Daily Devotional

The Whole Purpose

C. S. Lewis

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.  Sourced from BibleGateway.

The Self-Betrayal of Women

Willing, Thrilling Degradation

We are told that women loooooove "Fifty Shades of Grey".  Always, when we hear such nonsense, the qualifier must follow.  Some women love the tripe.  But it must be acknowledged that this particular "pushing of the boundaries" has been dominated by women throughout.

For decades, women have ceaselessly complained about a lack of access to the levers of Hollywood power. Well, now they have grabbed hold. “Fifty Shades” is a woman’s story directed by a woman based on a screenplay by a woman which itself based on a woman’s best-selling blockbuster.  [John Nolte, BreitbartHollywood]

In the West we have long been more than a little puzzled by modern, rootless feminists taking up the Islamic burkha and entering into polygamous "marriages" and submitting to some of the worst forms of subjugation.  They love it, don't you know.  Rather they resemble stricken ships with neither steerage nor anchor on a storm tossed sea. And now come the women celebrating their sisters being subjugated to subservience and pain.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” isn’t controversial or envelope pushing, it’s a pathetic rationalization created by the pathetic for the pathetic.  Feminists have gone from resenting having a man open a door for them to being okay with kneeling naked on all fours in front of the door until the man comes in to physically abuse and emotionally degrade them. Congratulations…

You’ve come a long way, baby.

This is where feminism was always going to lead--straight to the manacles.  Feminism is an ideology that draws upon Marxism.  Women have been oppressed by the male dominated power structures of capitalist society.  Women will be redeemed by revolutionary liberation from male oppression.  They would be free from homes, motherhood, children, pregnancy--only then will they be truly human.  Then the revelation comes that the endgame is a degradation and subjugation never imagined--with this one difference.  This time they welcome it and lionise it.

When any human being, any culture, throws off the restraints and constraints of God they do not, thereby, become free.  They become enslaved to anything, in ways and means they both abhor and welcome at the same time.  They come to resemble beaten, broken animals.

Towards a Christian Political Philosophy

The Moral Purposes of Law and Government

Feb 11, 2015

Justin Taylor

Several years ago First Things published an essay entitled “Law and Moral Purpose” by Robert P. George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.  I’ve taken a section of this essay and added questions, numbering, and italics, turning it into an “interview” of sorts.

What are the obligations and purposes of law and government?

(1) To protect

• public health
• safety
• morals

(2) to advance

the general welfare—including, preeminently, protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties.

Wouldn’t this require the granting of vast and sweeping powers to public authority?

No; the general welfare—the common good—requires that government be limited.

Daily Devotional

The Perfect City

He has prepared a city for them. (Hebrews 11:16)

John Piper

No pollution, no graffiti, no trash, no peeling paint or rotting garages, no dead grass or broken bottles, no harsh street talk, no in-your-face confrontations, no domestic strife or violence, no dangers in the night, no arson or lying or stealing or killing, no vandalism and no ugliness.

The city of God will be perfect because God will be in it. He will walk in it and talk in it and manifest himself in every part of it. All that is good and beautiful and holy and peaceful and true and happy will be there, because God will be there.

Perfect justice will be there, and recompense a thousandfold for every pain suffered in obedience to Christ. And it will never deteriorate. In fact, it will shine brighter and brighter as eternity stretches out into unending ages of increasing joy.

When you desire this city above everything else on the earth, then you honor God, who, according to Hebrews 11:10, is the architect and builder of the city. And when God is honored, he is pleased and not ashamed to be called your God.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Letter From the UK (About Show Trials)

Paedophilia and "Date-Rape"

It was Stalin who perfected the "art" of show trials.  Those identified as enemies of the Soviet Union had to be put through a public trial to confirm their guilt before they were executed.  In most cases, the "guilt" consisted of confessions extracted under relentless torture and accusatory statements of former acquaintances who feared a similar fate if they did not comply.  The general public in the Soviet Union loved it.

