Stones Cry Out

That’s what the German’s pay, and yet their system has long ago run out of money.

Germany’s system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.

Pointedly, the insurers made clear that cutbacks alone won’t solve the problem. They said the government would have to consider raising premiums on the insured or, you guessed it, raise taxes. Currently, German workers pay a fixed-rate premium into the insurance scheme; that rate is now set at 14.9% of gross pay.

Chancellor Merkel, something of a political acrobat, was previously allied in coalition with leftist Social Democrats. She’s now resisting calls from the Free Democrats to get off the state-pulled health-care train. The FDP’s spokesman on health, Daniel Bahr, wants a "shift in direction away from state-run medicine." Why? Because "the current financial figures have showed us that the health-care fund doesn’t work."

"Doesn’t work."  Please someone inform the Senate Democrats of this.

1. Austrian economics.
2. The importance of one Mr Brentano.
3. Is that martyrdom of or and the intellectual?
4. Looking at the left and the politics of healthcare.
5. From where I sit, the description includes “handsome” the picture … not so much.
6. Big “O” Orthodoxy, Not just an intellectual exercise.
7. Well, I linked this yesterday and was told it was deceptive. Try try again.
8. What’s “wrong” with capitalism.
9. Considering church and state.
10. Where the wild things really are … and what it’s like over there.
11. Logical fallacy and the budget.
12. In Mr Obama’s military.
13. Singing … Skopjans?
14. Cost and Afghanistan.

1. China, currency and all that stuff … a response here.
2. Exports and … Bangladesh.
3. Menace, phantom or no … another view on that here.
4. For the Afghan McChyrstal plan.
5. Freedom of choice, spin and Mr Kennedy.
6. Liberal anger, Mr Obama and the Asian “tour.”
7. A question.
8. Fiction unfolding.
9. Mr Mohler and the Manhattan Declaration.
10. Neo-Malthusians?
11. The party of “if a Black man votes against healthcare he isn’t Black” looks askance at a RNC “purity” test.
12. One effect of the climate-hackergate.
13. Icons a secular aesthetic.

Hollywood, are you listening?  Liberals who think at least Chavez isn’t the monster he’s often portrayed as, are you paying attention? 

President Hugo Chávez has risked international ire by lauding Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist notorious for a series of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings across Europe, as a "revolutionary fighter" unjustly imprisoned for trying to defend the Palestinian people.

The leftist Venezuelan leader praised Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sánchez — as "one of the great fighters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation", denying he was a terrorist and claiming his lifetime imprisonment in France was unfair.

"I defend him," he said during a speech on Friday night. "It doesn’t matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe."

Of course, this is now in addition to all his other BFFs.

The fiery anti-American leader sought to defend leaders he said were wrongly branded "bad guys", heaping praise on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is to visit Venezuela later this week, and the Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, who he called "brothers".

He drew the wrath of Ugandans after casting doubt on the crimes of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. "We thought he was a cannibal," said Mr Chávez of Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. "I have doubts … Maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot."

Hat tip: Betsy Newmark, who wonders if those Hollywood leftists who have made common cause with Chavez will ever get asked about this latest news.  Yeah, probably not.  After all, it is the leftist media most likely to do any interviewing.

Now we know where that annoying campaign slogan was really coming from:

Source: GraphJam

I’ve heard some folks say that they’d happily pay their part to get health insurance for everyone.  The only problem is, they think that it’s just a matter of money; a few (or a whole bunch of) extra bucks out of their paychecks.  But there’s more to it than that.  Republicans have come out with some numbers that show this is a bit more costly than that.  A sampling:

5.5 million — Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

$1.055 trillion — New federal spending on expanded health insurance coverage over the next ten years, according to a Congressional Budget Office preliminary score of the bill

0.7% — Percentage of all that new spending occurring in the bill’s first three years-representing a debt and tax “time bomb” in the program’s later years set to explode on future generations

$88,200 — Definition of “low-income” family of four for purposes of health insurance subsidies

114 million — Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage under the bill’s government-run health plan, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group

And what about paying for all of this with Medicare fraud reduction?

$60 billion — Loss sustained by taxpayers every year due to Medicare fraud, according to a recent 60 Minutes expose; the government-run health plan does not reform the ineffective anti-fraud statutes and procedures that have kept Medicare on the Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk programs for two decades

Zero — Prohibitions on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid from using cost-effectiveness research to impose delays to or denials for access to life-saving treatments.

That silly talk about "death panels"?

