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Quick comment on taxes

26-Jan-12

Our country taxes all kinds of stuff at different rates.  We tax retail sales in Florida at a rate of 7 percent.  And in Florida, wages are not taxed at all.  We tax your home phone at a certain rate and your cell phone at a different rate.  Gasoline, propane, natural gas, diesel fuel, and jet fuel (JP-4) are all taxed at different rates, and sometimes the tax rate on the same product varies according to its use.  Diesel fuel for a farm tractor is taxed less than diesel fuel for a semi.

Long ago, the Constitution permitted taxation of property, sales, imports, exports, etc.  All these were taxed at different rates depending on how the politics all worked out.  But we didn’t allow direct taxation of people’s wages.  Then the Constitution was changed, and now we do allow direct taxation of income.

And no big surprise here, the rate of taxation on personal income is different from the rate of taxation on increases in the monetary value of a piece of property.

That’s what all the hoopla is about with Mr. Obama’s deceitful blather about taxing the billionaire at a different rate from his secretary.  The truth is — and if he doesn’t know this, he shouldn’t be president — we might not tax the billionaire at all if he has no personal income stream.  What we do tax is the increase in the value of his property.  And, yes, we long ago decided to tax increases in property value at a different rate from personal income.

What with all the bloviating about this, you’d think the president had recently discovered some long-hidden subterfuge in the tax code.  Fact is, all taxation of every form, sort, kind, and variety is like this.  Virtually no two taxes are the same, and politicians have long kept it this way.

If you want a truly flat tax, you’ll have to do it Moses’ way.  He had a flat, 10 percent tax on net production along with a flat user fee on people who came to the tabernacle or temple.  If the president were truly interested in what he calls “fairness” rather than just playing the demagogue for his ignorant voters, he’d be pushing a Moses-style flat tax.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Newtopia

23-Jan-12

Newt and Big Media

Say what you will about the substance of Gingrich’s campaign or his marriages and the circumstances under which they went kaput. But it was sure fun to see him yank down CNN’s pants (and ABC’s) over their attempted mugging with Marianne. And what Newt said about the “elite media protecting Obama” by attacking Republicans was right on the money. The leftist media have been shilling for Mr. Obama for the past five years, what with thrills up their legs, comments about him being “God,” and their fierce uncuriosity about his missing college and financial records, absence of Harvard Law Review articles, passport records, name changes, personal finances, terrorist connections, ghost-written books, his sojourn in Pakistan, ad nauseum. It’s heartening for a POTUS candidate point out the pattern in a tone that doesn’t sound like a whine.

But it’s not enough. Where the media have hounded Newt and Mitt about their tax record, business records, and past sins, the GOP’s nominee should echo those same demands concerning Mr. Obama and hammer on it till it gets some traction. At some point, even the rudderless middle-of-road voter will begin to wonder why GOP nominees have to bare it all while Mr. Obama steadfastly conceals it all. In a campaign where distrust of D.C. is already factoring heavily into the outcome, sowing some richly deserved distrust of D.C.’s wholly-owned elite media is sure to help matters.

GOP’s Ivy Leaguers be hatin’ on South Carolina

The great thing about Gingrich’s win in South Carolina is that it reminded the GOP’s northeastern clique that other parts of the country 1) vote, 2) matter, and 3) are in no mood to obey their betters.

Note to the Ivy League wing of the GOP: lots of people outside the Boston-D.C. corridor have somehow formed the impression that you’re a bunch of godless, amoral, unpatriotic, big-spending, media-attention-craving, bribe-taking, gutless RINO sellouts more eager to cut a deal with home-grown Marxists than to defeat them with courage and wisdom and the principles of of the Constitution.

Who can say where the rabble gets such ideas!

But perception being sorta-kinda like reality and all, you have to take these yokels into account. If they can vote a thumb in your eye, they’re in a mood to do it good and proper. Over the next couple of years, see what you can do about changing their impression of you. And with deeds, not spin. It’s almost like they’re catching on to the spin thing.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Slaughter of the innocents

23-Jan-12

We’ve just passed the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s low water mark for jurisprudence, Roe vs. Wade. As our preacher pointed out in church yesterday, America has now eliminated somewhere around 50 million unwanted kids. Numerically speaking, that’s the size of the Nazi Holocaust eight times over, a staggering amount of humanity that never drew a breath.

The wisest thing said about this by any of the GOP presidential candidates came from Ron Paul. Abortion arises from “the morals of the people,” and the law shifted to reflect those morals. When the morals of the people shift away from abortion, the laws will follow.

