Good morning.

1. Progressive anthropology/reporter investigates conservative evangelicals.
2. Of risk and market distortions.
3. Speaking of risk.
4. On beauty.
5. And Syria.
6. It’s not about infrastructure silly, it’s about kickbacks for donations. Remember, the “Chicago way” … it’s all about corruption.
7. Our governmental system, defined.
8. And battleships doing their thing with the help of CGI. If you think that interesting, I’d recommend this book too.
9. Have you ever heard of “red sprites” … I hadn’t. Interesting.
10. Upcoming must-watch TV.
11. More feminism/guns overlap.

Well we’re all here. Sunny, salty, and slightly warm.

1. Why move them now?
2. Not … the great escape.
3. Romney talks at the NCAAP, one take.
4. But … gay marriage … that’s all that liberal/progressives want to talk about.
5. Watching the meltdown.
6. Zooooom.
7. Guns and girls in Texas.
8. Ooblick being studied (aka non-Newtonian fluids)
9. Just in time.
10. That’s not post-modern that’s pre-modern.
11. Obama as socialist.
12. A book suggested, Mr Lewis on some somewhat familiar liturgical poems.
13. Spinning your way out of jail.
14. Moving some goalposts.
15. Blood and coming of age and two films.
16. A modest proposal.
17. Will he follow Gov. Walker’s lead?
18. Pro-choice, choosing violence.

Michelle Obama thinks so.

There is no better place than church to talk about political issues because they are ultimately moral issues, First Lady Michelle Obama told a church gathering on Thursday.

“To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better – no place better,” Obama told the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s 49th general conference, held in in Nashville, Tenn.

“Because ultimately, these are not just political issues – they are moral issues,” she said. “They’re issues that have to do with human dignity and human potential, and the future we want for our kids and our grandkids.”

When the political and the moral intersect, I agree that churches should not be afraid to take a stand on an issue (and shouldn’t lose it’s tax-exempt status when doing so). So I’m glad to hear Mrs. Obama talk about this.

But does anyone want to guess what the "separation of church and state" crowd would have done if Laura Bush had said the same thing? I think we all know what reaction they would have had. So bookmark that page for when they get their voice back. (They’ve been rather quite for, oh, about 4 years now.)

In the little book Star Wars on Trial, in the chapter “Charge #2″ (to whit: While Claiming Mythic Significance, Star Wars Portrays No Admirable Religious or Ethical Beliefs”. The witness for the prosecution (John C. Wright) attacks this in part by pointing out that Star Wars borrows more from boy-fiction Flash Gordon &etc than anything pretending to be religion. Mr Wright suggests:

A real religion addresses metaphysics, spiritual powers, martyrdom, ethics, salvation, miracles, and life after death.

And no, all world religions necessarily evidence all of these. What he argues, point by point, is that Star Wars “Force” as religion is a calisthenic, it is

an atmosphere, a spooky hint of mystic powers and hidden forces meant to lend an air of exotic super-naturalism to the proceedings. The Force is there for the sword fights. The Force is meant to explain why a kendo fencer can perform amazing leaps, parry laser bolts or make a single one-in-a-million bull’s-eye shot into a ray-shielded thermal exhaust port with a proton torpedo and blow up a space station the size of a small moon.

The Force isn’t learned by credoa nd ethics, it’s something you learn by practice, “by doing one handed handstands while levitating crates on Swamp Planet.”

What, for example, are the doctrinal differences between Obi-Wan and Mr Vader?

Good morning.

1. I’d never heard of that film. How about you?
2. The International courts and Syria.
3. What to cut?
4. Guns and grain. This is very much related.
5. Supply and demand.
6. Is this a one-off or a harbinger?
7. Sight and aim.
8. Amazing. Simply amazing.
9. Contra simple materialism.
10. Outsourcing.
11. Why the current attempts to slice the pie in medical reforms such as Obamacare are well described as arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
12. Helping a drunk.
13. Clones and Olympic competition.

Good morning.

1. Women and combat … testosterone matters.
2. On aggression.
3. Wonder why the White House is equipping IRS SWAT teams? What for? What’s coming down the pike?
4. Maybe they figure the piper will have to pay when people figure out the song and dance they’ve been given is untrue?
5. Advice for the married(s).
6. On Caucasian stereotypes.
7. Flashmob.
8. I’m in the first 45%.
9. A thought experiment.
10. Timor.
11. Movements in American Orthodoxy.
12. This raises, indirectly, an interesting question. Stimulus advocates argue that it doesn’t matter what the stimulus gets spent on, just so the money gets moved. That necessarily would include “not raising taxes on the rich?” Oops.
13. Bonhoeffer.

