Stones Cry Out

Good morning.

1. Considerations regarding anti-trust.
2. Uncertainty regarding the government and the recovery. I think this is a big factor in the slowness of the recovery. The administration has showed its willingness to swing a big sledge hammer at the economy … and the uncertainty which way that hammer will rock is one of the big reasons for caution in the business sector.
3. On teachers unions.
4. And they say Chicago politics is dirty.
5. Defining tradition and the church in a way that I’d think makes it more difficult for the Protestant to reject.
6. Ms O’Donnell and her opponent.
7. The center reviews the Constitutional challenges to Obamacare.
8. Looking for mystery fiction.
9. About those culture wars.
10. Puppies and love.
11. Bang!
12. Regarding last night’s post on economic inequality.
13. Has Mr Biden ever ever done one thing which was commendable?
14. A Catholic priest and a sex scandal.

I ran across an interesting observation in Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan (a U of Chicago economist who has the distinction of being on of the economists who clearly and unequivocally warned of and predicted the recession well in advance of its occurance). Anyhow, I thought this quote fragment was insightful when viewing the distinct difference between left and right regarding income inequality, from the beginning of Chapter Nine:

Not all forms of income inequality are economically harmful. Higher wages serve to reward the very talented and the hardworking, identify the jobs in the economy that need the most skills, and signal to the young the benefits of investing in their own human capital. A forced equalization of wages that disregards the marginal contributions of different workers will deaden incentives and lead to a misallocation of resources and effort. 

However, when the only pathways to high wages are seen to be birth, influence, luck, or cheating, wage differentials may not act as a spur to effort. Why bother when effort is not the route to rewards? Ineed, as the political economists Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos argue, perception in a democracy as to how high wages or wealth are obtained can create self-reinforcing patterns. If society believes people earn high wages as a result of their training and hard work, it is less willing to tax high earners, thereby ensuring they have strong incentives to acquire skills and exert effort. If society believes people earn high wages because of connectedness, chance, or crookedness, then it will tax incomes more heavily, and since few of the honest will then bother to work hard, only those with influence, the lucky, or the cheats will flourish. 

The left and right in the US are distinguished in part by their willingness (or lack thereof) to tax high earners. The left like to pretend that the middle class right is “duped” into wanting to lower taxes on the wealthy because they are just stupid when in reality what is going on is that the middle class believes that the wealthy got that way in the main part due to their training and hard work. One might also observe that the left’s willingness to punish the wealthy will have its own negative social repercussions as noted above as well. 

Mr Rajan also points out that the willingness to tax high earners is higher than it was in the past and the above observation might be a clue to why that might be, that is our perception of who the wealthy consist as well as how they got that way is moving. This is unfortunate. 

Good morning.

1. The upside to the reaction to TARP, which I think is naive in that the negative reaction will not last long enough to serve as a moral hazard.
2. What COIN looks like up close.
3. Jews and Nebraska.
4. Defending Ms Rand.
5. Mr Lindzen and AGW.
6. Comparing two rallies, why is it that the ostensibly green democrats never manage to police their own trash?
7. Knowing your partner was “the one.”
8. Hell.
9. Cinema.
10. Porcupine.
11. Darwin, doubt and God.

Good morning. Sorry I’m late with this.

1. If you need evidence that the Administration is out of touch …
2. The Supreme Court and expansions of powers.
3. The “You’re only Christian because your parents were” argument.
4. Russian politics and more here.
5. So, if Mr Bush and Cheney had done something like this, how would the left have reacted? 
6. Education and incentives, here and here.
7. The AGW fringe.
8. History, Islam and given credit where credit is due (or not).
9. We really really need to cut the top three down.
10. Heh.

The “One Nation” rally of liberals vs. the “Restoring Honor” rally of conservatives.  What a study in contrasts.

