Good morning.

1. Christ is Risen … all together now.
2. Memory eternal .. in Poland, here and here.
3. Monkabee #2, heh.
4. Taxes too high you think? Guess what’s coming down the pike.
5. Threats on the rise … or at least reports of threats. Those who complain that the GOP is too quick to pull the victim gambit stay silent as their side does.
6. Kitty got teeth.
7. Background reading on the VAT tax.
8. One more from the Gentlemen on porn.
9. The “anti-Christian position that our beliefs are not chosen?” Huh?
10. On FDR and the actual “Great” Depression.
11. Swiss and firearms.
12. Tea party plug.
13. Planned Parenthood still spouting nonsense.
14. I would have guessed 2-4 percent.

I was on Spring Break vacation with the family last week, so other than my post-dated blog posts, I didn’t write much … well, anything.  But I did surf the web and kept track of some articles I wanted to highlight when I came back.  Here they are, in mostly chronological order of when I found them.

Amnesty International decided that jihad was not antithetical to human rights so long as it’s "defensive". 

The bump in polling numbers after passing health care "reform" was supposed to go to Democrats.  Instead, while it’s just a measure of emotion at this point in time, you’d think that all the promises of the bill would give Democrats a few higher point.  Instead, they’re at an 18-year low.  It’s quite possible that people are only now understanding what they supported all along, because the "free" stuff isn’t materializing right now.

What was the point of the resurrection on Easter?  Don Sensing has (had) some thoughts.

The Tea Party’s ideas are much more mainstream than the MSM would like you to believe.  And Tea Partiers are much more diverse that the MSM realized.  Turns out, they did some actual journalism and found out the real story.  Imagine that.  Has the liberal slant of the press become a problem of corruption, especially with, first, the willful ignoring of the Tea Party story, and second, the willful misreporting of it?

Toyota cars have killed 52 people, and got a recall for it.  Gardasil, a cervical cancer vaccine, has had 49 "unexplained deaths" reported by the CDC and it’s still required in some states.

Changing the names to protect the guilty, the words "Islam" and "jihad" are now banned from the national security strategy document.  When the next terror attack Islamic jihadists happens, it’ll be interesting to find out how they describe it.

Cows have been exonerated of helping to cause global warming.  No, really.

Rep. Bart Stupak’s reversal of his principles is having the proper effect; he’s decided not to seek re-election.  Likely, he couldn’t get re-elected anyway, after betraying his constituents, but let this be a lesson about trusting "conservative" Democrats too much.

And finally, media scrutiny of church vs. state (click for a larger picture):

Oh, that liberal media.

Good morning.

1. Climate and equilibrium.
2. Napoleon and Spain (not Russia).
3. Reading the Red Wheel.
4. Death and taxes … and this?
5. Say it ain’t so.
6. Porn discussions continue, two Gentlemen posts here and here.
7. Robots and the sacred?
8. The next recession?
9. The Episcopal Barbie?
10. Poland and grief.
11. One response to the “it is a curse to speak of him” meme.
12. Spartacus!!! Cancellara wins Roubaix.

[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#5 Jimmy Carter. Born again President b. 1924

America had never had a presidential candidate, at least in the nation’s collective memory, utter the words: “I am a born-again Christian,” like the Georgia peanut farmer and Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter did as he plied the towns of Iowa and the nation in an unlikely quest that resulted in his election as president. As a result of this bold declaration and public witness and the publication of Chuck Colson’s biographical account of his conversion, Born Again, Newsweek magazine declared 1976 the Year of the Evangelical.”

Jimmy Carter was different, and observers of his 1976 bid for the presidency readily recognized it. As a candidate, Carter spoke very openly and candidly about his faith, his commitment to Christ, his love for Scripture, and his desire to bring “a new spirit” to government. He quickly became a symbol of the rekindled religious and political vigor of American evangelicalism.

Carter said: “I’m a father and I’m a Christian; I’m a businessman and I’m a Christian; I’m a farmer and I’m a Christian; I’m a politician and I’m a Christian. The most important thing in my life beyond all else is Jesus Christ.”
Based on his Christian testimony and toothy optimism, I—like many other Christian belivers–supported Jimmy Carter in 1976 and delayed my final college work to become part of his Iowa campaign staff. I considered his election a harbinger of good will and healing for our nation, and marveled that such an outspoken Christian was sitting in the Oval Office.