In the West we have gotten pretty close to show trials, sans the torture.  Peter Hitchens describes one such disturbing manifestation of the "art".  What is one of the last remaining sins which both public and officials condemn and excoriate alike?  Paedophilia.  And this in a context where virtually any sexual deviance or evil is now regarded, even lionized, as a human right, to be celebrated and defended at all costs.

The Global Warming Industry is a Busted Flush

Global Warming: So Dishonest It Makes Enron Look Like a Paragon of Integrity

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon 
9 February 2015

“Fiddling temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,” says Christopher Booker, not pulling his punches. And I think he’s right not to do so. If – as Booker, myself, and few others suspect – the guardians of the world’s land-based temperature records have been adjusting the raw data in order to exaggerate “global warming” then this is indeed a crime against the scientific method unparalleled in history. 

 Sure you could make a case that Lysenkoism or  Hitler’s war to discredit “Jewish science” were more evil but these were confined to discrete geographical regions under specific totalitarian regimes. What’s so extraordinary about the manipulations to the global land-based temperature sets is that they affect every one of us, wherever we live.

Whether you’re an elderly couple in mid-Wales who have just had 20 per cent knocked off the value of your retirement cottage by the new wind farm on the hill opposite, or you’re a tribesman in the South East Asian jungle whose virgin forest home has been trashed to make way for a palm oil plantation to grow eco-friendly biofuels, or you’re a scientist in New Zealand who has been hounded out of your job because your research doesn’t fit the “global warming” narrative, or you’re a science teacher in Ohio who is obliged, whether you like it or not, to lecture your charges on the dread perils of climate change, or you’re a Republican senatorial candidate who has been targeted as a “denier” in a green attack dog campaign financed by Tom Steyer, you’re all victims of the same global scam: a scam perpetrated by a tiny handful of individuals whose junk statistical manipulation of the global climate records have transformed routine weather patterns into the world’s biggest and most influential ever science scare story.

Daily Devotional

Living Witnesses

"And they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus."
Acts 4:13

Charles H. Spurgeon

A Christian should be a striking likeness of Jesus Christ. You have read lives of Christ, beautifully and eloquently written, but the best life of Christ is his living biography, written out in the words and actions of his people. If we were what we profess to be, and what we should be, we should be pictures of Christ; yea, such striking likenesses of him, that the world would not have to hold us up by the hour together, and say, "Well, it seems somewhat of a likeness;" but they would, when they once beheld us, exclaim, "He has been with Jesus; he has been taught of him; he is like him; he has caught the very idea of the holy Man of Nazareth, and he works it out in his life and every-day actions."

A Christian should be like Christ in his boldness. Never blush to own your religion; your profession will never disgrace you: take care you never disgrace that. Be like Jesus, very valiant for your God. Imitate him in your loving spirit; think kindly, speak kindly, and do kindly, that men may say of you, "He has been with Jesus."

Club Memberships Must be Paid

Second Rate Kabuki Theatre

It seems inevitable that New Zealand will be off on another military adventure to the other side of the world because . . . because . . . because it's inevitable, that's why.

We were cynically amused the other day when some folk (a politician and a few odd bloggers) were offended when a member of Britain's ruling class urbanely suggested that New Zealand needs to send troops to combat ISIS because it belongs to a club.

Mr Dunne also launched a stinging attack on comments made in New Zealand last week by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond when he said: "Frankly we've got used to New Zealand being there alongside us, alongside the US, the UK, Australia, as part of the family." . . . .  Mr Dunne, a minister and the leader of United Future, described Mr Hammond as a "patronising figure from abroad loftily telling us we are in the club, we are part of the family and it would be lovely to have you along for the next round of unmitigated slaughter".

But the British Foreign Secretary was telling the truth.

Credibility in Tatters

Lies, Damned Lies, and Scientists

We are told that all educated and rational people respect science and scientific disciplines.  The respect is to high that we have even erected an idol, called Scientism, which propounds that only matter exists, so that the study of matter is our sole prophet.  But now science lies discredited.  This particular idol  "lies broke in the Temple of Ba'al".

Public science, official science, state-propagated science has had its credibility riven to shreds.  Who would want now to be a scientist?  It has become a thoroughly discredited profession.  James Delingpole explains how this has come to pass.

