan disclosed such vivid details, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney walked them back Michael Jackson-style. Bin Laden, he said in version 2.0, “was not armed.” Brennan had clearly implied that bin Laden “resisted” with arms. Carney amended the narrative by insisting that “resistance does not require a firearm.” How exactly bin Laden resisted, Carney would not say.

It’s been all downhill, uphill, K-turns and 180s ever since. Fasten your seatbelts:

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof and it’s more important to avoid offending peaceful Muslims who supposedly don’t embrace bin Laden as a “true” Muslim in the first place.

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time — “minute by minute,” according to Carney — and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute” because there was at least nearly a half-hour that they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill (SET ITAL) or (END ITAL) capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while Decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated Carney on Wednesday.

And they wonder why Americans of all political stripes think they’re blowing smoke.

A Worth-While Spinoff

What Are We Doing Here, Again?

What on earth is Nato, the US, and minnows like Australia and New Zealand doing in Afghanistan? With the death--nay, execution--of Bin Laden maybe the question will now be faced honestly.

In George Orwell's 1884, the state is engaged in perpetual war--a war without purpose or meaning. Afghanistan is now the United States's longest war and is shaping up like Orwell's vision. We have documented over the years the stupidly inane "mission creep" from executing Bin Laden and bloodying the nose of the complicit Taliban to "nation building". This latter inanity is the liberal war of choice. It is a way where humanitarianism is the ultimate ethic and highest value. It makes the war feel good to naive idealists.

We know that a majority of American voters now oppose Obama's war in Afghanistan. We know that the war is not winnable in any military sense. We know that the Karzai regime is hopelessly corrupt. We know that centuries old tribalism is the most powerful driver of Afghani politics. We know that "nation building" is a self-congratulatory, fatuous farce. So, when will military, political, and common-sense reality hit home to Obama, the governing elites, NATO and everyone else supportive of this useless national self-indulgence?

Charles Krauthamer is a cheer-leader for the cause of American global military supremacy. He is a "making the world safe for democracy" kind of chap. He is reported to have reflected thusly on the execution of Bin Laden:

In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, I found myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer that this was a global game-changer for American greatness. It was a gutsy and courageous decision by President Obama, brilliantly executed by the Navy SEALs and all the intelligence and support behind them.

As Krauthammer put it, after the tough slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan, this amounts to the restoration of unquestioned U.S. military dominance. America has not slipped, nor has our military reach and power.

Puleeez. The author of this particular piece is Larry Kudlow--a self-professed "hawk" and "American exceptionalism" drum major. But now Kudlow is asking the question--the right question. Why is the US continuing in Afghanistan? What are we doing here, again?

Thus far, nearly 1,600 U.S. troops have been killed in action in Afghanistan. To me this is the most tragic part. Of course, I wholeheartedly support our troops. But is this blood really necessary? Are the projected future costs really necessary?

Again, I ask myself: All this to support Karzai? Isn’t this the sort of nation-building that the late William F. Buckley Jr. opposed? Are American national-security interests really tied up in Afghanistan? Is now not the time to contemplate a much more rapid troop withdrawal from Afghanistan?

He concludes with the following:

Going forward, what exactly is our real mission in Afghanistan? That’s the basis of my concern. Are we as Americans and conservatives really convinced that the continued mission is worth the lost blood and treasure? Is now not the time to leave?

What exactly are we doing in Afghanistan? And how do we get out of it?

When the Amerolotrous right wing start to ask such questions it is a good day.  Now if we can only get Sarah Palin to stop being a chippy cheerleader for this inane war we will be seeing real progress.  We have the hunch that if a Republican candidate for president were to make the case for immediate withdrawal strongly and rationally it would likely make him or her a clear front runner, and an almost certain shoe-in to the Oval Office in 2012. 

If withdrawal from Afghanistan were the only tangible outcome of the execution of Bin Laden that alone would be a great boon. 

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Hold Our Tummies and Laugh for a While

Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, May 01, 2011

Thus far, I have enjoyed the presence of Donald Trump on the political stage. The entertainment value is high. He started right in on the birther thing, and within weeks, sure enough, remember the art of the deal, out comes the long form of Obama's birth certificate. Huh. Wonder how that happened. My initial theory is that Obama responded as soon as he was challenged by someone who is right at his level.