Let’s start with the numbers.  Now, you may say that the numbers really aren’t that meaningful; what matters is the message.  Fair enough, except the number really mattered to the Left.  As pseudonymous writer “LaborUnionReport” notes from RedState:

You see, the size of the Saturday’s OneNation rally would not really matter if…

1. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz didn’t foolishly make the claim that he would have 300,000 people at Socialist Saturday;
2. Leninist labor boss Richard Trumka hadn’t predicted 100,000 union members;
3. The SEIU hadn’t claimed 75,000 of its purple progressives would be bused in (unless the SEIU really meant that 75k of its janitors would do park clean-up for all the SEIU signs that were left lying around), and;
4. Some dolt didn’t come on stage and claim that a satellite image proved that the Marxist March on Washington was bigger than Beck’s 8/28 rally…

Identical aerial views of the two rallies clearly show what one would call a gaping enthusiasm gap.  Keep those shots in mind when you read media articles that try to equivalence the two.  And consider, too, how many bought-and-paid-for attendees were there for “One Nation” (including students getting school credit for attending) and they still couldn’t hold a candle to the crowd from “Restoring Honor”, the vast majority that came on their own dime.  Nancy Pelosi once called the Tea Party “astroturf”, but clearly the plastic grass is on their side of the fence.

Oh, and another contrast is how you treat something you pay for vs something that’s provided for you.  You care more for something you paid for yourself, and thus there was quite a difference between how the “One Nation” attendees left the Washington Mall vs how the “Restoring Honor” attendees did.  When you pay for something yourself, you tend to take better care of it, which is a truism that can apply to government policies in general; a lesson the Left  never seems to learn.

And as Doug Ross notes, socialism played a big role in the rally.  Do these people even know the sordid history of socialism in the world?  That’s where this bunch wants to take us; further and further dependence on government and the power grab that is part and parcel of places like Venezuela.

This is their “America”?  What an awful place, and what a contrast between liberal and conservative.  I still do have hope.

Evangelical leaders of previous generations are in the process of passing the torch to younger leaders, for whom there are at least 10 fresh challenges. We’ve considered the challenges of Navigating Newfound Authority, Waging a New Bloodless Revolution, Overcoming Spiritual Superficiality; Creating Culture,  Returning to Virtue, Bridging to Everyday Relevance, Resisting the Seduction of the New Social Gospel and Learning to Communicate Again. Now this challenge:

Embracing the Diversity of the New Christian World

Ask Americans what faith group they belong to and the vast majority—some 75 to 85 percent—will say they are Christian. About 37 percent will say they are evangelical or born again. Non-Christian religions (including Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism), collectively make up about 4% to 5% of the adult population. The rest say they have no religious belief or affiliation. Those statistics probably surprise most people because of the efforts of media and others to be sensitive to the increasing number of non-Americans among us and to the vast diversity of faiths that they bring with them.

(A Barna poll, by the way, showed that born-again Christians are increasingly well-educated, well-off and from a variety of cultural backgrounds, perhaps most surprisingly, Asian-American.)

The greatest threat to American Christianity is not other faith groups but faithlessness, spiritual vacuity. Although individuals identify themselves as more Christian than non-Christian, the sad reality is that for far too many of those supposedly adherents, there is no “there” there.  

While in the U.S. evangelicalism is the only part of Christianity that is growing, it is growing slowly and that growth is among independent groups, not denominations (for the most part), while a conservative strain of Christianity—both Protestant and Catholic—is surging in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Orthodox or evangelicals Christian believers in America will increasingly find their strongest and most numerous allies and spiritual partners not in the western mainline Christian denominations, but in the conservative Christian—both Protestant and Catholic—in the global south.   

Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State and author of The Next Christendom (2002) wrote about the shifts in the global church:

If we look beyond the liberal West, we see that another Christian revolution, quite different from the one being called for in affluent American suburbs and upscale urban parishes, is already in progress. Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient world view expressed in the New Testament: a vision of Jesus as the embodiment of divine power, who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race. In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations—currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America—now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that is likely to become dominant in the faith. The revolution taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is far more sweeping in its implications than any current shifts in North American religion, whether Catholic or Protestant.

The growth in Africa has been relentless. In 1900 Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million—about nine percent. Today the Christian total stands at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 percent. And that percentage is likely to continue rising, because Christian African countries have some of the world’s most dramatic rates of population growth. Meanwhile, the advanced industrial countries are experiencing a dramatic birth dearth. Within the next twenty-five years the population of the world’s Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world’s largest faith). By 2025, 50 percent of the Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America, and another 17 percent will be in Asia. Those proportions will grow steadily. By about 2050 the United States will still have the largest single contingent of Christians, but all the other leading nations will be Southern: Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. By then the proportion of non-Latino whites among the world’s Christians will have fallen to perhaps one in five.