Good morning.

1. A letter posted.
2. The fluidity of language.
3. Mr Roberts reluctance.
4. Much to lose means having much in the first place.
5. Visiting other places and rites.
6. Talking tough, sort of.
7. Who is “really Black” or really Native American, or White, or whatever … the problems with the left’s race identity politics. Someday, we’ll judge people by the content of their character … but before the left can let go of their racism, they have to admit that their racial identity crap is racist.
8. Grrrr.
9. Civilization ending? Yikes.
10. Betting on ignorance.
11. Now there’s a question that displays lack of self-examination. “Where’s the atheist fiction.” Hello? That describes most fiction, almost all science fiction and probably 98%+ of regular fiction. Look at the NYTimes best seller lists for the last year. Name three books in which religion and theology factor in a meaningfull way. I’ll wait. Name a mainstream science fiction book written in the last 20 years in which any character is religious, in most of them religion doesn’t even exist and/or is never mentioned. How about thrillers?
12. Pedagogy.
13. Look at the places you can go if your premise if false. I suspect a true statement would be that the motives behind charity are varied and that there is not one.
14. St. Patrick.

Good morning.

1. As people in US talk about the lifeguard who was fired because his employer (probably rightly) feared liability suits. This struck me as similar in some ways, culture/politics/law coming to the wrong conclusion.
2. Academic freedom? Or just a complete lack of pedagogical sanity?
3. Smelling another big war (read as global conflagration) in the next decade or so.
4. Hope and prayer … found and needed.
5. In which the left thinks that painting themselves as the Nazi Jew haters is a good move. I’m just a bit confused by that strategy.
6. Some advice regarding the tax/Obamacare ruling. I have a question for those watching the “tax vs penalty” debate? Is the child rebate in the tax code a penalty or a tax on those without children?
7. DADT and the chaplaincy.
8. Lots of places are citing the large storms resulting in power outages over the Eastern US as signs of global warming, ’cause that storm was so unusual. Alas it wasn’t.
9. This reminds me of William Safire’s grammar puns, for example “A preposition is something that you should never end a sentence with.”
10. Recommended books.
11. A health care “what if” considered.
12. The culture war and demographic collapse.
13. A lights show … what I noticed most was the lightning.
14. ’cause in Florida they dislike shopping at Staples and Home Depot.
15. And we’ll finish with a slight understatement.

Help for atheist preachers
From CNN,

The transition from preacher to outspoken atheist has not been easy, and DeWitt is trying to smooth the way for other former believers. He is executive director of Recovering from Religion, an organization founded in 2009. Its slogan: “Thousands of organizations will help you get INTO religion, but we’re the only one helping you OUT.”

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Youth Ministry:  Content and Context
What a concept.

From the post,

Our teaching and Bible study should help students engage with Scripture. Long ago I moved away from the traditional youth talk of sharing my ideas supported by a few verses. I started teaching from passages, allowing God’s Word to speak more directly to students. If you have not experienced the difference, you might not understand what I mean. Expounding Scripture can be done in a variety of ways, yet the result is the same—getting a clear sense of the Bible’s meaning and figuring out how it applies to our lives.

Allowing God’s Word to speak? What (another) concept. Imagine what would happen if we moved from trying to be relevant to an unbelieving culture and actually depending on God’s Word?

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Grade Inflation? Say it isn’t so!
When I was a high school student (way back when) there were just a few students that achieved a 4.0 GPA (with 4.0 as the max). Nowadays it seems like the 4s just flit about unfettered from the shackles of herculean effort.

And, of course, along with this news we’ll also be hearing that the quality of students graduating from our public school system is extraordinary?

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GradeInflation.com
Yikes! There’s even a website devoted to the subject.

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And people were afraid of a Vice President Sarah Palin?
From the article,

Vice President Joe Biden told the graduating seniors of Cypress Bay High School in Florida today that they should imagine a world where hunger no longer exists because crops grow without the need of soil, water or fertilizer.

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The connected generation
How will it impact, if it will, the near future economy of the United States?

