Stones Cry Out

• A common error of today’s stimulus packages, they all raise taxes … which counter the intended effect.
• “Alcohol may have been involved” … ya think!?
• Obama and the Blago scandal … the real problem … recalling the Plame and recall the shoes are on the other feet now. And no, I think it unlikely Obama did anything wrong … but then again, neither did anyone in the Plame fiasco either.
• Uhm, non-violent protest involves a likelihood of jail time … its in the cards and not necessarily a bad thing.
• On opinions.
• A book recommendation for the younger set, and one which I jumped on for my daughter’s upcoming birthday. Another book here.
• Cash and Mr Phelps.
• Verry English.
• A bunch of book recommendations. I concurr on Father Elijah (the book that should have replaced that execrable Dan Brown thing). It gives me pause on taking Anathem on the holidays though.
• Simply amazing.
• Cost cutting comes to health care. As the Instapundit (somewhat annoyingly often offers), “more please.”
• For your prayer list.
• A story to watch (and why).
• Modern art.
• We were “told” that this was just “GOP scare tactics”, hmmm.
• Whatever. Color me unsurprised.
• I’m fairly certain that’s satire, but I’m not sure.
• Russian worship demographics.
• Not about crass commercialism or ever repeating holiday music “classics” I think.
• I remember baking a batch of beheaded gingerbread boys when we studied the French revolution back in the day.
• Serious about Islam.
• Bad news about the Good News.
• Our (recent) debt and promises in perspective.
• Mr Obama’s education choice.

The cure is going to be far worse than the disease ever would have been. On our behalf our government has promised to repay debts which seem to exceed our worth and their printing (virtual) money fast enough give it away, 0% interest rates indeed. Our President is promoting a “2nd Bill of Rights” which, calling them rights, is insanity. Entitlements aren’t rights. The “right to recreation?” I’m speechless.

Rome fell. Northern Europe and much else fell to pre-Iron age levels of technology. Nonsense like we’re seeing these days might bring us down too. If it does happen there is a problem. For … an essential problem lies between here and there. How many people do you think live at today’s population densities today? And how many can subsist at bronze age subsistence. Between here and there lie a lot of pain and suffering.

Things might not get that bad. But I do think our freedom from government intrusion in our lives is about to increase by orders of magnitude. Loss of freedoms like this have always been accompanied by violence and bloodshed. How will the American gulag manifest itself? We shall see.

Last Sundays’ sermon was about meeting the God of Christmas.  If Christmas says anything, it says that God is full of surprises.

The text was John 1:1-9, where Jesus — The Word — is introduced in 3 different ways; the Word (vv. 1-2), the Light (vv. 3-4) and the Life (vv. 5-9).  We see his pre-existence, his creative power, and his life-giving light, which overpowers darkness.  I find it interesting that many religions claim that there needs to be a balance between good and evil.  John 1:5 begs to differ.  There is no balance; the Light overcomes the darkness, and the Light our life.

Some say God cannot be understood, but God most certainly wants to be understood.  If not, He wouldn’t keep trying, all throughout the Bible, to reveal Himself.  True, we cannot know all there is about God, but it is also true that we can know what He does reveal and what we are willing to see.  After all, he came down at Christmas and became one of us and spent 3 years teaching us about Himself and what He is like.  He will speak to us in our language and in a way we can indeed understand.  What we learn may be difficult and, as mentioned, surprising, but that’s not His problem; that’s ours to overcome, with His guidance.

God came into the world because He wants the world to know Him.  He wouldn’t have made the effort if knowing Him was indeed impossible.  During this Christmas season, get to know the God of Christmas.

• Chicago … Ayers and Obama yet again.
• Not exactly kind humor … but I, alas, laughed.
• Considering the future of (armed) conflict.
• One family some time back … verse.
• Speaking of verse …
• If one considers that the zeitgeist of the age (or the nation) has will and intellect … this one has our number. One response.
• Justice and the human brain.
• Contra power sharing.
• St. Nicholas of Myra shedding the Santa image?
• Regulation about to strike the economy.
• Oil prices considered.
• The Democrats, standing tall against “standards”, makes y’all proud to be American I tell ya. 🙂
• Modern notions of courtship.
• Getting it wrong.
• A leap of faith.
• Nativity in DC canceled (for the foreseeable future I might add).
• Stability and a map.
• Mr Polamalu.
• Ya think. Duh.
• On freedom.

