>Earmarks and Corruption

>Blowtorches Long Passed Due

Republicans in the US Congress are finally looking as it they will take action against “earmarks”–one of the most corrupt practices in the US polity.

The practice has long been defended by “mainstream” Republicans–you know, the ones who allegedly appeal to independent voters. The arguments they have advanced have consisted of breathtaking misdirections (“if we ban earmarks we will give the President more control over spending”). Now they are feeling the electoral heat and they are changing tune. Way passed time–and their turning is not to be trusted. Keep the blowtorch to the y-fronts, we say.

Here is Patterico on earmarks.

Before he was dragged kicking and screaming into supporting an earmark ban, Mitch McConnell (Republican Senator) and a lot of the Smart People were arguing that a ban on earmarks does not reduce spending by a single penny.

Why wouldn’t it?

Can one of the Smart People explain this logic to me?

The argument I have seen is that eliminating earmarks simply turns over spending power to the executive. But I don’t understand why this must be the case.

Let’s take a standard example of an earmark from the post below. Barack Obama, Fearless Champion of Responsible Spending and Opponent of Earmarks, is the junior Senator from Illinois. In that capacity, he requests $1 million in an earmark intended for a local hospital at which, coincidentally, his wife works — at a $316,962 per year job in the position of executive administrator, which is hospital terminology for “Wife Of Guy Who Might Give Us Money.”

The earmark is rejected by lawmakers. Why does this mean that the President now gets to decide how to spend that $1 million? Why can’t lawmakers decide to simply remove that spending from the appropriations bill?

You know: cutting spending! What a concept!

The idea that this approach is rejected out of hand — that any dollar not directed by Congress becomes a dollar directed by the President — seems to miss the entire point. Why can’t a dollar (or a million, or millions or billions) not directed by Congress be returned to the taxpayer? Or, even more shockingly, used to reduce our crushing debt?

As for the size of earmarks, it’s true that they are a small part of the budget. But it’s symptomatic of the mindset.

If you are missing your mortgage payment every month, it’s probably not because you’re subscribing to People Magazine. But if you’re missing your mortgage payment every month, you should not be subscribing to People Magazine. If you are, it’s a good indication that you just don’t seem to understand the problem.

We have to change the mindset, Mitch. So embrace this change with the right attitude. It’s time to return some dollars to the taxpayer.

If we take the lawmakers’ small entitlements, maybe they’ll get in the right frame of mind to take on our big entitlements.

All we can do is try.

Fortunately, we do not have “earmarking” in New Zealand. Our corruptions take other forms, but corruptions they remain. Our electorate must remain both scrupulous and ruthless when it comes to dealing with public corruption. Thus, we are pleased to see Pansy Wong resign. But there is more, much more. And we need more blow torches. There are y-fronts aplenty.

>Turning Tides?

>We Would Hope So
(But We Are Not Holding Our Breath . . . )

Inventory2 at Keeping Stock fills our stockings with cheery news. The PC tide is receding in New Zealand and sanity is returning. Golliwogs are back! This announcement is made against the backdrop of a story from the UK, where a pig was removed from a barnyard ensemble on sale at an early childhood education store–out of respect for Muslims and Jews.

No doubt Animal Farm is about to be banned, as well, because it features pigs. Well actually, it has been banned in dozens of countries already, so if finally the ban is promulgated in Britain as (for reasons of religious sensitivity, of course) the UK will have joined a particularly loathsome and noisome club. One’s friends define one, as do one’s enemies.

Whilst on the subject of political correctness and the damage that it does–US citizens have been scandalized by the introduction of body scanners and genital groping at airports (to find secreted bombs, of course). What many don’t realize is that such a gargantuan screening effort, together with the intrusion into personal privacy, has been driven by the non-discrimination demands of political correctness. The US refuses to profile and focus on suspect terrorists. Therefore everyone must be regarded as a potential terrorist. Political correctness requires perverse profiling: everyone is regarded as guilty, until the intrusive scanning and patting down proves them innocent.

Those who refuse to discriminate righteously, end up promulgating a police-state.

>Rising Tides

>“Two Kingdoms” Will Always End as Only One

Peter Jones
Director, Truth Exchange

One Ring to rule them all

One Ring to find them

One Ring to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

J R R Tolkien

Having been rasied in the cultural centre of the universe–Liverpool, England–and having taught among the Gauls for 18 years in the South of France, I keep my eyes upon Europe.

In the UK, a new Government education policy require the teaching of “multiculturalism” is every subject. Multiculturalism takes many forms. . . . To the statement in a recent poll, “Religion is very important to me in my daily life,” only 24% of the British responded positively–the next-to-lowest rate in the world. It turns out that there is hardly any faith for the Queen to defend. Easy job, great pay!

The lowest response came from the French at 23%. Most “religious” Frenchmen call themselves “Catholic”, but only 52% of Catholics believe there is a God! Of those who do, around 80% believe that God is a “force” or “energy”. And France has another pressing problem: no French babies. The “Nation” is not reproducing itself. Is there a relationship between physical reproduction and religious commitment?

Into this spiritual and demographic multicultural void gallops militant Islam–armed with both faith and babies.

The highest response (to the question about the importance of religion in daily life) came from the Egyptians (96%). This figure is very typical for Muslims, who also have the highest birth rate in Europe. Mohammed is the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam (and in the UK). By 2025, one third of all European children will be Muslim. Then we shall talk of Eurabia, because young Muslims are increasingly radicalised. While only 17% of British Muslims over 55 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in the land of the Magna Carta, 40% of their children under 24 want sharia to rule.

For French writer, Jean Raspail, the present social crisis is a clash between two definitions of France: “the Nation” (with its long history, biological identity and “Christian” religion) and “the Republic” (a political notion based on the secular “values” of democratic utopianism). A comparable clash occurs in Germany between the children of Luther and Bach (who produced the secular pluralistic state of modern Germany, but are no longer making little Luthers or Bachs) and the recent Turkish immigrants (many of who do not speak and do not with to speak German, but who produce little Turks).

A similar crisis is brewing in the USA, bwere two nations of America are in tension. One is “America the free” (freedom of speech and religion, which has become the natural domain of pluralistic secularism). The other is “America under God” (the belief that the American experiment depends on a constant appeal to “the Creator” and to the ethics of the Bible). The spiritual domain hs always been tacitly granted to Christianity, exercising, as if by divine right, though without a Queen, a sort of spiritual custodianship of the culture.

All that has changed! The tension has become a clash. Christianity has been weakened by the power of secularism and by rising religious paganism that demands equal spiritual custodianship of the nation and free political expression of its view. (We still await the arrival in force of Islam, though a congressman was recently sworn into office, hand on the Koran.)

Secularism, paganism and Islam all have their sights on a this-worldly social victory. Christians have a more complicated stance, with one foot in the kingdom of this world, and one in the kingdom of Christ. This dual-citizenship frees them in this world to stand for truth and justice, have babies, build churches as signs of the coming kingdom of the transformed universe, and live for Christ, whatever the cost . . . .

One day Christians may be jailed in the brave new world of once “Christian” Albion–with no help from the Queen. But eventually they will live free forever in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Kingdom of Christ, with those from every nation and tongue who honour Jesus as Lord of lords and King of kings.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>Those We Imitate, We Honour

When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations. Deuteronomy 18:9

Moses is revealing and proclaiming the Law of God to Israel–laying down God’s instructions about how they are to live in the land of Canaan which they are about to enter. This is but a foreshadowing of the New Covenant. Israel’s entering into the land of Promise to inherit it and possess it is an antetype of the entering in of Christ’s people–not into heaven as is so commonly but mistakenly believed–but an entering into and taking possession of the entire earth.

Christ’s servants have been called and redeemed out of slavery and commanded to go forth and disciple all the nations. Israel’s entering into the land and taking it as their possession and inheritance was but a pale foreshadowing of the great inheritance of the whole earth. The work of going in and taking possession of the entire earth is what Christ’s people are engaged in now.

