Stones Cry Out

Unless you’ve been living in a closet for 2 week, or are a die-hard Obama supporter trying to avoid the news, Scott Brown, the Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.

Yes, that Ted Kennedy.

Was this simply a local election, judged solely on local issues?  I don’t think so, especially since Brown himself injected national issues into it when he said he would vote against health care "reform".  Yes, local issues played a part, but I think the national ones overshadowed them. 

This is Massachusetts, after all, one of the bluest of blue states, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.5 to 1, and where they were replacing a Democrat who’d held that seat for a generation. 

Polls a month ago put Coakley ahead by 20 points.  Brown then made it national, and all of a sudden the momentum shifted in a big way.  The payoffs, most notably to Senator Ben Nelson, didn’t help matters.

There are those that say conservatives shouldn’t get credit for Coakley’s defeat, and explain why the loss was mostly, if not wholly, due to disappointment by Democrats in Obama; what he promised vs. what he’s delivered.  The problem with that analysis is that not much on that front has changed in 3-4 weeks, when Coakley’s numbers tanked.  The issues noted in that blog post — military commissions, international surveillance, drug laws, sentencing reform, Gitmo’s closing, the Afghanistan war, anti-terror policies — have not substantially changed one bit since mid-December.  So you can’t really say that those are the issues that moved the voters.  A sea changed occurred, and there’s one thing, one major issue, that did change during that time; the health care "reform" bill. 

According to Rasmussen, 56% of voters thought that this was the most important issue.  Brown brought up the issue of voting against it, and once he did, voters flocked to his side.  Now true, some did so because they don’t like it at all, and some did so because they thought it didn’t go far enough.  Rasmussen notes:

Forty-seven percent (47%) favor the health care legislation before Congress while 51% oppose it. However, the intensity was clearly with those who are opposed. Just 25% of voters in Massachusetts Strongly Favor the plan while 41% Strongly Oppose it.

Fifty percent (50%) say it would be better to pass no health care legislation at all rather than passing the bill before Congress.

But the point here is this is Massachusetts, after all, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and where Ted Kennedy was in a safe Senate seat for a generation.  And they’ve elected a man who says he’ll vote against the health care "reform" bill.  Conservatives, mostly of the Tea Party variety, have been getting the word out on how awful this bill will be, and while the opinion polls have gone against it, now, more importantly, the voters have as well, pulling off what’s been called an epic upset. 

Will Democrats in Washington get the message?  We’ll see.

1. A payoff “matrix” for Democrats.
2. Church and state in the EU.
3. Church and space (in the EU?).
4. Christians and Jews and inter-marriage … in medieval Poland.
5. Heh.
6. This was linked as bad sociology by me a day or so ago, here it is linked non-critically.
7. Martyrdom.
8. A remark from the conspiracy in the wake of the MA elections.
9. A correlation … cause?
10. The coming invasion … or not.
11. Training report.

Here’s a quick question for Protestant readers, especially those who adhere to innerrancy and Sola Scriptura … although those of other traditions might jump in.

Look at the endings of these two books:

II Kings 25:27-30

Now it came to pass in the 37th year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the 12th month, on the 27th day of the month, that Evil-Merodach king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, released Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison. He spoke kindly to him, and gave him a more prominent seat than those of the kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin changed from his prison garments, and he ate bread regularly before the king all the days of his life. And as for his provisions, there was a regular ration given him by the king, a portion for each day, all the days of his life.

Jeremiah 52:31-34

Now it came to pass in the 37th year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the 12th month, on the 27th day of the month, that Evil-Merodach king of Babylon, in the first year of his reign, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah and brought him out of prison. He spoke kindly to him, and gave him a more prominent seat than those of the kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin changed from his prison garments, and he ate bread regularly before the king all the days of his life. And as for his provisions, there was a regular ration given him by the king, a portion for each day, all the days of his life.

More than just a little similar. So … what does your tradition say about this similarity?

1. Thoughts on the “super-majority.”
2. Hunger.
3. Actual (real-life) lawyers contending for the un-Constitutionality of the healthcare bill.
4. Guns for God.
5. Heresy.
6. Podcasts on monasticism that come highly recommended.
7. Is that right? Does the left interpret any enthusiasm on the right as “dangerous and intimidation?”
8. Dishonest activists …. no really? (Isn’t that the norm)
9. Hope and change continue (to fade).
10. Demographics and Russia.
11. If you, like me, have questions about charitable organizations like the Red Cross giving their top management big 6 figure salaries … here’s some that don’t.

