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Conservative monster under the GOP bed

09-Mar-10

The voice of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is daytime talk radio where people like Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, Boortz, and others do their thing.  Here’s what I’m hearing lately: The GOP is dry-mouth scared that conservatives are going to abandon them this fall.  The fear is real and not at all unfounded.

The GOP has repeatedly sold out the Constitution in favor of compromise with the Democrats.  Most recently this was true of the TARP program, but it continues to be true of a wide variety of smaller but equally absurd spending programs.  What do Constitutional conservatives expect?  Speaking only for myself, I expect members of the House of Representatives to use the power of the purse to shrink back government to its Constitutional size.  For example, the government should never, ever write another check to National Public Radio, Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and a host of other enemies of America.  There is no Constitutional warrant for these expenditures.  Show me some stuff, HR members — and this isn’t difficult — just don’t write that check.

Constitutional conservatives want to pare back government’s regulatory overreach.  For example, John McCain (RINO – AZ) has introduced legislation to empower the FDA to start regulating vitamin supplements.  Baneful FDA influence explains why American-made pharmaceuticals that cost $2 in Communist China are $150 over here.  Now they want to do that for people who take vitamins?  Constitutional conservatives should be telling Mr. McCain, not just no but… with added emphasis no.

Slow-motion Euro-socialism oozing out of GOP leadership is why Constitutional conservatives have been flocking to the upstart Tea Party movement and are poised to abandon the GOP in droves.  The fear of that is having a good effect on the GOP.  Senate Republicans have fought ObamaCare® better than I’ve ever seen them fight anything.  That’s good, and I’m grateful for it.  But the history of the GOP leads me to believe the reformation will be short-lived.  That opinion is fairly widespread, I think, and that’s why Constitutional conservatives are like a big monster under the GOP bed.  If they dangle a finger or toe over the edge of the bed, the monster will drag them under.

Message to the GOP:  If you want ex-GOP members like me to vote your way in November, opposing ObamaCare® is a good start, but nowhere near enough.  Show me some evidence you’ve read the Constitution, understood it, and are committed to it this time.  Because I’m not interested in a temporary recess in galloping socialism.  I want to vote for people who will roll it back or die trying.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Hiring giants

08-Mar-10

The Hebrews of 1100 B.C. were as honest as anyone has ever been about what they wanted from their government.  They applied to Samuel the judge and prophet and said, “Make us a king so we can be like the other nations around us, and he can judge us and fight our battles for us.”  (1 Sam 8:19-20)  They didn’t like being different from the heathen.  They wanted a judge and a warrior.  God gave them Saul, the prototypical earthly king: Tall and good looking but who proved in the end to be gutless and jealous.

Saul’s best qualification for office was that he was tall.  The old joke about promoting the tall one applied to him, and the Israelites were delighted with their new ruler when he was presented to the public.  (1 Sam 10:24)  They wanted a warrior-king, and what could be better than a very tall warrior-king?

The problem, as Qui-Gon Jinn noted, is that there’s always a bigger fish.  Saul had not long reigned when the Philistines appeared on the field of battle with Goliath as their champion who challenged anyone in Israel to an ordeal of single combat.  Whoever defeated him would win on behalf of the whole army, and the losers would be their servants.  Saul, tall as ever but now not tall enough, sulked in his tent.  The man who would have judged Israel was himself judged a coward.  The man who would have protected the nation could not even protect himself, but offered his daughter as payment to whomever defeated Goliath.  The warrior chosen to fight their battles for them was not up to the task but waited on a boy named David to fight Saul’s battle for him.

The Hebrews applied the wrong standard when looking for leadership, and God let them have what they wanted as a chastisement.  Those two facts should warn Americans in general and conservatives in particular.  Another tawdry election season is upon us.  Don’t you wonder what would happen if we chose on the basis of righteous character?  (Prov 29:2)  God gave us our nationhood and our liberties; he can take them away.  After all the political disappointments conservatives have suffered in the past few years, you’d think they’d have learned by now that the arm of flesh will fail you.  (Jer 17:5)

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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The two big issues in the warming debate

07-Mar-10

The big issue of unreliable data

There are four basic positions on global warming.

1.  The earth is warming and man is causing it.   2.  The earth is warming as a result of natural forces.  3.  The earth is not warming.   4.  We can’t tell.

