Improving the Citizens

Ve Vill Make You Free

There has been a bit of aog’nghast in certain quarters in the United States recently.  It turns out that a previously highly regarded chap called Brendan Eich was recently appointed CEO of Mozilla–an internet browsing software company–but was subsequently forced out because he was a pariah.  His crime?  Years ago he was guilty of donating some money to a political campaign in California to restrict the institution of marriage to adult males covenanting with adult females. 

That meant he could not serve as the CEO of an internet browsing company.  He was guilty of thought-crimes.  Eich was forced out for his political and ethical opinions.  The supine Board of Mozilla surrendered faster than Baltic Ukraine, and with less fuss and bother.  All this, in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”–a sentiment which must now be understood in the wider context of a herd of lemming-like creatures rushing for the cliff.  To be fair, some public homosexuals have expressed shock, horror, and outrage–and good on them.  Andrew Sullivan, for example, who campaigns for the recognition of homosexual marriage wrote: “The hounding and firing of @BrendanEich disgusts me – as it should anyone interested in a tolerant & diverse society.”  Bill Maher, who has publicly ridiculed even the suggestion that homosexuality may be immoral, spoke disconsolately of a “gay mafia”:

I think there is a gay mafia. I think if you cross them, you do get whacked. I really do. TheBlaze

Satirist H. L. Mencken commented on this kind of thing from a broader perspective:

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. [“Criticism of Criticism of Criticism”, Prejudices: First Series.]

Well, Mr Eich, consider yourself evangelised.  Your homosexual fellow citizens would have your opinions improved and lifted up, compulsorily.   It’s what it means to live in the wonderful secular paradise, hymned as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  For the free, think Eich.  For the brave, refer to Mozilla’s Board of Paper Tigers.  For the delusional messiahs, think homosexual “marriage” evangelists.   

 

Only Fools and Horses

Derision and Fury

The ancient Greeks, via Homer, believed that one ought not to excel too much in anything, lest one attract the jealous, vindictive attention of the gods.  Accordingly, heroes such as Odysseus lived a perilous existence.  The Living God is not thus.  He created man to be great, and good.  Psalm 8 declares:

O Lord, our Lord
How majestic is your name in all the earth! . . .
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
What is man that you are mindful of him
And the son of man that you care for him.
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
And crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under his feet.

The truly great man, who is also good as the Bible defines it, and who does great deeds attracts the love, commendation, approval, and approbation of the Lord.  But the man who sets himself up as if he were God, or as if he were God’s Messiah, risks attracting His despite and vengeance in this world, and eternal damnation in the world to come.  And a people complicit in such brazen rebellion and idolatry risk sharing in his fate.  King Herod provides an apt example:

On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to the them.  And the people were shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!”  Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by works and breathed his last.  But the world of God increased and multiplied.  (Acts 12: 21-24)

Fast forward to 2008 in the United States.  Obama stands to accept his party’s nomination as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, and says.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Maybe these words reflected rhetorical exaggeration; they were not meant to be taken literally.  But Obama’s record in office and the reactions of his devotees suggest otherwise.  We see here shades of Herod, and the adulation of an idolatrous people.  They are thus a portent of great hardships ahead, even disaster.

One of the queens of the Chattering Classes has recently reflected upon Obama’s stellar orbit and the black hole that tracks him. 

“I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime,” Barbara Walters told Piers Morgan on his show Tuesday night. But despite her best judgment, she went on to say it – and it was quite a controversial statement.   What exactly was it?

“We thought that [Obama] was going to be – I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime, but – the next messiah,” she told Morgan.  The response came after Morgan asked why Obama has faced so much opposition, and “Why is he struggling so much to really fulfill the great flame of ambition and excitement that he was elected on originally in 2009?”

“He made so many promises,” she began. “We thought that he was going to be – I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime, but – the next messiah. And the whole Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it, that Affordable Health Act, it just hasn’t worked for him, and he’s stumbled around on it, and people feel very disappointed because they expected more.”   She added: “It’s very difficult when the expectations for you are very high. You’re almost better off when they are low and then they rise and rise.”

Yes, Barbara–but a craven idolatrous people don’t elect Presidents because they have low expectations of the candidate, do they?  To win the support of an idolatrous people, who worship Man in general and the United States in particular, you have to promise to fulfil their idolatrous dreams.  Only then will they vote for you, and cheer you, and adulate you.  And the craven candidate, for his part, will doubtless come to believe his own press, put out by his own PR spinmeisters.  

The Scriptures provide the divine commentary upon such idolatry and folly.

