Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

To Curvet and Simper in the Pulpit

Posted on Wednesday, September 18, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

The sodomy challenge — and all related sexuality challenges — present us with a glorious opportunity. It is a glorious opportunity that the Spirit has cleverly disguised as a real hazard to our future comfort and well-being.

For the gospel is a troublemaker. Let me explain that first and then come back to the sodomy challenge.
It is quite true that the gospel is good news. It is true that the gospel is a message of salvation and redemption. It is a message of buoyancy and hope. All this is true, and the one who preaches the message should be lifted up by the glory of God’s everlasting kindness to us. It is kindness.

But it is never heard that way initially.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

October 03

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. —Romans 16:20

Devotional:
But, as the promise respecting breaking the head of Satan belongs to Christ and his members in common, I therefore deny that the faithful can ever be conquered or overwhelmed by him.

They are frequently filled with consternation, but recover themselves again; they fall by the violence of his blows, but are raised up again; they are wounded, but not mortally; finally, they labor through their whole lives in such a manner as at last to obtain the victory.

Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Crime, Part IV

Miles to Go

In his book, Badlands David Fraser makes the point that the NZ Police force is undermanned.  To be sure, no-one appreciates a fat, bloated inefficient government department.  But policing is a core government responsibility, and even less appreciation should apply when a police force is overwhelmed by crime. 

But is it really true that the police force is undermanned and that crime is winning?  The current received wisdom is that for the first time in a long time we are winning the battle against crime.  The government has set targets for fighting crime: by June 2017, reduce total crime by 15 per cent, violent crime by 20 per cent, and youth crime by 5 per cent.  In July 2013 it announced progress made:

In the past year, youth crime fell by 12 per cent and total crime by 6 per cent. Justice Minister Judith Collins said young people made up a third of all arrests, and if they could be kept out of court in their teens then they stood a good chance of staying out of the justice system for life. NZ Herald.

So far, so good.  Will it continue?

Letter From Australia (About Human Maggots)

David Suzuki drives me crazy

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, September 25, 2013 (7:48am)

The Daily Telegraph
  


DAVID Suzuki’s appearance on the ABC flagship program Q&A spelled the death of any credibility left in the fag end of the climate alarm movement.  The affable climate alarmist is described by his acolytes in the Australian media as “iconic scientist and thinker”. He is really the Canadian Tim Flannery, with an expertise in insects rather than mammals.

At 77, Suzuki describes himself modestly as an “elder”. But his performance indicates he only has mastered the age bit of the equation, more than the wisdom.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

October 02

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple. —Psalm 27:4

Devotional:
Call to mind, I beseech you, the continual sighs you have been heaving for so long a time. Although you had many kinds of grief, I doubt not that your chief regret was that of not being permitted to devote yourself entirely to the service of God.

Consider well, whether you have not vowed daily before God, that you wished for nothing but the means of getting rid of the servitude in which you were held. Now that your wish is granted, rely upon it that God holds you to your promise.

Thinning Crowds

Burgeoning Doubt

As expected, there has been much ado about very little.  The UN IPCC report on global warming, and the faithful troops are trying to gin up the crusade once again.  Most acknowledge that the drive to save the planet and humankind had become desultory and distracted, to say the least.  One might even say the febricity has cooled off.  But now, at last, an event.  The IPCC is about to publish. The news media, the chattering classes, the halls of academia have something to trumpet forth once again. 

Except that it is all empty theatre.  You can sense it.  Our own politicians betray the cause as lost.  John Key, the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, once was very public about our need to "play our part" so that we did not lose access to our vital trading markets.  Being good climate citizens was necessary to maintain open and free trade with other countries.  Now, nary a peep.  Now there is strong global demand for New Zealand's agricultural exports.  No-one cares a fig about our carbon dioxide emissions.  The economic idiocy of "food miles" has now been thoroughly debunked.  Concern over global warming is passe.

But that will not stop the true believers having another go.  They remind us of rabid fans trying to re-capture the glory of a once-dominant sports team.  Out come the chants and the cheerleaders, only to be overwhelmed by their own echoes reverberating in a near deserted stadium. 