Daily Devotional

Institutional From the Beginning

On Church

C. S. Lewis

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in Words to Live By
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Sourced from BibleGateway.

Clutching The Comfort Blanket

It All Depends . . . 

We have commented frequently on the compulsion in the West to self-dissimulate over Islam.  When it becomes more Islamic and less Western in its practices, Islam is routinely described as extremist.  A classic in the genre appeared recently in one of New Zealand's most widely read blogs, entitled How widespread is extreme Islam? In the context of the article, "extreme" Islam means an Islamic society which practises Sharia law--which just happens to be historical and traditional Islamic law.  To be fair, the article develops the case that "extremist" Islam is actually much more widespread than Western propaganda generally avers. 

"Extremism" is in the eyes of the beholder.  The West in general has a Euro-centric and existential perspective on these matters.  Essentially, extremist Islam is any manifestation of the Islamic religion, or an Islamic society, which does not follow the values and ethics and historical legal traditions of the West.  As Edward Said would have said, this represents a profoundly arrogant, self-centred and xenophobic perspective.  On the other hand, to Islamic societies, the West is extremist--so extreme in its degeneration and evil that it warrants the title, The Great Satan.  The term "extremist" is of little meaning, and can be understood only by reference to one's starting point.

Letter From the UK (About Fiddling Temperature Data)

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming 

By Christopher Booker 

The Telegraph

8 February, 2015

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

Daily Devotional

Strive Strenuously to Return

"I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee."
Isaiah 44:22

Charles H. Spurgeon

Attentively observe the instructive similitude: our sins are like a cloud. As clouds are of many shapes and shades, so are our transgressions. As clouds obscure the light of the sun, and darken the landscape beneath, so do our sins hide from us the light of Jehovah's face, and cause us to sit in the shadow of death. They are earth-born things, and rise from the miry places of our nature; and when so collected that their measure is full, they threaten us with storm and tempest. Alas! that, unlike clouds, our sins yield us no genial showers, but rather threaten to deluge us with a fiery flood of destruction. O ye black clouds of sin, how can it be fair weather with our souls while ye remain?

Let our joyful eye dwell upon the notable act of divine mercy--"blotting out." God himself appears upon the scene, and in divine benignity, instead of manifesting his anger, reveals his grace: he at once and forever effectually removes the mischief, not by blowing away the cloud, but by blotting it out from existence once for all. Against the justified man no sin remains, the great transaction of the cross has eternally removed his transgressions from him. On Calvary's summit the great deed, by which the sin of all the chosen was forever put away, was completely and effectually performed.

Practically let us obey the gracious command, "return unto me." Why should pardoned sinners live at a distance from their God? If we have been forgiven all our sins, let no legal fear withhold us from the boldest access to our Lord. Let backslidings be bemoaned, but let us not persevere in them. To the greatest possible nearness of communion with the Lord, let us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, strive mightily to return. O Lord, this night restore us!

The Triumph of the Left

We're All Marxists Now

In his book, The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens describes and and seeks to explain how there is no longer any substantial ideological debates in the UK.  Rather there is an ideological consensus, shared by both "left" and "right".  That consensus is nurtured in the bosoms and minds of an elitist few who now dominate the Labour and Conservative parties.

Hitchens illustrates this situation by contrasting the UK with Russia.

Russia is no longer an ideological state, externally or internally.  It no longer seeks global power, and in some ways is less interested in the minds of its citizens than are "Western" countries which demand increasing obedience to the formulas of political correctness.  In Russia you may hold what private opinions you like.  Just do not challenge the state.  In Britain, your private opinions may be reported to the authorities and get you into trouble, even if you believe your actions are part of normal life and you have not wish to challenge the state.  This paradox is one of the most alarming facts about the modern world, and is unfortunately too little understood.  . . .

Here as everywhere else in the formerly anti-Marxist "West", the supposedly beaten Left have become the establishment.  The Left and their utopian ideas dominate the civil service, the arts, broadcasting, the academy, the bench of bishops, the courts and the police.