Moses’s instructions continue to have relevance to us, the heirs of the Old Covenant, the Church as we go forth to take possession of the earth. Our text requires that as we do this, we do not imitate the nations in their detestable practices. We must at all times remain separate, holy to the Lord. Under the New Covenant with the full revelation of our Lord and His death and resurrection into which we are all baptized, we no longer require the scaffolding, the supports, the props, the protections, and the “spoonfeeding” of infancy, required by ancient Israel. Full and final atonement for sin has been made, we have died to sin in Christ, we have risen with Him to the heavenlies, He has been enthroned upon high, and His Spirit has been poured out upon His people and Christ goes forth to conquer, not with a sword, but with His holy Word. These realities allow the Old Covenant scaffolding to be removed; the types and shadows are no longer needed.

These great realities and forces allow Christ’s people to be insinuated amongst Unbelievers and not be overcome; they enable us not to conform to Unbelieving practices that surround us; they free us from an otherwise inevitable conformity to the world.

Deuteronomy 18:9 commands that we not learn to imitate the detestable practices of Unbelievers. Not learning implies that Unbelievers and the cultures of Unbelief stand willing and ready to instruct and teach us in their beliefs and ways. Unbelief stands ready always to instruct us in its version of truth, knowledge, power, and control over the world. In Moses’s day, the dominant “power-word” of the nations was witchcraft and divination. Engage in rituals to get the gods to reveal their secret knowledge to you. Then cast spells and engage in sorcery to manipulate and control the world around you. (Deuteronomy 18: 10-11)

The Lord says that whoever does these things is detestable to Him; he who practises them will be driven out from before the Lord. (Deuteronomy 18:12) As they are driven out, God’s people enter in, occupy and take over in their place–but only if they themselves remain blameless to the Lord. (Deuteronomy 18:13).

It is at this point that we need to confess that many of Christ’s people in our day do not realise that the dominant culture of Unbelief in which we live and move is just as pagan and detestable as the Canaanite culture of Moses’s day. It, too, has its false version of truth, knowledge and power. Its culture of Unbelief has matured into even more detestable and despicable forms than ancient Canaanite paganism. Now the hubris and arrogance of man has emerged into full-throated Unbelief. There are no demons, spirits, witches, or gods–whatsoever. The power-word is impersonal nature itself, and its lord and god is man, and man only. With the faculty of Reason and its prophetess of Science, man can plumb the deep things of reality and determine his own truth. He can then weave his knowledge as a form of spell-casting to manipulate and control the world.

God says, “do not learn to imitate these detestable things”. How intolerable and completely unacceptable, then, it is to send our children to be taught in these false beliefs, these divinations and sorceries. To send our children to be taught in pagan-controlled schools, which are officially forbidden to acknowledge and teach God alone as the source of truth and knowledge, is equivalent to the Israelites sending their children down to the local temple of Baal to be taught there by Baal’s prophets and priests what the real truth about things is, and the way things really are.

When Israel actually did do this in later years, it provoked the Lord to a terrible anger, resulting in the destruction of Israel. Israel itself was driven out from before the Lord, as one of the pagan nations of Canaan, because what they were doing was so detestable to Him. Do we think, for a moment, that it is any different now. Did Christ come to make us more amenable to idols? Has He come and died and ascended so that we can be free to give our children up to the instructors and instructions of Unbelief? Has He sent forth His Spirit upon us, so that we would send forth our children to be taught detestable things? May it never be.

>Environmentalism and Shonky Science

>United Only in Their Rejection of Modern Society

What the ‘green movement’ really got wrong

Ben Pile

Channel 4’s mea culpa from two leading environmentalists still took for granted that humanity faces insuperable natural limits.

Monday 8 November 2010

Environmentalists have long claimed that their desire to save the world has been thwarted by conspiracies of Big Oil and right-wing think-tanks. Channel 4’s What the Green Movement Got Wrong showed signs that some environmentalists are at last beginning to take responsibility for their failures. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know, and will the new environmentalists be so different from the old?

The main thrust of the film is that, by opposing GM, nuclear power, and DDT, environmentalists have damaged the chances of a solution to climate change and have done serious harm to poorer people and their own public image. Critics have been arguing this for environmentalism’s entire history, of course. But it is interesting to see some sober reflection on green failure nonetheless. Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (see a review of the book here), speaks candidly about how his objection to GM ‘wasn’t a science-based rational thing. It was an emotional thing and it was about the relation between humans and other living things’. Since Lynas ‘came out’ in favour of nuclear power, he has found himself on the receiving end of the self-righteousness he once meted out to others.

Although it is interesting to see one-time activists reflecting in this way, the reformulation of environmentalism doesn’t really address the problems with its initial perspective. The arguments in the film don’t form a criticism of environmentalism as an instance of the politics of fear, but merely moderate some of its excesses. There is an interesting discussion about the shortcomings of the precautionary principle, and the film’s participants are far more circumspect about risk from certain technologies than they have been in the past.

But these risks are merely seen in contrast to the ultimate catastrophe: climate change. Technologies are not considered in terms of their potential for humans, but are embraced reluctantly as solutions to climate change. Genetically modified (GM) food is sold seemingly only on the basis that it is a means to begrudgingly feed the poor. The limitations of the catastrophic narrative still are such that they constrain discussion about progress beyond subsistence.

The new environmentalists’ point is that the environmental movement failed to protect the environment. So the tension between development and environment still haunts the debate, rather than being exorcised from it. And this is the film’s major shortcoming. The real claim of environmentalism – its ethics – is not merely that we must protect the environment, but that we should live within environmental limits.

This is explored only briefly in the film, by reference to Paul Ehrlich who, in the late 60s, attempted to give these limits numerical substance. Ehrlich predicted dire consequences, but the resource depletion, mass famine and economic collapse he saw in his calculations failed to materialise. Undaunted, the environmental movement merely deferred the date of eco-tastrophe further into the future, and made an ethic out of life within presumed environmental limits – ‘sustainability’. The result has been the tendency of the environmental movement to produce ideas which are hostile to technological development and appear to be anti-human in consequence. But this character of environmentalism is only superficially explored in the film.

This shallow treatment of environmentalism’s substance resulted in a heated but ultimately futile studio debate broadcast after the film. In this exchange, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, Greenpeace’s token scientist Doug Parr, and Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth (FoE) criticised the film for what they saw as it’s preoccupation with technology as the means to overcome these limits. ‘You can’t look at technology in ideological isolation’, said Bennett, insisting that FoE have a ‘pragmatic rather than ideological approach to technology’. Monbiot claimed that this was the most ‘ideological film I’ve ever seen on television’. Each side now accused each other of ‘ideology’, while claiming science and pragmatism for themselves.

However, this kind of ‘pragmatism’ has long been a feature of the environmental movement. For instance, in 2004, Lynas declared that ‘[t]he struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere’. In 2008, Monbiot seemed to agree, arguing that the eco-anarcho-socialists gathered at Climate Camp were undermining themselves: ‘Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim’, he said.

It is this claim about ‘pragmatism’ that allows environmentalists to smuggle their own ‘ideology’ into such debates under the cover of ‘science’. And it was only ever a clash between two groups of environmentalists – rather than criticism from without – that would finally expose the tendency of ‘pragmatism’ to produce its own crises. The same ‘science’ seems to produce different arguments, and here lies the biggest mystery about the greens. ‘Where’s the cohesion of the new environmentalists?’, asked Doug Parr; there is no new environmental movement, he pointed out.

In fact, there never really has been an environmental movement, full stop. Environmentalism has been a loud and bizarre spectacle of UK politics, but it has never moved more than a handful of people out onto the streets at any one time. It has never achieved sufficient numbers to count as a political force. And there has been no cohesive environmental philosophy. Instead, as Lynas admits, environmentalists were united, not by science, but by their emotional rejection of contemporary society.

As with most criticism of environmentalism, it is often the reaction to it that reveals more than the criticism itself. Monbiot replies that the movement was unsuccessful, not because it failed to capture the minds of the public, but because ‘we are massively out-spent by corporate-funded movements which have had hundreds of millions poured into them telling government and the media there isn’t a problem’, a claim which surely ignores the UK and EU governments’ environmental policies. He complains that Channel 4 has ‘broadcast a series of polemics about the environment… over the last 20 years’. But the three films he’s talking about – Against Nature, The Great Global Warming Swindle and What the Green Movement Got Wrong – occupied no more than six hours of two decades of near continuous broadcasting. What environmentalists lack in terms of a sense of proportion, they make up for with a sense of persecution.