As president, he continued to teach Sunday school, found occasions to share his faith with foreign leaders, readily admits in his post-presidential works that religion was an indispensable guide for his presidential behavior, and believes that Americans “have a responsibility to try to shape government so that it does exemplify the will of God.”

Regarding his frequent public displays of faith, church historian Martin Marty explained that Carter knows no other way to be. “Jimmy Carter is a public Christian…. It’s O.K. to be a private Christian in America, but he doesn’t know how to be a private Christian. Religion for him goes right to the streets, and he successfully relates his Sunday faith to his Monday world.”

My enthusiasm and optimism waned in the next four years, not because of any failure of presidential faith or moral fidelity, but because of a malaise that gripped the nation, Carter’s weakness during the Iran hostage crisis, and the fact that he never seemed to grasp the art of pulling the right levers of presidential power.

[After the campaign, the next time I was with Carter personally was during a Habitat for Humanity build in Chicago in the early 1990’s, when the odd couple of Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Chuck Colson swung hammers together to build homes for four poor but worthy Chicago families. On the first day of the build, Carter and Colson appeared together on the Today show in a live feed from the construction site. When Jane Pauley asked Colson what it was like to team up with Carter, Colson responded (with his remarkable ability to produce on the moment quips): “The last time I worked with a President I got one-to-three years [his prison sentence for Watergate]; this time I just got hard labor.”]

Although Carter failed to retain his early support of many evangelicals and was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the transparency of his Christian testimony—regardless of his politics—further emboldened evangelicals who were moving deliberately toward a greater role in public life and political action. Carter’s race for the nomination and his election to the presidency established for many the arrival of evangelicals as a new force on the American scene.

Good morning.

1. The big race, and a look at the course.
2. Moving product.
3. Shooting’s too good for ’em. 
4. One of the gentlemen notes two reasons why porn is bad for you. This as well, is not unrelated.
5. That was my suggestion, back in the day.
6. 47% pay no federal taxes?
7. Animals without oxygen.
8. More on the Obama assassination kerfuffle.
9. Uhm, … in the East, Christian churches are domed and have always been so, Islam borrowed that from the Christians. 
10. Coolness in nature untangled.
11. Video.
12. For the ladies in Pakistan.
13. Post-Pascha let-down.
14. Self reliance and healthcare.

An interesting note from last nights reading. I had started reading American Rifle: A Biography. At the start of the book it notes that before the advent of the flintlock the American natives weren’t interested in firearms. But the flintlock change that, and the musket (later rifle) became a highly sought very expensive commodity item. Prior to that introduction, wars and conflicts between American native groups were based on enmity and for one 7 year conflict between two tribes resulted in 7 deaths. After the flintlock, conflicts were based not on enmity but on (economic) interest and became deadly. After 25 years, the number of combatants from one tribe dropped from 800 effectives to 300.

The point that enmity vs (economic) interest driving lethality is probably can be generalised and considered in the context of the popular opinion about European religious conflicts of the 15th-17th centuries.

Good morning.

1. An example of how Orthodox theology is bound to its liturgy.
2. A billion dollars? I tend to think that’s not credible.
3. Islamic extremism, apparently, doesn’t exist.
4. More Democratic fantasies … see the second paragraph here (and read the rest too).
5. Zipping around the globe.
6. Putin in Poland mentions Katyn. I’m not sure that approach will sit well with the Poles. More here.
7. Hope and change vs reality. Well, it is a change, after all Bush didn’t implement the plan … Mr Obama did.
8. Never is a hard thing justify, i.e., let’s suggest a situation where the wife is in the process of beating her husband is he justified in striking back in defense?
9. Or another advertising plug for SWA.
10. Getting out and marching (for Christ and the Cross).
11. Theodicy.
12. For myself, I think a Amendment prohibiting the Feds (or States for that matter) from entering actuarial enterprises would be best. New Orleans is a prime example of why
13. In the past, I’ve tried to identify the difference between Liberal/Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians as a different ordering of the importance of Equality, Happiness, and Liberty, wherein each group puts the corresponding facet as the primary goal of government as primary. Here is a suggestion it is a different perspective on costs for the latter group.

Good morning.