People’s morals don’t change in response to aggressive moralizing alone. Morals change when sinners come to know the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. When that happens, you don’t have to worry about their views on abortion. They’ll be against it. So let’s get about the business of spreading the Gospel.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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IBM’s possible EV battery

23-Jan-12

The electric car makers keep on dreaming, bless ‘em.  A forecast by Deloitte says they’ll sell a bazillion overpriced golf carts, soon, to “Generation Y” because (I am not making this up) digital dashboards could be user-customized, and Gen-Yers like smart phones in their cars.  Personally, I’m doubtful.  But digital dashboards can be put anywhere, not just in electric cars.  And as for the smart phone thing, to quote an anonymous Gen-Y source, “I go, like, really?  Android’s a fail in your mom’s minivan?  Dude!  I’m like, whoa.”

On the other hand, IBM says it’s working on a form of lithium-based based battery which could conceivably produce a car with a 500-plus mile range.  That’s great news, but only if…
- If the battery really has that much range
- If the range is predicated on real, practical driving and not special test conditions
- If the car itself isn’t an ultralight beer can on wheels
- If the battery technology can be scaled up to auto size
- If the battery can be mass produced at a price competitive with gas burners
- If the battery isn’t so bulky it makes the car ugly
- If recharge times can be got under ten minutes (or, alternatively, battery replacement time)
- If battery life-cycle costs don’t add significantly to the cost of driving the car
- If weather extremes don’t hurt battery performance
- If, given the odd chemistry of this battery, high altitudes don’t kill it
- If, also given the odd chemistry of this battery, air contamination doesn’t make the battery impractical
- If safety issues (such as post-crash fires) arising from high energy density can be managed

THEN Big Blue might just have a winner.  I sure hope so.  This would be the greatest thing for the electric power business since the invention of wire.

Word of warning: One reason power companies want EVs is so they can draw power FROM your battery while it’s parked in your garage.  This is like filling up your gas tank, then having Exxon siphon some gas back out while you’re asleep, and then three days later putting it back in.  That all works out provided you don’t need a full tank an hour after they siphoned out some gas.  If you sign up for a deal allowing your power company to do this, make sure you read the fine print and know what you’re getting into.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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ObamaCare and creeping tyranny

21-Jan-12

As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Christian organizations with health care insurance have one year to begin providing birth control for their participants… or else.  For Roman Catholics and a few other denominations, this is just flat-out unconscionable.  It’s long been a Roman Catholic doctrine that birth control is sinful.

The explanation provided by Kathleen Sebelius was that this order, “strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”  This, of course, is a flat-out lie.  There is no balance.  There is only a government mandate with groups opposing birth control being 100 percent losers in the contest.  The bottom line is that the church has said for centuries, “Artificial contraception is evil,” and now along comes Barack Obama and his bureaucratic Brown Shirts saying, “Here’s the compromise: Pay for it.”

Prediction: This is only the first of many assaults yet to come upon Christianity via the Orwellian phrase, “health care.”  ObamaCare will soon have us all paying for abortions.  If that makes it past public rebellion, abortions will someday become required for certain situations.

It was disappointing to hear the GOP presidential candidates discussing ObamaCare in their most recent debate.  They all talked of repeal but also said it would be difficult — as if difficulty were an excuse for failure.  Romney promised to issue waivers to all the states so they can opt out.  Fine, waivers, no problem, do ‘em on Day One.

But the contraception debate shows why repeal must be the only acceptable long term plan.  The way you succeed in repealing ObamaCare is by playing total hardball with Democrats just like they did when they rammed it through the Congress.

You prepare men for battle by reminding them that abortion is an act of violent bloodshed, and then you follow up by taking a no-compromise stance: The GOP controlled House of Representatives will allocate no money to any Democrat-controlled state for any purpose whatsoever until ObamaCare is repealed in toto.  Let the abortion-mongers howl.  Let them curse and swear.  Let them take to the airwaves calling conservatives every evil name.  But if the welfare checks stopped coming to their state, they would hoist the white flag.  Everyone knows this.  If the battle is worth fighting at all, and it is, then it is worth winning.  But as has been the case for all my years of observing American politics, the GOP simply lacks the courage to implement what it claims to believe in.

This is not a time in the history of the republic for weak knees and half measures.  Freedom is at stake.  Kathleen Sebelius has shown us what the future holds.  Wherever Christianity conflicts with ObamaCare, there will be an announcement of “compromise” followed by an order for the church to cave in totally.  The encroachments will not stop there.  They never do.