• The parable of the sane homeowner for Mr Chu our energy advisor.
• Advent conspiracy.
• Academics not in touch, hmmm.
• Mr Madoff, his bilked buddies and their billions … and the KGB.
• That’s right … and guess what have you heard of that Thomas Jefferson fellow? He owned actual slaves! How about George Washington. Him too. Golly.
• Riders reactions to the Giro parcours.
• You know, you’d think those mucking with the market would understand the least bit about … you know … market.
• Modern Greece?
• Christianity in China in the 6th century … forgotten?
• Epistemology and art.

I’ve been recently pondering whether older notions of demons and modern notions of ideology, meme, and the like are not unrelated. Along those lines, this brings in questions regarding the detecting of intelligence. How can we locate and find (non-human) intelligence among us? Assume for a moment that intelligence other than us is at work in our local sphere, i.e., the earth, how might we locate it? How might we detect it?

Another analogy might be to consider these intelligences (or our intelligence) might be actually something akin to second order forces, like the relationship between the internal electrical forces holding atoms together and Van der Waals forces between atoms. This could go in either of two ways. That is inspiration, flashes of genius, might be really “from outside of us” … or the other way, that humans collectively form social networks which themselves might exhibit intelligence independent of individuals. Consider an ant colony. Imagine an ant colony that collectively as a colony exhibits intelligence. Now consider that those ant’s are us … individually intelligent and having exhibiting some number of colonial intelligences at a macro level. Why not?

On that note … does any reader have any suggestions further reading on either identifying intelligence or a modern theology of demons?

Yes YOU, if you opposed the auto maker bailout, want the economy to fail.  YOU are a reckless ideologue.  YOU don’t want to solve problems.  YOU want the US to suck up a Depression.  YOU are extraordinarily irresponsible.

So says Harry Reid and the Left side of the blogosphere.  If you want fiscal responsibility out of our government, you’re irresponsible. 

And in January, this line of thinking will hold even more sway in Washington, DC.  Hold on to your wallets, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

From Mike Lester (click for larger version):

Thanks to Senate Republicans, the auto bailout didn’t happen.  For now.  The UAW, et. al. may just be biding their time until there are more Democrats in the Senate (i.e. January).  More analysis (and specific credit to Sen. Bob Corker) from Francis Cianfrocca at RedState.

• Reflecting on devotions to Mary, Theotokos.
• Prophecy and dating.
• Taking the Christmas wars to a new level, as in “yer all going to hell.”
• That jars with my back of the envelope notions of pricing, $147 -> $4/gallon gas but $100 -> $1.50? Shouldn’t it be about $2.3?
• Man, planes, and YouTube.
• There are rebates and then there are rebates.
• Hmm. My redoubtable commenters will likely explain why that’s not bias.
• Grasshopper bot.
• Missing the companion piece in which Congress arrests itself for it’s very own (trillion dollar?) Ponzi scheme called “Social Security.”
• OK, I’ve got the Rush part down, i.e., I don’t listen to him or for that matter any political radio programming.
• A Movie recommendation or more precisely a question on one for the holiday gift exchanges.
• Chavez and safety.
• Elder abuse.
• Benedict and Chesteron … on the same page.
• Bringing academia to earth … a good goal for the academic (HT: Milton Stanley)
• Blogging while hiding in the bathroom.
• Mommy wars.
• Artificial sex.
• Zimbabwe.

The "Durban II" UN conference on human rights dealing with racism is set to meet next March.  The first meeting of this type in 2001 became so obsessive about Israel that Colin Powell pulled the US out of it.  In a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week, they suggested we not even show up this time.  A little harsh?  Premature, perhaps?

Consider this:

"Durban II," planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing. The draft declaration says Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians amounts to no less than "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide and a serious threat to international peace and security." We’ll spare you the rest.

Israel will be the main obsession, but it’s not the only target. The draft declaration also goes after the West’s freedom of speech and antiterror laws under the guise of protecting religion (read: Islam) from "defamation." The entire West will be in the dock for allegedly persecuting Muslims. "The most serious manifestations of defamation of religions are the increase in Islamophobia and the worsening of the situation of Muslim minorities around the world," the draft reads. "Islamophobia" is a term used to brand any criticism of Islam as a hate crime.

The Islamic terrorists who have killed hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists get a free pass. Instead, the draft calls for a media code of conduct and "internationally binding normative standards . . . that can provide adequate guarantees against defamation of religions." If this sounds like censorship, that’s because it is.

Well, can’t we just reason with them?  If we don’t show up, we can’t make a change, right? 

But we may not be able to make a change anyway, given who’s in charge.

The conference is being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, like its discredited predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, has been taken over by the world’s main abusers of human rights. The Organization of Islamic Countries, the most powerful voting bloc at the U.N., put Libya in charge of preparing Durban II, assisted by such other pillars of the international community as Iran and Cuba.

