Letter From Australia (About Androgyny)

 The Last Desperate Throw of the Dice

Miranda Devine has skewered the Australian government’s slurs, lies, and distortions against Tony Abbott, leader of the opposition.  She suggests that the behaviour of Julia Gillard confirms some of the worst stereotypes of women.  The antics of Gillard and her colleagues have brought disgrace and shame upon the heads of Australian females. 

WATCHING Julia Gillard desperately flail around last week in the last death throes of her government, you could wish her prime ministership had been different. But as a woman I’m embarrassed, insulted and angry that the stocks of women in power have been brought so low.

Playing the gender card is the pathetic last refuge of incompetents and everyone in the real world knows it. It offends the Australian notion of the fair go. Australians who were delighted, regardless of politics and the way she got the job, that a strong, agreeable, seemingly capable woman was in The Lodge, have been sorely disappointed, to the point of cynicism and despair, by Gillard’s self-indulgent performance “calling out” Tony Abbott on misogyny.

So, Tony Abbott is a misogynist.  What is the evidence?  Manufactured, concocted slurs and spin are being put forward as “evidence”.

This was the best her enormous stable of spin-doctors could do to justify the accusations of misogyny they have been throwing around; it boiled down to five charges:

THAT Abbott did make sexist remarks in 1998, during a roundtable discussion with then-NSW Treasurer Michael Costa about the under-representation of women in positions of power.

Costa: “I want my daughter to have as much opportunity as my son.”
Abbott: “Yeah, I completely agree, but what if men are by physiology or temperament, more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?”

Abbott “completely” wants his three daughters to have equal opportunities to take powerful jobs, but he asks whether men might have an innate advantage. He wasn’t asserting it as fact, but as a discussion point, and it’s well worth pondering.

For instance, voice is very important to demonstrate authority. A man with a booming baritone will command attention. Height is another issue. Men are usually taller than woman, and height generally correlates with high office. But we all know people who command authority, whether male or female, just by the power of their personality. What qualities do they have that help them transcend any physiological deficits, and how can we learn from them?

In any case, the dearth of women in high places is hardly because of sexism any more than it is because they lack talent. It is mainly because of individual women’s choices. Many have passed up opportunities offered to them, in some cases ahead of equally deserving male colleagues, because they preferred to nurture their families. That’s the real silent conversation.

Charge number two against Abbott:
THAT in 2004 he did say:  “Abortion is the easy way out.”

The line comes from a nuanced speech which Abbott gave in 2004, in which he concluded: “Even those who think that abortion is a woman’s right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year.”

Any reasonable person would conclude that he was no extremist, was respectful of different views, and compassionate about the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies.This is the line which so offends the Prime Minister, in context:

“To a pregnant 14-year-old struggling to grasp what’s happening, for example, a senior student with a whole life mapped out or a mother already failing to cope under difficult circumstances, abortion is the easy way out. It’s hardly surprising that people should choose the most convenient exit from awkward situations.”

Abbott’s offence is that he holds different views on abortion to those of most women in the Labor party.
But is that a crime? Abbott’s colleague, Opposition Foreign Affairs minister Julie Bishop, declared last week that she, too, disagrees with Abbott on abortion, “but I respect his views. They happen to be different to those that I hold. That does not make him a sexist at all.” And she pointed out “when he was the Health minister, at no time did he seek to change the laws in relation to abortion in this country.”

So what Gillard objects to is that Abbott holds a different opinion to hers. That is a worrying trait in the most powerful person in the country.

Charge Three against Abbott:
THAT he did make a throwaway remark about “housewives” doing ironing. Big deal.

Charge Four:
THAT he did say: “If the Prime Minister wants to, politically speaking, make an honest woman of herself”.

Whether he intended or not to use a turn of phrase associated with marriage, Abbott certainly has made the prime minister’s honesty a central criticism, and one which bites electorally because of her broken promise on the carbon tax.

Charge Five:
THAT he did stand next to a sign that read: “Ditch the witch.”

Abbott didn’t know the sign was there when he addressed that carbon tax protest. He didn’t create the sign or organise for it to be there. For sure it was offensive. But it’s dishonest to pretend he was responsible. The elderly protesters that day behaved properly otherwise. They didn’t smash down the doors of parliament house like unionists had done, and they were offended at being branded a “convoy of incontinence” by Gillard ministers.

So there it is, Labor’s entire case of misogyny against Abbott. It’s a joke, and yet all week long, ministers hit the airwaves to claim Abbott hates women.

Raggle Taggle Leaders

Deafening Silence

We expect a chorus of indignation and outrage swelling to a climactic crescendo in Parliament this week.  Something truly terrible has happened in the land–the kind of thing so bad that mothers clutch their children to their breasts in mortal dread. 

A Maori tribe has sold–yes sold!–land given to it as part of a treaty settlement.  Te Uri o Hau was awarded some land near Mangawhai just north of Auckland which consisted of 616 hectares of forest in prime coastal land.  They are selling off a third (230 hectares).  Who is going to stand up to protest? 

Well, we expect that the Mana Party, the Green Party, and probably the Maori party are going to express moral outrage at the betrayal of Maori being disenfranchised from their land with which they have a deep spiritual connection, and in communion with which Maori hear the ancient spirits talking to them.
  Now it will be gone for good.  With whom will the mokopuna–and generations yet to come–commune now?  Their birthright is being stripped from them.  They will be alienated from their own Maoritanga.  We expect the Maori Council will rush the now well-beaten path to court seeking an injunction to stop the sale.     

But wait.  It’s worse.  Is that possible?  Alas, it is.  The traitorous hapu, Te Uri o Hau have sold the land to foreigners.  To outsiders.  Expect Winston Peters, the champion of national economic autarky, to arise to his feet in Parliament and thunder against precious coastal land being alienated from the people of New Zealand and sold to foreigners.  The grossly incompetent Overseas Investment Office approved the sale.  The government is betraying us all. 

Peters will be followed hard on heels by David Shearer, leader of the Labour Party decrying not just the destruction of prime forest in order to clear the land for sale–a traitorous economic act to be sure–but to see the Chinese in control of coastal land just north of Auckland where Aucklanders love to slurp coffee and wine in boutique sea side cafes of a weekend is just too much for the ordinary Kiwi bloke to stomach.  It’s an insult to our national mana and confirms that the Government is indeed betraying us all.

One of his colleagues will whisper in Shearer’s ear that his press secretary had it wrong.  The land had not been sold to the Chinese.  It has been sold to an American.  Ah, well.  That’s different.  But no.  Wait.  Not just any American–a multi-billionaire.  An exploiter of the downtrodden masses.  This odious man is taking precious land from poor, animist, taniwha loving Maori and using it for his own exploitative venal purposes.  Marx and Lenin and Mickey Savage would be turning in their graves.

Before Shearer has even had a chance to wipe the egg off his face and sit down, Red Russel, co-leader of the Greens will join the fray.  Russel cites reliable sources that have told him the purchaser of the land, Mr Kayne an odious man from California who runs a firm called Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors (and doesn’t that name say it all, Mr Speaker) is not just a capitalist exploiter, he is a climate desecrater.  I have been told, Mr Speaker he insisted that the land be cleared of trees before he expropriated it from New Zealanders.  The global warming meter has gone off the scale.  The wicked Mr Kayne is willingly complicit in the destruction of the planet.  And he is coming to live here!  In New Zealand.  What will that do, Mr Speaker to our Clean Green brand?  Huh?  Have you thought of that Mr Speaker?  Oh, sorry.  Of course you have not.  You cannot think. I rest my case.  Anyone who disagrees with me or doesn’t understand my soaring logic cannot think by definition.  I am my own self-autheticator of my own facts.  No-one else counts.

Will we hear the chorus?  No.  Not at all.  We will be deafened by silence.  But if Mr Kayne had in fact been the CEO of KungShu Capital Advisers, out of Beijing we would have required ear plugs to get some rest.  Therein lies exposed the jingoistic hypocrisy of the raggle taggle collage of opposition parties masquerading as national leaders in our Parliament.  Their hypocritical silence serves as loud and clear condemnation. 

Meanwhile, let’s give genuine credit where it is due.  Firstly, a big thumbs up to Te Uri o Hau which sold the land in the first place.  With an eye to prospering their own, they plan to use the proceeds to invest further into dairying, where, they argue they have more competitive strengths.  Moreover, they believe, according to the NZ Herald, that under Mr Kayne’s ownership the local community would benefit substantially from the sale. 

Te Uri o Hau said the development . . .  would add about $5.9 million to the local economy and the complex would create about 30 jobs.