———

Perhaps the most remarkable point [is that the trends have] registered so little on the consciousness of even well-informed Northern observers. What, after all, do most Americans know about the distribution of Christians worldwide? I suspect that most see Christianity very much as it was a century ago—a predominantly European and North American faith.
As the media have striven in recent years to present Islam in a more sympathetic light, they have tended to suggest that Islam, not Christianity, is the rising faith of Africa and Asia, the authentic or default religion of the world’s huddled masses. But Christianity is not only surviving in the global South, it is enjoying a radical revival, a return to scriptural roots. We are living in revolutionary times.

Timothy Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York writes:

The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the West to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The rising urban churches of China may be particularly influential in the future. But the West still has the educational institutions, the money, and a great deal of power. What should the relationship of the older Western churches be to the new non-Western church? How can we use our assets to serve them in ways that are not paternalistic? How can we learn from them in more than perfunctory ways?

Evangelical leaders of the next generation will be looking at a very different evangelical church, likely to be more diverse and stagnant in America and soaring in the global south. Their challenge will be to grasp new opportunities to serve and support the growing yet needy church communities, and to learn all they can from the fresh new perspectives from vibrant New Testament expressions of the Body of Christ around the world.

Venezuelans are getting tired of the food shortages, the electricity shortages, the soaring crime, the deep recession (i.e. everything that comes part and parcel with socialism) and have started taking back the country, starting with last weekend’s elections.  American voters are poised to do the same in November.

The "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is apparently mostly about symbolism, false narratives and propaganda.  Flotillas are required to keep up the narratives.

The United Nations will appoint an Earth contact for aliens.  No, really.  "Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire."  Doesn’t it strike anyone as unintentionally humorous that "Unoosa" sounds like some alien specie you’d see on "Star Trek"?

When the Bilderbergers met last June (cue paranoid music), one of the topics they discussed was Global Cooling.  No, really.  (Al Gore was apparently not invited.)  But indeed, global cooling, were it happening, would be worse than global warming.  Crops, for starters, kinda’ like the heat.

Tea Partiers uncover rampant voter fraud in Houston.  Would it surprise you if I said that most of this was related to a former SEIU employee’s voter registration group?  Yeah, me neither.

"Scientists have invented an efficient way to produce apparently safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos…."  They start with ordinary skin cells.  As Glenn Reynolds would say, "Faster, please."

And finally, from Mike Lester, two views of the Constitution.  (Click for a larger image.)

Good morning.

1. If this wasn’t so, then Christians should abandon claims that they follow the cross.
2. About the Contador kerfuffle.
3. Henry David speaks out against progressives.
4. You won’t lose the coverage you have, oh, wait.
5. Book cooking.
6. The biggest (greatest, strongest, or whatever) in the world.
7. FLOTUS foiled.
8. Pakistan.
9. Alas, I was more drawn to the painting than the prayer.
10. Slavery.
11. Quantum revolution.
12. No Joe … Rocky and Bullwinkle is not unwatchable and “boxtops” as the new international currency standard is pure genius and not irrelevant in today’s economic times.

Low-wage workers may lose what health benefits they do have because these "mini-med" plans used for high-turnover workers don’t spend enough, according to the government. 

Don Sensing has the details.

Keep your insurance if you like it?  Yeah, right.

Good morning.

1. Two “thousand word” commentaries.
2. A fable.
3. Separation of Church/State, from the other angle.
4. Inflation in our future.
5. One reaction.
6. The elephant in the evangelical marriage discussion.
7. Volokh conspirator in a bigger venue.
8. In the context of Hawking’s talk of God, Wittgenstein.
9. Physical dexterity.

To clarify,

A coalition of Mexican mayors has asked the United States to stop deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. to Mexican border cities, saying the deportations are contributing to Mexican border violence.

Meanwhile, President “Mexicans were here before America was an idea” Obama is trying to pitch the notion that there is no “us” and “them”, with regards to illegal immigration [sic].

Sorry, Mr. President, but we’re not buying this whole one-world idea and, just as a reminder, you swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America.

Good morning.

1. A prediction on Presidential ratings.
2. On his message.
3. He should know, he was one of them.
4. How not to put yourself in others shoes.
5. 2.7kg bike.
6. Tea Party and the starfish (note I got malware warnings from the sidebar blogroll provider site going there).
7. A picture for the day.
8. Look where the libs want to take us, if you think unemployment is bad now.
9. Verse.

In this video, slam poet Chris Tse apologizes for being a Christian (warning: a couple of instances of foul language). Before you watch the video, think for a moment which actions Tse might have singled out as worthy of apologizing for. Consider our culture, its worldviews, and especially how Christians are portrayed in secular media.