They now censor (and censure) speech and thought, through the formulas of political correctness.  They place narrower limits on the speech and writing of others than the Lord Chamberlain ever did on the London stage.  At the same time they dispense with any rules that might get in their own way.  A liberal will defend to the death your right to disagree with her.  Disagree with her, and she will call the police. [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning (London: Continuum, , 2009) p. viii, ix.]

The same realities hold true in New Zealand--with one major difference.

Business People Dangerous When It Comes to Politics

Banal Business Naivete

Stephen Franks
February 14th, 2015

Few business people are good at democratic politics. They expect what works in business to work in democracy. They’re frustrated by the messy necessity to maintain a working consensus, by multiple conflicting objectives, and by the unreliability of delegates.

They think that if only the right people were in charge, the best structures and systems would be like those in business, where everyone accepts single prevailing decisions from nominated rulers, and he who pays, rules.
Business people who get embroiled in politics commonly hate it so much they eject before they flame out. Those who survive and learn may be small in number but they are among the best we have, and we owe them a lot for their patience.

Many good business people are equally hopeless in assessing policy. I could not count the number of times I’ve heard the idiocy that the Resource Management Act ("RMA") is a good law, with nothing seriously wrong with it except how it is administered by council people who are stupid or wrongly motivated. These business defenders have no idea that they’ve just explained exactly why the RMA is  so badly conceived and written as to besmirch the rule of law.

Daily Devotional

Better Than Money, Sex, and Power

Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. (Hebrews 10:35)

John Piper

We need to ponder the superiority of God as our great reward over all that the world has to offer. If we don’t, we will love the world like everyone else and live like every one else.

So take the things that drive the world and ponder how much better and more abiding God is. Take money or sex or power and think about them in relation to death. Death will take away every one of them. If that is what you live for, you won't get much, and what you get, you lose.

But God's treasure is abiding. It lasts. It goes beyond death. It’s better than money because God owns all the money and he is our Father. “All things are yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23).

It's better than sex. Jesus never had sexual relations, and he was the most full and complete human that ever will exist. Sex is a shadow — an image — of a greater reality, of a relationship and pleasure that will make sex seem like a yawn.

The reward of God is better than power. There is no greater human power than to be a child of the Almighty God. “Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3).

And so it goes on and on. Everything the world has to offer, God is better and more abiding.
There is no comparison. God wins — every time. The question is: will we have him? Will we wake up from the trance of this stupefying world and see and believe and rejoice and love?

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Terrible Deeds

Horses for Courses

President Obama took an opportunity recently to lecture Christians about "getting on high horses" from which to criticize Islam and Islamic extremism.  There was a good deal of  violence and depredation in the history of Christianity, he solemnly hectored.

President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians "in the name of Christ."  "Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."  "So it is not unique to one group or one religion," Obama said. "There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."

Wow.  Glad we have got that straight.

Except that poor ol' Pressie Obama learnt his history in the arms of Edward Said and Marxist historians who were more in love with their abstract ideology than with actual history.  (Said taught at Columbia, Obama's old school, developing a theory of Western interaction with the Middle East, known as Orientalism.) Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly one which pillories imperialism, colonialism, and oppression as a Western disease.  The Crusades and the Inquisition, eh.  That's where Christian evils were equivalent to the present depredations of ISIS.

Back to the Future

The Revival of the Nixon Doctrine

Here is an interesting piece on the Truman versus the Nixon doctrines on US Foreign Policy.  It argues that not by intention, but by neglect and incompetence, Obama has moved the US from the previously revived Truman Doctrine under Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton and the Bushes to adopt, de facto, the Nixon Doctrine.  It appears there is something to be said in behalf of benign neglect.

The World Is Figuring Out How to Fight ISIS

No Thanks to Obama

by Virgil 
8 Feb 2015
BreitbartNews

Yes, it’s unfortunate that the US has a president, Barack Obama, who consistently sees things from the Muslim point of view.  Even the Obamaphilic reporter Juliet Eilperin, writing for the Obamaphilic Washington Post, had to admit, “President Obama has never been one to go easy on America.”  With a pro-Muslim commander-in-chief, and with the administration insisting that “climate change” is the greatest threat we face, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the villainous Islamic State is on the march in the Middle East.