What development?  What complex?  Hah.  An international golf course (a la Cape Kidnappers and Kauri Cliffs).  Now you are talking!  Top marks Te Uri o Hau.  More power to you.  Thanks, boys.  Job well done.

Fodder for Fascism

Afraid of Little People

A public brouhaha is under way in New Zealand over the merits and demerits of charter schools.  A list of horrible things that charter schools will allegedly do is being trumpeted by the teacher unions.  They are absolutely certain that charter schools would be evil and wicked and do immeasurable harm.

A similar propaganda campaign is being waged in Britain–except there charter schools have been in operation for some time.  As a result the rhetoric has ratcheted up a few degrees.  Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Telegraph looks at some of the latest allegations.  Apparently free (that is, charter) schools are going to spread fascism.  If charter schools go ahead we predict that it is only a matter of time before we see similar allegations surfacing in New Zealand.

What’s really driving the Left’s loathing of free schools

 

Brendan O’Neill
Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.

In his bid to win the hotly contested prize for the most hilariously fallacious argument against free schools, Patrick Roach of the teaching union NASUWT has claimed that they will spread fascism. Apparently, because these schools are not under the direct control of the state, all sorts of vile ideologies could take hold in them, warping the minds and frying the values of future generations.

In a speech at a Unite Against Fascism fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference last week, Roach said that deregulated schools could become incubators of fascistic thinking and behaviour, since schools that aren’t absolutely beholden to the state will no longer be obliged to “engage young people in learning and education around citizenship and values in terms of multiculturalism”. In short, if we take the state out of the picture, and let teachers and parents do their own thing, we’ll end up with schools staffed by Blackshirts and attended by horrible little Hitlers.

Roach’s bunkum doesn’t only expose the increasing desperation of teaching trade unions as they scrabble about for scare stories to try to turn the public off free schools. It also reveals a lot about the modern Left’s unthinking devotion to the state, and its corresponding distrust of anything that exists outside of the state.

What Roach is effectively saying is that if the all-knowing, all-caring, super-multicultural state isn’t on hand to tell children to be racially respectful, then those children will drift towards hateful thinking. He seems so enamoured of the state that he cannot conceive of the possibility that non-state actors – whether it’s parents, neighbours, teachers not tied to state-style diktats – just might be able to inculcate children with some pretty decent moral values. In the modern Left’s worldview, if the state isn’t permanently on standby with its ready-made list of values, bucketloads of welfare cash, parenting advice and whatnot, then ordinary people will starve, go mad, turn racist and end up as fodder for fascism.

This is fast becoming the key argument against free schools – the idea that deregulation in the education system will inevitably lead to the corruption of the next generation. So we’ve also been told horror stories about some free schools selling “junk foods” that are banned in state-maintained schools. Alarmingly, some schools have been found selling chocolate and Red Bull!

St Jamie Oliver, defeater of the Turkey Twizzler, says “children’s health will suffer [if] the standards that apply to maintained schools have been relaxed for academies and free schools”. There have also been scare stories about creationists setting up free schools and potentially unleashing in Britain the kind of “Christian fundamentalist” thinking that is more widespread in the US. To this litany of terrible things that will happen if the state isn’t invited to control every single aspect of children’s learning, we can now add the claim that free schools will foster fascistic hysteria.

In summary, then, if free schools become widespread, we can expect to see more fat, chocolate-smeared creationists and fascists spreading to all and sundry their school-learnt nonsense about the beginnings of the world or the inferiority of ethnic minorities.

This nightmare vision of the prejudiced lumps that will be churned out by free schools reveals far more about the prejudices of the Left than it does about the real world inhabited by parents, teachers and kids. It is a testament to the modern Left’s fear of the blob of unpredictable folk . . . that  it believes people will become sick in both body and mind if they aren’t constantly cared for by the state and inculcated with its values.

Make no mistake – their disdain for free schools is driven by their panic over what will become of the little people if the authorities aren’t on hand to control them.

 

Tangled Webs Being Woven

Who Made Up the Porky?

Where did that fabricated story about the attack upon the US embassy in Libya come from?  This has now become the pressing question of the presidential campaign in the United States.

The story (now proven to be “spin”) came to the widespread attention of the country when  Ambassador Susan Rice went on six weekend talk shows one Sunday to tell the nation five days later that the attack upon the US embassy compound in Benghazi, Libya which killed four US government employees including the US ambassador, was a spontaneous demonstration of public rage incited and caused by an anti-Islam film made in the US. 

Up until that time few had heard of the now-demonised video.  Hillary Clinton’s US Secretary of State has now gone on the record stating that the State Department at no time, not even at the beginning of the attack thought that it was a public demonstration gone wrong.  This from the Daily Mail:

In a briefing on Tuesday, State Department officials said ‘others’ in the executive branch concluded initially that the attack was part of a protest against the film, which ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. That was never the State Department’s conclusion, reporters were told.

Both the State Department and the Defense Department believed that it was a deliberate, terrorist attack–from the beginning.  It had nothing to do, they concluded, with a public demonstration that turned violent.  This from Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense:

“The reason I think it pretty clearly was a terrorist attack is because a group of terrorists obviously conducted that attack on the consulate and against our individuals,” he told a Pentagon briefing.  “What terrorists were involved I think still remains to be determined by the investigation. But it clearly was a group of terrorists who conducted that attack against that facility.”

OK.  So where did the story come from?  Within one day, (Sept 12th) President Obama was implying that “denigration of religious beliefs” was the cause.

Sept. 12: As these homicides become clear, Obama says, “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, but there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None.” Obama then skips his daily intelligence briefing and jets to a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Within two days (Sept. 13th), Hillary Clinton was fingering the video as the true cause of the deaths of the Ambassador.

Sept. 13: “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares. “We absolutely reject its content and message.”

 The next day (Sept 14th) White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney said:

Sept. 14: “The unrest we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims find offensive,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announces.
That day, as the murdered Americans’ remains reach Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton says: “We have seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Enter Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN.   On Sunday, Sept 16th She emphatically told the nation via repeated appearances on national weekend cable shows six days after the tragedy that the deaths came from a public demonstration against a video defaming Islam which had been made in the US.  Now, we know (from Brit Hume) that no-one from the US administration is allowed to appear on the weekend talk shows without explicit approval from the White House.  So, Rice’s effort was a direct extension of the White House’s spin.

But now we know that it was all false.  The defence now has morphed into “Well, it’s what we were told at the time”.  OK.  So who told Clinton, Carney, Obama, and Rice et al. that the deaths in Libya were a result of a public demonstration against an anti-Islamic video?  No-one has come forward.  Clearly the US intelligence community, the Defense Department and the Department of State did not so brief their political masters.  It has now become clear they never believed that, even when it was occurring.

Where did the story come from?  Silence.  It is now clear that on the part of Clinton, Carney, Obama, Rice et al. it was a conjecture at best, or a wild fabrication, at worst.  But why?

Our best guess is because that’s the way Obama (and his colleagues) see the world.  They are pre-committed to interpret uprisings against the US in the Muslim world that way.  If Muslims are mad at us its because we have offended them.  It is at the heart of the Obama Doctrine.  It appears to be a classic example of the syndrome of fabricating “facts” to conform to a one’s world-view. 

Others have suggested that Obama had been extolling his success at defeating Al Qaeda via the execution of Osama Bin Laden.  To admit that terrorists were alive and well and fighting back would be a public humiliation.  Either way, it would represent fabrication and pure spin. 

There are few things more dangerous than a political leader who believes his own propaganda.  The Bible says that God gives men up to the remorseless tyranny of their own lies.  Obama and his coterie appear well down that track. 

Letter From the UK (About Liberal Bishops)

A day of judgment for liberal bishops

By Damian Thompson
Religion  
Last updated: October 12th, 2012
The Daily Telegraph

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a “blood-crazed ferret”. He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His new book is called The Fix: How addiction is invading our lives and taking over your world.

The riches of liberal Anglicanism (H/T the Bad Vestments blog)

From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph

The strangest thing happened last week, though few people noticed it. America officially ceased to be a Protestant country. According to the Pew Forum, the percentage of Protestants has dropped to 48 per cent, down from 53 per cent in 2007. That’s a huge shift.

But, before Catholics start punching the air, let me point out that the percentage of Catholics has been flatlining for years at 22 per cent. The big jump is in unaffiliated Americans, including atheists – up from 15 to 20 per cent. These “Nones”, as pollsters call them, are laying waste to the religious landscape of the United States. And Britain.