You have to ask why the Obama administration is doing this.  What do they have to gain?  Answer: They’re intent on making ObamaCare the signature historical achievement for this president.  As long as there are private institutions and companies that maintain their own health care plans, there will exist alternatives to the government plan, and those alternatives will always be superior.  How to eliminate the alternatives?  Impose conditions upon them that they can’t live with.  For religious institutions, you go after their religious convictions by making them pay for what conscience forbids.  For secular institutions, you go after their profitability by making them pay for things they cannot afford — such as children riding on their parents’ insurance until they’re middle aged.

The current administration is comprised of people who want a state-controlled economy, centrally planned, with themselves in the driver’s seat.  This cannot coexist with freedom.  The 2012 elections and the next two years will tell the tale on the American experiment and answer the question as to whether liberty can endure in a fallen world.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Marianne, Millard, and the Grinch

19-Jan-12

The uproar du jour over Marianne Gingrich’s spitting mad expose’ of Newt is fast becoming a case study in missing the point. Newt has all along admitted that he’s got personal baggage. He did some folly and now confesses he was wrong.  “God has forgiven me,” he says.

And yay for forgiveness.  But forgiveness isn’t the point, never was, and one suspects Gingrich, canny guy with a Ph.D., knows it.  Pleading forgiveness suggests something like, “If God has forgiven me, then who are you to…?”  And people who aren’t thinking tend to back down.

But the issue isn’t whether God forgave Newt nor whether you’ve got the bile to impose upon Newt more exacting standards than God Almighty.  There are actually two real issues.  On the practical level, can Newt and his baggage defeat Barack Obama in the general election?  Second, if Gingrich won the general election, does he have the judgment and character to be leader of the free world?

What matters, then, is whether Gingrich can see the real issue (he can), face it head on (likely), speak to it humbly and publicly (less certain), and then change course so a persistent character problem doesn’t keeping popping up everywhere else like peccadillo whack-a-mole.  Think of Bill Clinton whose character tainted nearly everything he did as president.  Clinton is a man of great energy, almost-great intellect, and possessed arguably the best knack for political gamesmanship in American history.

But it was all poisoned with ego and lust.  I see no evidence that he ever came to understand how personal integrity has any bearing on one’s fitness to rule.  Who needs a Republican clone of that?

__________________________________________

And there’s the media angle.  The Gingrich divorce is about 12 years old.  The public already knew about it.  In fact, the public already knew Gingrich marriage number two finished nasty with Newt in the starring role as a cad.  So there is quite literally no news here.  None. Zero, zip, zilch, nada.

And yet here is a first-string, three-letter media outlet, garments rent, prophesying woes about it.  Why are they doing this?  No, cancel that.  Why are they doing this now?  Next they’ll announce Saddam Hussein has been captured?

The unavoidable answer is that the lefty media wants Romney to be the GOP nominee using logic nauseatingly similar to that of conservatives.  That is, if we can’t have the guy we really want, then Romney is the next-least-worst thing we could live with. Conservatives want a president who knows the Constitution and is committed to upholding it.  But if they can’t have one, then they’re willing to hurl into airsick bags, then vote for Romney just to prevent another four years of Obama.  For their part, the news media are in their fifth year of arousal with a giant man-crush on Obama.  Because Obama is cool, and what more could anyone ask for in a president?  But just in case Obama gets defeated, they want the GOP nominee to be not a constitutional conservative.  That means they want a northeastern liberal on the Republican ticket, so Romney is the man.

This is good news and bad news for Mr. Romney.  It means he’ll likely be the GOP nominee, that is, if the leftist media can help him pull it off.  It’s bad news for Romney because he’ll be the most unwanted president since Millard Fillmore, and like Fillmore, he probably won’t get a second term.

__________________________________________

And finally there’s a pastoral angle to this.  Marianne Gingrich, she of scorn and fury, was Newt’s second wife.  Published reports say she began consorting with Newt when he was still married to his first wife.  Every father, and every pastor, should gently point this out to the kids they’re responsible for.  If you’re cheating with a cheater, don’t be surprised when the cheater cheats on you.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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A real money quote

19-Jan-12

I’ve often fumed about everyone in the power business picking natural gas over every other fuel source. The problem is that they’re all running to the same side of the boat. Now, gas is good stuff. It’s way cleaner than coal. Gas fired power plants are far easier to start and stop than either coal or nuclear plants. Plant construction is less than a quarter as much as a nuclear unit of comparable size. And, for now, gas is cheap.

But as Jay Apt of Carnegie-Mellon University was recently quoted as saying, “The surest route to $6 or $8 gas is for everybody to plan on $4 gas.”