Of course, now there is the racist charge associated with all this. I am frankly torn about that. One the one hand, some responsible parties might want to argue that frivolous charges of racism -- on the basis of jokes like the one above at the expense of Obama -- are debasing the currency of our public debate. But I would respond that the currency of public currency is debased already, and I don't think one more can hurt.

On the other hand, and this is the way I lean, charges of racism are so grotesquely inflated these days that perhaps we can all play along, trying to get the grotesque inflation to move into hyper-inflation, and to do this in a way that might hasten the crash. On the day that everything becomes racist, then nothing will be, and then we will all be free, and Dr. King's vision will finally be realized.

I mean, how is it racist to compare a foolish black guy to a foolish white guy? Ah, but the way things are calculated these days, it is.

Now if anybody thinks that the mere arrival of the long form birth certificate is going to shut up those who are conspiratorially minded, I would like to cite badbanana as an authoritative voice. "Nice try. If the U.S. government can blow up the World Trade Center, it can probably fake a 'long form' birth certificate."

The problem with those who try to penetrate the secrets of the world's conspiracies is that they don't ever look on the surface. They haven't read Poe's purloined letter. They are the kind of people who used to worry about what rock songs said when played backwards, when the real problem is what they said frontwards.

Why, the question is posed, with furrowed brow, did Obama withhold that certificate for years, spending millions to keep it out of public view, when it was always within his power to release it (as he just did). Hmmm? Well, obviously he was throwing chum into the water, trying to attract serious Republican presidential candidates. And all he got was Donald Trump! He was shark fishing and came back with a really big tuna. I think we should all hold our tummies and laugh for a while.

Bonny Hone

The Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate

Poor old Hone Harawira. You have to have a certain sympathy for the politician who is so bedevilled by a sense of grievance that perpetual truculence is his mien. When one must always lash out at a world of perceived enmity one soon devolves to an extremist growling curmudgeon. Hone is rapidly getting to the stage where the only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.

First there was the re-run of calling his political nemesis a Nazi sympatico. It was a charge he had made years ago, but he has been foolish enough to repeat his folly in recent days. Don Brash a Nazi. Really? Really! Actually if you compare Brash to Harawira, the more Nazi-like is Harawira himself if his stated policies are anything to go by. Yes, we know that this would be an egregious exaggeration, but after all it was Hitler and Nazi ideology that presented Aryans as superior and better than everyone else, and Hone argues (wrongly) but vociferously that Maori are exceptional and have more rights than any other race in New Zealand. So, if Hone is really going to persist in the Nazi meme he may find the cap fits him more snugly than anyone else.

But he is on a roll.  He has now come out to call Bin Laden a great freedom fighter (that is, someone like himself). According to the NZ Herald:

Hone Harawira has described Osama bin Laden as "a man who fought for the rights, the land and the freedom of his people". In tributes on Maori-language television, the leader of the new Mana Party said the al-Qaeda founder should be "honoured" rather than "damned" in death according to Maori culture.

Apparently his right hand woman, radical Maori lawyer, Annette Sykes (who looks to be shaping up as a co-leader of Hone's Mana Party) has similar views. In an interview with Duncan Garner, the following interchange took place (H/T: Keeping Stock):

Duncan And what's Annette said about standing, Annette Sykes?

Hone Annette said she'd be happy to consider it and we'll probably hear her answer later on today at the party launch. . . . She'd make a great leader of this party. This isn't about me being the leader, this is about the kaupapa leading the party. This is about the people in this country recognising in this party a beacon in a time of desperate straits for a lot of Maori, Pacific Islanders and Pakeha.

Duncan Are you comfortable with someone like Annette Sykes being so involved, I mean remember what she said around the time of 9/11 where she laughed and effectively applauded and clapped when those planes went into the towers on 9/11? I mean are you comfortable being a party in parliament having someone like that there?

Hone I'm comfortable having alongside me one of the strongest Maori women I have ever met, one of the strongest women I have ever met, a person who's courageous in all that she's done, who has defended those that all other lawyers have walked away from, and who is fearless in her dealings with government, with Iwi leaders, and with all levels of society. I have great respect for Annette Sykes.

"Excuse me while I change feet." Hone is a gift for conservative New Zealand. He is a precious diamond to the (now) refocused Act Party. Every time Hone's growling, truculence leads him to enunciate his extreme racial views, and his neo-Marxist ideology, the number of committed voters for Don Brash must rise exponentially. And, because Hone is tribal Maori, tribalism will out. His own people will close ranks behind him and support him all the way.