Here’s the question that intrigues me. Once the old, routine churchgoers have died off, and now that “None” is the default position for liberal-minded young people, what will the churches of the future look like?
We’re beginning to find out. More to the point, the clapped-out Anglican and Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world are finding out, too – and it’s giving them nightmares.

Those youngsters who once went to church out of obligation are now spending Sunday mornings in the supermarket or the gym (body worship is a flourishing faith). That means that the only young people in the pews are true believers who really want to be there.

If you’re a “go-ahead” bishop, vicar or diocesan bureaucrat, this is a scary development. You’ve spent your career reducing the hard truths of Christ’s teaching – such as the inevitability of the Last Judgment – to carbon-neutral platitudes. Suddenly, the 20-year-olds in your flock are saying: no thanks, we’ll take the hard truths. Eek!

In the Church of England, young evangelicals are embarrassed by the thespian agonising of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. If there’d been a hand-wringing event at the Olympics, he’d have shattered all records.

In the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales, the disconnect is even more stark. Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy. (Remember Jack in Father Ted? You get the picture.)

Also – and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to report this – the Vatican has pulled a fast one by appointing two new diocesan bishops, Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and Philip Egan of Portsmouth, who are in tune with conservative youngsters rather than an English Catholic bureaucracy run by crypto-Marxist megabores trained in the public sector.

Bishop Egan has only been in his post for a few weeks, but already he’s been telling orthodox young Catholics what they want to hear: that they should adore the Blessed Sacrament, advertise their faith by making the sign of the cross, and even keep a rosary handy in the car. Cue barely suppressed shrieks from the old guard in Portsmouth, whose “director of liturgy”, the composer Paul Inwood, writes cod plainchant decked out in the harmonies of a 1970s cocktail lounge.

None of this should surprise us. When religions come under attack, they attract believers who invest in their more dogmatic, countercultural teachings – and who deliberately raise the degree of tension between themselves and society. There are few things more countercultural today than Bible-based evangelicalism or strictly orthodox Catholicism. For decades, Liberal bishops have droned on about how they wanted to draw young people back to church. But I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

 

Unworthy and Shameful

The Curse of Unethical Immoral Leaders

We don’t know why this should be the case, but it does seem that left-wing governments and political parties have a perpetual nastiness about them. 

Over time this creates rising political risks since demonising your opponents means that all they have to do is show up to the electorate as reasonably normal people and in an instant two things happen.  The first is the credibility of the slanderous overkill party goes up in smoke.  The second is that the electorate find those so excessively slandered to be much better than expected.  He or she turn out to be a pleasant surprise. 

Obama and the Democrats in the United States appear to have fallen into this trap.
  Unable to run on Obama’s record over the past four years they have spent millions upon millions of dollars portraying Mitt Romney as a black beast of terrible proportion.  Then Romney shows up as a normal guy who smiles and jokes at the first TV debate and hey presto people are really pleasantly surprised.  But they are also miffed that the other mob has lied and misled and slandered for so long and they feel a bit guilty that they got sucked in there for a while. 

The Australian Labour Government appears to be making the same mistake.  This year they have demonised opposition leader, Tony Abbott.  Paul Sheehan, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, shows just how badly Labour has been behaving. 

Tony Abbott is a hack. A dog. An aggressive, carping, bitter, mindless, deceptive, dodgy, mendacious, rancid, negative, nasty, muck-raking, untruthful, obstructionist, opportunistic, sexist, political Neanderthal. He is unfit for high office. He cannot control his temper. No trick is too low for him. No stunt is too wild. He is a bully. A thug. A snake oil salesman. A poster child for vile bully-boy values. He has repulsive double standards. He hates women. He stands for nothing. He has unhealthy obsessions. He is nuts.

Abbott behaves like Jack the Ripper. He is Gina Rinehart’s butler. He is Nancy Reagan without the astrology. He is a douchebag.

I’m quoting here, mostly from Hansard. These are not comments from media figures, or feral demonstrators, or dredged up from 10 or even 30 years ago. These are insults delivered this year, by federal Labor MPs, directed at one person, and orchestrated by Julia Gillard. The level of personal insult has been on an industrial scale.

Just like Romney all Abbott needs to do is turn up on a national stage during an election campaign and appear even vaguely human and he will be a resounding success.  Meanwhile Labour will have discredited itself as untrustworthy.  Electorates can get vindictive over such things.  Character assassination of Tony Abbott might make the Labour Government look good in its own eyes for a while, but beware the electorate scorned. 

Ethically, of course, it is shameful.  It is immoral.  It is evil.  Politicians who engage in such behaviour are unworthy of trust.  Here is Sheehan’s assessment of how low it has become:

But it is this government’s concentration on Abbott’s character that sets it apart. It is the tactic on which the Gillard government has staked its survival, the politics of the personal, of targeting character, of hammering the same message about the same person, by every minister, until it seeps into the public mind.

The strategy was unveiled at the beginning of the year with some of the worst political bastardry from the nation’s leadership seen in a long time. It started with an Australia Day address at the National Press Club delivered by Anthony Albanese on January 25. By convention this is a respite from political hatchet jobs, but Albanese launched into Abbott’s character, describing him as ”One Trick Tony”, that one trick being ”more negativity, more nastiness, more obstructionism”.

This was standard from Albanese, but something much nastier came out of the Prime Minister’s own office the next day, Australia Day. A group of Aboriginal demonstrators had gathered at the tent eyesore in Canberra. A member of Gillard’s staff alerted one of the people at the demonstration and said, falsely, that Abbott was nearby and had just denigrated the Aboriginal tent embassy.

Australia Day 2012 was thus marked by a hostile mob surrounding the Leader of the Opposition, berating him, banging on windows, making threats. In an irony that could become a metaphor, the Prime Minister, herself at the same function, got caught up in the mess.

Julia Gillard’s nefarious behaviour reached a pinnacle recently when she accused Tony Abbott of mysogyny, ironically whilst she was defending her Speaker’s absolutely crude statements about women made in some e-mails.   It seems that the brazen lying effrontery knows no bounds:

Then came the climax last week, when Gillard exploded in rage in the Parliament after she had been caught in the implosion of the reputation of the Speaker, Peter Slipper, a failure by the Prime Minister in every respect, tactical, ethical, moral and political.

Abbott was ruthless in exploiting the failure and Gillard was ruthless in defending it: ”It is misogyny, sexism, every day from this Leader of the Opposition. Every day, in every way … I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man … If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia … he needs a mirror … I am offended by the sexism, by the misogyny, of the Leader of the Opposition …”

It was mesmerising. It was great television. Of course Twitter went into a fever (Labor MP Steve Gibbons tweeted: ”That douchebag Tony Abbott.”) Of course the speech went viral on social media. The Prime Minister’s outrage would have resonated with every woman who has endured boorish men. But was the accusation of misogyny true? No. Was it ethical? No. Was it a diversion? Yes. Was it part of a pattern? Yes. Was it good politics? We shall see.

When government’s and political leaders deliberately dissemble and lie for their political advantage and when they falsely attack and defame others in the process it is time for them to ascend the scaffold and go to the block.  Voters have a way of passing sentence and carrying out the necessary execution.  As Sheehan says, we shall see. 

 

Letter From America (About Benghazi)

Who’s ‘Politicizing’ Benghazi? 
 It was Obama who chose to blame a national humiliation on an obscure YouTube video.

By Mark Steyn
National Review Online
October 12, 2012

‘The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about.

For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

She’s right!
The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure, Caligula put his horse in the senate, but it was a real horse. At Ohio State University, the rapper will.i.am introduced the president by playing the Sesame Street theme tune, which oddly enough seems more apt presidential-walk-on music for the Obama era than “Hail to the Chief.”

Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.

But, alas, it was her boss who chose to “politicize” a security fiasco and national humiliation in Benghazi. At 8:30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9:40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose — a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12, by which point the consulate’s survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.

To “politicize” means “to give a political character to.” It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: “Gee, they nuked Israel. D’you think that will hurt us in Florida?” So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be “bad” for Obama — by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, it’s real bad. They’re dead, over, gonesville.

Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as “Chris,” as if they’ve known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want “politicization”? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shrivelled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

In the vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply: “Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.” That too is false. He also denied that the government of which he is nominally second-in-command had ever received a request for additional security. At the risk of “politicizing” things, this statement would appear also to be untrue.

Instead, the State Department outsourced security for the Benghazi consulate to Blue Mountain, a Welsh firm that hires ex-British and -Commonwealth special forces, among the toughest hombres on the planet. The company’s very name comes from the poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand,” whose words famously adorn the regimental headquarters of Britain’s Special Air Service in Hereford. 