Below are a couple of pieces illustrating the actual situation in the public sphere.  Firstly, James Delingpole, writing in The Telegraph:

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

Ten Theses on Postmodernism

Posted on Sunday, September 29, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

This important post originally ran May 10, 2010 at Blog and Mablog.


1. Truth is objective, ultimate, absolute, personal, alive, and triune.

2. Because of this ultimate reality, it is possible for creatures who were fashioned by this living God to know Him as the personal and ultimate truth, as well as to know lesser truths in the created world that we see all around us. We know Him apart from that world, and we know Him through and in that world. We know. Some of us only wish we didn’t.

3. Objective truth does not mean uninterpreted truth. Objectivity in our knowledge of truth means that our interpretation lines up with God’s interpretation of it.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

October 01

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. —Psalm 142:2

Devotional:
He tells us still more clearly in the next verse that he disburdened his cares unto God. To pour out one's thoughts and tell over his afflictions implies the reverse of those perplexing anxieties which men brood over inwardly to their own distress, and by which they torture themselves, and are chafed by their afflictions rather than led to God; or it implies the reverse of those frantic exclamations to which others give utterance who find no comfort in the superintending providence of God.

A New Oxymoron

Government Teachers

We have long been sceptical of the current fad in government schools of equating higher quality education with IT gadgets.  Should new entrant students be taught to write and vocalise numbers and how to manipulate them in order to multiply, divide and subtract, or should they be provided with calculators and taught how to use them?  Why, the latter of course.  Increasingly, avant guarde educational theory in many circles equates education with competence in operating machines.

Cue the highly advanced, superior, modern classroom.  An ipad on every desk, er. . . seat.  But, then, even desks are so last century.  Teachers now interact with students via private networks or e-mail.  Neither teacher nor students we are told  ever need to meet face to face.  It is "inevitable" they will be replaced by virtual classrooms.  There is existing technology which is perfectly capable of constructing this now.  It's only the archaic structures of our ridiculously outmoded education system that are holding us back.  Welcome to the wonderful world of cutting edge government education. 

Michelle Malkin has a couple of examples of how superior this new pedagogical wave will be--and how pockets of vested interests will be lined with gold along the way.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Red Queen in Alice

Posted on Monday, September 23, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

So the House has now passed a bill that defunds Obamacare. The president is miffed, and certain Republican establishment honchos are apoplectic.

These realists of the right say that this quixotic business has got to stop because “you can’t govern from one half of one third of government.” If all you have is the House, then you can’t be expected to do anything until you win the Senate, and the White House. Once you have done that, then you will be in position to do all the swell things that the Republicans wouldn’t do the last time they had the White House and Senate.

Now it quite true that you can’t govern with one half of one third of our government. That is very true. But I don’t want them to govern. I want them to stop governing.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 30

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC website.

Bible Text:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. —John 3:16

Devotional:
"He gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him may not perish." This, he says, is the proper look of faith, to be fixed on Christ, in whom it beholds the breast of God filled with love; this is a firm and enduring support, to rely on the death of Christ as the only pledge of that love.

The word "only-begotten" is emphatic, to magnify the fervor of the love of God towards us. For as men are not easily convinced that God loves them, in order to remove all doubt, he has expressly stated that we are so very dear to God that, on our account, he did not even spare his only-begotten Son.

Global Warming Games

More Time Please

There is a very fine line these days between science and propaganda.  Old school science--that is, science in the good old days--was largely populated by a bunch of ruthless sceptics who believed very little, challenged everything, and wanted experimental proof.

This is not to say that every scientist believed he had to "go back to the beginning" and re-work every experiment to prove for himself the laws of motion or the veracity reflected in the periodic table of the elements.  As Michael Polanyi has argued, all scientists operate within a tradition of knowledge passed on from practitioners to neophytes that represented what he called tacit knowledge.  But, let a few experiments throw up results that are not expected, and old school scientists would get a rush of blood to the head.  The labs would be booked out for months, arguments would rage, and debates would go long into the night.

These days much of this rigour has disappeared--particularly in those "disciplines" where proof or disproof cannot be offered via experimental tests.