 Most likely winner in the reality contest: Option Four.  A review of the relevant data sources produces a mixed result.  The most direct measurements of warming are, of course, surface weather station temperatures.  As Anthony Watts as shown, the quality of the data set is quite poor, plagued by numerous problems in how weather stations are sited.  Some stations are trending up, others down, still others flat.  As many bloggers on this subject have pointed out, there are very few weather stations above 45 degrees of latitude even though stations near the poles are crucial for analyzing one of the warmists’ most public claims, namely, that the north and south poles are melting.  Bottom line on weather stations: There aren’t enough of them, and the shortage is most severe in the most crucial areas, some are trending all over the map, and the ones that are trending warmer tend to be in sites that make their results suspect.

 Similarly, measurements of ocean temperatures are based on a floating network of buoys so widely scattered that patches of ocean the size of the state of Georgia may be represented by a single thermometer.  And is anybody calibrating these things regularly to see if the instrument cal drift is bringing in a systematic error?  (Answer: no.)

Finally, the data set is subject to some unpublished degree of instrument uncertainty.  As I mentioned here, I have a modicum of real-world experience with industrial temperature measurement which has made me intensely suspicious of claims that global temperatures have changed by so many hundredths of a degree.  Such claims embody an assumption of accuracy which most temperature measurement devices do not possess.

There are other sources of information such as satellite infrared measurements of the earth’s surface.  Again, with my industrial experience in infrared measurement, I simply do not believe the warmists know what they claim to know.  Not to strip your brain gears with technical jargon, but measuring the surface temperature of the earth requires correctly characterizing the emissivity of the Earth’s myriad surface features as well as the ever-changing value of the transmissivity of the atmosphere.  The peer review process of science desperately needs to be applied here to convince the public that this is been done, and done right.  Reason: The public is being asked to crash the economy and surrender its civil liberties in order to save the planet.  In view of the staggering cost of what warmists are demanding, it’s not being picayune and nettlesome to ask them to prove it using data and methods that are completely reliable and completely open to all members of the public.

 The issue of leftists grabbing for power

The lesson of ClimateGate is precisely this: There is a creepy nexus between leftists’ totalitarian political goals and warmists’ data scandals.

Related, there is an equally creepy sense of on the part of the principals involved in ClimateGate that, as scientists, their motives and methods ought not be challenged.  This is bizarre.  If warmists’ suggestions for a remedy reflected something other than a giant grab for power and money, their sense of injury at being questioned might look like something other than a cover-up masquerading as a personal affront.  What seems to be escaping the whole warmist camp is that nobody in the public has any personal grudge against any of them.  But the solutions being proposed for this problem exhaust all the English superlatives for extreme totalitarianism.  The one entity common to absolutely every aspect of modern living is energy.  And energy is what they want to control.  From the gas pump to the electric power plant, from the massive factory machine right down to your cell phone charger, they want control over every last power-using doodad on the face of the planet.

I’m not willing to discuss that unless and until it’s proven that there is no other way to save the human race.  Come to think of it, maybe not even then.  I know it’s old-fashioned, but “better dead than Red” still works for me.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Be like that

05-Mar-10

The psalmist’s descriptions of the righteous man are mostly descriptions of Christ.  They’re intended to inspire worship by stating the standard and leaving it to the wise reader to realize that only one Man has ever satisfied the standard.  Here’s one of the short ones, Psalm 15:

O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent?   Who shall dwell on your holy hill?  He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart; who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend; in whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honors those who fear the LORD; who swears to his own hurt and does not change; who does not put out his money at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent.  He who does these things shall never be moved.

Every single phrase of the psalm points to the Lamb.  He is blameless.  He does do what is right.  Satan is the slanderer, but not the Lamb.  And if you’re a friend of Jesus, and even if Satan slanders you, the Lord will not pay any attention to it.  Even the wicked prophet Balaam had to confess that the Lord refuses to see iniquity in Jacob.

The Lord swore to his own hurt and changed not.  Titus 1:2 speaks of a promise made before the foundation of the world, a promise for our salvation.  The Lord has kept his word, even though the price was “to his hurt,” yet he has changed not. 

Be like that.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Why do we need energy standards?

04-Mar-10

If you watch energy news for any length of time, you’ll see members of Congress proposing new energy standards for this or that appliance.  Why are they doing this?  Simple: Because the efficiencies won’t pay for themselves on energy savings.  The only way to get a sale for a product that is more expensive but not much better is to have the government compel people to buy it.