Meanwhile Maori politics is fracturing into impotence, hopelessly divided between Hone, the Greens, Labour, and the Maori Party itself. A house divided against itself cannot stand. "Mainstream", non-tribal Maori must be embarrassed every time Hone growls--particularly because he asserts that he represents true, authentic Maori beliefs and culture. The way Hone tells it, he is true Maori--all the rest are Uncle Toms.

We are confident that Hone will attract great media attention. The right wing must be rubbing their hands with glee.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Do Your Soul Some Good

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, May 02, 2011

I don't have an awful lot to say about the death of Osama bin Laden. He was a very bad man, and we should be glad that he is now in a place where no injustice will ever come. Unjust men can come there, as bin Laden just did, but no injustice ever will. The afterlife is a holy place. Hell is a holy place.

Just a few cautions for Christians as they talk about this. The fact that we are all sinners, and that we all deserve death and judgment, is quite true. But if we hasten to remind ourselves of this reality at moments like this, the effect is not to heighten our sense of awareness of sin, but rather to flatten it. A bizarre kind of moral equivalence takes over our thought processes, and we begin to think that God will have no work to do in the judgment whatever -- all He has to settle is that we are all sinners and we all died. But God will not judge us by the crateload. The Bible teaches plainly that the unconverted will be judged in accordance with their works, and the Scriptures say just as clearly that not all works are the same. Evil is something that can grow and mature. And when it does this, the judgment is greater. The judgment is so great, and the issues so momentous, that only God can do it. We should leave the judgment to Him, and when He judges the nations of men, that will truly be one of His greatest works. The only thing historically greater will be His accomplishments in the salvation of the nations of men.

I am writing this in Prague, as we having been spending some time in Eastern Europe, in countries that were formerly in the Soviet block. We just came from Poznan, Poland, where we were privileged to visit a post-commie shopping mall. It was a very nice mall, and the posters and ads had a bunch of the usual sins and follies that you would find in an upscale mall. But it was nothing like what used to happen here -- when a million Poles were taken off to Siberia, for example, and never heard from again. We were sitting with some of our friends, having a beer on the old town square, and were talking about families that were touched by this. I asked if, in a group this size, there would be stories about such families in every group. Oh, yes, was the answer. In our small group, one man's grandfather was taken. Another man, a Ukrainian, grew up in Siberia because his father was taken there. Another man said, yes, his wife's family lost loved ones. Compare all this to some chick with too much eye make up for a regular person, much less for someone on a fifteen foot tall poster.

Osama was a violent and evil man, and so we should thank God he is dead. He was killed by men who, by all accounts, were not exactly cub scouts themselves. But any kind of flattening, any kind of moral equalizing, any attempt to witness to a co-worker by talking about the death of bin Laden, and then pivoting to a discussion of your aunt who sometimes gets into the cooking sherry too much, will the effect of representing the Christian faith as morally clownish.

This is not my subject here, but please note that I am arguing for a sense of proportion here, and I am not arguing that the measuring stick is made in America. The ghouls who run the abortion industry, and their shills in the halls of Congress, kill more Americans every day than bin Laden did in his one major flame-out, and the Navy Seals aren't coming after them.

The judgment seat of God is the place where every necessary distinction is remembered, every nuance is in its place, every discrepancy noted, and every cup of cold water counted. Not to put too fine a point on it, the judgment seat is a place where God makes judgments. Too many Christians talk about it as though judgment day were simply a cosmic steamroller. Of course, we have not forgotten the basic division between those who are in Christ and those who are not, but that is not the time when God then fires up the steamroller. Moral distinctions matter. God makes them, and He is infinitely good.

So we know this situation is more complicated than what we hear on the news, for that is always the case. But recognize the limitation, and simply thank God for this one good thing. Thank God that Osama has come to justice, and while you are at it, thank God for the call made by President Obama. If you're as conservative as I am, it will probably do your soul some good.

No Special Rights, So . . .

One Law for All

We remain militantly critical of contemporary Maori ideology. We believe it excuses personal and family accountability by resorting to the fallacy of historical determinism: Maori, their leadership tells them, are victims of predatory exploitation by European or imperial powers; the significant cause of social and cultural and spiritual degradation amongst Maori stems from the unjust extortions of the Pakeha. We believe this ideology enslaves Maori and subjugates them more subtly and more potently than any European migration.