One of the current dogmas on the progressive/liberal left is that military spending is far too great. They will enjoin and welcome in today’s depressed economy any sort of broken window ala Bastiat, transposing ditches, repairing roads which don’t urgently or presently need repair, beautifying rarely used parks, or spending great sums on underused airports but if that money is spent on military resources, well now, that’s going far beyond the pale.

The current budget has four large parts which make up about 75% of the budget. These parts four parts are to a first order roughly equal. The other three parts along side the military expenditures are social security, payroll security, and healthcare. The opinions expressed here by myself regarding government/state involvement in actuarial activities and the need to be careful about keeping incentives in order are likely well known. Thus the salient objection that the military budget is too large in comparison to the other three large expenditures would normally be contested here with an eye to the point of view that the other three are not part of what a government should be engaged and therefore eliminated entirely. However, let’s set that aside and inspect for a moment the question of the size of the military budget and whether it is too large or too small. Read the rest of this entry

1. The bullet may still be ducked.
2. One comparison.
3. Is this a failure of hope/change or just a transparency transgression?
4. Where are the public sinners?
5. Dirt girls.
6. So … is this news to Mr Krugman … or was he being dishonest?
7. I’ve never understood the attraction of this sort of story.
8. Dishonest (or at least bad) sociology noted.
9. Lookin’ good or not?
10. Now, I didn’t watch the video, but I’ve never liked that sort of question … I find them unanswerable, much to the frustration of my daughter(s) who can’t figure out why I can’t answer a simple question like, “What’s your favorite color.” This question seems in the same category.
11. Epistemologically privileged information on Haiti and aid.
12. “Scientism” recast.
13. Blessing of the water.

There are many ways to contribute monetarily to the relief effort in Haiti.  (Our own contributor, Rusty, suggested one way here.)  I’d like to share a couple more.

The Salvation Army:  In Haiti since 1950, the church I grew up in has one of the lowest overhead percentages of any charity you’ll come in contact with.  You can go to this web site and put a donation on your credit card.  Alternately, you can text the word "Haiti" to 52000 on your cell phone to donate $10, which will be added to your next cell phone bill.  (Carrier’s text message charges may still be applied.)

The Christian & Missionary Alliance:  The church my with wife grew up in, and with whom her parents spent 30+ years as missionaries to Indonesia, has set up a web site to collect donations.

Today marks the 14th day of our Daniel Fast.

During this time of prayer and meditation on God’s Word, I’ve found that my inadequacies at engaging in a fuller prayer life are surfaced. While others about me seem to readily spout eloquently laced verbal prayers, whether in a worship service or an informal gathering, I’d rather take time to think about what I have to say, and then say it – as succinctly as possible. While some leaders extol (even direct) congregants to speak their prayers and worship “out loud”, ostensibly so others around them can hear them, I prefer to quietly direct my supplications to God. While some fellow Christians claim to have conversations with God, I tend to read the prayers in the Bible not as informal conversation, but as meditative communion. As such, it can be very frustrating for someone like myself to model his prayers as many of those in the church.

As I’ve been reading Adam McHugh’s book, Introverts in the Church, I’ve been enlightened to many aspects of introversion that I was previously unaware of. One aspect that struck me, regarding this prayer issue, is that of how the typical introvert’s mind works. In a nutshell, while an introvert is typically quiet on the outside, inside his mind is racing from thought to thought, idea to idea, recalling and analyzing past events, and so on. This is exactly the type of process that I find happening with myself (and, silly me, all this time I thought I was just daydreaming!). What McHugh states, though, is that the introvert must learn to harness this thought pattern and not just let it run unhindered. As this applies to prayer, I think one must learn to take control of the various thoughts permeating through his head, and take cues from them as prayer petitions – guides, if you will, to your supplications.

Yesterday, I read, out loud, from our church Bible, in our church sanctuary. As part of our group fast, our pastor has instituted that our congregation read the Bible within our sanctuary. It is a wonderful opportunity to have God’s Word read out loud, completely through, within the walls of the church. Individuals and families sign-up for various 1/2 hour time slots, throughout the week, and simply arrive, read, and enjoy the presence of God. In the past, we’ve had members of our deaf church participate by signing the Word, and we’ve had an Old Testament scholar read in Hebrew. My reading, yesterday, stretched from Romans 14 to I Corinthians 6.