What Lynas has realised, and Monbiot has not, is that ‘sceptics’ did not undermine the environmentalists’ cause. Environmentalists were their own worst enemy. They have alienated the rest of society by their own uncompromising and misanthropic outlook. The challenge for the new environmentalists is to emerge from this crisis of their own making into an era of growing scepticism, while keeping an eye on the consequences of their arguments. But without the precautionary principle, alarmism, doom and catastrophe, and premature claims to scientific certainty, what is environmentalism?

Ben Pile is an editor of the Climate-Resistance blog.

>British Realism on Al Qaeda?

>Something The US Should Also Learn

General Sir David Richards is the newly-installed Chief of the Defence Staff. He is a 39 year career army officer. In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, he appears to present a more contained and realistic view on dealing with Al Qaeda and other forms of Islamic militancy. Whilst he has to defend his country’s current commitment in Afghanistan, he does so with an expression of wishful thinking, rather than military conviction.

Defeating al-Qaeda and Islamist militancy

The general subscribes to the notion that such an ideologically-driven adversary cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, and to attempt to do so could be a mistake.

“In conventional war, defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation’s capital.

First of all you have to ask: “do we need to defeat it (Islamist militancy)?” in the sense of a clear cut victory, and I would argue that it is unnecessary and would never be achieved.” It is a bold statement and he quickly adds: “But can we contain it to the point that our lives and our children’s lives are led securely? I think we can.”

This sort of talk would have you “gone by lunchtime” in the United States. He goes on to suggest that Islamic terrorism is not fundamentally a military problem but a religious and philosophical one. He believes it will only be “defeated” by westernising those lands where Al Qaeda is now supported. He does not use the term “westernise” but that is actually what he has in mind.

Education, prosperity, understanding and democracy, he argues passionately, are the weapons that would ultimately turn people away from terrorism, although he admitted that to believe that such an undertaking could be achieved “within the time frame of the Second World War would be naive in the extreme”.

Ah, yes, back to that doomed notion of “nation building”.

We believe a far more sane and enlightened approach would be for the US and others to focus their military and policing efforts on protecting their citizens from attacks. It should not be upon removing the threats. Such a goal is idealistic and naive. It sucks nations into social welfare programmes and “nation-building” in such extremely primitive places like Afghanistan (which, of course, have to be protected by the requisite military force and presence.)

Reading between the lines, General Richards appears to be setting up a point at which he will begin to argue for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“I believe the sacrifice made by British troops in Afghanistan has been worth it,” he said, the smile slipping from his face. “I keep well in touch with servicemen and women and that is all our views.”

Recent polling in Afghanistan also suggests that up to 90 per cent of Afghans do not want the Taliban to return but the general admits that the country is beginning to tire of Nato’s failure to deliver on many of its promises.

He continued: “If I thought for one minute that the majority of the Afghan people didn’t want us any more – then I and everyone else would say that it’s time to go, we’ve failed.

“But there is no indication of that. The vast majority do not want the return of the Taliban and it must be in our strategic interest to see that whole region stabilised before we eventually go, which we will do.

Ninety percent of Afghans do not want the Taliban to return. Must have been some real smart polling that was done. If that were true, victory would have been achieved five years ago. He cannot really believe that. We suspect he is looking for as fast an exit as possible.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Little Something Called Context

Atheism and Apologetics – Letter to Mr. Harris
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, November 12, 2010

Howm’I supposed to defend the faith against these swamis of reason when they keep making me wheeze like they do?

Sam Harris, aspiring scientist and indignation impresario, is promoting this project, in order to advance the sweet voice of reason. You can look at a really cool graphic they have put together here. The base line represents all the verses of the Bible, and the red lines all arch, like so many mortar shots, to the location of another verse, with which it is supposed to collide. You can then tell at a glance that the Bible is just full of contradictions. The night sky is lit up with them. A really cool graphic is necessary to illustrate this because today’s street smart youth know that iPhone apps have dispensed with the need for actual arguments and textual study, you know, the kind with books.

I took a random sampling of just a couple of their contradictions, and addressed them below. I will perhaps be forgiven if I don’t work through them all. You don’t need to drink the whole bottle to tell that it’s vinegar. So, here are a couple drops from their bottle, in all their glory, and I don’t think I am risking contradiction when I say we need to look elsewhere if we are looking for Pinot Noir that goes with the tenderloin.

#208 If a husband believes, is his wife saved also? 1 Cor. 7:14, Acts 16:31 ≠ 1 Cor. 7:16

Can you feel your faith teetering? Well, you oughter, you superstitious rube, because here are the verses themselves, actually quoted.

“For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy” (1 Cor. 7:14).

“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31).

Which are said to contradict . . .

“For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?” (1 Cor. 7:16)

Let’s see. The name of this venture in high intellectual attainment is Project Reason. I am thinking that maybe they should rename it as Project Literacy, for that is where (it seems to me) the issue may lie.

Scripture tells us that a believing spouse ought not to leave an unbeliever simply because of that unbelief. You don’t need to worry that having an unbelieving spouse will pollute any resultant children, for the unbelieving spouse is sanctified with the result that the children are holy (1 Cor. 7:14). So, go ahead, stay married to that unbeliever if the unbeliever is content to remain married. And then, to throw us off completely, we have an account of salvation coming to the entire household of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:31). Apparently, nobody has taught Sam Harris how doctrine ought to be derived from narrative, along with the corollary of how it ought not to be.

Now, all this is set up as a contradiction to the question posed in 1 Cor. 7:16, which encourages a believing spouse whose unbelieving spouse decides to leave them. We know about this because of an intervening verse, verse 15, a little something that we biblical expositors like to call “context.”

“But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace” (1 Cor. 7:15).

So when you look at that poster, with all those red arches proving that the Bible is a tissue of contradictions, just remember that #208 was one of those red lines. Tell yourself that Sam Harris thinks the Bible is unreliable because it tells Christian spouses to stay married to the non-Christian if the non-Christian wants to, and not to worry about it if they don’t. Most of us would call this different counsel for different circumstances, but for Sam Harris, it is a contradiction. This, under the banner of Project Reason?

“Put your money in the slot, and push B17 if you want the Fritos. Push D9 if you want the Snickers bar.”

“O ho! Can you Christians not see the contradictions?”

“Um, no, actually . . .”

“Let us graph it for you. Let us draw a red line from the Fritos to the Snickers. Now do you see?”

“No.”

“Did you go to one of those Christian schools? Did they even have science classes?”

Okay, so maybe that one was a fluke. Let’s look at one more before my patience runs out.

#211 Is it OK to make images? Ex. 20:4, Deut. 5:8, Deut. 4:16-18, Dt. 4:23, Deut. 27:15 ≠ Ex. 25:18, 20, Num. 21:8

Now here are the verse, in toto, with a little surplus added. The little surplus is more of that context business.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Ex. 20:3-5a).

“Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: Dt. 5:8-9a)

“Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth: And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath dividedc unto all nations under the whole heaven” (Dt 4:16-19).

“Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee” (Dt. 4:23).

“And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice, Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen” (Deut. 27:14-15).

All of which is said to contradict . . .

“And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat” (Ex 25:18).

“And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be” (Ex 25:20).

“And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live” (Num. 21:8).

Follow that? God told the sons of Israel not to make images that they would bow down to or worship, and this is said to contradict the making of images that they did not bow down to or worship. Heh. Let us illustrate this Accomplishment of High Reason with a parallel argument. It is against the rules of soccer to touch the ball with your hands. Does it follow that it is a contradiction to allow the players to kick the ball with their feet? I don’t think so, but of course I am not an aspiring scientist like Sam Harris.

>The Canute Award . . .

>Just What We Didn’t Need

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve (equivalent to our Reserve Bank) must in in the front line to win this year’s Canute award. (The Canute award, to our knowledge, does not exist–but it ought to. It should be given to the public official or politician whose hubris has led him or her most spectacularly to attempt to command the impossible.) Bernanke has thought that he can “stimulate” the US economy by throwing freshly printed money at it ($600 billion).