We believe this ideology is a neo-Marxist variant. Maori represent the exploited poor, the weak, from which the hegemonic Pakeha have extracted their pound of flesh. It makes many within Maoridom sunburnt strawberries: brown on the outside, red on the inside. We have smiled at Hone Harawira's call to arms: he wants to stand up now for poor and disadvantaged Maori, the working stiffs. He opposes exploitative Pakeha, but also (now) monied tribal interests. Maori neo-Marxism is undressing and exposing itself. This is a false Gospel and will betray those seduced by it to their destruction.

But, at the same time, we believe there are historical injustices wrought by our government which should be addressed. They should be addressed because it is just to do so. At a personal or communal level, our lives should not be made to depend upon the redress of past wrongs and grievances, whether real or imagined. Evil happens in our sinful world. The Christian call is to accept such without bitterness, seek to begin again under the wonderful aegis of Christ Himself, and arise to serve Him where we are, with what we have.

But there is an obligation to restitute, where possible, those who have suffered injustices at the hands of the state. (Restitution is not always possible, but if it can be done, it ought to be. The state must at all times be under law, and held to account by the law; if not, then we are governed not by law, but despots.)

In this regard, we were pleased (whilst saddened, and provoked) by historian Paul Moon's piece in the NZ Herald on the injustice being perpetuated against the Tuhoe people. (For the benefit of our overseas readers, the Tuhoe is a Maori tribe located on the South Eastern part of the North Island of New Zealand.) Here is a synopsis of Moon's account:

At the start of May last year, all the indications were that the Crown and Tuhoe were putting the finishing touches on a deal that would see Te Urewera National Park returned to Tuhoe, with enough caveats to ensure that access and other rights for the public would remain practically unchanged.

Tuhoe would have what all the evidence shows rightfully belongs to it, and the rest of the country would not be adversely affected in any way in the process. The sort of settlement one would have expected the Crown and the public to welcome with open arms.

The deal was a long time coming. The Waitangi Tribunal has documented in excruciating detail how successive governments since the 19th century trampled over Tuhoe rights - appropriating their lands with disregard for the occupants and with contempt for any sense of natural justice.

In the roughly 18 months before last May, negotiations between various Government departments and the iwi looked promising. All that remained were the formalities confirming the transfer.

What happened? Considerations of justice got tossed out the window. Politics intruded.

Then, someone blinked. A rushed announcement was made by the Prime Minster that Tuhoe were not going to have the National Park returned to them after all. The iwi's clearly stunned negotiators were left wondering what had suddenly gone wrong with negotiations that had appeared to have been progressing so well. The excuse the Government used last May - and has stuck to since - was that the return of Te Urewera National Park might set a precedent for other Treaty settlements.

Putting aside the sui generis nature of Tuhoe's claim, the argument that doing something right in dealings with one iwi might mean having to do things right with other iwi, hardly seemed to be a good basis for the decision. The moral rectitude of returning Te Urewera National Park to Tuhoe ownership was completely airbrushed out of the political equation.

This hits the matter front and centre. Had the Crown acted unjustly  towards a Maori tribe? The evidence is compelling that it had. It would seem that duplicity and mendacity were the guiding principles of government actions towards Tuhoe over a long period of time. Was the government now saying that justice is a wax nose to be shaped at will by the whimsy of government as it genuflects to political considerations? Populism at its worst.

What has happened since, and where are things at now?

Yet, in spite of the enormous frustration of having the expected return of the land snatched away at the last minute, Tuhoe's response in the subsequent 12 months has been one of patience, restraint and dignity. Its negotiators have persisted with their calm, informed approach in dealings with the Crown, while all the time, the Crown's tactic has been one of delay.

No doubt the beguiling character of Te Urewera National Park has been a consideration for those who oppose returning the park to Tuhoe. Its long-lauded sublime characteristics have for more than a century left visitors to the area in awe of its staggering beauty.

To others, it is a drug-addled and gang-choked backwater - a dystopia in the middle of utopia. Either way, it is a part of the country where the links indigenous communities have with the land is strong, and where experiences since the 1860s have left an ingrained sense of grievance among many of the inhabitants.

We agree that the return of historical lands will not redeem Tuhoe. To the extent that tribal members believe that it would is a measure of their self-deception. But justice ought to be done, nonetheless.

It is becoming apparent that the forthcoming election will focus once again upon Maori and their place in this country. Some will be arguing forcefully (and we believe correctly) that there must be one law for all New Zealanders and that Maori are not in a special category. They do not have a special class of citizenship.

