Considerettes

The Anchoress, posting at First Things, has a wonderful post on the issues raised by Anne Rice in her "quitting" of Christianity.  There is plenty of blame to go around, and in this portion of the post I’m quoting, The Anchoress covers them in part, but the whole post is well worth the read.

Anne Rice wants to do the Life-in-Christ on her own, while saying “Yes” to the worldly world and its values. She seems not to realize that far from being an Institution of No, the church is a giant and eternal urging toward “Yes,”, that being a “yes” toward God–whose ways are not our ways, and who draws all to Himself, in the fullness of time–rather than a “yes” to ourselves.

Unfortunately, we Christians teach this poorly and generally make too many excuses for our failings. Too many of us go out into the world seeking to confront and “fix” others, when the key to the Christian life begins with confronting and “fixing” the self. This can only be done through grace, which enters upon the Yes, and moves and grows on the intentional breeze of Willingness, because that is the only thing that counts, our intentions and our willingness; “worthiness” does not enter in.

But willingness only comes with humility. It comes when we can say “Thy will be done,” and then actually surrender, instead of preparing a treaty.

The world, because it is worldly, cannot understand Christianity or the churches; the world will never love either, and it is foolishness to think otherwise. But the church is not here to be loved by the world; it is here to serve the Bread. The Living Bread did not come for the love of the world, but for its life.

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When TIME magazine is defending Rush Limbaugh, you gotta’ wonder if the Apocalypse can be close behind.  Regarding the BP oil spill, and the potentially exaggerated predictions of what was to come, TIME’s Michael Grunwald writes:

The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

There’s a bunch more; it’s quite an interesting read. 

Obligatory disclaimer:  This is not to say that the ecological problems that did occur weren’t bad, nor that more should be done to prevent spills.  I’m just pointing out that the "Cry Wolf" type of ecological disaster pronouncements get a lot of play in the press up front.  Even though when it’s over we finally get a tiny bit more sober, what’s I’m betting will be remembered in future years are the initial claims, and not so much the reality. 

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If you had information about local organized crime activities, and were contemplating giving this information to the police, would you be more or less willing to be an informant if you knew your name might be associated with that information?  Would you be willing to take that chance?

Yeah, me neither.

NewsBusters, in a post regarding all the classified information dumped to the public via the NY Times and, more recently, by Wikileaks, noted Jim Miklaszewski discussing this on MSNBC.

Not only are those named put at risk, but those who might potentially cooperate with the Americans are probably not going to do it now. You know, often allies, U.S. allies, have told the Pentagon, State Department, why should we cooperate with you, because whatever we tell you is going to end up on the front pages of the New York Times.

That’s one of the complaints, actually, specifically from Pakistan.  Every time U.S. officials travel to Islamabad to sit down and try to gain increased cooperation from Pakistan, inevitably, we are told, they complain about press leaks that jeopardize anything they’re going to do in conjunction with the U.S.

(Emphasis supplied by NB.) 

While Pfc. Bradley Manning may have had a legitimate beef with how portions of the Afghanistan War have been run, his implication in this massive document dump to Wikileaks far overshadows his initial charges.  If he’d kept the dump relevant to his whistleblowing, I’d think much better of him (aside from the fact that he didn’t go through the normal channels the military has set up for whistleblowers). 

But this dump, purporting to merely foster transparency, has damaged our credibility with potential sources, and given our enemies a boatload of late summer reading.  Just as there were other, proper ways for Pfc. Manning to get his point across, there are better ways to foster transparency than giving aid to our enemies and discomfort to those who might help us defend ourselves.

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Obama’s executive order forbidding the use of ObamaCare money for abortions has been rendered useless by … the Obama administration.  Did anyone, other than hyper-partisan liberals, really believe him when he signed it?  I certainly didn’t.

The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned about when Congress considered the bill.

The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new "high-risk" insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March.

It has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.

Tabitha Hale writing at RedState explains that the so-called "high risk" qualifier is just another fig leaf.

The loophole comes in the wording:

The section on abortion (see page 14) asserts that “elective abortions are not covered,” though it does not define elective — which Johnson calls a “red herring.”

Therein lies the problem. Anything that is not hard worded is a gray area that will be manipulated by the most pro-abortion administration we’ve ever seen. What, then, determines an “elective” abortion? Is the mother who chooses to terminate her baby with Down’s Syndrome “electing” to have an abortion, or is she forced by circumstances?

The National Right to Life Committee has determined that the only abortion that will not be covered under the plan is gender selection. It’s dangerous territory, which is why there should be no Federal funding for abortions, period. Everyone has a different definition of what is “elective.” We know all too well what happens when Washington has room to maneuver within the wording of the law.

Bart Stupak caved, and I agree with Tabitha that the term "pro-life Democrat" is an oxymoron.  The Democrats flat-out lied to get their agenda through, both (at least) in that this would be a a cost saver (whereas now they’re defending it in court as a tax increase) and what it would pay for.  This is big government.  It’s what it does.  The more power you give it, the more it’ll lie to you (and bribe you) to get more.

We’ve not seen the end of the surprises.