He has run smack into a minor irritant–the bond market. Clearly, thousands upon thousands of creditors to the United States have taken a different view–one based upon their self-interest, quite understandably. They have reasoned that the fiat creation of billions of dollars will be inflationary. More printed money purchasing the same amount of goods and services will push prices up (due to more money competing for the same amount of goods), which is to say, the value of US dollars will go down, which is the most insidious form of theft of all. So, they have started to move out of owing US debt. The US currency has dropped sharply in value (perfectly rationally so) and interest rates have started to rise–the exact opposite of Bernanke’s intent.

The US yield curve (a graph summarising interest rates across a range of debt maturities) is now strongly positive–that is, longer dated debt has a higher interest rate. Usually when longer term interest rates are higher, the “market” (that is, millions of lenders) are saying they expect inflation to rise. They expect that in the future money will be worth less than it is today, so they require higher interest to be paid now to compensate them for their anticipated losses in the future. Hence, interest rates rise in an attempt to keep them interested.

Meanwhile prices are rising.  According to CNBC,

Prices of cotton, silver wheat, soybeans, corn are all up big this year. Cotton futures are up the most, climbing 90 percent so far in 2010. The price of silver is up 63 percent.

and

There might not have been a second round of quantitative easing, if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke shopped at Walmart.

A new pricing survey of products sold at the world’s largest retailer showed a 0.6 percent price increase in just the last two months, according to MKM Partners. At that rate, prices would be close to four percent higher a year from now, double the Fed’s mandate.

The “inaugural price survey shows a small, but meaningful increase on an 86-item grocery basket,” said Patrick McKeever, MKM Partners analyst, in a note. Most of the items McKeever chose to track were every day items like food and detergent and made by national brands.

It would appear as though the market is telling Bernanke that inflation is rising and his quantitative easing is equivalent to throwing gasoline on a smouldering flame. And spare a thought for Mr Obama, economic incompetent-in-chief who has been gravely telling the G20 leaders that “Quantitative Easing” was necessary to get the US economy growing again, which in the end would be to the good of all. How terribly inconvenient that millions of investors and lenders to the US think otherwise and are voting with their feet.

It is poetic justice for all who aspire to be modern day Canute’s.

>El Nino, La Nina and Global Temperatures Explained

>A Super La Nina is Developing

The Super La Nina and the Coming Winter

Posted By Art Horn On October 25, 2010Published in Pajamas Media

Historically, these strong La Nina events drop the Earth’s average temperature around one degree Fahrenheit, and the drop comes quickly. As a result, some of the same places that had record heat this summer may suffer through record cold this winter.

La Nina is the lesser-known colder sister of El Nino. La Nina chills the waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and in turn cools the entire planet for one to two years or more. This chilling has the potential to bring bone-numbing cold to many parts of the world for this and the following winter. As a result, world energy demand may spike in the next one to two years as much colder weather hits many of the major industrial nations.

This La Nina appears to be special ^[1], at least so far. It is well on its way to being the strongest of these events since the super La Nina of 1955-1956. During that powerful La Nina that lasted two years, the global average temperature fell nearly one degree Fahrenheit from 1953 to 1956.
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) measures the air pressure difference between Darwin, Australia, and Tahiti. The lower the value of the index, the stronger the El Nino typically is. The higher the SOI index, the stronger the La Nina. The September SOI value of +25.0 ^[2] was the highest of any September going back to 1917, when it was +29.7. During that super La Nina, the global temperature fell 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1915 to 1917. The +25.0 September SOI reading is also the highest for any month dating back to the +31.6 value in November of 1973.

The most recent La Nina developed in the spring of 2007, and persisted until the early summer of 2008. The global average temperature fell one degree Fahrenheit in that period of time, equal to all of the warming of the last 100 years! If the trend of this rapidly developing, potentially super La Nina continues, an equal or larger temperature drop can be anticipated during the next one to two years. This La Nina ^[3] is coming on very fast and very strong. Already it is colder than the six coldest La Ninas of the last 60 years when they were at a similar stage of development.

What about the recent heat we’ve all heard about?

For the last year, the world has been dealing with the warming effects of a strong El Nino. The El Nino warms the ocean waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean and in turn heats the atmosphere. Western Russia melted under a record heat wave this summer, after freezing from record cold last winter. Many parts of the southern United States had record heat this summer, but also shivered under record cold last winter. The persistence of the jetstream to blow in patterns that changed very little for long periods of time contributed to these extremes of temperature. This locked in jetstream wind pattern enhances temperature anomalies by restricting the exchange of air flow from one place to another. What would be hot becomes very hot, and what would be cold becomes very cold.
It is common for the jetstream to behave this way when the sun is in the solar minimum, such as it has been for the last three years. We are emerging from the minimum, but the sunspot numbers are continuing to be very low. Some solar experts say this next sunspot maximum may be one of the weakest in 200 years ^[4]. As a result, the tendency for the jetstream to blow over parts of the Earth with little month-to-month variability may continue this year. That would result in continued extremes of temperature. The difference would be this time cold areas would be even colder due to the oncoming super La Nina and the falling global temperature.
The El Nino of the last year pushed the global temperature right back to where it had been in the beginning of 2007. The result has been no net warming or cooling since then. In fact, there has been no net warming or cooling since around 1999. Interestingly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 369 parts per million to 387 ppm (parts per million) during this time. This amount is above the level of 302 ppm in 1910, when 20th century global temperature started to rise. Despite this significant rise in carbon dioxide since 1999, there has been no “global warming” ^[5] during this period.

Right now the Pacific Ocean is in the beginning of a thirty year cooler spell called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation ^[6]. There is a strong, potentially super La Nina developing. The sun is still quiet with very few sunspots. When these conditions exist ^[7], the first two months of the cold season (December and January) tend to be cold from Montana to Iowa to Florida up to the Great Lakes and most of New England. In addition, temperatures tend to be very cold from central and western Canada to Alaska. China could suffer a bitterly cold December and January if historic temperature patterns are consistent with current conditions. Much of central and western Europe are cold in these situations as well.

The second half of the cold season (February and March) typically experiences some changes in the global temperature patterns in these types of winters. For Europe the changes are not good. Bitter cold and snow dominates from western Russia across all of Europe. In other words, what starts as a cold winter in central and western Europe deepens into a severe winter in February and March across all of Europe. The extreme cold eases in southern China but it deepens in the north and northeastern part of the country. In the United States the cold of December and January in the middle and eastern part of the country reverses to mild weather from Texas to Florida up to the Great Lakes and New England. All of the western U.S. is cold and snowy up to the northern Great Plains. What starts as a mild winter out west turns much colder with large amounts of snow while the east gets a break from the cold.
The current La Nina is coming on stronger than any in decades. The world is demanding more and more energy to fuel growth even in hard economic times. This winter may test the world energy supplier’s ability to provide it. The resulting increase in demand could produce a spike in energy costs. This could bring more hardship to people who are suffering through this long and deep recession. It remains to be seen if this La Nina equals or exceeds the super La Nina of 1955/56.

Right now El Nino’s colder sister is on the fast track to generate more temperature extremes and a very cold winter in some parts of the world.

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-super-la-nina-and-the-coming-winter/
URLs in this post:

[1] special: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/11/with-a-rapid-onset-the-strongest-la-nina-since-1955-56/

[2] September SOI value of +25.0: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/soihtm1.shtml

[3] This La Nina: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/mei.html

[4] weakest in 200 years: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/icing-the-hype/using_the_ap_magnetic_index_prediction_for_solar_cycle_24_amplitude_predict/

[5] no “global warming”: http://www.climate4you.com/

[6] Pacific Decadal Oscillation: http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

[7] these conditions exist: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/WINTER_201011.pdf

>Stranglehold

>Money Laundering, Unions, and Politicians

Some folks have been asking the national education unions to “show us the money”. Lots of moola is being spent promoting the “spontaneous” orchestrated litany of outrage from the Boards of Trustees of 225 primary schools who are not complying with the Ministry of Education in the matter of national testing. Over $100,000 has been donated to the cause by the Principal’s Federation–an educational union–to pay for PR spin, messaging, framing, tilting, and geeing up lazy media in their campaign against government education policy.