It would be a very salutary thing, we believe, if the advocates of "one law for all New Zealanders" would take up the case of Tuhoe, precisely because there must be one law for all in this country.

The Tangled Webs We Weave

Onwards and Upwards!

The borrower becomes the lender's slave, says the Scripture. This is true, both for individuals and corporate entities--including nations. A nation in debt is a nation enslaved. A government is debt is a government enslaved.

At first blush this sounds preposterous. If a government spends more than it takes in taxation, it raises money on the open market (usually overseas). It borrows to cover the short-fall. If there is any enslavement occurring here it is upon the future citizens who will have to stump up with the cash in taxes. The government, and the legislators and administrators that constitute it, get away scot free.

But the reality remains--a government in debt is a government which is enslaving its people to the state. More and more money is going to have to be exacted in taxes to pay back current borrowings and interest, and continue to fund ongoing operations. Since most government spending goes upon so-called entitlement programmes, the appetite for spending does not abate. It can only grow. The Oliver Twist syndrome kicks in. Dependence upon the State creates an insatiable demand for more support. Expenses always rise to meet "income", non? Nice-to-haves turn into necessities. The dependant electorate clamours for more with the regularity of a ticking clock. Ongoing operational (distribution costs) rise; more borrowing is required to fund the beast; interest payments compound; and the miracle of compound interest grinds the faces of future citizens into the dust.

Moreover, since governments inevitably end up raising finance offshore they subject the country to economic and market forces over which they have diminishing influence. They--and all their citizens-- become price takers. The currency is where this shows up most immediately. In the end an insolvent country will have its currency devalued, pushing up the price of borrowing and gutting the tradeable sectors of the economy. The circle becomes vicious.

Another facet of national slavery is that denial becomes endemic. Mendacity becomes part of national life. Right now, the United States is the most powerful illustrative example of the perils of national indebtedness, in general, but of the attendant mendacity, in particular. Mark Steyn removes the shroud, exposing the necrotic flesh beneath.

Discredited
The Fed’s policy is quantitatively accelerating American collapse.

The other day Paul O’Neill said that . . .

Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O’Neill is. A decade ago, he was President Bush’s first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Colonel Qaddafi’s Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I’ve no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I’m sure there was a good reason.

Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaeda terrorists. Really.”

Really?

Absolutely.

“They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”

But hang on, generally speaking, when you hit your “debt ceiling,” your credit is at risk. If you’ve got a $10,000 credit card, and you run it up to the limit, but you need a couple more grand right now, pronto, because you outspend your earnings by 50 percent every month and you have no plans to change that anytime soon, well, the bank might increase the limit to $15,000, or $20,000. Or they might not. There is a question mark over your credit because there is a question mark over your credit worthiness: It is at risk.

Paul O’Neill seems to regard that attitude as unhelpful. So does Timothy Geithner, his successor at what is still laughingly known as the United States Treasury. Secretary Geithner says that even to be discussing the debt ceiling is “a ridiculous debate to have.”

Ridiculous?

Absolutely.

“I mean, the idea that the United States would take the risk that people would start to believe we won’t pay our bills,” continued Geithner, “is a ridiculous proposition, irresponsible, completely unacceptable.” The best way to convince people to believe we’ll pay our bills is to borrow up to our limit, and then increase the limit and borrow a whole bunch more. This would be the 75th increase in the debt ceiling in the last half-century. Let’s just get it done, and resume the party.

But if Geithner thinks that even discussing the question is “ridiculous,” then, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, why have a debt limit at all? What’s the point?

Well, because it gives us more credibility with our creditors, right? Even if we set the debt ceiling way up in cloud-cuckoo land to a bazillion trillion gazillion dollars and 83 cents, even a debt limit entirely unmoored from reality still gives the impression we haven’t quite flown the coop.

Yes, but why does the U.S. government need to maintain credibility with its creditors when increasingly it’s buying its debt from itself? Every month there’s more and more U.S. Treasury debt and fewer and fewer people who want it. The Chinese are reducing their exposure. The investment behemoth Pimco, which manages the world’s largest mutual fund, recently dumped U.S. Treasuries entirely. To avoid the failure of U.S. bond auctions, or an increase in interest rates to make them more attractive to rational lenders, the U.S. government’s debt is bought by the U.S. government’s Federal Reserve.