What Apt means is this. If everybody thinks gas will remain cheap forever, they’ll build more and more gas plants. And each new power plant increases gas consumption a lot. We’re talking a million and a half horsepower for one big gas plant, and that’s large by any standard. Do this a few score tmes around the country, and suddenly you’re trying to burn more gas than the industry can physically supply. When that happens, prices soar.

And it wouldn’t be the first time the electric power industry has suffered through a boom and bust cycle with natural gas. Also, don’t count the greenies out. They may yet be able to make hydraulic fracturing illegal, and the price of gas would go right back up.

The power industry is in some respects similar to the financial industry. It’s better to be overly cautious than to risk poverty by betting all your money on one seemingly enticing investment. Diversity is the key to long term security. If American utilities become too reliant on natural gas for electric generation, then the specter of disruptions in gas supply become nightmarish.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Bat and breakfast

18-Jan-12

I knew a guy some years ago who, together with his wife, opened a bed and breakfast in a small southern town.  The B&B was located in century-old frame house three stories high.  The third floor was really just a huge attic.  The attic was home to a vast colony of bats.

He began trying to drive out the bats.  Not easy.  Going into the attic to confront them directly was not on the options list.  The bats were numberless, and it was just too creepy to get in there with them.  He thought about calling an exterminator, but the guys in the office counseled against it.  The exterminator was licensed, and the license might require the exterminator to report the bat colony to some tribe of environmental wackos.  If things went bad, he could end up stuck with the state’s most expensive bat colony while a court blocked all his actions.  Attracting the attention of feds at any level was judged too risky.

Eventually he found a guy in our company who knew something about bats.  “Watch them leave in the evening to see where they’re getting out,” he said.  “After they’re gone for the night, block up the hole they’re using for the exit.  You’ll have to do this a whole bunch of times.”  This he did.  Armed with sacks of steel wool, he started plugging holes.  The bats returned, fluttered all over the place, then entered by other holes.

The plugging went on for several weeks until the bat numbers started to go down.  As the bat entrances got plugged, some of the bats actually tried entering by the doors.  His wife would open the door in the morning, and a bat or two would flit madly in the kitchen while she screamed and swung at them with a tennis racket.  He learned it was not helpful to explain that bats won’t hurt you because then his wife would hurt you.

Once the bat count fell to a small number, he worked up his nerve to enter the attic and start catching individual bats.  He discovered that bats cannot take off from a level surface like a bird.  They require an elevated perch where they can jump off.  He’d chase the bats through the attic with a fish net and place them in a five-gallon bucket whence they could not escape.  After he got a bucket full of bats, he’d drive miles down the road and empty them out.  They’d climb a tree, hop off the side, and before long be back at his house.  I have no idea how bats navigate, but I know you can’t get rid of them by releasing them into the wild.  They will get home before you do.

The guys in the office expressed interest in the bat project.  One day he brought a bucket of bats to work.  With heavy gloves, he picked up a bat to show us, “See,” he said, “they have little dog faces.”  Unfortunately, his cubicle was located along the main hall of the building.  A company veep happened by that day and went into instant max freakout when he saw the bats.  He turned to the plant manager and said, as if my friend weren’t present, “Tell that man to get those things out of here.”

After several months’ effort the human won and the bats abandoned their colony, leaving “behind” several hundred pounds of guano.  Guano is bad. It is insects digested by rodents and left to rot, in this case, in a hot attic. Some was fresh, some aged to perfection.  He shoveled and scraped what he could.  He at first thought he could sell it to local gardeners or dry it and sell it on E-bay to hippies in California with organic farms.  It turns out that guano is less desirable than expected.  He eventually took to just throwing it out.  There was a lot of it.  I can’t remember how many five-gallon buckets of bat doo he threw out, but like I said, it was a lot.  The bats had been there for decades, hanging upside down and crapping in the attic.

After the mass of mess was gone, the remaining crust clinging to surfaces still had to be cleaned up somehow.  Chlorine bleach seemed like the natural choice for a massive disinfectant.  This brought about considerable discussion at work because guano is heavy on nitrogen compounds including ammonia, and one of the engineers remembered that if you mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, you will liberate chlorine gas. Given the amount of bat doo still up there, we figured it’d be enough to kill off the neighborhood. 

I don’t remember the cleanser he finally selected for the attic, but I know it wasn’t as effective as he’d have liked.  A mutual friend did some carpenter work on the B&B, and I asked him about it.  Upon recalling the work site his nose and upper lip went mobile and he said after a long pause, “There’s still a… a scent.”

No, the Bat and Breakfast was not a commercial success.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Limited government? How come?