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I’ve been on vacation for about 10 days, so I have some catch-up to do here.  Here are some stories I noticed over the break.  Others will get their own post.

"Young Men’s Christian Association" to be renamed "Young".  This is ostensibly to remain more inclusive, but it’s not like folks have been staying away in droves or anything.  Just some more political correctness, removing even the hint of anything Christian in our culture, even if only ever referred to by its initial.

Handing out the Gospel of John is now "disturbing the peace" in Dearborn, Michigan.  Four kids from a group called Acts 17 Apologetics face jail time for handing out the text and talking to people at a Muslim festival.  The link on their name goes to their YouTube channel.  I’ve watched some of the videos, and I just don’t see "harassment" or "disturbing" going on.

Christian beliefs are now "unethical" when it comes to counseling, according to Augusta (GA) State University.  They want Jennifer Keeton to agree to a plan that includes "diversity sensitivity training" and changing her beliefs before they will allow her to graduate.  Read the article and, even if you disagree with her, tell me that this doesn’t sound like Soviet Russia.

The "JournoList" situation really blew up while I was out.  Oh, that liberal media.  Kenneth Anderson said it best, "To all you non-JournoLister reporters out there, please be aware that your credibility has just taken a big hit, because we, your faithful readers, don’t actually know who is or who isn’t.  You can thank JournoList for that, you can thank Ezra Klein, and you can thank the Washington Post, which has done its outstanding professionals absolutely no favors in any of this."

When even Democrats are poised to revolt over taxes (however temporary that might be), you know there’s a problem

And an appropriate cartoon from Chuck Asay:

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Turns out that the prisoners in Gitmo would rather stay in Gitmo than go home.

The Obama administration would quickly send home six Algerians held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but for one problem: The men don’t want to go. Given the choice between repatriation and incarceration, the men choose Gitmo, according to their lawyers.

He’s got what seems to be a good reason why.

The detainee had asserted that if he is returned, the Algerian government will torture him or he will be targeted by terrorist groups who will kill him if he refuses to join.

But i spite of the recent history of torture of prisoners in Algeria, the administration disagrees.

Administration officials point out that despite this history, the United States, under the Bush and Obama administrations, has already sent 10 Algerian detainees home from Guantanamo Bay, and that none has been persecuted.

"We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight," said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the active litigation. "The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture."

You know, if we really were torturing prisoners in Gitmo, this sort of request wouldn’t be such an issue.  Algeria doesn’t torture released Gitmo detainees, and they want to stay?  Understand, we’re not talking about some guys who just showed up.

The administration has been preparing to repatriate one of the six Algerians. But lawyers for Aziz Abdul Naji, 35, who has been held at Guantanamo for more than eight years, said he is "adamantly opposed to going back."

Adamant about staying at Gitmo.  Just let that sink in.

(Hat tip: Power Line)

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Not that we really needed a commission to tell us this, but Obama apparently did.

The co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt and deficit commission offered an ominous assessment of the nation’s fiscal future here Sunday, calling current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.

The two leaders — former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton — sought to build support for the work of the commission, whose recommendations due later this year are likely to spark a fierce debate in Congress.

They’re talking mostly about a future economic crisis, not even the current one.

Bowles said that unlike the current economic crisis, which was largely unforeseen before it hit in fall 2008, the coming fiscal calamity is staring the country in the face. "This one is as clear as a bell," he said. "This debt is like a cancer."

So where’s all the money going?

The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said.

Entitlement spending has become the federal government’s primary purpose these days, despite there not being anything in the Constitution specifying this role.  And because people feel, indeed, entitled to it, cutting always has been and always will be, extremely difficult if not politically impossible.

And remember, this is before ObamaCare. 

What’s their recommendation?

"We can’t grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

Bowles pointed to steps taken recently by the new coalition government in Britain, which also faces an acute budgetary problem, as a guide to what the commission might use in its recommendations. That would mean about three-quarters of the deficit reduction would be accomplished through spending cuts, and the remainder with additional revenue.

I remember what got George Bush (the first one) essentially fired from the Presidency.  He promised, "Read my lips; no new taxes."  He then proceeded to go along with Congressional Democrats who bargained with him to raise taxes with promises of spending cuts to come later.  The taxes went up, but the spending cuts never happened.  The public blamed Bush, but they were only half right.

Democrats now control Congress (for now).  Do you really think they’ll go for such spending cuts?  Their history over the decades suggests they’ll have nothing to do with them, and they’ll run us into the ground with debt.

If Republicans win big enough in November to change the balance of power, they had better start living up to their talk of fiscal conservatism.  But if they do, will the entitled public go along with it?

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They check immigration status at traffic stops.  This can only be referring to those racists in … Rhode Island.  Do you think we’re likely to see a lawsuit from the Justice Department there?  Yea, me neither.  In fact, it’s already been upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals when a private citizen sued.  Yet the government is going after Arizona for this.  Can’t have anything to do with who each state voted for in the last election, right?