For instance, Dollar Tree sells cheap 100-watt light bulbs for $1 per four-pack, or 25 cents a bulb. (If you’re going to Wal-Mart, you’re paying way too much.)  The bulb will last around 800 hours and will consume between $8 and $10 worth of electricity depending on your local power prices.  Total cost for 800 hours of bright light is $8.25. Suppose somebody made a bulb for a dollar that gave the same amount of light, lasted 7,000 hours, and burned only $2 worth of electricity.  Would the government have to order you to use this bulb?  Or wouldn’t you have sense enough to buy them yourself?

When you see this or that member of Congress proposing new energy standards for electrical devices, you should ask who is benefitting.  It is all but certain not to be you.  I’m not an anarchist and not really even a libertarian, but the government would be wise to leave free people alone to make economic decisions for themselves.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Painting idylls at the landfill

02-Mar-10

Business buzzword

Business managers for a long time have been overusing the word “excellence” in an attempt to get their employees to think in terms of doing their best.  Ford Motor Company tried this a few years back with their “Quality is Job One” slogan.  Zenith, the TeeVee manufacturer, used to advertise that the quality goes in before the name goes on.  These efforts were as much for internal consumption by the workers as for advertising value to the customers.  It was supposed to create in the workers a habit of mind that accepted nothing less than the best, and in the customers it was to create an expectation of products that do what they’re designed to do, don’t break down, and are worth the added expense to get something better.

There have been some notable successes along this track.  The Japanese economy of the 1970s and 1980s was built by people who made products that were way better than comparable American goods.  Sony led the way with stereo and hi-fi equipment that was the best, period.  If you buy a Honda car, you expect, and virtually always get, a well made, long lasting, trouble free car. 

There are some companies still doing this in America.  If you’re into hunting, Leupold rifle scopes and binoculars are the best you can buy.  You can pay way more and get German made Zeiss or Swarovski optics, but you’re just buying overpriced German workers and marketing snootiness.  Nobody makes a better riflescope than Leupold no matter how much they charge.  They make and sell excellence, right here in the USA.

Counterculture grunge

There is an equally large counterculture out there which is deliberately running the opposite way.  This accounts for the fad in tattoos, the weirdball connection between motorcycles and obesity, gangsta culture with its pants on the ground and hat on sideways, the resurgence of the hippie look with men sporting pony tails and leprous women who shun bathing.  For every secular man who is trying to get rich by producing the best widget, there is another secular man giving the finger to the establishment by looking like a derelict. 

If you want to see just how ridiculous this whole thing can get, check out the movie stars who are patchwork composites of every social trend.  The men carefully muss their hair to look like schizophrenic people yet wear sunglasses that cost $1000.  The women deface their bodies with tattoos and then spend a fortune on dental veneers.

Wave catchers

One of the central features of modern evangelicalism is this matter of trying to “catch the wave,” sociologically speaking.  They spend a great deal of effort trying to identify the next big thing so they can run out in front of it trying to fake leadership.  The idea is to look hip so the Secular Man will be naturally attracted to the church.  Once he’s in there, we whip the Gospel on him and, gotcha, so to speak.

The problem with this approach is that the world system is not a monolithic bloc all marching in lock step like so many storm troopers in a Nazi parade.  Two of its big divisions I’ve described here, the Establishment and the Antis, are opposed to one another.  Whatever the next big thing is among the Establishment will be the object of contempt by the Antis.  So which trajectory should we try to hurl ourselves in front of?  The real world is infinitely more complicated, divvied up by every sort of thing that makes humans what they are.  There is not one “wave” for the church to get hold of.  To think this way is to misunderstand both the world and the Gospel.  And if you think about that for a minute, you realize we’re talking about being as dumb as it’s possible to get, being stupid in both kingdoms.

Wiser children

Jesus said the children of this world are wiser in some respects than the children of light.  At least some units of the Secular Man’s kingdom are committed to doing their very best.  In whatever field of interest it may be, they have cultivated an interest in being the best.  You have to respect that, I think.  It wasn’t the kingdom of God that built the Hubble telescope.  Whatever you think of the expense of such projects, those guys did a good job.