From the post,

The most interesting part of the survey, though, is the finding that parents will go to great lengths to help their kids find work. Nearly a third (30 percent) of recent graduates report that their parents are in some way involved in their job search process. Nearly one in 10 (8 percent) recent graduates say that a parent has accompanied them to a job interview, with 3 percent of grads saying their parents have actually joined the interview itself.

Murphy’s law and others give not exactly hard and fast guidelines for prediction of events and interpretations. My (just coined as such) first Rule is the following

Conventional Historical Wisdom is always wrong.

In what follows this will be applied to the third rail of historical discourse … vis a vis to suggest that the Jewish narrative concerning the Holocaust is wrong. This may or may not be a historical third high voltage line as suggested above, but there are blogging/pirate rules that state any you mentions Nazis loses the argument … and Nazis will be noted in this piece.

For a long time references to the Holocaust have bothered me, in that the focus on that particular feature of German/Nazi atrocities has overwhelmed our historical recall of other Nazi (and concomitant Soviet ones). When one recalls mass murders in the mid 20th century …. with rare exceptions only one thing will be recalled and the others minimized or forgotten. This is wrong. Do not misunderstand, the fault for this lies with historians, teachers and educators … not with the Jewish people. Their memory, their remembrance is apt and warranted. What is not is for the rest of us to forget that this was just a small part of a larger horrific picture.

If, in a recent non-mass killing like that at Columbine, if 10 persons had been killed of which 4 Muslims had been killed if conventional wisdom called this an attack on Islam that would be wrong. It would not be wrong for Islamic faith communities to remember this in their own way. It would however be wrong for everyone to do that. Similarly remembering the mass murders of the 20th century in Eastern Europe as being only about the Holocaust would also be wrong.  This is however, the conventional story.

Read the rest of this entry

Good morning. We’ll try a comma, pause, comma edition.

1. My youngest daughter starts driving this fall, so,  is this good advice or not?
2. A problem of our time for, well, many.
3. So would that poster/graphic work, perhaps, as the main thread of a graduation speech?
4. Diaspora, and then, return.
5. Here’s an interesting question, does your the meta-X work consistently with the micro-X and macro-X as exemplified here with ethics and political theory (and I couldn’t figure out how to transform that into comma, pause, comma … sorry). Note, that’s not specific tenents of micro/macro but the meta layer.
6. While Congress wastes its time on college loan matters, surprise, they ignore arguably more important flaws within the secondary educational system.
7. Remember how the liberal of so many stripes bemoaned certain language in political discourse after a certain shooting, well, will this be remarked?
8. Tears don’t work, really its true, in Legislative bodies in a close vote.
9. Slurp and Zaap!
10. This didn’t turn out how I’d expect, really, not at all.
11. Considering wages and minimums, and well, justice.
12. The reality of the so called reality based party is, alas, based on lies.
13. Mr Romney has shown himself to be very weak regarding his notions of foreign policy, however, so has his opponent.

With every head bowed, and every eye closed…
And so begins the invitation to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus. Just like Paul did? Peter?

The “Sinner’s Prayer”, long used not in Christendom, but in American Evangelism, is the subject of a post by David Platt. From Platt,

It seems that “praying the prayer” is often used in a worship service or an evangelistic conversation to “cement a decision” or “close the deal” regarding someone’s salvation. People are often told immediately, “If you prayed that prayer, you can always know that you are saved for eternity.”

Lest anyone think he is anti-evangelism, he also states,

Most importantly, once someone repents and believes in Christ, be willing to lead that person as a new follower of Christ. Remember, our goal is not to count decisions; our goal is to make disciples.

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VBS under attack – the new norm?
One trend that seems to be in vogue, amongst evangelicals, is to alter the traditional Vacation Bible School (VBS) marketing to cater to “non-churched” (those who used to be known as non-Christians) in a manner which doesn’t overtly imply prosyletizing. Yet, society appears to not be that stupid. Case in point is this story from New York.

A Baptist church in New York City is facing backlash after they passed out flyers inviting children from a nearby public school to attend Vacation Bible School. Some neighborhood parents accused the church of being discriminatory because they oppose gay marriage.

Heh. We evangelicals may end up being forced into living counter-culturally, whether we want to or not!

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Not enough Sun?
What’s the gov’t subsidized world coming to when a solar panel outfit can’t survive in the middle of the Southwest United States?