17-Jan-12

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

Nimrod be hatin’ on the Apostles

The Republican primary elections are now officially underway, and it’s worth pointing out that the mainstream media are using it to drive their own agenda.  It runs like the silent news ticker beneath the talking head on Fox, and it demands the body politic be moved as far from Jesus Christ as it’s possible to get. The old political order was Judeo-Christian. The new one pointedly won’t be. They’re applying what pressure they can to turn America away from both Sinai and Calvary back to Babel.

And no, that sort of clamor isn’t new, as the quote from Psalm 2 shows. But Christians should remember that if they listen to ABCCBSMSNBCCNN, they’re hearing people who are, for the most part, contemptuous of Christ and the Christian heritage of the West. The news media are dominated, if you will, by those raging heathen.  Media personalities openly despise candidates such as Mr. Santorum (whom I do not support, by the way) whom they regard rightly or wrongly as principled Christians.

You can imagine that if media folks were challenged on this, they’d likely explain why they don’t like religion mixing with politics (causes wars, they’d affirm confidently).  They might even explain why Christians shouldn’t bring their religious views into politics.  What’s harder for them to explain, and in fact I suspect them of being in denial on this point, is why they harbor such a squinty-eyed loathing for people like Santorum, Palin, Bachmann, and others whom they perceive as Christians.  They want rid of Christian influence, and they want rid of the people who bring this influence.  Those who doubt this aren’t paying attention.

The simple explanation for their animus is that they believe it’s “us” Christians against “them” secularists.  They are not prepared to understand, nor would they believe if they did understand, that true Christianity is the fountain from which their right to dissent flows.  This is our well.  We aren’t about to poison it.

Inherent limits

In swinging an axe at the Christian roots of America, therefore, the Secular Man truly knows not what he does. Christianity is the only belief system with an inherent reason for limiting government.  Christianity sees government as instituted by God for a specific set of purposes that benefit man.  It is subject to God and therefore subject to his law.  When government rebels against God by transgressing his law or neglecting its just duties, it ceases to benefit man, forfeits its just authority, and becomes legitimately subject to overthrow.  In this way, Christianity naturally gives rise to the idea of a limited government, limited, that is, by God Almighty.

There is no such limitation built into the chief rival religion of the West, secularism. If the Secular Man gets his way, it’ll be his way, and nothing in the innards of that philosophy can frame the concept of pulling up short of a totalitarian state.

Limits from separation

Not only does Christianity provide a reason for limiting government, but its very concept of the ecclesiastical power being distinct from the civil power is a priceless Gospel bequest to the West.  Government by its very nature is organized force.  Resistance against its inevitable overreaches requires some other organized power.  The Gospel church is an obvious candidate for this check on state power, but not the only one.  Once it became clear that there could be organized opposition to state power, then people organized all kinds of ways to protect their own interests.  Mo’ power to ‘em, says I, but please remember: In America, this got started with the church, not the Freemasons or Kiwanis Club.

The Welfare drift

The country is so divided right now that it really doesn’t know which way to turn.  Lots people like the idea of freedom and enjoy chanting slogans in favor of it, but quite honestly the most potent political force in the country is the amassed greed of the slight majority of voters who are getting a check from the government.  That has become a sort of high speed continental drift in which the whole body politic traces out its moves on a stage that relentlessly moves left because of the tectonic power of giveaways multiplied by 150 million hands held out, palms up.

There are some people who understand that the welfare state cannot forever coexist with private property rights.  One or the other must prevail in the end, and for right now, the men with the guns are being controlled by the greed of the people who want free checks.  Without private property rights, there can be ultimately no other rights, and so there you are.

Chasing the train

Further, with Christianity being ever more banished from political discussion, the basic American idea of government being limited is also falling away.  People advocating for limited government must feel like a dog chasing a train; they’re running and barking and it’s receding from view. Fewer people question government power grabs any more, let alone challenge them, and the discussions of policies is almost invariably pragmatic rather than principled. Will warrantless wiretaps result in privacy violations? Will the president use recent legislation to essentially eradicate the right of habeas corpus?  Will it inflame Arab tensions if the president, minus Congress, commits U.S. fighting forces in Libya?  All pragmatic, weighing immediate results, none of it principled, weighing matters against the Word of God or even asking what sort of civilization we are building.