Leviathan Stirs

NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell's imagination – Alan Rusbridger

Guardian editor says depth of NSA surveillance programs greatly exceed anything the 1984 author could have imagined

The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell's 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday.

Speaking in the wake of a series of revelations in the Guardian about the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: "Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time.

"This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom," he said.

Read More:

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 27

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore. —Psalm 37:27

Devotional:
If the meek possess the earth, then everyone, as he regards his own happiness and peace, should also endeavor to walk uprightly, and to apply himself to works of beneficence.

It should also be observed, that he connects these two things: first, that the faithful should strictly do good; and, secondly, that they should restrain themselves from doing evil; and this he does not without good reason; for as is shown in the thirty-fourth Psalm, it often happens that the same person who not only acts kindly towards certain persons, but even with a bountiful hand deals out largely of his own, is yet all the while plundering others, and amassing by extortion the resources by means of which he displays his liberality.

"Peaceful" Activism--a Greenpeace Artform

Not Playing By the Rules

We confess being guilty of the odd smile or two when news broke that Greenpeace has tilted its lance at Russia.  This is not to say, of course, that the Russian record when it comes to preservation of the environment is stellar.  Far from it.  But Greenpeace has a higher calling than ordinary human beings.  It is more than willing to disregard the law when it comes to its own particular, peculiar version of  rabid environmentalism.  When the "fragile" arctic environment was deemed to be at risk from Russian offshore drilling, Greenpeace engaged in its trademark "peaceful" protest which involved assailing and climbing up on the rig.  The Russian coastguard steamed in and arrested the lot, seizing its boat.

Now Greenpeace has been getting away with this sort of thing for years in the West.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 26

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do. —I Timothy 1:4

Devotional:
These are the two causes for which many forsake the pure doctrine of salvation; namely, because they are moved with their pride to seek out new matters, and God will have his students to be humble.

Do we wish to profit in his school? Let us have this humility, not to presume to know too much, but only to be taught by him as he pleases. And again, there are others so shallow that they have no desire to master what is contained in the gospel, and wish often to change their pasture, and think that their ears are being abused if anyone repeat often to them a thing which is to their profit; as when we preach of the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of his grace, it seems to them that they already know this too well and that they are too much accustomed to it.

Socialist Rationing Required For the Rear End

Not Sublime, But Ridiculous In the Extreme

A new human right has been discovered in the bowels of Venezuela--toilet paper.  This will be dubbed as one of the great advances of civilisation in the 21st century, to be sure.

Venezuela Orders National Guard to Oversee Toilet Paper Factory
By Nathan Crooks – Sep 20, 2013 11:30 PM GMT+0200

Venezuela’s government issued an order to occupy toilet paper producer Manufacturas de Papel C.A. as the South American country struggles to abate shortages of consumer goods.

National price regulator Sundecop will temporally take over plants owned by Manpa, as the Caracas-based company is known, to verify production processes and distribution before placing them under the watch of the National Guard, the agency said today in an e-mailed statement.

“The action taken at the producer of toilet paper, sanitary napkins and disposable diapers corresponds to the obligation of the state to guarantee the normal supply of primary necessities,” Sundecop said in the statement.

Books

Esteemed Theologian, J. I. Packer on Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pinpoint the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God’s amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ’s and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. . . . [H]is constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer.

—The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works (Orbis, 2004) vii.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 26

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website.

Bible Text:
But he shall say, 1 am no prophet, 1 am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle from my youth. —Zechariah 13:5

Devotional:
Zechariah mentions these two particulars—the false prophets will give up their office and that they will then spend their labor in doing what is right and just, supporting themselves in a lawful and innocent manner, and affording aid to their brethren. It is the first thing in repentance when they who had been previously the servants of Satan in the work of deception cease to deal in falsehoods, and thus put an end to their errors.

Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Criminality, Part III

Our Most Dynamic Growth Industry

There is one proposition the criminal justice system in New Zealand is pretty much agreed upon: prisons are bad.  For some they represent cruel and unusual punishment.  For others they are bad because they socialise inmates into becoming career criminals.   Still others reject prisons because they put the full responsibility for criminal acts upon the criminal and ignore the social causes of crime.  They are society's way of deflecting blame upon itself on to others.  Yet others regard prisons as dehumanizing institutions, akin to the evil of slavery.  Others--more pragmatically inclined--point to the high recidivism rates which provide compelling evidence that prisons fail to deter criminals, on the one hand, and fail to rehabilitate, on the other.  Yet others complain about the costs of building and running prisons. 