Why do the nations rage
And the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together,
Against the Lord and his Messiah, saying
“Let us burst their bonds apart
And cast away their cords from us.”

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
And terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.”  

It is a sobering thing to contemplate the perilous consequences of God holding a president and an entire nation in derision.  

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.

Messianic Pretensions Blowing Up

Wild and Restless Spirits

When governments get the-grand-idea and seek to bring it to pass for the good of mankind the results are always disastrous.  God is a jealous God; He does not brook pretenders to the throne of  Heaven. 

Climate change has seen a flowering of false messianism.  Governments have set out to save the world and have ended up looking like stupid chooks.  Germany and windpower imbroglios are the latest–which is particularly ironic since Germany has been hailed by greenists everywhere as the poster nation for where the rest of the world needs to go.

The Telegraph compares how the UK is still cheerleading for wind power, attempting to imitate Germany, while in the latter country people are starting to rue the day they ever went down that ephemeral and unpredictable track.

Germany’s wind power chaos should be a warning to the UK

Germany has gone further down the ‘renewables’ path than any country in the world, and now it’s paying the price  

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a massive commitment to ‘renewable’ energy

By Christopher Booker
7:00PM BST 22 Sep 2012

On Friday, September 14, just before 10am, Britain’s 3,500 wind turbines broke all records by briefly supplying just over four gigawatts (GW) of electricity to the national grid. Three hours later, in Germany, that country’s 23,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels similarly achieved an unprecedented output of 31GW. But the responses to these events in the two countries could not have been in starker contrast.

In Britain, the wind industry proclaimed a triumph. Maria McCaffery, the CEO of RenewableUK, crowed that “this record high shows that wind energy is providing a reliable, secure supply of electricity to an ever-growing number of British homes and businesses” and that “this bountiful free resource will help drive down energy bills”. But in Germany, the news was greeted with dismay, for reasons which merit serious attention here in Britain. 

Three is a venerable adage to the effect that we should beware what we wish for.  But when a messianic dawn beckons, few will heed such antiquated warnings.

 Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent. 

One struggles to find a comparison where huge investment and effort is put into an enterprise where the output will be just 17 percent of physical capacity–or 25 percent for that matter.  Words like “over-capitalisation” spring to mind.  Imagine if a town built a bridge capable of carrying 100,000 tonne trucks where the maximum load it would every carry was just one fifth of that.  Citizens would be muttering about hubris and waste.  Precisely.  But none of this matters when the messianic goal and pretension of saving the world has captured the wilful arrogance of the modern mind.  

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe, the picture that Germany presents is, on paper, almost everything the most rabid greenie could want. Last year, its wind turbines already had 29GW of capacity, equivalent to a quarter of Germany’s average electricity demand. But because these turbines are even less efficient than our own, their actual output averaged only 5GW, and most of the rest had to come from grown-up power stations, ready to supply up to 29GW at any time and then switch off as the wind picked up again. 

Folks talk about Germany being the economic powerhouse of Europe.  In fact, Germany has so overcapitalised its power industry the cost basis of the whole economy has become uncompetitive.  It has built the boondoggle of all boondoggles–a monument to human folly.  Now watch Germany be outcompeted everywhere around the globe.  Watch German industry rush to the exits, looking for cheaper places to do business.  Watch systemic unemployment rise and smile as Germany catches the French disease. 

Beware the law of unintended consequences, they say.  Messianic pretensions only serve to make that law yet more brutal and implacable, yet more unseen.  The first unintended consequence in Germany is industry needing to build back up power supplies into its operations to cope when the wind puffs die.  Costs sky rocket; CO2 emissions spike up again.

Now the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether. 

In fact, a mighty battle is now developing in Germany between green fantasists and practical realists. Because renewable energy must by law have priority in supplying the grid, the owners of conventional power stations, finding they have to run plants unprofitably, are so angry that they are threatening to close many of them down. The government response, astonishingly, has been to propose a new law forcing them to continue running their plants at a loss.  

You vill do as ve say!  What will Germany do to counter this now inefficient, vulnerable power supply?  Well, it could build more conventional power stations flat out.  And so it has come to pass.

Meanwhile, firms such as RWE and E.on are going flat out to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020, with a combined output equivalent to some 38 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. None of these will be required to have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which is just an empty pipedream. This makes nonsense of any pretence that Germany will meet its EU target for reducing CO2 emissions (and Mrs Merkel’s equally fanciful goal of producing 35 per cent of electricity from renewables).

The Preacher said, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).  To which we add, “Amen, and amen.”