The probability is low that we will hold onto a nominally Christian concept of limited government.  In its place, the growth of the state.  The upcoming election is the most serious in my lifetime.  If the growth of the state cannot be checked here, then unlimited government is where we are headed, sooner or later.  Some political issues that matter much:
● repealing ObamaCare
● recapturing Congressional authority over the President’s war powers
● reasserting citizens’ rights under the Bill of Rights
● shoving back hard against the welfare state
● shoving back even harder against the regulatory establishment

If God graciously grants us a president (Christian or not) who comprehends why these issues matter to the founding principles of the country, we’ll know we have found another season of grace in his sight. And if not, then we’ll know we have only ourselves to blame for what may be about to follow.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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OMG! OMG! What if the fundies are right?

07-Jan-12

Fox News has published an article from Shari Johnson on the subject of homosexual marriage.  Johnson says she held Christian views on the subject and that her mind was pretty much closed until her 37-year old daughter phoned one night to say that she was a lesbian.  Johnson then mentions Mark Driscoll’s recent article (also from Fox), “What the Bible Really Says About Sex,” and wonders aloud “who decides” such things as God’s design for marriage.

The answer is in the title of Driscoll’s article.  He was explaining what the Bible itself actually says.  And while Driscoll is a highly controversial speaker because of his occasionally raunchy pulpit language, he got it right on this subject.  Johnson relates the fact that she called a Christian friend who was in a similar situation with a child and asked how she could reconcile the Scriptures with her own daughter’s homosexuality.  The reply began with two very honest words, “I can’t.”

Thanks, friend of Shari, for that unusually refreshing bit of honesty. True enough, the Scriptures cannot be squared with homosexuality.

Johnson concludes her article with this question, “Two years ago, after 39 years as a Christian who thought she knew the meaning of the scriptures and the mind of God, I asked myself a serious, life-changing question. What if I’m wrong?”

Okay, that’s not a bad question to ask.  Here’s one that also needs to be addressed squarely: What if the Christians are actually right about God’s opinion of homosexuality?

The answer to that question would put us back to studying the Bible and discovering some critical things:
1. God actually is against homosexuality. It’s a sin he’ll eventually judge.
2. But homosexuality, like any other sexual sin, is not the unpardonable sin.
3. God loves homosexual sinners just like he loves other sinners.
4. Because God loves them, he wants to liberate them from the shame, bondage, and degradation of sin.
5. God will save and forgive those who come to him through Christ.

The biggest problem for homosexuals in Our Time is the media-promoted movement to reclassify homosexuality as just another species of love. The basic argument has a veneer of plausibility because homosexuals are capable of being steadfast and committed to one another. But if it’s actually true that the Lord views homosexuality as a corruption of his created design (and he does), then being committed to that evil is no virtue. Besides, the logic of the argument fails. Mixing a virtue with a vice does not change the nature of the vice.

Any parent can sympathize with Ms. Johnson’s distress and disappointment with her daughter. She wanted the best for her kid, but her daughter grew up to be something she never wanted. Indeed, despite the relentless PeeCee promotion of homosexuality, I’ve never met a parent who wanted a child to become homosexual. Now that Johnson’s daughter is a middle-aged adult, it’s honestly getting a bit late to make big, life-correcting changes. But it’s better to face the truth as it is while beseeching God for his mercies than to hide our eyes from it and cherish false hopes that his mercies might not be needed after all.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Nuclear power still makes financial sense

04-Jan-12

A brief, back-of-envelope estimate of power costs from a new nuclear plant shows why utilities are still interested in building new nuclear capacity.  No, this isn’t a scientific analysis, just a rough estimate to show you it makes sense.

Suppose it costs $17 billion to build a new, two-unit nuclear power plant.  And let’s suppose the investors hit the sweet spot and cleared a 10 percent return on their investment.  That’d be $1.7 billion per year, or $850 million per year for each plant.

Now, how much would a plant have to charge for its electricity to make that investment back?

A 1000-MW plant could produce a theoretical maximum of:

(1E09 Watts) × (365.24 days/year)  × (24 hours/day) = 8.77E12 Watt-hours/year

So, $850M/yr  ÷ 8.77 W-H/yr = 9.7 cents/KWH

But a real plant can’t produce its theoretical max.  There’s a capacity factor that measures what a plant can reasonably be expected to put out.  For the U.S. nuclear industry last year, the nationwide average capacity factor was about 90 percent.  Figuring this into the price we get:

9.7  ÷ 0.9 = 10.8 cents/KWH

In addition to the capital investment, toss in operating and maintenance costs, decommissioning costs, nuclear fuel costs, etc.   The Nuclear Energy Institute says the industry average for these is roughly 2.5 cents/KWH.  Let’s round that way up and say we’d add a full 3 cents per KWH for the power you get from a nuclear plant.  That’d bring the price of electricity to about 13.8 cents/KWH.  Let’s round up again and say it’ll be 14 cents/KWH.