Well strike me down and call me a dead parrot, we hear you say. Where did the money come from? It came from you and me. That’s right, you read correctly. The taxpayer forks over money to fund the workings of the school Boards of Trustees. The Boards of Trustees have donated to the principal’s union, which in turn has used it to engage in a political campaign.

According to Kiwiblog, which has drawn on Whaleoil :

Now talking of the campaign against national standards, it is important to stress again that sadly the taxpayer is being forced to fund most of this campaign. Membership of the various principals’ associations is not paid for by the principal, but by the taxpayer through Vote Education.

Whale Oil has some documents showing the extent of the taxpayer funding – around $100,000 from the regional principal associations.

Whaleoil has the documented evidence here.

You might ask, How did this come about? Well, it is part of a collective bargaining contract with the Ministry of Education. The principal’s union is to be funded by the taxpayer, in Vote Education, via the budget for Boards of Trustees. This came about during the previous Labour Government’s reign–during which there was a deliberate objective of funding as much union activity as possible using taxpayer’s money. It was payback and payoff time.  But the rort has been engineered through clandestine means, with taxpayer’s money being laundered through various conduits until everyone either forgets or fails to see that we are all funding unions–who are working against (in this case) us.

This is scandalous. But it illustrates why all state sector unions must be de-registered. State sector unions inevitably engage in graft, fraud, corruption, and featherbedding–as is the case here. Our allegation is that corruption is intrinsic to state sector unions. What we see operating in the education sector unions is not an aberration–it is an inevitability.

Here is how the inevitability of corruption plays out. Unions are interested in two things primarily: increasing income for their hierarchy and members, on the one hand, and stifling competition for their members, on the other. Therefore, they have a vested interest in supporting and voting and campaigning for those politicians and political parties which will bestow more of your money upon them. And they do. Politicians need support, both monetary and organizational resources for campaigning. So a faustian bargain is struck. Unions support left-wing politicians and political parties, who, in turn, pay off their union supporters, using tax payers funds through the government spending budget. As time passes, state sector unions exert more and more control over government policies–regardless of who is occupying the Treasury benches–because they have the money, resources, and strangleholds over the operations of government departments.

This results in a perverse inversion of government where the taxpayers end up increasingly in servitude to state sector unions, and the unions, for their part, operating under the protection of a legislated monopoly, effectively hold us all to ransom. Instead of being public servants they become tyrants, holding all of us to ransom. We become the state servants. They become the masters of us all.

No Western democracy can long endure which allows state sector unions.

>Booms and Busts Inevitable

>Economics Always A Dismal Science

To the secular humanist, chaos or randomness is evil. This, despite the fact that the faith of the secular humanist asserts that chance is the fundamental reality of everything there that exists. The modern world wants to control, to plan, to rule, to regulate. Especially this shows up in matters economic and financial. It frustrates and offends–even as one is offended at blasphemy–that the government cannot control and adequately regulate the market.

Yet economics remains to this day the “dismal science” and this will always be the case. Alex J. Pollock explains why.

Is Economics a Science?

By Alex J. Pollock Saturday, November 6, 2010

It would be, if it weren’t for the people.

Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in “Economic Sciences.”

Financial crises keep happening—the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical.

But why should this be? Do we not learn from experience? Does economic knowledge not increase? And how about having computers, vast amounts of data and information, and new mathematical models to guide lending and investing decisions?

Do we not learn from experience? Does economic knowledge not increase?

The former CEO of Household International, first bought by HSBC and then brought low by the subprime mortgage collapse, is said to have bragged that his operation had 150 PhDs to model credit risk. The idea that improved knowledge will keep us out of trouble is not new. “[Benjamin] Disraeli had asserted that the boom of 1825 would not turn to bust because the period was distinguished from previous ages by superior commercial knowledge,” wrote Edward Chancellor in Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, but there was a big bust anyway.

Our 21st-century housing bubble, now deflated, was inflated despite—indeed partially because of—amazing computer power, reams of data, and sophisticated models operated by exceptionally bright analysts informed by Nobel Prize-winning financial theories. These computerized models created a sense of security, just as did the “superior commercial knowledge” of 1825.

As the great investment guru, Benjamin Graham, wrote in his classic, The Intelligent Investor:

The concept of future prospects . . . invites the application of formulas out of higher mathematics to establish the present value of the favored issues. But the combination of precise formulas with highly imprecise assumptions can be used to establish, or rather to justify, practically any value one wishes . . . Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results: but in the stock market [or in the subprime mortgage-backed securities market] the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics, the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions.

Models and Recursiveness

Consider Moore’s Law of Finance, as I call it (after my bond-market friend Mike Moore): “The model works until it doesn’t.” Perversely, the more everyone believes the model, and the more everyone uses the same model, the more likely it is to induce changes in the market that make it cease to work.

Our 21st-century housing bubble, now deflated, was inflated despite—indeed partially because of—amazing computer power, reams of data, and sophisticated models.

In this cycle, the market and the regulators became enamored of the statistical treatments of risk, whereas the most important issue is always the human sources of risk. These human sources include short memories and the inclination to convince ourselves that we are experiencing “innovation” and “creativity,” when all that is happening is a lowering of credit standards by new names.

For example, with the spread of “stated income” loans during the housing bubble, the disastrous previous experiences with “no doc” and “low doc” loans seem to have been forgotten. Such loans are a notable temptation, or even invitation, to a little lying in order to facilitate the dream of buying a house whose price will always keep rising.

Human elements of risk also include optimism, gullibility, short-term focus, genuine belief in momentum or the extrapolation of so-far successful speculation, group psychology or the lemming effect, and, inevitably, fraud.

We should not be surprised that as optimism increases, so does credulity. The father of central banking theory, Walter Bagehot, observed: “The good times of too high price almost always engender much fraud. All people are most credulous when they are most happy . . . Almost everything will be believed for a little while.”

In this cycle, the market and the regulators became enamored of the statistical treatments of risk, whereas the most important issue is always the human sources of risk.

The subprime boom and bust cannot be discussed without considering securitization of subprime pools through tranched, senior-subordinated structures based on mathematical models. The lower tranches of subprime mortgage-backed securities were extremely highly leveraged to credit risk. They were often gathered into collateralized debt obligations and further tranched, thus creating securities hyper-leveraged to credit risk.

Some of these tranches went to buyers who were greatly surprised by the vast losses. This must put us in mind of Stanton’s Law (name after Tom Stanton, author of A State of Risk): “Risk migrates to the hands least competent to manage it.” This is because the more competent can manage their risk by passing it to the less competent.

But there is another possibility: “When genius fails,” (the title of a book about the failure of long-term capital management) the extremely clever may believe too much in their own models and cleverness, then find out they had much more risk and much less science than they thought—and so the fall of famous Wall Street firms. As Bagehot also said, “Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected.”

Belief—For Example, Belief in House Prices

In the bubble, according to the Case-Shiller national house price index, U.S. average house prices increased by an enormous 90 percent from early 2000 to the peak in mid-2006. Then they fell more than 30 percent from the peak, back to about the level of 2003.

Perversely, the more everyone believes the model, and the more everyone uses the same model, the more likely it is to induce changes in the market that make it cease to work.

We are now almost four years into the housing bubble’s deflation. National average house prices have gotten about back to their longer-term trend line. As gravity pulls a thrown object back down, house prices are coming back to their trend.

Indeed, how could anybody believe that the prices of houses do not go both up and down? For that matter, how could anybody believe that the price of anything could not go down as well as up? That is the nature of a price.

Risk and Uncertainty

To forecast and, moreover, control the financial future correctly is literally impossible. This is because of the exceptionally complex and very rapid recursiveness of financial markets and the resultant Uncertainty. This “Uncertainty,” with a capital “U,” means, remembering the classic definition of economist Frank Knight, that you not only do not know the odds of events, but you cannot know the odds.