Romans 14, from the Bible in our church sanctuary.

Image – © A. R. Lopez

Blaming God for the earthquake in Haiti got Pat Robertson some major blowback.  (He didn’t really blame God, he blamed Satan, but work with me here.)  All manner of scorn was heaped upon him.  Fair enough.  Then how about this lesser-publicized remark regarding the earthquake?

When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?

(Emphasis mine.  Well, actually it’s Tim Blair’s, to whom the hat tip goes.)  See it’s OK for actor Danny Glover to blame a planet for these problems.  Heck, Al Gore’s made a living doing that.  But talk about what Blair calls “a less-fashionable deity” and all hell breaks loose.

That’s a phrase that Brit Hume used to describe his mentioning of that same deity.  Sounds like his contention that someone else wouldn’t have faced the same firestorm if they had said the same thing he did about Tiger Woods but suggested a New Age guru, is sounding more and more correct.

Want to nail Robertson for his comment?  Have at it.  But you you should give the same treatment to Glover.  The media and the liberal elite don’t, which suggests which side their on (or, more specifically, against).

1. Chicago school economics noted.
2. Discussing cure and disease … what constitutes genetic disease/disorder?
3. Liturgy and Leviticus.
4. Uhm, yikes.
5. Toll roads and competition.
6. In part, the basis for my union post.
7. Spidey.
8. Healthcare and Constitution.
9. Those who decry our military expenditure … take note (here too).
10. A homily … Zacchaeus Sunday means something else … to whit Lent is coming nigh.
11. Obamacare and marriage.

I’m going to form a union (if the “union exemption” for taxes on healthcare gets passed). Some features of my new union:

1. The dues will amount to the price of your employer’s healthcare, which we will pay for on their behalf … but get that nice loophole thing.
2. Management is welcome to join.
3. We will not take up any wage/workplace or other similar issues.
4. We will not collectively bargain with management, our truck is not with them, but with regulatory burdens.
5. Will will take full advantage of government tax shelters and perks for unions.
6. We will dissolve immediately when it is no longer advantageous to exist.

Seems like these simple steps will set the course in motion. Whaddya think? We have Blue Dog dems, RINOs (DINOs?) why not tea party unions.

Are there other perks and benefits to unionising that I don’t know about? I’ve spent so many years despising unions that I hadn’t realized all those reprehensible government perks to buy votes can and should be subverted and used by the rest of us.

1. Economics and green codes.
2. Obama-care and the selling point.
3. Why Orthodox.
4. The Hut burner.
5. Haiti. Remarks on the same, with some epistemic advantage.
6. Again, for my youngest daughter.
7. Well, the right reacted (largely) allergically to Avatar, how will the left react to Eli’s message?
8. A rally.
9. An interview on marriage.
10. Bush and the golden era (for gays).
11. On fasting.

If, as Pat Robertson says, Haiti is suffering God’s punishment, through the ravages of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, because of their “pact with the devil”, then what can we expect Him to do to a country which has made a similar pact, resulting in the deaths of over 40 million innocent human beings?

Aid to Haiti via WorldVision – Donate at this link

Some scattered remarks on race prompted by this post (which in turn was prompted by my linking this post).