That’s the bad news.  And yet, paradoxically, there’s also some good news.  Moreover, the good news points to a new kind of better strategy for the US—or, more precisely, to the revival of a successful old strategy.

Daily Devotional

Better Persons

"He shall save his people from their sins."
Matthew 1:21

Charles H. Spurgeon

Many persons, if they are asked what they understand by salvation, will reply, "Being saved from hell and taken to heaven." This is one result of salvation, but it is not one tithe of what is contained in that boon.

It is true our Lord Jesus Christ does redeem all his people from the wrath to come; he saves them from the fearful condemnation which their sins had brought upon them; but his triumph is far more complete than this. He saves his people "from their sins." Oh! sweet deliverance from our worst foes. Where Christ works a saving work, he casts Satan from his throne, and will not let him be master any longer.

No man is a true Christian if sin reigns in his mortal body. Sin will be in us--it will never be utterly expelled till the spirit enters glory; but it will never have dominion. There will be a striving for dominion--a lusting against the new law and the new spirit which God has implanted--but sin will never get the upper hand so as to be absolute monarch of our nature. Christ will be Master of the heart, and sin must be mortified. The Lion of the tribe of Judah shall prevail, and the dragon shall be cast out.

Professor! is sin subdued in you? If your life is unholy your heart is unchanged, and if your heart is unchanged you are an unsaved person. If the Saviour has not sanctified you, renewed you, given you a hatred of sin and a love of holiness, he has done nothing in you of a saving character.

The grace which does not make a man better than others is a worthless counterfeit. Christ saves his people, not in their sins, but from them. "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord." "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." If not saved from sin, how shall we hope to be counted among his people. Lord, save me now from all evil, and enable me to honour my Saviour.

Public Swamps, Politicians, and Their Cronies

The Dangers of Mates Having a Drink Together

Crony capitalism is a despicable thing.  It occurs when government sidles up to businesses to offer favours and rewards not available to competitors if they will do the government's bidding.  It's a "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" situation.  Publicly it's sold as a "win-win" for all.  The reverse also occurs.  Businesses sidle up to government to lobby for contracts and benefices.  The quid pro quo is often support in the form of funds for political campaigns or, worse, money in the back pockets of politicians.

All governments and politicians, of whatever stripe (ideologically left, right, and centre) are susceptible to such corruption.  Power corrupts.  Businessmen and private capital are entirely corruptible when they get close to power.  Politicians are already well down the track, their hubris driving them on.

The only way to resist the invasion of such rodents gnawing at the body politic is to maintain a high wall of separation between politicians and the decision makers who will decide which contracts and tenders will be awarded to whom.

The Great Divide

Two Parents, Radically Unalike

The word misanthrope used to refer to someone who hated the human race.  Under the delicate touch of feminist ideology the term has morphed into a sexist perspective, referring to someone who hates males.  Dana at Patterico describes the case of one who is truly--and literally--misanthropic.

The answer to the question “What makes a good man?” depends on who you are asking. For one ardent feminist named Lana, her answer would unarguably be that to suggest a man could be good is itself a contradiction in terms and thus, the question is moot. Never the terms shall meet. Because of her misandry, Lana refused to allow her baby boy entry into the world where he would have had the opportunity to prove his mother wrong:

Daily Devotional

God is Love

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person.

If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often some- thing quite different: they really mean ‘Love is God’. They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’. They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a [static] person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Sourced from BibleGateway.

Nothing Here, Move Along

Equivocating to Save Face

One of the most puerile of all informal fallacies is the fallacy of equivocation.  A protagonist attempts to advance his argument by wilfully (or mistakenly) changing the meaning of key terms, thus failing miserably in the attempt to prove his case.  Here is an example: "all banks are beside rivers; therefore, the financial institution where I deposit my money is beside a river."