It is in vain to think that an official “systemic risk regulator” like the “Financial Stability Oversight Council” anointed by the Dodd-Frank Act or anybody else can or could foresee all future financial problems or prevent all future bubbles and busts. Everybody, no matter how intelligent and diligent, no matter how many economists and computers are employed, makes mistakes when it comes to predicting (let alone controlling!) the future.

Because uncertainty is fundamental, sometimes disastrous mistakes will continue to be made by entrepreneurs, bankers, borrowers, central bankers, government agencies, politicians, and by the interaction of all of the above.

Knight wrote: “If the law of change is known, no [economic] profits can arise.” Likewise: “If the law of change is known, no financial crises can arise.” But in economics and finance, the law of change is never known. So change reflecting uncertainty goes on, bringing booms and busts periodically, and Adam Smith’s “progress of opulence” on the trend.

Economics and finance might be science, if it weren’t for people.

Alex J. Pollock is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he spent 35 years in banking, including 12 years as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.
FURTHER READING: Pollock recently completed Boom and Bust, an introduction to financial cycles and human prosperity. He also explained “Error vs. Fraud” in the banking industry and how “It’s Easier to Be Brilliant than Right.” He discussed “TARP and Leviathan,” outlined “The Future of Housing Finance,” says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac create “A Nightmare on Every Street,” and dives into “Comparing International Housing Finance Systems.” (Links to all these found in the original article, published in The American)

>A Fatwa Against All Christians

>Christians Now “Legitimate Target”

About ten days ago, Al Qaeda operatives invaded a Christian worship service being held in a church in Baghdad. By several accounts they began indiscriminately shooting and throwing grenades at the congregation. Security forces arrived, stormed the church, and dispatched the terrorists–but not without a great loss of innocent life.

France has announced a special asylum programme for 150 Iraqi Christians, with priority being given to those who survived wounded in the attack, according to a report in Al Jazeera. Good on the French.

The same article reports that

Al-Qaeda has declared Christians everywhere “legitimate targets” in the wake of the bloodshed at the Baghdad church.

So be warned. Every Christian in the world should now consider that, like Salmon Rushdie, they have a fatwa hanging over their head. Not that it will change anything. We are called to be servants of the Living God, not to be in craven subjugation to the devil.

But the religious reality represented by Al Qaeda is becoming more evident.

>Hypocritical Chutzpah

>The Education Unions are Only Being Consistent

We always knew the education unions would resist mightily the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic for government schools in New Zealand. We always knew, as well, that their resistance would be couched in “harmful to children” messaging. And so it has proved to be. Ten percent of primary schools have decided not to comply with the testing regime. It appears as though there has been little or no consultation with parents in their decision. It is becoming more apparent by the day that non-compliance is at the behest and pressure of union functionaries (whether the union of principals or the union of teachers). It is also apparent that behind the unions, the opposition Labour Party is pushing and shoving and agitating.

Now one might be left wondering, Why the brouhaha? The stated reason is that national standards testing will damage children. How come? It will brand up to fifty percent of them as failures. The psychological damage to children, we are gravely told, will be devastating. How asinine is this!

Yes, maybe, but, actually, we well understand their point of view. Government education has long been an operational arm of secular humanism. It has functioned as the church of our established religion.  Man is intrinsically good and perfectible. If children are left to mature without harmful influences they will grow up to make their perfection a reality. All evil is externally sourced. Wrongs, harms, evils are environmentally conditioned. Thus, if a child is told that they have “failed” to achieve a certain standard it will likely damage their self-esteem–their sense of worth and worthiness–thus inhibiting their gradual (and otherwise inevitable) evolution to adult perfection. This damage is merely an environmental, even political construct. Standards are man-made. They are nothing more than fashionable conventions of the day. Thus they artificially cut across the nascent perfection of the child and inhibit the child from achieving true self-actualisation. Ergo, national standards testing in primary schools will be damaging to children.

But if national standards are damaging to children, they are equally damaging to teachers. If a teacher is exposed as having failed to teach his or her charges so that can meet and even surpass the required standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic, great damage will be done to the teacher as well. The teacher will be told by the system that he or she has failed.

Now, we need to be fair here. New Zealand’s dominant culture and overwhelming established religion is secular humanism. The Living God does not exist. Man charts his own destiny and is evolving ever higher. The beginning and end of all referents for truth is Man himself. What the educational unions are doing, how they are thinking, and their political agitating is entirely consistent with the entire state education system. The unions are the true sons of the system and the religion upon which it is based. Therefore they can hardly be condemned by their co-religionists–at least not without breathtakingly hypocritical chutzpah.

Our challenge to all the secular humanists who are advocating for national standards and are expressing outrage against the union actions is to at least be honest. The educational unions are being far more consistent with your religious beliefs than you are. State schools have to reflect the established religion of the day; the educational sector has taken the religion of secular humanism and has diligently applied it to its doctrine of the child, its doctrine of the teacher, and of its understanding of truth, and to its doctrines of pedagogy and so forth. The end result is a growing failure to read and write and do maths. But don’t blame the unions, and don’t blame the system. Focus instead upon the wretchedness of your established religion upon which they are based and which they consistently reflect.

Having said all that, as Christians we would prefer that national standards go ahead and they are properly employed, both to help young pupils and to rank teachers. We also hope that national standards will reflect fundamental competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reason we take this position is a religious one. The Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth has ordained and commanded that language and numeracy are part of the DNA code of His entire creation–of all that He has made. We cannot serve Him, nor can we fulfil our responsibilities in any sphere without reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since even unbelievers serve His purposes and are His (unwitting, even unwilling) servants, numeracy and literacy are fundamental to human life and society. Therefore, everyone needs to learn to read and write and compute, which means that they need to be taught.

But the pervasive influence of our established and official Unbelief leads us to doubt that the national standards policy will survive. The established religion is just too strong, too pervasive, and too consistently interwoven throughout the fabric of the state school system–as you would expect it to be. So, here is how we expect it will play out: the educational unions will continue their dissent and campaign of opposition. Ninety percent of schools will comply with the new government testing programme. The educational establishment will ostensibly embrace national standards, then morph them until they become moribund. Firstly, they will call for national standards in more than just reading, writing, and maths. (“National testing is good. It’s just too narrow and restricted. We need to extend it to other equally important subjects”, etc.) Secondly, they will tweak the standards to reduce their meaning and usefulness. (“Language testing must reflect the diversity of our multi-cultural society. We need reading and writing tests in ‘bro-talk’ and ‘txting’ and other wonderfully vibrant lingual dynamic evolving lingual developments.”). Testing in arithmetic will extend to IT skills and competency, computer use, keyboard facility, and so on.

Within five to seven years the national standards will be as meaningless as NCEA is today.

They used to say, “You can’t fight City Hall”. You cannot fight the educational establishment because it is such a consistent operational expression of the overwhelming, dominant established religion of our day–secular humanism. It will always win–until secular humanism itself is discredited and disgraced, and our people repent of their folly and return to “God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

In the meantime, Christian schools and universities are the only viable long term alternative.

>The Jig Is Up

>The Green Bubble Is about to Burst

By S. Fred Singer
Republished from American Thinker

There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the “smoking gun” that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist.

It has become increasingly clear that any observed warming during the past century is of natural origin and that the human contribution is insignificant. It is doubtful that any significant warming is attributable to greenhouse gases at all.

Once the public accepts these scientific conclusions, it should have immense consequences for policy. It will mean that the impact of rising CO2 levels is negligibly small, as has already been concluded by the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), a group of scientists skeptical of the U.N.-supported IPCC. It would also mean that wind energy, solar energy, and other “non-carbon” energy sources are not needed and are in fact counterproductive. It would remove the need for alternative fuels such as ethanol (which might please many true environmentalists). It would also mean that carbon trading, cap and trade, and fanciful schemes for carbon capture and sequestration would all end up in the dustbin of history.

One may expect a huge outcry and serious and protracted opposition from those who have built their careers on global warming hype and who have made investments in alternative energy or are looking for immense profits from carbon trading. Yet the scientific facts must win out in the long run — even against the financial interests of favored groups, wind farm profiteers, ethanol refiners, carbon traders, and the investment firms and banks that have placed hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients’ money into green projects.