• In the first post, Dafydd (Mr Lizard?) points out that he says “To be a racist, one must, at the very least, believe in the concept of race — where “race” means some discrete and self-perpetuating subgroup of humans, defined by skin color and a certain morphology, but that also affects behavior and (some argue) thought itself.” Yet, in part this is in itself false. “Race” that is observable phenotypical inheritable differences between groups of humans, the prime notable example being skin color, do in fact track real differences regarding ability in a variety of ways. Northern Europeans and a few others have a genetic mutation which prevents the turning off of the ability to digest lactose. The notion that all racial differences have no impact on statistical distributions of cognitive and physical skills is a fallacy. Significant (statistical) differences of abilities and traits track along cultural lines because of historical geographical and social isolation allowed/allows the development of real measurable differences in the abilities of these subgroups in a range of arenas. Some of these differences are more significant in the modern world than others.
• Mr Schraub makes a interesting correction in his definition of racism. He writes, “And what is a racist? I’d say a concept or argument or behavior is racist if it causes or reinforces unequal inegalitarian distribution of benefits and burdens on racial lines.” The replacement of unequal with inegalitarian is interesting in the light of de Tocqueville’s observations of America. His prediction that American tendencies to move equality to a “cutting down the outstanding” to match the herd comes to mind. A premise of egalitarianism is one the axiomatic foundational political concepts for the left (as extended and distinquished from beyond legal/moral egalitarianism). The right remains with the older classical liberal notion of legal/moral egalitarianism. But, by including “egalitarian” concerns in a definition of racist ideas and racism, then it follows that a rejection (or more accurately a disregard) of egalitarianism might go far to explain why when the left, as so frequently occurs, accuses the right of racism that then the right has trouble figuring out the basis of that accusation. It also gives a hint why Mr Schraub (and others) apparently can talk of “unconscious” racism. That is because they use a notion which requires the premise of egalitarianism to work. For if one is “free” regarding egalitarianism (not driven at all by egalitarian concerns) the tracking of one’s concepts/arguments/behaviors with egalitarian concerns will be somewhat random … and therefore often be judged by egalitarians to be in contrary to those concerns. If you back off on your definition of inegalitarianism to purely moral and legal venues distinct from material then there’s another problem. For then racial concepts, arguments, and behaviourswhich the progressives utilize and promote are those which are racist and the legal egalitarian ones the right prefers are not. This, perhaps, is the reason for the correction seen above.
• Even if one accepts the definition of racism as being intrinsically tied to material egalitarian policy there is a problem of differing ideas of the presumptive consequences of policy. For example, take affirmative action as a race-based policy. The intention of the policy is egalitarian, it is meant to normalize material inequities by given enhanced educational and employment opportunities to races deemed disadvantaged. Opposition to this policy is normally thereforedeemed racist, by Mr Schraub’s definition. Yet, one might hold the opposite opinion, that is the effect of affirmative action is exactly opposite of the intent, that it enhances and sustains the unequal material norms that it hopes to diminish. In that case, from the point of view of those (like me) who believe that, support for affirmative action would be racist not the reverse. Thus you cannot (apparently) judge a policy/argument/behaviour as racist in any objective non-personal way. Racism becomes a purely subjective relativistic concept.  Or in other words it becomes completelyuseless.
• A famous writer once observed that race and racism, specifically regarding Black America, is the “most important” factor for American (US) historical development. This however, mostly betrays the fact that the writer himself was concerned chiefly with Black American issues. For it is categorically false that this in the “most” important factor for American development. Technology, foreign events and currents, and even the interaction of the multiple cultural heritages in the waves of immigration to these shores dwarf the Black/White matter regarding our historical development. Compare for example the historical impact on today’s America from two events that occurred in the late 50s, that being the transistor and the civil rights movement. Which impacts today’s America more? Clearly the former has more impact.

Finally a summary of these points follows.

While race as broadly defined (White/Black/Asian) is not useful, narrower cultural groups do in fact track with real differences of ability. Second, including ideological concepts in a definition of racism is less than useful, unless the purpose is to cast aspersions on those who don’t hold to your ideology. Third, even within the concept of those ideological concepts, using material egalitarianism within a definition of race is problematic. Finally, race itself is less important than many (if not most) race theorists imagine, so if you really want to change the world become a scientist or engineer and not a lawyer or social worker. 😀

Today marks the midway point of our Daniel Fast.

At this point, I have found the experience to be different from the Daniel Fast I participated in last year at this time. Last year, I inadvertently excluded nuts and whole grains from the menu, and the result was great hunger. Now some would say that, since you’re on a fast, shouldn’t you be hungry? Certainly, however while one is hungry on a fast, hunger should not be the focus of the fast.

Another aspect that is different from my fast of last year is the absence of the feeling of frustration. During most of my fast in 2009, though I engaged in the reading of the Word and in prayer, I experienced a great deal of frustration. That has not been the case this year. I haven’t experienced any great workings of the Spirit, as some of my more extroverted friends may have, but I have certainly experienced an immense amount of inner peace.

The reading of the Word has included the book of Acts. Some selected verses (all ESV):

All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. – Acts 1:14

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. – Acts 2:42

Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. – Acts 3:1

But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. – Acts 6:4

So Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. – Acts 12:5

Imagine what we could do if we would pray in the same manner as the early Christians. But, we’re too busy.

Between soccer games, movies, concerts, after-school events, happy hours, television, the internet, hobbies, work, etc., we might be able to squeeze in a 5 or 10 minute prayer… if we’re lucky.

Fresh strawberries. A great fruit item to our menu.

Image – © 2010 A. R. Lopez