$634 Billion — Amount that could be saved by denying individuals access to treatments that are not “cost-effective,” according to a report by the liberal Commonwealth Fund; Section 1160 of the bill gives bureaucrats in the Obama Administration virtual free rein to develop a new “high-value” reimbursement system for Medicare by May 2012

Your money would be buying more government intrusion, less freedom, subsidies for those "poor" making $80,000 a year, expansion of unemployment, and a price tag that, while it may feel good at the beginning, will hit up-and-coming wage earners the hardest. 

Happily pay for this?  Really?

1. An artistic aesthetic for the family photo that I don’t quite get.
2. Contra move-on and a self-contradictory PAC.
3. Questions regarding the upcoming (show?) trial.
4. That Manhattan document.
5. Man and Woman … Mars and Venus.
6. Unimpressed by pork … or outright bribery.
7. The other healthcare bill.
8. Uranium ore and international politics.
9. Stalin and a war memorial.
10. West/East and Mary, Theotokos.
11. A favorite novel.
12. Dr Who and ethics.
13. Myths.
14. The Muslim Palestinian left and Mr Obama’s policy.
15. Lessons and climategate.

And it ain’t a happy day for the CRU.  True, this is a cybercrime, and the perpetrator(s) should be brought to justice.  But equally as big is the contents of the >1000 e-mails and >3800 documents. 

The Hadley Climate Research Unit has confirmed the hack, so this is not a hoax, and global-warming-skeptic sites like "Watts Up With That" and Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald-Sun newspaper are sifting through the data, finding some rather compromising evidence.  Some include details on how temperature data was manipulated, to frustration that the climate models didn’t predict the current global temp decline, to attempts to obfuscate data released via a Freedom of Information request.  Bolt has been updating his post frequently and has a dozen examples so far.

As the Wall St. Journal says, "Well, this should get interesting."

True, this could all be a major hoax, but with Hadley confirming the breach, and with 61 megabytes of data having been dumped (i.e. a vast amount), this is sounding very real.  Stay tuned.

In our self-absorbed, narcissistic culture, filled with people desperate to find meaning to their lives, is it no surprise we’ve generated the Personal Promise Bible? (HT: STR)

Have you ever inserted your name as you read the Bible to make it more personal? Now you can experience the reality of God’s love and promises in a way you never thought possible. In the Personal Promise Bible, you will read your first name personalized in over 5,000 places throughout the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, over 7,000 places throughout the complete Old and New Testaments.

Indeed, with a tagline of “as unique as you are”, such a product only reinforces the notion that the Bible was written directly to us individually. This, I think, is an issue that has crept up in the evangelical church in America. In Bible studies, class discussions, and sermons alike, do any of these phrases sound familiar: “To me, this verse means…”, “What does this verse mean, to you?…”, “My special verse is…”, or “God gave me this verse…”? It’s this “the Bible was written to me” idea which causes so many Christians to literally steal away the intended meaning of scripture. Consider the classic “my special verse” of Jeremiah 29:11,

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

The main problem with this unique-as-you-are Bible is that most of the Bible was not written directly to us! This certainly does not mean we cannot gleam truths, insights, applications and personal significance from the words in God’s Word, but it does mean we should approach the written Word in a manner consistent with how we approach any written form of communication. We must understand the historical foundation of Israel and the early Church which, as with any foundation, precedes us and on which we stand. We must understand that the ultimate author of the Bible (God) has an intent (plan) He is communicating to all people and working out through His church. And we need to realize that the individual authors of the Bible, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote in specific literary genres, to specific audiences, with specific intentions.

If we fail to understand these basic premises, and choose to personalize essentially the entire Bible, we’ll end up with an anti-Word. Consider Jeremiah 29:11 in this unique-as-you-are context: “For I know the plans I have for Rusty,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper Rusty and not to harm Rusty, plans to give Rusty hope and a future.” How many times have you heard Christians take this verse in essentially that personal-for-me context? Yet, are they ready to do the same with the preceding verse? “This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to Rusty and fulfill my gracious promise to bring Rusty back to this place.”

It’s interesting to note, when I’ve pointed out Jeremiah 29:10 to people who want to claim Jeremiah 29:11, the mental gymnastics that take place to suddenly turn the meaning of verse 10 into an allegory or metaphor or something completely apart from the personal promise they are so convinced is contained in verse 11.

Could it be that one reason we’ve drifted into a post-Christian culture is because we completely misunderstand our place in God’s Plan through an ill-educated approach to reading His Word?