Nothing has been learned from European disastrous experiences, it seems. As Bjorn Lomborg (a firm believer in AGW) reports, Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by €47 billion in subsidies. The lasting legacy is a massive debt and lots of inefficient solar technology sitting on rooftops throughout a fairly cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1% of its total energy supply. Denmark’s wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialized nation. Spain has finally discontinued its solar subsidies as too costly; as Prof. Gabriel Calzada reports, the program actually caused a net loss of jobs.

Having successfully exploited domestic subsidies, Europeans are now looking at the United States as the new “land of opportunity.” A recent example (described in the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 26, 2010) is the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant, on 7,000 acres of Federal land in the desert of southern California. The $6-billion project is a venture by two German companies, and it may be eligible for a cash subsidy of nearly one billion dollars in taxpayer money. Even after these subsidies, the cost of the electricity generated will be 30 to 70 percent more expensive than electricity generated by natural gas, the dominant electricity-generating fuel in California.

In addition to direct subsidies, the companies are seeking federal loan guarantees and, no doubt, an array of benefits from the State of California. Solar Trust of America, a joint venture between Germany’s Solar Millennium AG and privately held (mostly by Arab oil money) Ferrostaal AG, is awaiting approval from the Energy Department for a federal loan guarantee for the first two of its four planned units. Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. are working with Solar Trust to obtain project-equity and tax-equity investment.

The White House claims that the federal cash subsidy will create three hundred permanent jobs (at about $3 million per job!). The nature of the jobs is not specified, but one may assume that there will be much need for sweepers to remove dust and dirt from about 7,000 acres of solar mirrors. Not exactly “high-tech,” is it?

>Interesting Snippets

>Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before We Sleep

Every generation seems to hold the pretentious view that it is the biggest, the brightest, and the best. It is one of the deceits and conceits of a culture riddled with evolutionism. Within Christian circles this crops up in a number of ways–most often in the idea that we are in the “end times”–by which is meant the Final Advent of our Lord is just around the corner.

David Chilton reflects upon this persistent Christian canard:

The third presupposition, of course, is that we are living in the last age of the Church (again, we should note that these people are too often unable to think of themselves as living at any time other than the climax of history).  This presupposition is erroneous.  The prophecies of the glorious condition of the Church, to be fulfilled before the return of Christ, are far from their accomplishment.  We probably have thousands of years to go before the End.  We are still in the early Church!  http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0930462092&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrAnd, while it is fashionable for modern Christian intellectuals to speak of our civilization as “post-Christian”, we should turn that around and make it Biblically accurate: Our culture is not post-Christian–our culture is still largely pre-Christian.

Chilton cites at this point, William Temple:

The earth will in all probability be habitable for myriads of years yet. If Christianity is the final religion, the church is still in its infancy. Two thousand years are as two days. The appeal to the “primitive church” is misleading; we are the “primitive church” . . .

David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Fort Worth: Dominion Press, 1987), p. 56,57.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Principalities and Porkers 

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, November 06, 2010

Here are some quick takeaways from the election.

1. Now the Republicans are on the hot seat. We move from campaign rhetoric, which always gets the juices flowing, to the actual business of governance. Two test cases for you to watch. The first is that certain Republican principalities and porkers are in line (seniority-wise) for plum spots in new line up in the House of Representatives. If they get them, this is evidence that the GOP didn’t get it. A second example, this one in the Senate. If Lisa Murkowski (did I spell that right?) wins her write-in bid, she was clearly the choice of the people of Alaska. But she wasn’t the choice of the Republicans of Alaska. So if she gets all her old perks back from her Republican pals in the Senate, then this will be further evidence that the Republicans think that going on the wagon means five drinks instead of six.

2. Over the course of the next year or so, you will be told ad nauseum that the nation is suffering from endless gridlock. The American people, it will be said, want things to “get done.” Well, I might want to ask, what things? If I am tied up on the deck of a pirate ship, with a bunch of fellow hostages, and a fight breaks out among the pirates, with one faction wanting us to walk the plank, and the other faction wanting to run us all through, I cast my vote for gridlock. As in, yay, gridlock.

3. Of course, the jostling for 2012 began immediately. It seems to me that unless Obama demonstrates some of the flexibility of Clinton, who was President Gumby, he is done. Turn the oven off. Further, he does not appear to me that he has the capacity to do that kind of thing at all, what the pundits call pivoting. Further still, I think that things could get so bad for him that he decides not to run again, like Johnson, or he gets a serious primary challenge, from someone like, say, Hillary. On the Republican side, Sarah Palin had a very good night on Tuesday. If she decides to run, it seems to me that the nomination is hers to lose. I am not cheerleading here. I’m just sayin’. . .

>Nanny State is Back . . .

>Puffing Big Clouds of Smoke

Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.

The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)–for the good of others.

The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”. They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda–lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.

Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats’ figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely “politically convenient”, he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.

The ministry’s latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear. Rather, it’s a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.

The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.

Here’s how they derived the figure – number reckoning revealed courtesy of an Official Information Act request and extensive correspondence with the ministry.

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group. The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.

But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs. It’s easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs. Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. We know that.

And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy. But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Therefore, you have to compare the full life-cycle costs to the public health budget of smokers and non-smokers.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking. We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.

And, perversely, the deadlier cigarettes are, the greater will be this bias. The younger smokers are when they die of smoking-related illnesses, the greater will be the measured cost difference between smokers and non- smokers because a smaller proportion of comparable nonsmokers would be incurring end-of-life costs.

In other words, smokers save the public health system money! And, oh, by the way. We have not begun to factor in the huge costs to the country of longer living non-smoking people who commence receiving New Zealand (taxpayer funded) Superannuation at 65, and continue long into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Far, far cheaper to see people killed off by smoking at 45.  So, if the anti-smoking bureaucrats want to argue fiscal costs to cloak their nannying, beware the double-edge of the sword you hold.

The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish–pure and simple. Crampton concludes:

. . . be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.

So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!

When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted.  To achieve total abolition of tobacco the  individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it’s a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The “we-have-a-plan-for-you” bureaucrats are hard at work.

But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

>More Commentary on the US Mid-Terms

>The Midterms: Lessons Learned and the Way Forward

Sarah Palin
National Review Online

Have an intelligent message, and fight for your right to be heard.

Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda.

Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.

The first lesson is simple: Set the narrative. This year it wasn’t too difficult to tell the story of the election: It was about stopping an out-of-control Congress and an out-of-touch White House. In races across the country, Republican candidates ran on the message that the Left was bankrupting America with budget-busting spending bills that mortgage our children’s future, burden the private sector with uncertainty, and cripple our much-needed job growth.

The story of the next cycle, though, remains to be written. Its content depends on what Republicans do next. Just as in the 1980s, there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes, now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote them out in the next election. If that happens, the story of 2012 may well be that of the GOP going the way of the Whigs. No, the American people are expecting us to be bold and big in our economic reform to allow the private sector to create jobs and soar!

In the coming weeks, there will be those who lament that some of us endorsed conservative Republicans over liberal ones in blue-state races. It’s a good debate, and one I’m willing to have. First, we must keep in mind that there is no guarantee that any Republican will win in a deep-blue state (as evidenced by the exit polls in Delaware showing that the liberal Republican would have lost too). But even more to the point, we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In 2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more useless stimulus packages. If you think such a candidate will be with us when it comes time to vote down an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you’re living on a unicorn ranch in fantasy land.

In the coming weeks there will also be a debate about the viability of particular candidates. Anyone with the courage to throw his or her hat in the ring and stand up and be counted always has my respect. Some of them were stronger candidates than others, but they all had the courage to be “in the arena.” The second lesson of this election is one a number of the candidates had to learn to their cost: Fight back the lies immediately and consistently. Some candidates assumed that, once they received their party’s nomination, the conservative message would automatically carry the day. Unfortunately, political contests aren’t always about truth and justice. Powerful vested interests will combine to keep bad candidates in place and good candidates out of office. Once they let themselves be defined as “unfit” (decorated war hero Joe Miller) or “heartless” (pro-life, international women’s rights champion Carly Fiorina), good candidates often find it virtually impossible to get their message across. The moral of their stories: You must be prepared to fight for your right to be heard. . . .