Unfortunately, the one-year contract for consulate security was only $387,413 — or less than the cost of deploying a single U.S. soldier overseas. On that budget, you can’t really afford to fly in a lot of crack SAS killing machines, and have to make do with the neighborhood talent pool. So who’s available? Blue Mountain hired five members of the Benghazi branch of the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade and equipped them with handcuffs and batons. A baton is very useful when someone is firing an RPG at you, at least if you play a little baseball. There were supposed to be four men heavily armed with handcuffs on duty that night, but, the date of September 11 having no particular significance in the Muslim world, only two guards were actually on shift.

Let’s pause right there, and “politicize” a little more. Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans.

Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.

In the days before the attack Joe Biden had been peddling his Obama campaign slogan that “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” The first successful terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory since 9/11, and on the very anniversary and by al-Qaeda-linked killers, was not helpful to the Obama team. And so the nature of the event had to be “politicized”: Look, over there — an Islamophobic movie! “Greater love hath no man than this,” quoth the president at Chris Stevens’ coffin, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Smaller love hath no man than Obama’s, than to lay down his “friend” for a couple of points in Ohio.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

No Global Warming

The UK Met Office has ever so quietly released data on the internet, without media comment, apparently hoping that no-one would notice.  It shows that there has been no global warming for the last fifteen years according to the 3000 plus temperature stations scattered across the planet.  Meanwhile the shills for global warming continue to pontificate and bloviate away about the imminent doom facing mankind.

The UK Daily Mail has a big spread on the scandal of the oh-so-quiet release:

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it

• The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
• This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996

By David Rose
PUBLISHED: 21:42 GMT, 13 October 2012
UPDATED: 01:21 GMT, 14 October 2012
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

Six months ago data was released with much fanfare, headlines, shrieks, groans, and moans–a choral cacophony of doom–which “showed” that the previous six month period for which data had just been collected and collated (up to the end of 2010) had been particularly warm.  But oh-so-sadly the last six months data have reversed that temperature rise. Oh dear. Never mind.

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year. Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

Philip Jones of the Climategate -“make the data up”-scandal continues to cling on as all true believers ought.  He needs more time.  But give him just one reading for one short period that shows an up tick in temperature and old Phil will have his brazen doomsday trumpet out again in an instant.  For Phil and his fellow scaremongers temperature data is either good or bad.  Good data shows rising temperatures.  Bad data shows steady or falling temperatures. Phil only needs one good data point and he will hit the headlines insisting that the world is about to collapse.  But faced with fifteen years of bad data old Phil wants to see multiple decades before he will change his mind.  Of course this is a rather clever career move, since Phil will have long departed this dying planet before his histrionic febrile prognostications can be disproved to his own satisfaction. 

Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions. . . . The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’. . . . . Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’

There you have it.  The warming is actually going on–but it’s just being suppressed in the data by natural forces which we don’t understand.  The story is getting thinner and thinner.  But there is now far too much money at stake for this thing to go quietly into the night.  Not only are careers at stake, but personal fortunes.  So we expect the climate “scientists” will gradually coalesce around a common belief that we will need at least one hundred years of bad data before we ought to be allowed to give up on  “suppression” theories.

HatTip: Gotcha 

Letter From the UK (About Democratic Politics in the US)

Debatus Interruptus

The US vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan was instructive for all the wrong reasons.  It showed up some things about the modern style of Democratic politics.  Increasingly the hallmark of the Left in the United States is shrill abuse.  Often times that can indicate weakness in position, as in when under threat, shout loudly.

Here is Tim Stanley’s take on the debate and its larger historical context on the emerging style of Democratic politics.

Joe Biden interrupted Paul Ryan 82 times in 90 minutes. The Democrats have become the rude party

By Tim Stanley
US politics
Last updated: October 12th, 2012
The Telegraph

No one’s denying that Joe Biden delivered the more energetic performance in Thursday’s vice presidential debate. He interrupted Paul Ryan 82 times in 90 minutes. Yet some polls say that Ryan won and many pundits are calling it a draw. How come?

Two reasons. First, deconstruct the Biden bluster and some of what he said was nonsensical. In the first 10 minutes alone, Joe insisted that the US intelligence community was wrong on Libya but trustworthy on Iran. He claimed that the staff at the Benghazi embassy didn’t want extra security when lots of sources say that they begged for it. He seemed to rule out war with Iran under any circumstances, which would remove America’s one bargaining chip. As political klutzes go, Biden is to talking what Gerald Ford was to walking.

More importantly, Biden was rude. Perhaps he was trying to emulate Romney’s dominant performance from the week before. But where Romney was commanding, Biden was just insulting. The most damning moments came when the camera went split screen. On the right was Ryan trying to make a serious point about world peace. On the left was Biden laughing. The Vice President’s performance will doubtless rally the party faithful and give them a few applause lines to live off through to November. But it’s hard to imagine independents warming to these theatrics.

The Democrats have made the classic mistake of thinking that what they want to see is what everyone else wants to see. This isn’t peculiar to the Obama/Biden ticket but part of a long-term evolution. Back in 2000, Al Gore huffed and puffed his way angrily through a presidential debate and possibly cost his party the election. The Democrats ought to have learned from that, but the narrative that Bush “stole” 2000 only upped their ire.

After the Iraq War, the liberal Left began to regard itself as the conscience of America and to confuse reason with fury. In 2004, the Democrat base was infiltrated by a new generation of online activists – the so-called Deaniacs. Just as the internet is criticised generally for being a place where ferocious opinions are validated rather than challenged, so Howard Dean’s supporters lived in a cyberspace of their own, fuelled by disgust with Bush. They rallied around Dean because he was the most righteous and furious candidate in the race. His infamous yell at the New Hampshire primary heralded a new kind of confrontational, take-no-prisoners politics.

The Dean revolution became the basis for the 2006 mid-term landslide and for the Obama campaign. Of course, during this period politics as a whole deteriorated. Tea Party folks shouted down congressmen and Republicans questioned the patriotism of their Democratic colleagues. The 2012 GOP primaries was one of the ugliest electoral cycles yet, throwing out Reagan’s commandment not to speak evil of a fellow Republican.

But the difference between the two parties is that when it comes to election time, the Republicans are more disciplined (disciplined to the point of boring). Compare the two party conventions. The Tea Party and the Paulites were excluded from the GOP convention hall, both having to throw parties elsewhere. The messages from the speakers were low-key, patriotic, centrist, calm. The old conservative favourites of abortion and gay marriage were hardly mentioned at all. The Republicans seemed determined not to cause offence.

By contrast, the Democratic convention felt like a circus thrown by the Frankfurt School. Speaker after speaker angrily denounced the Republicans for a “war on women” and did their best to define themselves as a populist majority. Their success or failure is a matter of taste, but what could not be doubted was that this was a partisan, ideologically liberal event with no sense of shame about it. It was the victory of the Deaniac model of Democratic activism – shout and cajole your way to victory – and a victory for those, like Dean, who long argued that the Democrats would only win by being true to themselves.

And the speech that Biden delivered in Denver was identical in tone and talking points to his debate performance on Thursday – full of emotional personal stories, hard attacks on the Republicans and mockery for conservative positions. On Thursday, he even tried to define Catholicism as the crusade for social justice. For the record, he’s half right. But he needs to look up the word “subsidiarity” to see what Catholics think about big government.

Anger has a good heritage in American liberalism. William Jennings Bryan was angry about the cross of gold. Roosevelt was angry about poverty. Jesse Jackson was angry about racism. But there’s a thin line between the politics of anger and the reduction of the public sphere to ugliness. Biden may have crossed it.

It’ll be interesting to see over the weekend how his performance is defined – and in the next few weeks how it is remembered. It’s likely that the Democrats will endlessly recycle it on YouTube, returning to it like a necessary shot of political caffeine. But the wider public might find it a turn off. The Democrats are at risk of becoming vulgar.

Letter From the UK (To Julia Gillard)

 

Julia Gillard needs to man up

Brendan O’Neill
The Telegraph
Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.

 

YouTube sensation (and Prime Minister of Australia) Julia Gillard has been called a “badass motherf–––––” for her speech on sexism. The video of her laying into the Oz opposition leader Tony Abbott over his allegedly misogynistic views has gone wildly viral, being lapped up by bloggers and tweeters the world over, effectively making Gillard into the Susan Boyle of the feminist lobby.
But what did Gillard actually say in her 15-minute excoriation of Abbott? In essence, she just said one thing, over and over and over again: “I am offended.”