I’m thinking here in terms of comparison of how we do things corporately in worship.  Try this: Go to a church that is considered successful and try to summarize your observations.  In most cases, you’ll see people getting as far away from excellence as they can.  In the manners of the people, in the music, in the dress, in the preaching, in the whole enterprise, there seems to be a deliberate embrace of whatever is low, base, common.  What seems to have happened in the uber-casual churches is that people have picked out one tiny aspect of secular culture, which is the anti-establishment crowd of grungy people going around looking their worst, and they’ve figure it’s got to be the Next Big Thing.  So, what to do?  Catch that wave, brutha!  And that is why church after church is, as Spurgeon might have said, getting on the down grade.

Music

Nowhere is crud culture more evident than in the world of music where being countercultural is, in its own paradoxical way, a form of the establishment.  Secular musicians adopt a look which might best be called chic-n-scrounge, studiously neglect either to shave or grow a beard, embrace uniformly leftist views on just about everything, dress in sport coats over tee-shirts, wear flip-flops with their dress slacks….  You know the shtick.

And now the church has embraced that and made it the new standard.  It’s not simply that the new music is bad, which it mostly is.  By glomming onto a culture of cruddy clothes with three-day beards and brainless, tuneless music, the musical leadership in our churches as bought into the whole countercultural approach to life and advertised it to the world.  Instead of lifting up Christ, the predominant message to the world is more like hippies-R-us.  That’s not good, because we’re teaching people to serve Christ by deliberately offering him their worst instead of their best.

Music is a central part of worship.  God gave us the ability to sing and make joyful sounds because it better expresses the deepest things of the human soul.  What would David have been without the psalms he wrote and sang?  Isaac Watts was a good poet, but set his lyrics to a suitable melody, and you have hymns that will continue to be sung for all time.  But what will be said of this generation except that they sought to associate themselves with the slouchiest subset of a decaying civilization?  Crudely banging around on amped up electronics with slapdash lyrics and two or three phrases sung over and over and over and over…   Saints of God, call me a music prig if it makes you feel better, but this trend is not going to strengthen the work of the Kingdom of God in America. 

Music and worship leaders, you need to get over this infatuation with sleaze and get back to the real business of using music to exalt Christ.  Christians need to leave the worship service feeling as if they’ve been to the mount of transfiguration.  Aping the manners and forms of the worst icons of American culture is no way to serve the King.  You can’t paint idylls while looking at the landfill.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Superb summary of ClimateGate

01-Mar-10

The British Telegraph has the best-yet summary of ClimateGate’s intrigues.  The errors outed since ClimateGate began

tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

And yet each of these iconic issues has been publicly shown to be a fraud, and the two men who have been central proponents of the fraud, Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, have handled gigantic amounts of cash coming their way because of it.  The phrase “something’s rotten in Denmark” was never more apt than at the recent climate summit in Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, climate legislation based on this fraud keeps threatening the economies of America and the world.  This is no time to back off.  Take a few minutes this week to call your congressman and senators and remind them: there is no climate or energy legislation based on the warmist hoax that will be acceptable to the voters.  So kill the Waxman-Markey bill; kill it now, and dispose of the cadaver.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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When people mute the preacher

28-Feb-10

Dull preaching

The Bible says a pastor must be “apt to teach.”  That means the pastor should have some degree of talent for study and explanation.  The purpose behind the requirement is make sure the ministry of the word doesn’t get dumbed down or become so dull that nobody can sit through it.  The usual TeeVee stereotype of church is a bunch of people yawning through a tedious lecture on who begat whom.  There’s more than a little truth in the stereotype.

Why people hit the mute button

To speak a word in defense of my preacher brethren, sometimes people tune out the preacher because they have attention spans measured in seconds.  There are, in fact, idiots.  And some of them go to church.  And they manifest their idiocy by projecting it on the preacher.  I don’t know what could help these poor souls.  Other times people pay no attention because they are heathen and have no respect for holy things.  Sometimes a person is distracted by a pressing life issue like a pending divorce, comes to church hoping for a revelation about it, but the preacher was on a different subject that day.

Sometimes they mute the preacher and it’s his fault

People mentally mute the preacher when he’s serving up mouldered hash extracted from his leftover seminary files.  No need to tell people if you weren’t prepared, brother.  It’s obvious.

Sometimes the problem is that the preacher got stuck on alliterating all the points in his sermon and let the logic go haywire while trying to make the letters fit.  Instead of letting the Bible speak through him, the preacher produces piffle, preferring  pronunciations to principles and prompting parishioners to prance.  Actually, “prance” looks stupid here and doesn’t make sense, but the MS-Word thesaurus has no single word for “ignore you” that begins with a ‘p’ so I had to use “prance.”  Get the picture now?  Sainted brethren, I beseech you to devoutly lose the alliteration.