1. Nuclear thoughts.
2. Pascha in Iraq.
3. One atheist and the empty tomb.
4. Praise and vitriol.
5. A prayer.
6. 10 party government!?
7. It seems to me the Blame Bush/Cheney, err, Obama chant is missing here.
8. Will the denizens of the Beltway read this?
9. Consternation? Huh!? Why?
10. The Left calls them chickenhawks, the parallel phenomena on the other side, “fake macho?“
11. More on the politics and daughter count thing.
12. Yer not qualified.
13. Unpaid interns and Mr Obama.
14. Fine tuned qualification lists.

Tea partiers mostly white, conservative, male, pro-life, poll says

So says the New Mexico Independent.

From the post,

According to a recent Gallup poll, tea partiers are mostly white (79 percent), conservative (70 percent) and male (55 percent). While 68 percent of tea party supporters have not graduated from college, 55 percent—make more than $50,000 per year.

And yet, Timothy Johnson, a black tea partier, states,

“Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks,”

That was from the article, Black conservative tea party backers take heat.

Do you think liberals on staff at the New Mexico Independent will note how black tea partiers are called Uncle Tom, Oreos, and traitors?

This started as a reply about hermeneutic in the context of the flood on my personal blog. Do we take the flood literally or not. My interlocutor was exasperated exclaiming that to not take the text literally implies words have no meaning. This is exactly backwords. Here is my response to him.

Yes, you are exactly right. Words have meaning. There is this word hermeneutic, which I have used on more than one occasion used in this sentence. Yet, you gaily trounce in with replies like “Why start with the Bible at all? Why not just make up your own stories if that’s what you’re going to do anyway?” or other remarks along the “making it all up” line as if every religious person just takes their preconceptions and hammers the text until it fits. That is not what any honest theologian does (and I think the majority of people atheist or faithful are as honest as they can be). That word, hermeneutic means, “the method by which one extracts meaning from a text.” See that word there. Method. It is there for a reason. Read the rest of this entry

No, really.

Americans overall are far less likely to be killed with a firearm than they were when it was much more difficult to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, according to statistics collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control. But researchers have not been able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.

The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.

This isn’t from some right-wing news source, this is from MSNBC, for cryin’ out loud. (But you have to wait until the last page of the article to get the above paragraphs and the link to the stats and comparative graphs.  This is MSNBC, after all.)

Here in Georgia, the town of Kennesaw passed a law that every head of household must own a gun.  It is not one that is enforced, but the law went on the books in 1982.  Crime started to go down, and 25 years later the crime rate was cut by more than half, with zero residents involved in fatal shootings.  Worth considering.

Good Morning.

1. On the Constitutionality question and healthcare, not so cut and dried as the defenders do pretend. And a little help in for your research on the matter.
2. Demographics and housing markets.
3. Iran.
4. On Pragmatism.
5. BSG, btw I’m just about finished with season 2.
6. A in race bike change done, well, just about perfectly.
7. Burning Judas.
8. Shifting standards, from a prior comment, “The threshold inquiry has to be the perspective of the women themselves, in their diverse circumstances, rather than imposing our perspective from up on high (and one size fits all).” So, the threshold inquiry about “maverick” status has to be from the perspective of Mr McCain himself, not imposing our perspective from on high (and one size fits all)?
9. Apparently at home moms are jobless.
10. Memory Eternal, one of best known Christian bloggers has passed. Noted, well everywhere.
11. Ontology and popular culture … or just a joke.
12. 40% of Tea Partiers are Democrats … oops.
13. Riding to work.
14. Drones.
15. Is that why I’m conservative?
16. And … for the Palin fans.

From Michael Ramirez (click for a larger version):

Treating your enemies better than your allies doesn’t seem to be working, for either our enemies or our allies. 

Good morning.

1. Two Saints and Good Friday.
2. Christian redemption, large and small scale.
3. A Serbian song for Pascha.
4. An egg.
5. The Press and the Catholic Church.
6. Canada and the JDL.
7. April fools pranks in Russia.
8. Stage magic and the Administrations energy policies.
9. The intern and the min wage.
10. Legal research.

Good morning.

1. Rape on the decline, tied to the increase in the prevalence of pornography. Kids ethics and a tie in? 
2. How about this?
3. And a really good point on porn.
4. Red Tories … a term I don’t know much of anything about but perhaps should look into.
5. Labels and cans, for the LOST fans.
6. Good Friday in the Ukraine.
7. And the short hymn (troparion) for Good Friday.
8. Faith on the rise.
9. Looking back at the campaign. 
10. Greece.
11. Having an majority interest in that company makes this move suspect.
12. The unicorn, a fiscally conservative Democrat?