Political partisans are notorious for this kind of verbal legerdemain.  We were treated to the ignominious spectacle recently when someone had the temerity to suggest that Islamic enclaves in various European countries had created "no-go zones" for the rest of the population.  The resulting brouhaha and explosions of self-righteous umbrage were worthy of Krakatoa.    Fox News staff were forced to retract and apologize for allowing interviewees to utter such tosh without correcting them on the spot.  The Mayor of Paris insisted that nothing even resembling no-go zones existed in France.  A complete and utter fabrication, she fulminated.

But the fallacy of (wilful) equivocation was at work again.  The Mayor of Paris and her attendant Greek chorus were insisting that nowhere in France was there to be found a spot where one would be confronted with barbed wire, fifteen foot tall electrified fences, barricades and tank traps with armed guards at gates, and signs on the gates saying: "Islamic Only Zone.  All Infidels Forbidden Entry."  On this basis, one may safely conclude that Islamic No-Go Zones indeed do not exist in France, nor in the Seychelles, nor in Mecca, nor on the moon.

Bon Mots

 He Thought It an Impertinence, Sir

The story is recounted of Benjamin Jowett, when he was Master of Balliol College in Oxford.  Apparently someone asked him at dinner, "Dr. Jowett, we would like to know what your opinion of God is," to which he is said to have replied, "I should think it a great impertinence were I to express my opinion about God.  The only constant anxiety of my life is to know what is Gods' opinion of me."  [Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2014), p.374.]

Daily Devotional

Gladly Not God

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength! (Psalm 96:7)

John Piper

Here’s what I think would be some of what’s included in a full experience of what the psalmist calls for when he says, “Ascribe [=give] to the Lord strength.”

First, by God’s grace, we give attention to God and see that he is strong. We give heed to his strength. Then we give our approval to the greatness of his strength. We give due regard to its worth.  We find his strength to be wonderful. But what makes this wonder a “giving” kind of wonder is that we are especially glad that the greatness of the strength is his and not ours.

We feel a profound fitness in the fact that he is infinitely strong and not us. We love the fact that this is so. We do not envy God for his strength. We are not covetous of his power. We are full of joy that all strength is his. Everything in us rejoices to go out to behold this power, as if we had arrived at the celebration of the victory of a distance runner who had beaten us in the race, and we found our greatest joy in admiring his strength, rather than resenting our loss.

A Very Simple Document

A Treaty of Perpetual Umbrage and Grievance

Usually around this time of the year, when Waitangi Day rolls around in New Zealand, we end up with a couple or more posts on the crass historical revisionism which makes the Treaty of Waitangi a wax nose twisted into the shape of a pig's snout.

Dr Don Brash was asked to speak-in-reply to Dr Gareth Morgan's attempt to push the latest revisionist nonsense about the Treaty of Waitangi--our founding national document.  (Incidentally, both the good doctor's are qualified in economics, not history.  Nevertheless, both are modern men, opinionated, and able to argue a case.)

As expected, Don Brash got little to no air time in the media; what little comment was pejorative.  Gareth Morgan, whose cause c'elebre changes by the month, got plenty of coverage.  What is even more telling is that Don Brash is always framed negatively by the media and the Commentariat which suggests he may be saying something worth hearing.  Some years back he gave an address which catapulted him into political popularity to the extent that he almost won the following national election.  That speech directly attacked the modernist idea that Maori had special privileges in New Zealand.  There was an outpouring of popular support for Brash over this issue, not the least due to the fact that he spoke not with incendiary rhetoric, but laid out some pretty cogent arguments.

Letter From the UK (About Multi-Culti Britain)

Multi-Cultural England

Are You Feeling The Progressive Diversity Yet?

by Simon Kent 
6 Feb 2015
BreitbartLondon

Have a look around. Go on. See if you can recognise the country you live in.

Take a quick shufti at the all welcome, multi-culti, hail-fellow-well-met, step right in, pull up a pew and make yourself at home England you may have been lucky enough to have grown up in.