Consequently, the criminal justice system in New Zealand represent not so much a "war on crime" but a "war on prisons".  This is the argument David Fraser makes in his book, Badlands. NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa, Auckland: Howling At The Moon Publishing, Ltd, 2011.) What is the evidence?

"Tolers, You Absolutely Astonish Me"

Lewis and Tolkien Debate Myths and Lies

On Twitter, @TonyReinke points out that “On the evening of September 19, 1931, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis went for a walk, one of the most important walks in church history.”

At this stage, Lewis was not a Christian; Tolkien was.  Shortly after this conversation, Lewis became a Christian, being "surprised by joy", as he put it. There are sketchy accounts of the conversation--some from Lewis himself.  Tolkien wrote Lewis a poem to make his points more clear, entitled Mythopoeia.

After that late-night conversation with Lewis, Tolkien wrote a poem called Mythopoeia, in which he set out his views of myth, legend, and fairy story.  he wrote this poem for Lewis, and he put at the head of his poem the words that Lewis had used: "For one who said that myths 'are lies breathed through silver".

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him.  Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost or wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned . . . . 

[Jerram Barrs, Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2013.)   p.94f.]

Here’s a dramatic reenactment of their conversation, which attempts to capture the issues if not the exact conversation itself:

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 25

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness. —Psalm 143:10

Devotional:
"Teach me that I may do thy will." He now rises to something higher, praying not merely for deliverance from outward troubles, but, what is of still greater importance, for the guidance of God's Spirit, that he might not decline to the right hand or to the left, but be kept in the path of rectitude.


This is a request which should never be forgotten when temptations assail us with great severity, as it is peculiarly difficult to submit to God without resorting to unwarrantable methods of relief.

North Korea and Potemkin Villages

Useful Idiots

One of the most cringe-inducing episodes in recent Western history was the infatuation of the majority of intellectuals in the first half of the last century with the Soviet Union.  Whilst Stalin was ravening his subjects with famine, Western intellectuals were praising the wonder of a socialist economy.  They did this, of course, because long ago they had become converted to socialist ideology.  The Soviet Union was the leading exemplar of the secular New Jerusalem.  The standard eschatology of the time was that capitalism and private property was going to fall apart under their own contradictions whilst the Soviet New Model Man would emerge superior and the way of the future.  The intellectual avante guard became willing dupes.

The constant procession of Western admirers was treated to all sorts of displays of the wonder of the New Model Economy.  They dutifully gooed and gahhed. Stalin even ordered New Model Towns to be made--subsequently labelled Potemkin Villages after a consort of the Russian Tsarina Catherine II--which were essentially like Hollywood movie sets.  Through these Western visitors were duty conducted, dutifully to return back home raving at the wonderful increase in housing quality and living standards being enjoyed in the Soviet Union.  Meanwhile, eastward, beyond the Urals, the Gulag camps were hard at work.

In recent weeks we have had our own Potemkin moment.

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

No Need for Right Wing Devils

Posted on Saturday, July 13, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

Jesus teaches us to expect slander, to expect misrepresentation. Further, He teaches us to believe that when this happens, it is a sign that we are gaining on it. In Luke 6:22-23, Jesus tells us to rejoice and leap for joy when we reviled, excluded, shunned, and held in contempt. In Lattimore’s translation of that passage, Jesus tells us that we are “to frolic” when this has happened.

We are able to do this, Jesus teaches, because we know the outcome of the story. We have the big picture. We know that great is our reward in Heaven. But being heavenly-minded is not an opiate — being heavenly-minded brings real earthly perspective.

Conservative activists who are surprised or indignant at the gross lopsidedness of the whole system are being foolish because they are expecting the devil to be a gentleman. They are expecting him to fight clean, and to avoid every form of fighting dirty. What makes us think he might do that?