I tried up above to come up with a real-world comparison for the debt ceiling — imagine you’ve got a credit-card limit of 10K, etc. — but it’s harder to do that with the Fed’s policy: Imagine your left hand issues an IOU to your right hand in return for an e-mail with a large number on it . . . oh, never mind, it’ll only make your head hurt. “Quantitative easing” is extremely quantitative if not terribly easing, so raising the debt ceiling would enable us to issue more debt for us to buy from ourselves. You can see why Secretary Geithner thinks that’s a no-brainer.

While Jonah Goldberg was asking why have a debt limit at all, Michael Kinsley took it to the next stage: “If the national debt doesn’t matter, why have taxes at all?” Particularly when you no longer have to “print” money, you can just quantitatively ease yourself into it. Once we raise the old debt ceiling, we’ll be pretty much at the point where the U.S. government is spending $4 trillion but only taking in $2 trillion: For every dollar we raise in taxes, we spend two. No surprise there: The “poorest” half of the population pay no federal income tax. They’re not exactly poor as the term would be understood in almost any other country, but in federal-revenue terms they’re dependents, so in order to fund government services for the wealthiest “poor” people on the planet we borrow money from a nation of subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house.

But, if you can spend $4 trillion of which $2 trillion is borrowed, why not borrow $3 trillion and make even more Americans dependent? Hell, why not borrow the whole lot? After all, the sums we’re borrowing right now — $188 million every hour of every day — are unprecedented. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just made them even more unprecedented? That way we could have a federal budget of $6 trillion, of which, say, $5 trillion is raised by issuing Treasury bonds for the Federal Reserve to buy. That would stimulate the economy by creating 17 jobs for any remaining Americans who still feel the need to leave the house every morning.

Now I think about it, I seem to remember Secretary O’Neill and Bono were swanking around Uganda and Ethiopia in tribal garb as part of the Irish rocker’s campaign for African debt-forgiveness. Now there’s an idea. And, if it works for Africa, why not closer to home? After all, Bono supported the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and America is way more “heavily indebted” than Uganda will ever be.

Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have.

Who does have it?

Er, the Federal Reserve?

A few years ago, I raised the ceiling on my own house. You can do that — up to a point. It depends on whether your foundation is solid and your framing is structurally sound. But, even if they are, you take it too high and the roof falls in. We’re structurally about as screwed up as you can get, and the foundation is badly cracked. But hey, let’s just jack the roof up a little higher one more time. What could go wrong?

At this stage, nothing does more damage to our “full faith and credit” than business as usual. If you’re going to bandy glib, witless al-Qaeda analogies, the conventional wisdom Paul O’Neill represents is the real suicide bomb here. Men like O’Neill and Geithner think they’re quantitatively easing American decline. They’re not. They’re quantitatively accelerating American collapse.

Onward and upward!

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

Bad Ju Ju

Theistic Evolution is a Universal Acid

Syncretism is the mixing of (often contradictory) beliefs together. A little bit of this and that usually ends up with a mess of internal contradictions. When Christians try it, the outcome is always bad.

In the past couple of decades we have seen a determined effort by Christians to reconcile (or mix together) evolutionism and the Christian faith. The driver has been the same which provoked Immanuel Kant--the attempt both to save reason and make room for faith.

The human faculty of reason is a curious beast. Like all human attributes it can either be servant or master. When it becomes, or is made, master it is just another idolatry. When it is kept a mere servant of true faith it is a wonderful faculty. When it is made master, we call the resulting idolatry "rationalism"--the ultimacy of reason. A close, kissing cousin is "scientism" which asserts the ultimacy of the scientific method. The scientific method is a particular application of reason to the study of the material aspects of the creation.

Rationalism has asserted that all things that exist came into being by chance--by random changes and mutations. It has then constructed a cluster of scientific disciplines in an attempt to prove that this is the case. If rationalist science proves it to be true, then it must be so, since reason alone is the ground of all truth, non?.

But this idolatry has a dagger dicing up its vital organs. It is a variant of the Cretan paradox. If reason shows that all which exists came to pass via random changes then reason itself cannot be the ground of truth. Reason is an illusion with no ultimate truth value at all. The utterly and completely contradictory can exist because things like that happen in stochastically determined existence.