The Energy Information Administration says, “The average cost of electricity in the residential sector in October 2011 was 12.12 cents per kilowatthour.”

This means the price of new nuclear-powered electric plants will make your power bill go up, but not by all that much.  Not all the power you use would come from the new nuclear plants, so a slight amount of pricier electricity would be factored in.  The increase in your bill might be a dollar or two.

If the price goes up at all, you ask, why is nuclear power a good deal?  The answer is that older coal-fired plants are really cheap (the cheapest car to drive is the one that’s already paid for), but they’re being phased out rapidly for a variety of reasons, mostly old age but also because of aggressive new rule-making by the EPA.  New coal construction is not much cheaper than nuclear, and then you have to add in environmental costs and the far higher fuel expenses.  New gas generation is pretty cheap too, but America is growing much too dependent on gas-fired generation.  We need other sources in the power mix in case something goes wrong the gas fields.  As as with coal, gas-fired generation has very high fuel costs, and the plants don’t last nearly as long.

So no matter what we do, prices for electricity are going to rise.  If you install gas plants, prices will go up more in the long run.  The best chance for holding the line on price increases over the long haul is with nuclear power because fuel costs are less than a third of the operating cost, so even if they rise, they don’t affect the final price as much.  This plus the very long life span of the plants means the total capital outlay is reduced, and the combination keeps prices more stable.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Washington Visigoths hacking down the Constitution

03-Jan-12

The consent of the governed

The Framers of our Constitution traced the power of governors to the consent of the governed.  Being a Christian, I would have expressed that in slightly different terms.  The power to govern comes from God (Rom 13:1) and is inherently limited by divinely established, hence immutable, laws of justice.  Those subject to the government have a duty, also inherent, to monitor the actions of rulers and object when his immutable laws are violated.  So long as rulers generally act within the bounds of God’s laws, the governed are obliged to submit.

If rulers violate the law, citizens have a right and a duty to point out the error.  If grievances go unredressed, this begins to chip away at the citizens’ obligation to submit.  The Framers believed that a “long train of abuses” could eventually undercut entirely a government’s legitimacy.  If rulers habitually operate outside the bounds God established when he gave to them the authority to rule, then they forfeit their legitimate authority.  At some point, they become mere usurpers whereupon the citizens are duty bound to shift their allegiance to rulers who will obey the Lord.

The Declaration of Independence sets forth a mildly secularized version of this logic when it says the power to govern derives from the consent of the governed.  And instead of shifting allegiance to rulers who will obey the Lord, it says the citizens must “provide new guards for their future security.”

In a limited political sense, the end result is the same; that is, the government must operate within lawful bounds, else it ceases to be a legitimate government and must be replaced, even if it takes armed revolution to do it.

What the government may not do

Fast forward to the present.  Much damage has come from the Patriot Act which was signed into law by President Bush.  It was a decidedly sorry piece of legislation to start with.  Its warrantless wiretaps and other provisions trounce the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights which says,

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s crucial to read the words for what they actually say.  This is a statement of what the government may not do.  Furthermore, the exceptions to one’s personal privacy and security are spelled out in detail and include the protections we’ve come to expect: reasonableness of government action, probable cause, warrants supported by sworn statements, limits on what can be searched, and so on.  The Patriot Act authorized searches that are vast, electronic trawling expeditions.  Such searches are manifestly forbidden by the Constitution.

In like manner, the Constitution says the government can’t just nab people off the streets and hold them indefinitely.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

These protections are all limitations on government authority.  There are certain things the government may not do.  The Constitution was framed in part for the very purpose of limiting the power of the government over individual citizens.

Constitutional vivisection

By dint of the National Defense Authorization Act, the Obama administration now claims the right to imprison without accusation or trial Americans who are deemed a threat to national security.  Put this together with the Patriot Act and the nightmare comes into terrifying focus.  Something gets detected, say, from a phone text message intercepted by the National Security Agency, and the sender could be in real danger of vanishing without a trace.

Thus, the protective judicial wall between citizens and capricious enforcement action has been breached.  The president now claims the power to order individual Americans, perhaps identified by secret surveillance, arrested without warrant (and therefore without cause) and swept off the streets.

No American should tolerate the outrageous claim that such an authority is legitimate, just, or even necessary.  The actions proposed under this newest legislation are specifically named and banned by the Constitution. Freedom means nothing so long as the government asserts the power to impose Argentine-style disappearances on its domestic opponents.