Sometimes preachers are dull because they don’t know what they’re talking about and haven’t bothered to study.  Sometimes they are dull because they have no sense of organization and just prattle at random till their time’s up.  Sometimes a preacher is dull because he has led a dull life and has no interesting stories to illustrate his point. 

And then sometimes the preacher has too much of himself in the sermon.  If he’s a macho guy and all his references are to his life of head-cracking combat in the octagon, the ladies are likely to tune out.  Conversely, if he’s a flowery little sissy dressed in cufflinks and all full of poetry and lace, the men will find it impossible not to be scornful.  The lesson here is that Christ must increase and we must decrease.  In the end, if they go home with a hunk of truth but don’t even remember the preacher’s name, chances are the preacher did a really fine job, and that’s no lie.

Terminal diseases

Sometimes a preacher is dull because he has no talent for communication.  Sometimes it’s because he is no longer interested in his subject.  In cases like these, the best remedy is a career change.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Tritium

25-Feb-10

The nuclear industry can be its own worst enemy at times.  Several plants around the country have detected leakage of tritium into the ground on the plant sites.  Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen.  Tritium leakage is particularly problematic because the tritium is usually a constituent of water and is chemically identical to ordinary water so it cannot be filtered out or cleaned up.  I should be clear that, thus far, no hazardous concentration of tritium has ever gotten off the plant site of a U.S. commercial nuclear power plant.  The findings come from test wells that are drilled on site for the purpose of finding leaks.  Well, some plants have found them, which is bad, and that’s giving the anti-nuclear folks something legitimate to complain about.  It doesn’t help matters that some of the people speaking on behalf of one particular utility have given less-than-fully-straight answers to questions about it.

The state of Vermont appears to be reacting to that severely.  The Vermont Yankee plant has tritium leaks found in test wells.  The tritium levels are not trivial, and there is concern that groundwater movement could bring the contaminated water into the Connecticut River.  Their legislature is working to block a needed extension of the operating license for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant currently owned and operated by Entergy Corp.   That decision will hurt Vermont because, as the Wiki article says, the plant provides more than a third of the state’s power.  But I’m guessing the decision won’t be reversed.  Vermont is a northeastern state where environmental extremists are politically very potent.  It’s too bad the utility industry hasn’t done a better job of educating people about where electricity comes from because I’ve got a hunch that the vote in the Vermont legislature stems partly from people honestly thinking they can power the U.S. economy with windmills and green gadgets.  Who needs a leaky old nuke when we’ve got this nifty solar panel?

The ill tidings from the Vermont Yankee plant should serve as a stark warning to the U.S. nuclear industry which is trying to come out of a decades-long period of dormancy.  There are plants all over the country with buried piping that is getting old.  It’s an issue industry management knows about.  The utilities can argue — and it will be true — that the vast majority of this piping was properly coated at the time of its burial and that excavation backfills used materials that will preserve the coatings.  But that won’t answer the real concern that on occasion, perforations called “holidays” do occur in buried piping, and if the pipes have any radioactive materials in them, the stuff is going to seep out.  If the radioactive material happens to be tritium, there is only one way to stop it: Dig up the piping and all the contaminated dirt and dispose of it as radwaste. 

An excavation project like this would inflict severe financial hardship on the tiny number of U.S. nukes with tritium issues.  But if I could speak to all the stockholders of publicly traded utilities, I’d ask a simple question: What is the alternative?  And if I could offer a word of advice to companies such as the Southern Company who are about to build new nukes, it’d be this one: Do not ever bury any pipes on your plant site.  Run them in shielded pipe chases above ground.  If you can’t afford that kind of construction, you should question whether you really want to be in the nuclear business.

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Diversity? Diversity of what?

21-Feb-10

The Ivy-league stranglehold on American government is more a serious problem than we might imagine.  Here are the educational backgrounds of our Supreme Court members:

Roberts — Harvard
Scalia — Georgetown and Harvard
Kennedy — Harvard
Thomas — Yale
Ginsburg — Cornell and Harvard
Breyer — Harvard
Sotomayor — Princeton
Alito — Princeton and Yale
Stevens — U. of Chicago and Northwestern, the sole non-Ivy League guy on the SCOTUS

Can it be that there is not one person educated in the West or the South who is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?  There is no decent and accredited university in the world that would tolerate such a high degree of intellectual in-breeding in its faculty.  Why is it okay for the Supreme Court?