In what was essentially a gratuitously ostentatious display of Gillard’s own emotional sensitivity to certain words and ideas, the Aussie PM continually played the offence card. “I was very offended” by something Abbott said about abortion, she said. “I was very personally offended by those comments”, she said about something else. “I was also very offended on behalf of the women of Australia”, she said, in relation to a comment Abbott made about housewives. It goes on and on. “I was offended too by the sexism… I was offended by those things… I am offended by their content… I am always offended by sexism… I am always offended by statements that are anti-women… I am offended by those things… I am offended by things.”
The speech was basically a big, massive offence-fest, a public display of Gillard’s ability and willingness to take offence, both personal offence and proxy offence on behalf of “the women of Australia”, at every slight or slur that she overhears.

That this speech has become a huge hit among web-based feminists says a lot about the state of modern feminism. Once, feminism was about giving offence; now it is about taking it. There was a time when feminists self-consciously and sometimes gloriously offended against everything from family values to Fifties-style morality to religious views of what women should be like. Now, feminists spend most of their time taking offence, and trumpeting their wounded, offended feelings from the rooftops: they’re offended by certain words, by gangsta rap, by Page 3, by porn, by sexist T-shirts, by pretty much everything.

The transformation of feminism from an assertive, offence-giving form of politics into a passive, offence-taking form of therapy reflects a change that has taken place across the political sphere. Feeling offended is the lingua franca of modern politics. Politics used to be about saying, “I believe in something and I am going to make it happen”. Now it is about saying, “I am offended by something and I am going to make it disappear”. From gay-rights groups that fight to have offensive adverts removed from buses right through to hot-headed Islamists in the East who make a fiery, often violent display of their feelings of offence over anti-Muslim movies and cartoons, everyone is playing the offended game; everyone is taking to a soapbox, not to tell the world what they think, but to tell us how they feel.

This promiscuous and weirdly proud offence-taking – where saying “I am offended” is now basically another way of saying “I am a good, moral person with high-level sensitivities” – is a very bad thing. It implicitly demands an end to offensiveness, to anything that certain people or groups might find upsetting. But some of the greatest gains in history were only made possible by people’s willingness to offend against cultural norms or accepted wisdoms – from Copernicus’s offensive suggestion that the earth orbited the Sun to Sylvia Pankhurst’s offensive proposal that women should be equal to men. In contrast, what was ever gained through trying to stamp out offensiveness and make everyone polite and sedate and samey? Nothing but conformism and a stultified public sphere.

So, Madam Prime Minister Gillard, please man up. You are one of the most powerful women in the Southern Hemisphere. You should be bigger than this.

Wilfully Blind

Ignoring the Obvious

Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel does not like Darwinian materialism.  Nagel thinks there has to be something more–but he hopes that it is not God.  He has written a book, recently published entitled Mind and Cosmos in which he attempts to “develop the rival alternative conceptions” to the “materialism and Darwinism” of our age.

His book has been reviewed by two materialist Darwinists,  Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg.  As expected,  neither like what they have read.  But as always in these cases the position of the materialists and Darwinists is filled with fatuous, question begging contradictions.  Once again the Darwinists cannot see the inherent oxymorons in their position.

Nagel argues that one of the big nails in the Darwinisan materialist coffin is the existence of logical truths.
 

It is self-evident that something cannot be both red and not-red at the same time (the “law of non-contradiction”). So, too, it is self-evident that if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socates is necessarily mortal. Even if evolution endowed us with the capacity to recognize the law of non-contradiction and to draw valid deductive inferences, how does it explain the obvious truth of these logical claims? Nagel’s response to this question is that evolution cannot—and the problem is even worse than that:

Any evolutionary account of the place of reason presupposes reason’s validity and cannot confirm it without circularity.

Eventually the attempt to understand oneself in evolutionary, naturalistic terms must bottom out in something that is grasped as valid in itself—something without which the evolutionary understanding would not be possible.

In addition, Nagel recognizes that all (Unbelieving) thought is viciously circular.  Evolutionist ideology proceeds by application of reason and rational truths to justify evolutionary accounts of reason.  It constantly assumes that which it is trying to explain. 

How do our two reviewers try to get off the horns of that dilemma?  They appeal to the success of naturalistic sciences in explaining the way the world works.  This is begging the question on a grand scale:

This response starts by noting that we determine what is “rational” or “justified” simply by appealing to the most successful forms of inquiry into the world that human beings have developed. Paradigmatic examples of those successful forms of inquiry are, of course, physics, chemistry and biology. They are successful precisely in the way that Aristotelian science was not: they enable us to navigate the world around us, to predict its happenings and control some of them. To confuse one’s intuitive confidence in the logical and epistemic norms that make these sciences possible with some kind of a priori access to the “rational order of the world,” as Nagel puts it, is to forget whence that confidence derives—namely, the very success of these sciences. For philosophical naturalists, the charge of circularity is empty, akin to suggesting that the need for a usable table to have legs requires some justification beyond the fact that the legs actually do a necessary job.

Science works.  So it is its own justification.  It is the only justification it needs.  Great.  Funnily enough logical truths are self-evident and the laws of science “work” and yet Darwinian naturalists insist at the same time that the cosmos is random, having come into existence by brute chance.  Presupposing and championing an ultimately random cosmos, our reviewers declare that science works and therefore it is its own justification!  Talk about speaking with a forked tongue.  Sure we acknowledge that science has born enormous fruit.  That’s not the issue.  The issue is that on evolutionist and materialist terms it ought not.  Moreover, science and reason ought not to exist at all, and you ought not to be reading and understanding the words and phrases of this post.  The fact that you can and do explodes the materialist Darwinian myth. 

If evolutionism and Darwinian naturalism were to be true, logical truths must be a chimera and science would not exist.  If logical truths are self-evident and science is fruitful and productive, the cosmos is not random.  You cannot have both.  Nagel is honest enough to admit this and thus has ditched evolutionism and Darwinian materialism (only to replace it with his own version of mysticism). 

His opponents persist intoning mindlessly off a talking points sheet ignoring the fallacies intrinsic to their position.  Endlessly reciting the mantra does not make it any less contradictory or more true. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Froward 

Money, Love, Desire – The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 08 October 2012

I have written many times that free markets are for a free people, and that only a free people can sustain them. But slaves to sin cannot be a free people. And the only way to be liberated from slavery to sin is through the gospel that brings new life.

Another problem is that when slaves to sin spiral down into the civic slavery that is their natural civic condition, their masters will also be slaves to sin, albeit usually somewhat shrewder — at least for a short while. At some point the whole thing blows up for everybody, but the bottom line is that sin is the fundamental set of chains. You cannot hope to be enslaved by them, and yet be free in any sense that matters anywhere else.

Hayek, Friedman, and von Mises cannot keep people loving the freedom of markets any more than the wisest geologist who ever lived could have kept Cain from hitting Abel with that rock. Knowledge of the world is not the same thing as knowledge of the human heart.

Other foolish observers within the Christian tradition have seen that this is true, and concluded that the problem lies with Hayek, et al. “We need to have values other than free market values, etc.” This is to say that since sinners cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit, we need to haul out the chains of compassionate statism. Make ’em do compassionate stuff and everything. And at the top of this atrocious pile is someone with a brightly doctored O on their Froward bumper sticker. But that campaign theme just makes me think of Prov. 3:32, and I don’t know why Obama picked it.

There is no salvation without a savior, and Jesus is the only savior. And how will they hear without a preacher? What we need is the gospel, what we need is a reformation, what we need is revival.

But in the meantime, Christian statists need to stop telling us that since unbelievers cannot manifest love, joy, peace, patience, etc. in their lives, that this must mean that love, joy, peace, patience, etc. are optional. “Let’s work around not having them.” What kind of sense does that make? Preach the gospel. Free markets are a fruit of the gospel, and you cannot praise free markets without praising the work of the Holy Spirit of God.
Someone once said that real capitalism is easy to defend, but hard to praise. I understand where that sentiment comes from, but I want to lean against it, hard. Adam Smith’s invisible hand (whether he knew it or not) was and is the right hand of the Lord Jesus, and marvelous are all His works.

If we preach the gospel in power and truth, the result will be a free people. And when we have a free people, we will have free markets. Only a free people will be able to trust the hand of God in their financial affairs and market choices, which is what the free market is — people trusting God. That is the only way we can have free markets for any length of time.

What we have now, crony capitalism, or what I call crapitalism, is how sinners try to cheat the system. But you don’t blame football when someone cheats at football. You don’t blame math when people get their sums wrong. You don’t blame gravity when you trip and fall on your nose. Or at least you shouldn’t.