Forgetting our history… now about to repeat it

The NDAA section 1021 is an open, flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.  The British government’s essentially kidnapping American colonists is one of the things that instigated the revolution of 1776.  Now we’re retrograde by 236 years, with the occupant of the White House claiming the power to “disappear” any person he deems to be a threat.  Think of it: No trial, witnesses, no lawyer, no cross examination, no facing your accusers, no habeas corpus, no bail, no nothing.  Just you, gone, and nobody around to ask questions or know what happened or where you went or why, and the government answerable to nobody for it.

In the thirteenth century,  England’s King John committed crimes such as these against his people.  He was so tyrannical that his nobles rose up against him and — with paramilitary force — compelled him to sign the Magna Carta guaranteeing the judicial rights we now take too much for granted.

“Article 38. No bailiff for the future shall, upon his own unsupported complaint, put anyone to his ‘law’, without credible witnesses brought for this purposes.  Article 39. No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Now these ancient and vital protections, won by blood against tyrannical usurpations for 800 years, are under direct, frontal assault by the Congress and this president.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Battery technology

01-Jan-12

When I was a kid, nobody wanted a battery-powered toy.  Carbon-zinc cells were all you could buy.  They were so weak that photons from a flashlight would ooze out of the filament and drip onto the floor like goo.

Batteries are way better now.  Rechargeable lithium-ion cells can power your cell phone for many hours.  Alkaline cells used in toys and flashlights have somewhere between four and five times the energy capacity as the old carbon-zinc batteries.  The little “button” cells use, for example, in musical greeting cards, are similarly potent.

That’s not all to the good.  Americans have developed the habit of giving other people’s children sonically active devices containing these improved energy sources.  We’ve been the recipients of some of this.  The devices seemingly never die.  It’s a full week after Christmas, and we haven’t replaced the first battery.  So, attaboy, Rayovac.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Maybe the Blokes are coming around… ahead of us

31-Dec-11

British Prime Minister’s office has a website where, like our own president, they publish speeches, policies, and what not.  It makes an interesting read.  PM David Cameron recently spoke at Oxford’s Christ Church on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the completion of the 1611 King James Bible.  You can read the full text of his speech here.  I just wanted to relay to you one of his key statements about Great Britain: We are a Christian nation, and we should not be afraid to say so.

It’s true, Cameron curtsied in the general direction of multi-culti pride in all the various religions that infest Britain.  Our politicians do the same thing over here.  Still, he conjoined two words which set Western liberals moonbat crazy, “Christian” and “nation.”

Wouldn’t it be great if Cameron’s little nick in liberalism worked like a crack in Scrat’s iceberg and split the whole civilization into pieces with continents drifting and oceans sloshing?  True, the British expression of the faith has not always been warm and cuddly.  In fact, the man most responsible for the 1611 King James Bible was William Tyndale, and Tyndale was hounded out of England into Germany where he was eventually murdered for the crime of translating the Bible into English.

But Christianity eventually prevailed — along with reason — and Britain became a great Christianizing force throughout the world.  No, that’s not to approve of everything the British did in all of their colonies.  But on the whole, the world was better off because Britain civilized so much of it, and the civilizing came about because of Britain’s people generally knew the Bible and submitted to it.  As Cameron quoting Thatcher said, “we are a nation whose ideals are founded on the Bible.”  Indeed, and that’s what put the Great in front of Britain.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Quicksilver in the coal

28-Dec-11

The Edison Electric Institute has stated that the EPA’s new rule on mercury emissions from power plants is the most expensive in the agency’s history.  Nobody’s in favor of releasing mercury into the environment.  The regulatory approach and schedule for getting rid of it are what it at issue. 

The power industry can certainly find technology to get rid of mercury.  The question the public should be asking is whether power customers can pay the price. 

The most likely outcome of the new emissions rule is that scores of coal-fired power plants will be prematurely shut down and replaced with power plants that burn natural gas.  This shows why the EPA’s estimate of the cost of complying with the rule is absurdly low at $10 billion per year. 

Even if old plants are modified, retrofitting them with mercury removal processes and equipment can cost upwards of $500 million per plant, and scrubbers can consume millions of gallons of fresh water per day.  Also, utilities do not want to trap mercury and then have to find an EPA-approved way to dispose of it — only to have the EPA later change the rules on disposal, creating future costs which cannot be predicted.

Even though the price of natural gas is falling, power produced from it is still more expensive than what’s generated from coal.  Power prices will go up; it’s just not yet known by how much.  And as we’ve noted many times at AVFTA, the contention that wind and solar can replace coal is sheer fantasy.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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