"A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman."  I’ve read portions of the ruling, and I can actually see the judge’s point.  However, I think the 10th Amendment’s "equal protection" clause is being misused a bit to now refer to things like health benefits, which doesn’t really strike me as "protection" from a government’s viewpoint.  And Jack Balkin, a supporter of same-sex marriage incidentally, wonders (among other things) if liberals really want to go down this path with the 10th Amendment.  "As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power."

The "biggest revolution in the NHS [Britain’s National Health System] for 60 years" is … giving doctors responsibility for overseeing patient care!  Yes folks, it took 60 years of socialized medicine for them to realize that.  Do you want to lose those 60 years of common sense here?

Much of the media is saying that the report that was commissioned by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to investigate the ClimateGate document dump exonerated the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.  Except there’s the issue of the biggest thing critics have been harping on; the "hide the decline" suggestion that inconvenient data has been reworked to be consistent with the conclusion already drawn.  Buried in the report is this gem:

On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.

Terry Miller explains:

The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade—we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe—and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.

So the big issue that critics latched on to is, indeed, still a big issue.

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Four years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the schools there have made an impressive turnaround.  How this was done was with rebuilding the system with school choice and competition.  It’s working.

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Which country is not allowed to defend itself?

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It could happen.

Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body, three independent papers report in the July 2 Cell Stem Cell. The new technique will allow scientists to tap a large, readily available source of personalized stem cells.

Because taking blood is safe, fast and efficient compared to current stem cell harvesting methods, some of which include biopsies and pretreatments with drugs, researchers hope that blood-derived stem cells could one day be used to study and treat diseases — though major safety hurdles remain.

The findings “represent a huge and important progression in the field,” stem cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, Calif., writes in a commentary appearing in the same issue of the journal.

All this without the need to destroy embryos.  This just keep looking better and better for getting stem cells from adults rather than the more riskier and ethically challenged embryonic stem cells.

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Two weeks of links to catch up!

Closing Guantanamo; big priority during the campaign, not so much now.  (Well, especially since even Democrats don’t even want to do it.)

The Obama administration turned down using Dutch oil skimmers because they couldn’t meet our stringent government environmental regulations on how pure the decontaminated water was that they dumped back into the Gulf of Mexico, right on-sight of the spill.  Instead, we transport the oily water to facilities and decontaminate it there.  Huge efficiency drop during a major catastrophe because, ironically, of environmental regulations.  Read the whole article for more things we turned down that could have averted a lot of this problem.

Our own Treasury Secretary is ignorant of economic history.  Timothy Geithner said this at the latest G-20 summit:  “One of the mistakes made in the 1930s was that countries pulled back their recovery efforts too soon, prolonging the Great Depression.”  However, precisely the opposite happened.  Recovery efforts failed, lasted too long, and that’s what prolonged the Great Depression.  NewsBusters has the charts.

School vouchers improve graduation rates.  Now we have a government study to prove what common sense already told us.

Sharia Law in the UK:  Dogs barred from buses so as not to offend Muslims.

Democrats have decided that there will be no budget this year.  Hey, at least (this time) they’re being honest about it.  I guess they’ll just spend until it doesn’t feel good anymore.  Or until they’re voted out.  Whichever comes first.

In Venezuela’s socialist paradise, the government’s Food Ministry rounds up 120 tons of rice because it might be sold above regulated prices.  At the same time, 80,000 tons of food was found rotting in government warehouses.  Government efficiency at its finest.

Another example of bait-and-switch in the passage of ObamaCare.  Obama rejected the idea that the individual mandate was a tax increase, but in defending it from state lawsuits, the administration does classify it as a tax increase.  This way, the mandate falls under a law that forbids the states from interfering in tax collections.  In addition, “an early draft of an administration regulation estimates … a majority of workers—51 percent—will be in plans subject to new federal requirements….”

If your 11-year-old asks a particular Massachusetts school for a condom, they’ll get it, no questions asked.  Also, parents objections will not be taken into consideration.  Actually, there’s no real age limit on the policy; any kid can get one.  Only in Massachusetts.  For now.

And finally, all that hard work pays off, but not the way you thought it would.  (From Chuck Asay.  Click for a larger version.)

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Just had to point this out.  Since at least January, Glenn Reynolds has been noticing how often the term "unexpectedly" keeps showing up in news reports about the economy, either by the administration or by the reporters themselves.  Examples:

Jan. 8:  Employers unexpectedly cut jobs in December, even after the stimulus.

Feb. 4:  The number of newly laid-off workers filing initial claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week.

Mar. 31:  Private payrolls dropped unexpectedly fell in March.  (Though at some point, the word "unexpectedly" was excised later.  Perhaps they realized Glenn was on to them.)

Jun. 5:  The withdrawal of federal tax credits for home buyers led to a steeper-than-expected [aka unexpected] plunge in May home sales in much of the U.S., as the housing market struggles to wean itself from government support.

Jun. 11:  Sales at retailers unexpectedly fell in May.

The first few pages of this search will give you an idea of how often this comes up.

Y’know, after all this "unexpected" bad news after the stimulus, you’d think that they’d try something different.  Instead they want to do the exact same thing.  That’s government for you.

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