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Google search gets a B+ while Apple’s Siri gets a D?
But, of course, none of the Apple-heads out there will get wind of this news since they live in a closed system type of world. ;^)

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The Parent as the “Youth Pastor”
Considering that the vocation of youth pastor is a very new phenomenon, it seems that the notion of parental involvement in the theological training of children has merit. Oh, yes, it’s also kind of Biblical. From the post,

…if we are going to stem the tide of youth leaving the church, I believe a key component is a fresh awareness of the centrality of the parents for youth ministry. Parents are the church’s primary youth pastors, and a central place in youth ministry today must be given to helping parents embrace that privilege and responsibility, and equipping them to do it. Youth ministry has a valid and important supporting role to the parents, but it must never become a substitute. Our youth are too important to allow that to happen.

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A camera that keeps your home safe?
From the post title, “Solar-powered security camera keeps your home safe without wires”. Interesting. I’d be interested to know how a camera can manage to keep my home safe.

Good day (if just a tad hot).

1. On rights and the 4th. Those who thing rights important or useful need to deal with Rousseau’s (if I remember correctly) criticism that rights are insufficient against government which can redefine/define them as they see fit for their purposes … and we see that in action today.
2. A reading/viewing list … interesting intersection, I’m trying to read Moby Dick in parallel with China Meiville’s Railsea, ?as the latter seemed from the outset to draw a lot from the former and my memory of Mr Ahab and company is dim.
3. Slipped through the liberal eugenics screening programme.
4. Making it a law … as if everything were free and adding ~$2k to the cost of a table saw is inconsequential.
5. A liberal/progressive maxim … “the US is no longer the greatest country in the world” which oddly enough never proposes an alternative. The reason is that the statement is false. Others may be catching up, but in the words of UK educational maxims (as expressed in this wonderful book) if the US is not “top nation” who is? China with $4/day labor? India? France? Germany? Sweden? Cuba? Get real. If you want to name the US as not “top nation” you need to indicate which nation replaced the US.
6. Of taxation and consent.
7. Which founder?
8. Oooh, I did this (sort of) for my kids. When they were little and worried about the noise from the freight trains going through town … I told them, don’t worry, if it gets off the rails, the “snake” will get it.
9. To what purpose.
10. A Saint and romance.
11. Unnoticed and forgotten peoples.
12. There will always be war?
13. On union labor and freedom.

– image © 2012 AR Lopez

Episode 5 of the "Consider This!" podcast is out today and it’s all about a single topic, so I thought I’d post the script here for those who don’t do podcasts. If you do do podcasts, click here for the show notes and ways to subscribe, or just listen, to the show.

I mentioned previously that while the individual mandate was struck down as an exercise of the Commerce Clause, it hung in there as an exercise of the taxing authority of the federal government. That is to say, the way it was sold to the American people, and the way the Obama administration is continuing to try to defend it, is unconstitutional. By being given the authority to regulate commerce, Congress cannot force you to engage in commerce so that they can then regulate it. However, if arranged in a way such that you have to pay a tax if you don’t comply, well then it’s all hunky-dory. So then, when you hear Democrats insist that the mandate is not a tax, as they have been saying, remember that they are therefore arguing that it’s unconstitutional. They’re trying to have their mandate and eat it, too.

The main reason they’re arguing that it’s not a tax — going against a Supreme Court ruling that they are ostensibly in favor of — is because of the legislative ramifications. A tax can be repealed on a bare majority vote, and is not subject to a 60 vote Senate filibuster. This makes it much easier for, say, a President Romney and a Republican House and Senate to repeal. I would have thought that trifecta tough to accomplish this November, but with this ruling, I suspect a fire is going to be lit under many a conservative, and I hope that this translates into votes. I think Democrats, too, see this scenario as more plausible today than it was before the ruling, which is why they’re trying to make this particular hard sell. Billy Mays, the TV pitchman who used to try to sell you so many handy items, would be proud.

If you insist, against the advice of the Supreme Court, that the Commerce Clause should be good enough to implement a mandate, consider this. The intention of the clause itself was a negative power; a preventative, restraining one. It was written so that there was an authority to appeal to when there were trade disputes among the states. It was never intended to be a positive power by the federal government; one that allowed it to act on its own. Those aren’t my words. Those are James Madison’s. But hey, he’s just what some people call The Father of The Constitution. What would he know?

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