Every form of Christian statism, regardless of how it is packaged and sold, is a sly attempt to arrange for the cheaters to be given control of the game. And the only way we can stop that — you guessed it — is to preach Christ crucified and risen.

Secular Theology

The Religious Foundation of Modern Science

It was from the intellectual ferment brought about by the merging of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Islamic-Christian thought that modern science emerged with its unidirection linear time (rather than cyclic), its insistence of nature’s rationality, and its emphasis on mathematical principles.  All the early scientists such as Newton were religious in one way or another. . . . In the ensuing 300 years, the theological dimension of science has faded.  People take for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. 

The underlying order in nature–the laws of physics–is simply accepted as given, as brute fact.  Nobody asks where the laws come from–at least they don’t in polite company.  However, even the most atheistic science accepts as an act of faith (i.e. an assumption) the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.  So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.  [Paul Davies, “Design in Physics and Cosmology,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 148.]

How Did that Stimulus Work Out?

False Messiahs Struck Down Yet Again

Unbelievers are always looking for messianic saviours.  Rejecting the Messiah of God, the Lord Jesus Christ they frantically cast around for a substitute.  Then when times get tough, the demand can rise to the level of panic.  Almost inevitably–virtually without exception–the saviour is some organ or act of government.  Funny that.   “In government we trust” is the religious mania of the day. 

When the United States led us into the global financial crisis the people bowed and prayed for a saviour they had made.  Enter the Federal Government.  It would expropriate an extra one trillion dollars of its citizen’s money which it did not have (“no worries, mate–we will borrow it so your children and grandchildren can pay it off”).  It would then spend this borrowed money on grand schemes to create lots and lots of  jobs. 

The problem is that in God’s world, that is, the real world, false saviours get exploded and struck down.
The Living God is a jealous God and will not tolerate idols and pretenders in His presence and in His world.  Not only has the Big Spend Up failed, it has left the US worse off than before.  This from Michelle Malkin who reports on an ex-post analysis by an economist at the Ohio State University:

The Democrats’ trillion-dollar “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies. 

According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”

Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.” . . . 

Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider.  Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year.

The Uber Parent

 Beware Government “Help”

New Zealand, we are told,  has a high incidence of child abuse.  It was, therefore, entirely predictable that eventually the government would move to establish a national database of children of some sort.  The governmental authorities have a demonstrated record of incompetence in the area.  A most frequent failing is the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  Too many children being “helped” by too many government agencies who are unaware of what others agencies are doing.

To address the “information gap” the Minister of Social Development is proposing a national database of at risk kids be set up.  It is estimated that 30,000 children will eventually be on electronic record.

Whenever Big Brother proposes something like this the issue of official abuse percolates to the surface.
  We have lots of databases about people in New Zealand.  We also have plenty of incidents of abuse and misuse by people authorised to access such databases.  Will the checks and balances be sufficiently robust and real to disincline abusers of the new proposed system?

We have been told that there will be protections such as access by passwords and monitoring of use.  That is positive.  What, however, will be the sanctions if someone accesses another person’s record in bad faith?  The only credible sanction is instant suspension leading to dismissal (if misuse is proven) and initiation of  procedures to strike off professional registers if found guilty of misuse.  If such sanctions are not up front in large typeface, we predict that abuse will occur–probably on a regular basis.

Private corporations which maintain lots of personal data about clients (such as banks) have extremely strict codes of conduct about staff access and use of client information.  Penalties are usually summary.  Everyone knows the score.   Banks employ investigative staff to monitor employee behaviour and access of client information.  Consequently, compliance is high.

Will the state set up similar compliance regimes for those accessing the at risk kids database?  We hope so.  We also expect to be disappointed.  As reported in the NZ Herald, the whole project at first glance appears to be too big, too broad, with too many government agencies and quango staff given access:

Teachers, doctors, community organisations, Child, Youth and Family workers and others will have access to the database and be able to add to individual children’s records. High-risk adults will also be added to the database so they can be tracked and an alert given if a child moves into their household.

Parents and caregivers will be “profiled”–which is a bit embarrassing since profiling is not PC is lots of quarters:

A “risk assessment tool” developed at the University of Auckland will identify the most vulnerable children based on data in this system such as previous findings of abuse or neglect, behavioural problems, single-parent families, parental ages and education, intervals between babies and multiple-birth children.

Such tools are always blunt and crude.  To be fair and just they need qualification and review; checks and balances are essential.  That leads to the second major problem–secrecy and lack of informed consent.

Social workers will be able to log information into a new centralised system described as “not a new database on children but a mechanism for extracting and combining relevant information on children (and their caregivers) from existing databases”.  “Information will only be pulled into the platform when a child reaches a certain threshold of concern,” the documents say.

Parents will not be told if their children are being put on the database and when they are “pulled on to the platform”.  This is unconscionable.  Apparently, parents can find out only by requesting the records under the Privacy Act, after their children have been put on the database.  But this would potentially be open to abuse of the worst kind by overzealous do-gooders.  If there were a protocol which required that parents or caregivers be notified when a child is being first put on the database it would help stop casual expansion of the records without due process.  And why ought not parents be informed?  If they are neglectful informing them would put the parents on notice.  The idea of a semi-secret database able to accessed by thousands of government and quango and private sector functionaries without notice is a scary thought.

Without doubt one unintended consequence will be a further weakening of the institution of the family.  Take, for example, the issue of parental discipline.  There are many parents now who fear to speak out against the current stupid, inconsistent and draconian practice for fear they would fall under the attention of Nazi-like government bureaucrats who are authorised to operate on a “guilty until proven innocent” mode, with the first intervention and sanction being the removal of children from the home.

Now another sanction will loom: if  you come to the attention of the authorities you risk your children being put on a national snooping database which identifies them as being at risk because you happen to be their parents.

As soon as a child is entered on the database you, the parents, are suspected of nascent child neglect and abuse–by definition.  Imagine your child falling down and breaking an arm.  You take them to the doctor who looks the child up on the “at risk child” database and you are identified as someone who puts their own children at risk.  Suddenly the broken arm can be seen as probable evidence of child abuse–and so it goes on.  The child protection agency may be called.  Would they be waiting for you when you return from the doctor’s.  Would they demand access to the home to ensure that your child is not being abused by you, the suspect parent.  Will there be protections against such abuse, misuse, overreach, and browbeating?  We doubt it.

Ironically, the extensive consultation has apparently made it clear to the government that the draconian approach used by CYFS has proved counter productive.

CYFS already refers less urgent cases to community social services, but many people are scared to ring CYFS because of its statutory power to take children off parents judged to be abusive or neglectful.

No surprises there.

Thirdly, if your children are put on the database, what will be the procedures and protocols for getting them removed?  We expect there aren’t any, or if there are they will be so difficult and costly to apply and action that they will be beyond the reach of any but the wealthy.

Fourthly, expect this database and intervention approach to produce a mammoth new initiative in government bureaucrats planning for your lives.  Each child “on the platform” will have a plan developed by the government for it and its parents or caregivers.

Each child and family referred to these teams will have a “whole-of-child” assessment of their physical and mental health, safety, housing and other material needs, cultural wellbeing, caregiving, family relationships and support systems, behaviour, learning and development. . . .

Regional directors will ensure that each vulnerable child has a “lead professional” who will be “responsible for developing a plan and ensuring the plan stays on track and is delivered” by all the agencies involved.

So, if you get on the list the implication here is that you will be showered with state help and state intervention all co-ordinated by your personal “plan”.  There will doubtless be thousands upon thousands of parents and caregivers who will do all they can to get on that database.  The prospect of more government help is a huge driver of behaviour.  Within a nano-second the underground network will be buzzing about the best ways to get on the list in order to get more help and money.  A bit more neglect of your children would do the trick quite nicely.

Such initiatives are always well meaning.  The actual outcome and the real-life fruits are often as bad or even worse than the problems they ostensibly seek to address.  Be warned.

Letter From America (About Free Speech)

 Western Hypocrisy Mocked by Islamists

Every so often secular revolutionaries break out from the chains and constraints of the Commentariat.  They see some things that bear a remarkable resemblance to hypocrisy in the received wisdom of Western secularism.  More often than not the remedies proposed to the hypocrisy are way off the reservation, but the fundamental point being made remains sound. 

Here is William Saletan writing in Slate:

Hate-Speech Hypocrites

How can we ban hate speech against Jews while defending mockery of Muslims?