What better time to pause and reflect as we celebrate 800 years of the primacy of Magna Carta; exult in its written guarantees that curb the power of authoritarian rule, define the limits on taxation, ensure the right to trial by jury and guarantee the rule of law for all. No exceptions. We’re rubbing along quite nicely, don’t you think? Or not. Depends on where you’re looking and how you feel about the conceit of state-imposed multiculturalism.

Rotherham might be a suitable place to start.

This past week we have been treated (if that’s the word I’m looking for) to the news that years of failure by Labour’s Rotherham borough council to fully discharge its duties has seen more than 1500 young girls sexually abused, tortured and prostituted for financial gain by men of Pakistani heritage. The evidence is contained in a damning official report by Louise Casey that concluded police had failed to pursue Pakistani perpetrators for fear of “offending the community”.

Talk about having our noses rubbed in the sacred cause of racial diversity.

Daily Devotional

Poor Weak Prayers

"Praying always."
Ephesians 6:18

C. H. Spurgeon

What multitudes of prayers we have put up from the first moment when we learned to pray. Our first prayer was a prayer for ourselves; we asked that God would have mercy upon us, and blot out our sin. He heard us. But when he had blotted out our sins like a cloud, then we had more prayers for ourselves. We have had to pray for sanctifying grace, for constraining and restraining grace; we have been led to crave for a fresh assurance of faith, for the comfortable application of the promise, for deliverance in the hour of temptation, for help in the time of duty, and for succour in the day of trial.

We have been compelled to go to God for our souls, as constant beggars asking for everything. Bear witness, children of God, you have never been able to get anything for your souls elsewhere. All the bread your soul has eaten has come down from heaven, and all the water of which it has drank has flowed from the living rock--Christ Jesus the Lord. Your soul has never grown rich in itself; it has always been a pensioner upon the daily bounty of God; and hence your prayers have ascended to heaven for a range of spiritual mercies all but infinite. Your wants were innumerable, and therefore the supplies have been infinitely great, and your prayers have been as varied as the mercies have been countless.

Then have you not cause to say, "I love the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplication"? For as your prayers have been many, so also have been God's answers to them. He has heard you in the day of trouble, has strengthened you, and helped you, even when you dishonoured him by trembling and doubting at the mercy-seat. Remember this, and let it fill your heart with gratitude to God, who has thus graciously heard your poor weak prayers. "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits."

More Faux Outrage

Appalling Ignorance.  Beyond Appalling.

A local blogger posted the following fulmination:

UK Police lose the plot

February 12th, 2015 at 7:00 am by David Farrar The Independent reports:

A police force was forced to apologise today after one of its officers told a newsagent to hand over the names of four people in the name of community cohesion, after they bought a commemorative edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Wiltshire police confirmed that it had deleted the names of the buyers from its system, which were collected after officers toured shops warning newsagents to be vigilant during an “assessment of community tensions” in the sleepy market town following the attacks in the French capital in January.

Appalling. Beyond appalling. You buy Charlie Hebdo and the UK Police put you on a watch list. The Police officers in question should transfer to Saudi Arabia.

Hat Tip: No Right

Sounds really bad.  That's the way the media portrayed it in the UK.  But here is the Wiltshire Police statement:

Letter From the UK (About a Sinister Court)

A 'sinister court’ mocks justice again

The workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection are a national scandal 

Christopher Booker

The Telegraph

31 January, 2015

[We have published several pieces recently on the decline of civil liberties in the UK, and the stirrings of an authoritarian state.  Christopher Booker writes of another instance of Leviathan stirring to life. Ed.]

My article on January 3, headlined “The most sinister court in Britain strikes yet again”, has for the past month been the “Most Viewed” Comment item on the Telegraph website. Its theme was the workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection, which has only recently begun to emerge from the shadows – that’s thanks to the stalwart efforts of our top family judge, Lord Justice Munby, to lift something of the suffocating veil of secrecy shrouding the courts over which he now presides.

My report centred on the astonishing treatment of Kathleen Danby, a 72-year-old grandmother, who first hit the headlines last year when it was revealed that – two months earlier – she had been sentenced in her absence to three months in prison by Judge Martin Cardinal, for breaking an injunction by hugging her granddaughter who had run away from “care” 170 times.