If reason and science "prove" that existence is irrational, irrationality cannot be the case. If irrationality is the case, it could never be proven rationally. Thus, the more evolutionists labour to prove by rational inquiry that mankind evolved via random genetic mutation, the more they thereby contradict the notion. In debates with evolutionists an apt question is to inquire what would disprove the notion. The more astute can trot out various scientific "conditions" which would allegedly disprove evolution, leading to a rejection of the hypothesis. But when you ask them, If reality is ultimately stochastic or random, why would "x" constitute a disproof of evolution? they are left with no reply.  Either that, or they don't understand what stochasticity is.  

Upon this sinking sand of irrational-rationalism modern Western Unbelief has built its Tower of Babel. The edifice is impressive. It controls the Academy, the media, the arts, the law courts. Some Christians have reasoned that, in order to gain respect and a hearing, the Christian faith must accommodate itself to evolution. It must make room for it in the house of God if people are to make room for God.

So, various theories of theistic evolution have been proposed. God created the world by means of evolutionary processes--that is, in the case of the creation of life, by means of random genetic mutations. But let's be clear what is happening here: such Christians are endeavouring to make the teachings of Scripture conform to, or agree with, the dictates of rationalism. But if the teachings of the Bible are to be subject to a higher authority of human reason, then one does not need the Bible at all, or God for that matter. If one would only believe in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus if it could be proved to one's own satisfaction, then why would one bother to become a Christian? A Christ whose work is subject to verification by man and his rationalising is not worth worshipping as the Lord of all. In fact, it would be entirely untruthful and wrong to do so.

Thus, in all forms of theories of  theistic evolution, the God of the Bible "disappears", as one writer describes:

According to many new theistic evolutionists, God chose to "create" the world by setting up an indirected process over which he had no specific control and about which he did not even have foreknowledge of its particular outcomes.  In a very real sense, God created a world that creates itself.  In the words of Anglican theistic evolutionist John Polkinghorne: "an evolutionary universe is theologically undestood as a creation allowed to make itself."

This view is hard to reconcile with traditional conceptions of God's foreknowledge and sovereignty, which becomes apparent when one reads the writings of leading theistic evolutionists.Former Vatican astronomer George Coyne claims that "not even God could know . . . with certainty" that "human life would come to be."  Biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University, author of the popular book, Finding Darwin's God (used in many Christian colleges), flatly denies that God guided the evolutionary process to achieve any particular result--including the development of human beings.  Insisting that "[e]volution is a natural process, and natural processes are indirected," Miller asserts that "mankind's appearance on this planet was not preordained, that we are here . . . as an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out."  John, G. West, "Nothing New Under the Sun", God and Evolution, ed. Jay Richards, p.41.

In all forms of theistic evolution the clear revelation and teachings of Scripture are set aside and replaced with human ratiocinations. It is the Bible which is adapted and conformed and made subject to man. The Bible, quite simply, ceases to be God's revelation. God, as revealed in Holy Scripture no longer exists.  Adopting rationalism in some spheres (e.g. the origins of mankind) does not make room for faith; on the contrary, it destroys true faith.

Both rationalism and the Christian faith are universal acids. They cannot be contained, but eat everything else away. But rationalism does not just eat everything else away--it consumes itself as well. Rationalism can only be built upon irrational ceaseless tossing seas. When chance is ultimate and randomness "governs" the world, no rationality remains.

When Christians vainly attempt to reconcile evolution and the Christian faith, they neither save reason nor make room for faith. The very opposite is the case. They destroy both true faith and its servant, reason.

Sunday Sermon

Easter Sunday, 2011: "A Rest Remains"

Douglas Wilson

Christ Church – Moscow, ID
Sermon #1614 – A.D. April 24, 2011



INTRODUCTION:
We are celebrating Easter, the day on which we commemorate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead. But not only did He rise, but all things were restored in Him, which is something we model, not only annually, but also on a weekly basis. We worship on the first day because we are privileged to have a weekly Easter, a weekly memorial of life from the dead. Eventually we may be able to shake the name Easter (a Germanic fertility goddess, for crying out loud), but in the meantime we can rejoice that the names of the baalim don’t mean much to us anymore (Hos. 2:17). Thursday is Thor’s Day, and who cares anymore? This is an endearing quirk of Englishspeaking peoples—everywhere else Christians have the good sense to speak of Pascha. During the transition, if someone objects that Easter used to be a pagan name, we can reply that this seems fitting—we used to be pagans. But now we are Christians, and Christ is risen.


Easter Sunday 2011 from Canon Wired on Vimeo.