How did you do? It really wasn’t that difficult to guess which sins he’d be apologizing for, was it?

As one would expect, some of the politically correct sins presented were: the crusades, homophobia, anti-abortion protests, culturally insensitive missionaries, etc. Now, regardless of whether or not Christians, in general, are guilty of some or all of these infractions, does anyone else find it unsettling that the infractions listed match up with how the Christian and Christianity is portrayed in secular media?

While it appears that Mr. Tse is sincere, albeit naive, I’m concerned about how this type of “apology” dovetails with the secular worldview of the liberal west. I find it interesting that we live in a world which considers all ideas valid, yet demands apologies from those whose ideas which, truth be told, they consider wrong (i.e., not valid). It’s the old, “We will not tolerate intolerance!” mantra. Recall that one of President Obama’s first actions, as President, was to travel ’round the world apologizing on behalf of the United States.

Apologizing, evidently, is in vogue.

I’ve read some commentators who state that we live in a post-modern society which is not really interested in viewing the world through rational, enlightenment eyes. Therefore, any discipline which presents an argument to make its case, such as that of apologetics, is considered old-school. Instead, we’re told, we need to expend our efforts to reach the heart of the person – namely by means of anything relational.

Hence, we see efforts such those to administer so-called social justice to the less fortunate in our midst – or – to deliver apologies for hurting other people’s feelings.

Yet we humans are neither wholly rational or wholly emotional creatures – we are much more than that. We have, after all, been stamped with the Image of God.

As such, worldviews which tout the truth of pluralism are self-defeating, not because they don’t feel right but because they don’t work. In the same vein, apologies for the past actions of a particular group had better have the facts and context of those actions objectively correct, lest such apologies be nothing more than a meaningless flapping of wind.

References: (which I don’t apologize for listing)

The Crusades – Rodney Stark – God’s Battalions

Abortion – Christians offering help and healing to those who’ve chosen abortion

Jim Elliot – ’nuff said

Focus on the Family (yes FOTF) – an article that must surely be filled with hate towards the homosexual…

With regards to stories such as these, of U.S. military personnel committing crimes and atrocities, take care to note “The Difference”. While murderous actions of terrorists are considered the norm, such acts, when committed by U.S. soldiers, justifiably result in outrage here in the U.S.

As graphically illustrated, by Michael Yon’s photograph of a U.S. soldier cradling an Iraqi girl, mortally wounded by the normal actions of terrorist insurgents, there is a difference between us and those who would wage terror on the innocent.

Image © 2005 Michael Yon

All things are better in Koine! And my friend Joe Carter should get a kick out of the shot of Biola’s infamous hippie Jesus mural.

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Bad News / Good News The Bad News? 49% of Protestants think Mormons are Christians. The Good News? Those same Protestants are looking forward to having a whole lot of fun at church this coming Sunday.

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Mexico tosses us a red herring From CNN,

Violence in the United States is not related to illegal Mexican immigrants, but violence in Mexico is connected to vast shipments of weapons from the United States, Mexico’s foreign minister told CNN Thursday.

Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa pointed to efforts by Mexico to stop the flow of weapons, the great majority of which come from the United States.

“Since 2006,” she said in a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s editorial board in New York City, “the Mexican government has seized over 85,000 weapons in Mexico.”

She noted that it’s not just “regular weapons,” but also machine guns, grenades and other high-power arms.

Robert Pastor, a Latin America national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, pointed out last year there were at least 6,600 U.S. gun shops within 100 miles of the Mexican border and more than 90 percent of weapons in Mexico come from the United States.

I’d venture to say that the chances are slim to none that one could purchase machine guns, grenades, or other [related] high-power arms, in any of those 6,600 gun shops.

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With either choice, your system’s gonna get cleaned out Evidently, people would prefer to have a colonoscopy vs. cleaning out their computer’s registry.

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The FBI chooses Glock Contract award at close to $1 million, for 2,900+ Glock 23 .40SW handguns.

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Lucky Break: significant good fortune or opportunity What do you do, if you’re committed to naturalism, and you’re faced with the fact that your very existence hinged on at least 10 highly improbable events of the past? Well, the rational, neo-Darwinistic logical conclusion must surely be that we were really, really, really, really, really lucky! For those who can actually put 2 + 2 together, the folks at Reasons to Believe have been discussing the design aspects of our universe, for quite some time.