That’s the title of a new campaign by the Family Research Council, trying to get the word out on how so many diseases and conditions (>70) are already being treated successfully with adult stem cells.

Currently the most common and effective treatments using stem cells are various forms of cancers and anemias, he said, though adult stem cells have also repaired heart attack damage, treated leukemias, lymphomas, spinal cord injuries and helped patients with multiple sclerosis and juvenile diabetes. 

When asked about the embryonic stem cell research debate, [David] Prentice [Ph.D., former professor at Indiana State University] noted, “No human beings have even been injected yet” in embryonic stem cell research. Published science, however, has verified the successful treatments of thousands of patients using adult stem cells.

“Lets focus on helping the patients, and helping them now,” Prentice said. “We’re not even talking about embryonic stem cell research. It’s not helping anybody. It’s not even helping the lab rats.”

No human has been injected because of all the complications with embryonic stem cells, including cancer.  In the meantime, adult stem cells, without carrying the ethical and moral baggage, continue to work successfully.  And with new methods being discovered that make adult stem cells as flexible as embryonic, there is absolutely no need to even go down the embryonic path.

You can visit the campaign’s website here.

1. Mere Christianity considered.
2. On this, I concur.
3. Ouch.
4. Considering the Oreo and fat calories.
5. Praising Rowan Williams for a public speech no less.
6. Hmm, you wanna bet that the rich in California won’t obey that law?
7. A question asked.
8. On Ms Palin.
9. How not to pray for the President correctly.
10. Where’s the beef.
11. The prosecutor picks the venue? Is that normal?
12. Remarks on Mr Beck.
13. Eight days of night.
14. Mr Gore, photoshops for science.

Apparently we are heading to a New York show trial of a infamous Guantanamo Bay resident. Some years earlier, a famous essay by Hannah Arendt to whit, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which highlighted another show trial. In that former trial, to the discerning observer if not to the general audience, political ethics and the public/personal normative framing were highlighted. The prospects seem low, especially given the pre-trial protestations of an assurance of a guilty verdict by Mr Holder, of any such public debate and discussions about political ethics on the public stage. Earlier I queried an interlocutor in conversation over up-coming civil show trial what was his evaluation of the considerations involved in the detainment, processing, and treatment of illegal combatants. Read the rest of this entry

This has to be one of the most clever anti-Obamacare ads I have seen yet:

Source

Was this really a surprise?

The United Nations atomic agency has lost confidence that the Persian Gulf country is telling the whole truth about its nuclear program and isn’t hiding additional secret facilities.

Iran’s Qom enrichment facility, revealed in a Sept 21 letter, “reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said today in a 7-page report obtained by Bloomberg News.

This just in: Governments that rig the election system to make sure their hand-picked guy gets elected, and have genocidal designs on other countries can’t be trusted.  United Nations shocked. 

And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him till the morning.  And he saw that he prevailed not against him; and he touched the broad part of his thigh, and the broad part of Jacob’s thigh was benumbed in his wrestling with him.  And he said to him, Let me go, for the day has dawned; but he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.  And he said to him, What is thy name? and he answered, Jacob.  And he said to him, Thy name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name; for thou hast prevailed with God, and shalt be mighty with men. [Genesis 32]

Well, so then Israel means something like “one who wrestles with God” or at the very least prevails in his struggles with divinity. The early Church father’s, who by and large were not of Hebrew ancestry, read that through Christ we are all striving to shed our inner Egyptian and cross the Jordan to be come Israelites. The connection of out spiritual state with Israel can be quite plainly seen in Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses. So … let’s take this and see what it might mean for the American Christian today? What does it mean for the individual Christian. How do you wrestle with God?

Back when I was at University, in the 80s and not as I tell my children when the dinosaurs roamed the plains, most of my study was concentrated in maths and physics which essentially was to wrestle with Nature. Which was to ask, how was the world constructed? How can we understand it? How do we interact with it on a fundamental level? However, these are the big questions. People working in the field don’t work directly on the large questions. At any one time, people are working on smaller, more tractable questions which on getting answers will move the larger communities understanding of the big picture forward … or at the very least sharpen our understanding of what we don’t know.

Similarly, it seems to me, we as Christians are called to wrestle in exactly that way with God. How do we understand God? How are we to interact with him and with others? How to understand and work toward Theosis/Sanctification?

So, here’s my question for the gentle reader. What smaller questions are you working on as you wrestle? What knots are you trying to untangle?