The last, and possibly most important, lesson is that a winning conservative message must always be carefully crafted. If candidates are going to talk boldly on the campaign trail about entitlement reform and reducing the size of government, they must be prepared to word it in such a way as to minimize the inevitable fear-mongering accusations of “extremism.” We are quickly approaching a fiscal turning point where these crucial reform discussions will be mandatory. We need to speak about them in a way that the public will embrace. During his first run for the presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan found out that election campaigns aren’t necessarily the best settings for quasi-academic discussions about issues like Social Security reform. So for his next campaign, he resolved to build his platform out of tried and tested policies like tax cuts. Successful candidates in the next election cycle will have to test and develop similar policy platforms that address the crucial issues of entitlement reform and shrinking government in a way that the voters will find pragmatic and even attractive.

If we manage to do these things, there is no reason why we can’t look forward with confidence to winning in 2012. I have said all along that this election must be seen in conjunction with the next. Ultimately 2010 must be viewed as just the first battle in a much longer fight that leads to November 6, 2012, and beyond. We cannot fully restore and revive America until we replace Obama. The meaning of the 2010 election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,” and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us. But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew, revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic, pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding beacon of freedom.

Till then, I hope that commonsense patriots will join me in applauding the real heroes of this election year: the Tea Party Americans. In 2008, we were told that we had to “move beyond Reagan.” Well, some of us refused to believe that America chose big-government European-style socialism. American voters elected a politician who cloaked his agenda in the language of moderation. Once the mask was removed, Americans rejected his “fundamental transformation.” The Tea Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.

— Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president.

>Reflections on the US Mid-Term Election

>One Last Shot at Redemption

The analysis and prognostications are starting to come in from the US mid-term election. The dominant narrative from Obama and the left is that the shellacking of the Democrats, which descended down to state governorships and congresses, was due to frustration over the economy. This is a self-consoling blameshift. It allows the left to excuse the defeat. The narrative runs as follows: obviously the economy is bigger than the government. The powers of government are limited. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could under the circumstances. Ordinarily the economy would be turning upwards by now, but this recession was particularly bad because of Bush’s destructive machinations. So voters, knowing that things were not so good, took their frustration out upon the ruling party via the ballot box. In two years time things will be very different.

This narrative was enunciated in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other left-leaning media.

Tuesday’s election was indeed a “shellacking” for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news. It was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again.

Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.

Paul A Rahe comments upon the liberal narrative:

To believe this, one would have to be convinced that the voters were unaware that the Republicans were committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to extending the Bush tax cuts, and to reducing federal expenditures to the level of 2008. To argue its truth, one would have to ignore the Pledge to America – which is, of course, what our President and our erstwhile newspaper of record did.

This was, in fact, an election fought regarding first principles. Knowing that, the Democrats desperately sought to localize the conflict, and where they succeeded in demonizing individual Republican candidates, they won. In most districts, however, the results turned on national public policy. Over the last two years, the Democrats have been united for and the Republicans united against a set of measures that the voters were well aware of, and no legerdemain practiced on the polling data can obscure this fact. To say, as E. J. Dionne did in The Washington Post yesterday, that, “in fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents,” is to avert one’s gaze from the obvious.

Now, it would be naive indeed to argue that all who voted against the government were therefore signing up for the ideological and philosophical principles lying behind the Republican positions. But many commentators remain strikingly tone deaf–and one can only conclude–wilfully so, to the conservative, limited government ideology articulated by the Republicans and particularly the Tea Partiers. When the topic of Sarah Palin was raised on a liberal chat show just recently, Woopi Goldberg actually said she did not know what Palin stood for and what policies she was advocating. Is this wilful deafness, or a gratuitous slur, or what? Politeness requires that one reject the option of a gratuitous slur. It seems that Goldberg screens out what Palin has been talking about.We believe this is typical–what the comics would call a “derangement syndrome”. 

One liberal commentator has the gumption to face the truth. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, analyses the Democratic defeat this way:

Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.

Here we come to the nub of the matter. Independents outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans respectively. And those who are independent are predominantly conservative.

The 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

But there is a big “if” in all this. What was a landslide for Republicans this week could turn just as completely against them within two years, if that party fails to accept the re-conservatising of the party. In order for this to happen deeply entrenched and privileged Republicans are going to have to change or go.  This, in turn,  implies that Marco Rubio, elected to the US Senate from Florida, is right. He claims that conservatives do not like “big government”. They do not like deficits. They do not like high taxes. They do not like federal government intruding into local and state affairs. They abhor troughing and government sleaze. They have been disgusted with the Republican party because that party for years now has been little more than democrat-lite. Rubio said on election night that it was not a Republican victory or triumph. Rather it was the voters giving the Republican party one last chance to be true to its stated principles. If it fails now to be truly conservative, the party will disintegrate, and eventually be no more.

Time will tell.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Not the Clerk of Session 

Theology – Ecclesiology
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, November 04, 2010 1:31 pm

I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully.

The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching always comes down to the point of decision. Good preaching is aimed at the will; all good preaching aims at conversion. If the people are not converted, they need to be. If they are, then a message aiming at true conversion will encourage them, not beat them up. As Luther put it, we are called to a lifetime of repentance.

Good preaching reminds every Christian soul that we live before the God who sees and knows the heart, and who will sift those hearts in the great day of judgment. The problem arises when the need for true conversion is moved from the declaration of the gospel to the membership interview. The former declares the truth with the understanding that only God can see the heart. The latter, in the name of God seeing the heart, pretends that the minister and elders can see the heart.

If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this. The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the “not known to be regenerate” away from the Table? 

These questions go back to the Halfway Covenant, in the years before the time of Edwards. Now in the popular understanding, the Halfway Covenant was a downgrade of spiritual standards. In reality, it was an attempted upgrade, an upgrade that failed, one that backfired. This is how.

In Calvinist churches on the Continent, membership was based on 1. a profession of faith in Christ and 2. an outwardly obedient life. For the first, you told everyone you believed in Jesus. For the second, you didn’t spend all your time in saloons and shooting out street lights. Here is John Calvin: “we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us” (Institutes, Vol. 2, pp. 1022-23).

But by about 1636, some American churches had begun requiring some more than this (not something less). They wanted a testimony from each prospective member, a testimony relating their personal experience of salvation. The same would go for someone wanting to be a “full” member, in the sense of coming to the Table. Without that personal testimony, they were denied. But they had been baptized. And so what happened when they grew up (which happens more quickly than you might think) and married, and wanted their children to be baptized? What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and who could join any Calvinistic church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.

Church members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, where they give up themselves and their children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be baptized (Halfway Covenant, 1662).

The minister before Edwards was his maternal grandfather, Rev. Stoddard. Now Stoddard was in some respects a proto-liberal. Don’t make too much of that, but it should be noted. He was right about some things. He said, for example, “No man can look into the heart of another, and see the workings of a gracious spirit.” He leaned against the Halfway Covenant, adopting open communion in 1677. He believed that communion was a converting ordinance, and he was opposed to the idea of church covenants as being judicial in nature. He was therefore against church discipline generally. There he was wrong, and Edwards was right.

Edwards was right that church membership brought with it certain judicial responsibilities, and he was very cautious in how he tried to bring the Northampton church back to a tighter line. But he was at heart a revivalist, which meant that the tighter line was still drawn in the wrong place, at the point of membership interview.

A distinction should therefore be kept sharp between the preaching of the Word, and the shepherding of souls. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, but this does not mean that a minister can see hearts. When it comes to the division of soul and spirit, the Scriptures are sharper than a sword. But at the same point, fallible ministers can be as sharp as a pound of wet liver. But the fact that he cannot see this or that heart exhaustively should not prevent him from preaching the Word searchingly.

We lean the opposite direction, to protect ourselves against the errors of that other guy, who is leaning the other way. Some men see tyrannical pronouncements over the hearts of others in membership interviews, and so they refuse to declare the authoritative word of God from the pulpit — unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Other men know that they should declare this searching word from the pulpit, and they therefore assume to themselves the same prerogatives in the pastor’s study. Oh, the vanity of man! When Scripture says that “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do,” the “him” there does not refer to the clerk of session.