By William Saletan| 

Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2012

Photograph by Hasham Ahmed/AFP/Getty Images. Pakistani Shiite Muslims shout slogans beside a burning Israeli flag during a rally against Israel and the United States to mark the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) day on the last Friday of the holiest month of Ramadan in Peshawar in August

Jews have too much influence over U.S. foreign policy. Gay men are too promiscuous. Muslims commit too much terrorism. Blacks commit too much crime. 

Each of those claims is poorly stated. Each, in its clumsy way, addresses a real problem or concern. And each violates laws against hate speech. In much of what we call the free world, for writing that paragraph, I could be jailed.

Libertarians, cultural conservatives, and racists have complained about these laws for years. But now the problem has turned global. Islamic governments, angered by an anti-Muslim video that provoked protests and riots in their countries, are demanding to know why insulting the Prophet Mohammed is free speech but vilifying Jews and denying the Holocaust isn’t. And we don’t have a good answer.

If we’re going to preach freedom of expression around the world, we have to practice it. We have to scrap our hate-speech laws. Muslim leaders want us to extend these laws. At this week’s meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, they lobbied for tighter censorship. Egypt’s president said freedom of expression shouldn’t include speech that is “used to incite hatred” or “directed towards one specific religion.” Pakistan’s president urged the “international community” to “criminalize” acts that “endanger world security by misusing freedom of expression.” Yemen’s president called for “international legislation” to suppress speech that “blasphemes the beliefs of nations and defames their figures.” The Arab League’s secretary-general proposed a binding “international legal framework” to “criminalize psychological and spiritual harm” caused by expressions that “insult the beliefs, culture and civilization of others.”

President Obama, while condemning the video, met these proposals with a stout defense of free speech. Switzerland’s president agreed: “Freedom of opinion and of expression are core values guaranteed universally which must be protected.” And when a French magazine published cartoons poking fun at Mohammed, the country’s prime minister insisted that French laws protecting free speech extend to caricatures.

This debate between East and West, between respect and pluralism, isn’t a crisis. It’s a stage of global progress. The Arab spring has freed hundreds of millions of Muslims from the political retardation of dictatorship. They’re taking responsibility for governing themselves and their relations with other countries. They’re debating one another and challenging us. And they should, because we’re hypocrites.

From Pakistan to Iran to Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Nigeria to the United Kingdom, Muslims scoff at our rhetoric about free speech. They point to European laws against questioning the Holocaust. Monday on CNN, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad needled British interviewer Piers Morgan: “Why in Europe has it been forbidden for anyone to conduct any research about this event? Why are researchers in prison? … Do you believe in the freedom of thought and ideas, or no?” On Tuesday, Pakistan’s U.N. ambassador, speaking for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, told the U.N. Human Rights Council:

We are all aware of the fact that laws exist in Europe and other countries which impose curbs, for instance, on anti-Semitic speech, Holocaust denial, or racial slurs. We need to acknowledge, once and for all, that Islamophobia in particular and discrimination on the basis of religion and belief are contemporary forms of racism and must be dealt with as such. Not to do so would be a clear example of double standards. Islamophobia has to be treated in law and practice equal to the treatment given to anti-Semitism.

He’s right. Laws throughout Europe forbid any expression that “minimizes,” “trivializes,” “belittles,” “plays down,” “contests,” or “puts in doubt” Nazi crimes. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic extend this prohibition to communist atrocities. These laws carry jail sentences of up to five years. Germany adds two years for anyone who “disparages the memory of a deceased person.”

Hate speech laws go further. Germany punishes anyone found guilty of “insulting” or “defaming segments of the population.” The Netherlands bans anything that “verbally or in writing or image, deliberately offends a group of people because of their race, their religion or beliefs, their hetero- or homosexual orientation or their physical, psychological or mental handicap.” It’s illegal to “insult” such a group in France, to “defame” them in Portugal, to “degrade” them in Denmark, or to “expresses contempt” for them in Sweden. In Switzerland, it’s illegal to “demean” them even with a “gesture.” Canada punishes anyone who “willfully promotes hatred.” The United Kingdom outlaws “insulting words or behavior” that arouse “racial hatred.” Romania forbids the possession of xenophobic “symbols.”

What have these laws produced? Look at the convictions upheld or accepted by the European Court of Human Rights. Four Swedes who distributed leaflets that called homosexuality “deviant” and “morally destructive” and blamed it for AIDS. An Englishman who displayed in his window a 9/11 poster proclaiming, “Islam out of Britain.” A Turk who published two letters from readers angry at the government’s treatment of Kurds. A Frenchman who wrote an article disputing the plausibility of poison gas technology at a Nazi concentration camp.

Look at the defendants rescued by the court. A Dane “convicted of aiding and abetting the dissemination of racist remarks” for making a documentary in which three people “made abusive and derogatory remarks about immigrants and ethnic groups.” A man “convicted of openly inciting the population to hatred” in Turkey by “criticizing secular and democratic principles and openly calling for the introduction of Sharia law.” Another Turkish resident “convicted of disseminating propaganda” after he “criticized the United States’ intervention in Iraq and the solitary confinement of the leader of a terrorist organization.” Two Frenchmen who wrote a newspaper article that “portrayed Marshal Pétain in a favorable light, drawing a veil over his policy of collaboration with the Nazi regime.”

Beyond the court’s docket, you’ll find more prosecutions of dissent. A Swedish pastor convicted of violating hate-speech laws by preaching against homosexuality. A Serb convicted of discrimination for saying, “We are against every gathering where homosexuals are demonstrating in the streets of Belgrade and want to show something, which is a disease, like it is normal.” An Australian columnist convicted of violating the Racial Discrimination Act by suggesting that “there are fair-skinned people in Australia with essentially European ancestry … who, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people or by political activism, have chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.”

My favorite case involves a Frenchman who sought free-speech protection under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

Denis Leroy is a cartoonist. One of his drawings representing the attack on the World Trade Centre was published in a Basque weekly newspaper … with a caption which read: “We have all dreamt of it … Hamas did it”. Having been sentenced to payment of a fine for “condoning terrorism”, Mr Leroy argued that his freedom of expression had been infringed.

The Court considered that, through his work, the applicant had glorified the violent destruction of American imperialism, expressed moral support for the perpetrators of the attacks of 11 September, commented approvingly on the violence perpetrated against thousands of civilians and diminished the dignity of the victims. Despite the newspaper’s limited circulation, the Court observed that the drawing’s publication had provoked a certain public reaction, capable of stirring up violence and of having a demonstrable impact on public order in the Basque Country. The Court held that there had been no violation of Article 10.

How can you justify prosecuting cases like these while defending cartoonists and video makers who ridicule Mohammed? You can’t. Either you censor both, or you censor neither. Given the choice, I’ll stand with Obama. “Efforts to restrict speech,” he warned the U. N., “can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.”  

That principle, borne out by the wretched record of hate-speech prosecutions, is worth defending. But first, we have to live up to it.

The Government’s Non-Compete Clause

Adulterating the Currency

There is an old bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t steal!  The Government doesn’t like competition.”  Folk do not often contemplate that an entire government could be devoted to theft.  Yet why should it surprise us?  Sin and evil continually breaks forth out of the human heart; it is desperately sick (Jeremiah 17:9).  Christ alone can cleanse it, making men new–regenerating them. 

When unregenerated men gain control of a polity it is the most natural thing in the world for their addiction to sin to be woven through government policies, laws, and regulations.  Why, then, ought it to surprise us that governments should do evil?  Why, then, should we be shocked when governments steal?

The most common form of government theft is adulterating the currency.
  Mixing silver and gold coinage with dross metals, or clipping bits off silver or gold coins, or making them slightly smaller for the same ostensible value have been employed by unscrupulous governors and tyrants for centuries.  The modern way of currency adulteration is printing cash–or, as it is euphemistically termed these days, “quantitative easing”.  What a joke! 

The idea is that if the currency is made up of gold and silver coin at a defined weight but thieving governments adulterate the pure metal with dross, the mint can stamp much more coinage into circulation.  More coins chasing the same amount of goods and services mean that money is worth less, and prices rise.  Before the adulteration sixpence would buy a week’s groceries.  After the adulteration you would need a shilling because the value of the sixpence had halved.

These days adulterating the currency is easie peasie.  Paper and ink is really cheap; just roll the presses.  Even better, credit can be created instantaneously by means of a few strokes of an electronic key.  Or the Central Bank can create its own credit and go out into the market and buy up things at a prodigious rate and in prodigious quantities, thereby releasing lots of hot adulterated cash into the economy. 