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 24

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep hefore her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. —Isaiah 53:7

Devotional:
Moreover, we are also exhorted to conform to his example; not that we shall be able to humiliate ourselves perfectly before God, but yet we must force ourselves towards it. I say, that when God is pleased to chastise us and we feel great roughness at his hand, so that it seems as if we are overwhelmed, we must nevertheless keep silence, confessing that God is righteous and fair, and not letting one murmur be heard from our mouths.

Let us glorify God by our silence; even as if we were poor sinners convicted of their crimes and without an excuse.

Howlers

The Beginning of the End

The New Zealand government's long foreshadowed trial of charter schools is going to commence early in 2014.  Five schools have been approved.  Obviously this is earth shattering stuff to those who are wedded to the proposition that governments always do things better than anyone or anything else.  They see the opening of charter schools as the early death throes of civilisation as we know it.  The histrionic hysterics have been, well, hysterical, or, as Jane Austen would say, quite diverting.

There were three howlers in particular.  The first was an horrendous accusation levelled against charter schools.  It was suggested that they were going to be engaged in a very sinister practice.  They were going to extract profits out of running schools.  We kid you not.  Terrible.  How anyone could mix filthy lucre with the ethereal, other-worldly task of educating children was beyond comprehension.  It could only mean that operators of charter school had to be depraved miscreants.

Actually, this broadside opens up an interesting idea, well worth exploring.

Orwellian Double-Speak in Europe

New Thought Police Warmly Welcomed at  “Civil Liberties” Committee

Posted on | September 20, 2013 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

European Dignity Watch has an interesting report on a recent meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE), in which a lobby group called the “European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR)” was given a 45-minitues slot to present a policy proposal that is called the Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance.


The group’s approach towards “tolerance” appears to be rather simple: it claims to be promoting “tolerance”, which is vaguely defined as “respect for and acceptance of the expression, preservation and development of the distinct identity of a group”. With regard to potential critics it says: “There is no need to be tolerant to the intolerant (….) especially (…) as far as freedom of expression is concerned”.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the paper contains a lot of proposals how to limit, or even to completely eliminate, the freedom of speech of all potential critics of any of the groups whose acceptance the ECTR wants to promote.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 23

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's. —I Corinthians 6:20

Devotional:
This is a very important consideration, that we are consecrated and dedicated to God; that we may not hereafter think, speak, meditate, or do anything but with a view to his glory. For that which is sacred cannot, without great injustice towards him, be applied to unholy uses.

If we are not our own, but the Lord's, it is manifest both what error we must avoid, and to what end all the actions of our lives are to be directed. We are not our own; therefore neither our reason nor our will should predominate in our deliberations and actions.

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

Dereliction of Duty

The idol of the soft-despotic state must needs be mocked and ridiculed.  It is one of the more effective weapons God has given to His people to excise this particular demon from our lives.  As we engage in this divine sarcasm we are conscious of standing in a long line of prophets who did not hold back from mocking the idols of their day.  We have in mind Elijah on Mount Carmel, for example, ridiculing the priests of Baal, as they called upon their god but to no avail:

And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, "Cry aloud, for he is a god.  Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." (I Kings 18: 27.)

A recent tragedy has been the cold-blooded murder of innocents at the Navy Yard in Washington DC.  One wonders how it could be that a non-serving civilian could be granted admittance to a military installation, armed with a semi-automatic shotgun, to kill twelve people.  What happened to the nation's god?  In the words of Elijah, perhaps the soft-despotic deity in Washington was musing somewhere amidst a brown study.  Or he was in the loo.  Or he had undertaken a long journey.  Or he had fallen asleep.  The answer--all of the above.

Governments that attempt to rule everything in an embrace of soft-despotic tyranny end up powerless and incompetent.

From An Admiring Antipodean

Dear President Obama

I was greatly encouraged to view your recent address to ‘Planned Parenthood’ and rejoice in your warm endorsement of their work and in your wishing of the blessing of God upon them and all they do for the cause of women’s reproductive health and the right to take control of their own bodies. The practice of some 3,000 abortions a week in the USA is a ringing endorsement of their work and proof of their deserving your support.

I have long supported the ‘Pro Choice’ cause as you have, and must commend you for your courageous stand in support of late term terminations.