Yeah, those stalwarts of human rights and tolerance.    The inmates are in charge of the asylum.  The UN continues to be an exercise in futility, giving evil regimes legitimacy regarding their actions, under the cover of "international cooperation". 

In fact it was so bad, that the name of the body was changed 2 years ago to avoid the (well deserved) bad PR it was receiving for doing exactly what this body is doing; making human rights abusers arbiters of human rights violations.  And how well has that worked out?  The blog UN Watch has been watching.

In its two years of existence, the Arab-controlled council has systematically undermined the cause of human rights and eviscerated the UN’s few existing tools that work. Human rights monitors in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, Congo (DRC), have all been scrapped. Genocide by Sudan has been ignored, with the monitor of that country’s atrocities now on the  chopping block as well. Watch the March 2009 session, when the Sudan mandate is set to expire.

Violations by 189 other countries have been equally ignored, while Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism was encouraged. A full 80% of all country censures were directed at one nation, Israel. The list goes on and on.

Never in the history of international human rights has one of its own institutions inflicted so much damage.

On what basis will time be a healer? On the contrary, with each session, another remaining country monitor gets eliminated, more Islamic resolutions are adopted to curtail free speech in the name of “defamation of religion”, and human rights as a whole suffers.

The UN is fatally broken.  Its own attempts at fixing the problems simply keep the status quo.  If it is to survive, it must be remade from outside, or simply abolished.  The suggestion of a league of democracies has, I think, a much better chance at succeeding than the UN.

Some define madness as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I give you Exhibit A.

• Pray for the health of Fr John (of First Things).
• 9/11 already forgotten?
• A claim “nobody does it like …”, do you agree?
• That should clear that up.
• Or … we need local government.
• Hard advice for the blogger to take.
• Keynes and Benedict on value.
• Rank dishonesty in reporting … yet again.
• Some history of the Church in Russia.
• Arrests in Pakistan.
• Source selection noted.
• Considering the nativity.
• Whores and Priests.
• Justificatory liberalism.
• Of beasties.
• Kindergartners would work for less pay.
• Gay day counterproductive.
• Defending Obama’s Chicago origins … which presume (falsely perhaps) that Obama has done any amount of reforming.

Parishioners in the Episcopal Church USA are bailing out.

More than 60% of dioceses in the Episcopal Church USA suffered double digit decline in Average Sunday Attendance from 1997 to 2007 with predictions that the figures will only escalate in 2008 with even greater hemorrhaging.

An official report, drawn from the Episcopal Church’s own figures, shows that the Episcopal Church drew 841,445 Episcopalians in 1997, but in 2007 that figure was 727,822, a drop of 113, 623. In 2008 the estimated loss is about 1,000 Episcopalians weekly. With whole dioceses leaving, that figure could well reach 1,200 now that a new North American Anglican Province has been formed. Recently, nearly 7,000 Episcopalians left the Diocese of Ft. Worth.

More numbers at the link.  The report also notes what the reason is.

All indicators are that the losses will only increase in 2008. More parishes will leave as the new Anglican Province in North America takes shape. There is now overwhelming evidence that the consecration of V. Gene Robinson, a non-celibate homosexual to the episcopacy, has been a huge net loss to the church. His much vaunted "God is doing a new thing" is emptying, rather than filling churches. The Diocese of New Hampshire lost 12% of its parishioners between 2003-2007 and a further 6% in 2006-2007. Losses are expected to escalate in 2008.

Parishioners are standing up for what they believe is right…and walking out. 

When gas prices were quite a bit north of $4, Democrats blamed Bush’s policies.  Now that they’re down to $1.50, do they give him the credit?

Cue crickets.

Here’s another one; when the dollar was tanking against foreign currency, it was blamed on Bush.  But in the past 6 months, as Don Surber notes, the dollar has rallied against many currencies.  Credit where credit is due?

Keep the crickets handy.

In fact, neither of these events may be directly related to Bush policies, but if you’re going to blame him when things go bad, you should be at least intellectually honest when things go well. 

Unless everything is partisan, no matter what it is. 

• For those seeking an Obama connection to the Blago scandal … look no further. Another view of the scandal. And finally for those who don’t believe there’s such a thing as media bias … evidence of media bias that should be hard to set aside.
• History and lost causes.
• Hippos hang gliding.
• Joe Carter looks at numbers. I think he’d be interested in Conway’s view as well … this book, Surreal Numbers, is a cute introduction.
• Why the auto rescue is a hard sell. More on that here.
• Interesting poster art.
• Christmas as a (former) atheist remembered.
• Get Religion looks at the Cao election.
• Four days in Richmond.