But theft it is, and theft it remains.  When Russel Norman, a leader of the Greens proposed that New Zealand copy other “advanced” countries like the US and the nations in the European Union and print money because quantitative easing is the last desperate measure of unscrupulous thieves and is now avant garde he showed in  that instant how sin and evil, graft and corruption lurk in the heart of every man–and, therefore, in our political leaders and in our governments.  Unless it is dealt with by the Lord of glory, it will break out inevitably–to the hurt of us all.

When Henry VIII debased the coinage to fund his war with France the poor and common people suffered immensely.  In effect Henry was engaged in the rape and pillage of his own subjects.  He was at war not just with France, but with his own people.  Russel Norman would have us believe it was a good thing, actually.  A smart move.  Enlightened economics.

The bumper sticker was correct.  If you were to counterfeit the currency the government would prosecute you as a terrible criminal.  Yet governments claim the prerogative to counterfeit and adulterate and debase the currency at will. 

The cynical bumper sticker is right on point.  Don’t steal, because the government does not like competition.  Evil men doing evil things because they are enslaved to sin.     

Greatly Exceeding Expectations

Romney Was Set a Very Low Bar

It gets interesting when even Obama shills are wringing their hands in despair.

Here are some excerpts from Andrew Sullivan, writing for the Daily Beast.

Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?

8 Oct 2012 07:13 PM

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 – 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 – 45 lead. That’s a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama’s performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney’s favorables are above Obama’s now. Yes, you read that right. Romney’s favorables are higher than Obama’s right now. That gender gap that was Obama’s firewall? Over in one night:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. . . . 

Now look at Pew’s question as to who would help the middle class the most:

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney’s convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

How can Obama come back? By ensuring people know that Romney was and is a shameless liar and opportunist? That doesn’t work for a sitting president. He always needed a clear positive proposal – tax reform, a Grand Bargain on S-B lines – as well as a sterling defense of his admirable record. Bill Clinton did the former for him. Everyone imaginable did what they could for him. And his response? Well, let’s look back a bit:

With President Obama holed up in a Nevada resort for debate practice, things can get pretty boring on the White House beat right now. Pretty boring for Obama too, apparently. “Basically they’re keeping me indoors all the time,” Obama told a supporter on the phone during a visit to a Las Vegas area field office. “It’s a drag,” he added. “They’re making me do my homework.”

Too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously. Too arrogant to give his supporters what they deserve. If he now came out and said he supports Simpson-Bowles in its entirety, it would look desperate, but now that Romney has junked every proposal he ever told his base, and we’re in mid-October, it’s Obama’s only chance on the economy.

Or maybe, just maybe, Obama can regain our trust and confidence somehow in the next debate. Maybe he can begin to give us a positive vision of what he wants to do (amazing that it’s October and some of us are still trying to help him, but he cannot). Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it.

A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate – and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better – and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

Andrew Sullivan’s narrative overlooks one issue.  For the past nine months Democratic spinmeisters have been attacking Romney’s person–his ethics, morals, competence, and humanity at every opportunity.  They over-egged the pudding.  They set a very, very low bar for Romney.  He did a reasonable job in the first debate, and so exceeded everyone‘s expectation.  Suddenly the electorate sees him as not nearly the black beast he had been painted as being.  “Not half bad” is an excellent result for Romney–at at time when folk have realised that Obama is all hat and no cattle. 

It seems in their haste and zeal to demonize Romney, the Democrat machine might have shot itself in the foot.  Sullivan–a huge cheerleader for Obama–appears desperate.  Not a bad sign. 

Christians and Politics

Acting As If Christ’s Atonement Were Unnecessary

We should be sceptical when Christians aspire to enter politics.  We should be very cautious supporting Christians who aspire to exercise warrants of governmental power.  More often than not Christians make disastrous political and civil rulers.  

One reason modern Christians do more harm than good when it comes to government and law is because they confuse the roles and duties of the state with the church and the family and civil society. 
  The state is an institution of power.  It is entitled (and commanded by God) to employ force (the sword) for the punishment of evildoers. When an individual or group do not submit to the authority of the state they can end up stripped of property, freedom, and even life itself.

The power to confiscate, impoverish, enslave, incarcerate, and even execute is so threatening to ordinary citizens that historically Christendom insisted that the powers of the state be carefully defined, limited, prescribed and proscribed by law.  In the Christian republic, law is king, and all law–to be genuinely holy, just and good–had to be grounded upon God’s higher laws.

Historically, Christendom insisted that government powers be carefully limited and very narrowly focused. The doctrine of the divine right of kings (where the king was regarded as answerable solely to God and thus the power of the king was implicitly absolute) was rejected emphatically in time.  The doctrine of the separation of powers of government into various loci of competence and authority (executive, judicial, and legislative) was another development to restrain and restrict absolute tyrannical power. 

The twentieth century oversaw a vast expansion of state power.  Modern Western governments have claimed authority and powers which even “divine right” monarchs could never have imagined.  The expansion of administrative controls continues unabated–ceaselessly added to by faceless committees and a multitude of  regulatory bodies. 

When modern Christians get involved in politics and government they invariably seek to wield government powers for good.  In most cases this is nothing short of tragic.  It supplants the grace and mercy of the Saviour for the dead law of man.  God commands that we love our neighbour as ourselves.  Christians–with all the best intent and motives–inevitably try to take hold of state power when they have the opportunity to so regulate, legislate, and command that we are made to love our neighbour, we are compelled to love by regulatory fiat.  Such a mistake is oxymoronic.  Its fruit is terrible.

The state has been appointed by God for the administration of vengeance upon evildoing (Romans 13: 4).  It is not appointed to be an institution to make people holy, righteous and good by means of wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.  It has no appointed efficacy or power to transform people from sinners into saints.  Were that the case there would have been no need for Christ’s atonement and blood sacrifice upon the cross, and no need for His resurrection.  Salvation could have been achieved by passing a law and ruthlessly enforcing it.

The authority and competence of the state is exceedingly narrow.  Christians make a grave mistake when they think they can enter politics to “make a difference”.  In most cases they will end up inflicting far, far more harm than good.  When it comes to making people righteous the law is worthless.  If Christians have not got this clearly fixed in their minds they should stay away from politics, government, and civil administration as if it were the plague. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Buttering the Stage 

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 04 October 2012

I TIVOed the debate last night, and then hopped my way through it, like it was an ankle deep muddy stream. I got enough to get a decent feel for it, without subjecting my sanctification to the blah blah parts.
So here are just a few random observations, which I would ask all to take cum grano salis.

First, it seems clear that this is one of those debates which will take on a life and meaning of its own, independent of the actual performance on stage. During the debate, I thought Romney was more confident, affable, informed, etc. but Obama seemed generally okay.
The talking heads afterwards — for about ten minutes — seemed to spin it in roughly the same way. (When talking heads spin, that would make them spinning heads, but that image might take us in another direction.)

But when the Twitterverse was factored in, along with the morning after analyses, from both left and right, the consensus appears to have coalesced around the conviction that Romney buttered the stage with Obama. And so, these events being what they are, that seems to have been what happened. But whether it happened or not, that is certainly what it now means.

Second, it struck me that Romney is not as vulnerable on Romneycare (and such things) in this general election as I thought he was going to be. Consistent attacks on his state-level statism are certainly possible from the right, but it is looking as though Obama can’t mount an attack there. To do that, he would have to understand the love of liberty that motivates such critiques, which he clearly does not. Romney can deflect such questions with appeals to “process,” “bi-partisanship” and “state-level” action, and Obama doesn’t have anything to say — because had he been in the Massachusetts legislature, he would have been a participant. There are plenty of rocks to throw, but they are all on the other side of Romney where Obama can’t get at them to pick them up.

This is related to the third thing. One of the things that may have thrown Obama is that Romney tacked to the center in the debate. Jonah Goldberg concluded his observations with this caution, the last sentence of which I would like to highlight:

“And yet, we should keep in mind that most of his effective moments came when he distanced himself from the base of his party and struck a decidedly moderate, centrist, position. Personally, given the stakes and the state of his campaign, that doesn’t bother me very much. But, once again, we can’t say we weren’t warned.”

Those Christians who are supporting Romney need to do so in such a way that takes this caution, chisels it in granite, and sets it up as an impromptu memento for themselves in the Washington Mall. Support for Romney can only be justified (to the extent it can be) if Romney feels betrayed by his base, his support, his mandate-creators, on the second day of his administration. But if his supporters feel betrayed by him nine months into it, then we have ourselves one more instance of Lucy and the football. In other words, don’t say you weren’t warned.