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Driving nails with a banana

20-Feb-10

Tiger Woods’ apology included an angry denunciation of the news media.  They certainly have that coming for a host of reasons, but the nasty, gossipy inquisitiveness of the news media is just a fact of life for people who devote their lives to riches and fame.  If you choose fame as your path of life and achieve it, this is a consequence you cannot decline.  Like the old Cheech and Chong gag, you pick what’s behind door number three, and if it turns out to be a spinal tap, well, that’s what you get.  Nobody approves of media scumbags stalking his kids, but the only way to shield them is by doing nothing to attract the attention of scumbags.  And scumbags love sin, so there you go.

Woods indicated he intends to put some retread tires on his Buddhism.  Rotsa ruck with that one, sez I.  Buddhism teaches “restraint,” quoth Tiger, only sorta-kinda correctly.  To whatever extent it does so, a religion without a god cannot point to any particular reason why people should restrain anything.  In fact, the case could be made that all Tiger’s unhappiness has resulted not from his actions but from all the prudes and prigs out there acting out their hang-ups.  Given his Buddhist assumptions about morality, what would be wrong with claiming that?

Buddhism does teach that neutralizing desire is one of the things people should do, but the philosophy is self-defeating.  Why should I desire to defeat desire?  Or to put things even more absurdly, what if the first desire I defeat is the desire to defeat desire?  That would leave me stuck just like I was before.  As a tool for dealing with sin, Buddhism is not up to the task.  It’s like driving nails with a banana, and hitting it harder as Woods has promised to do really doesn’t help.

Taken together, the Tiger Woods business shows three basic Christian truths.  First, the law of God is absolute.  Woods’ actions were wrong, not just because they resulted in a few kilobytes of unhappiness out there in the cosmos, but because fornication is sinful and it brings men into a state of guilt.  Second, along with all of us sinners out there, Woods is made in the image of God and therefore cannot escape the voice of a God-made conscience accusing him.

Third, the dismal and hopeless tub of hogwash called Buddhism just shows why man needs not a philosophy but a Savior, Jesus Christ the Righteous.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Leaning upon the spear

18-Feb-10

The strictures of PeeCee have already slain a number of soldiers at Fort Hood.  Everyone knew Major Hasan was a threat, but nobody could say it aloud, and nobody could act on the obvious.  He was part of protected class and thus couldn’t be resisted until he acted.  Once he acted, of course, it was too late.

The diaper bomber was likewise a Moslem, likewise a mortal threat to his fellow man, but likewise a member of a protected class, and likewise protected by PeeCee codes from suspicion.

In the midst of pondering how long this can keep up, we read of yet another plot by Moslems to murder Americans.  The story is still emerging, but published reports indicate a conspiracy of Moslems to poison the food in a military chow hall at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

It’s not yet known for sure if this particular report is true, but odd as it may seem to people accustomed to proving everything in court, it’s irrelevant.  Fact is, the preponderance of terror attacks on Americans for the past few years have been perpetrated by Moslems.  Our leaders need to set aside the pretense that they haven’t noticed who’s been doing this.  To do less, as King James might have said, is to lean upon the spear.  I don’t know who first said democracy isn’t a suicide pact, but there’s never been a better time to remind everyone of this.  We can’t wait on each of 1.5 billion Moslems to act before categorizing them as posing a greater threat than the Presbyterians.

Why anyone would let a Moslem into the U.S. military became inexplicable on 9/11/01.  As of 11/5/09 (the date of Hasan’s killing spree), it began to look like a group cowardice on the part of a military command structure unwilling to name the threat and resist it.  What could we possibly say about it if this latest report turns out to be true?  It’s the sad duty of generals to send men into war, to die if necessary, for the sake of the country.  It is also the duty of generals to send themselves into a moral confrontation, and into career oblivion if necessary, for the sake of their men.  Like Kenny Rogers said, sometimes you’ve got to fight when you’re a man.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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What happens when you don’t pay attention in civics class

16-Feb-10

Oregonlive.com has an interesting take on the recent SCOTUS decision to overturn most of the McCain-Feingold act, which is the act that sought to outlaw free speech in politics.  One effect of the SCOTUS decision is to allow corporations to get back in the game of donating money to politicians… like they haven’t been doing that through various means anyhow.

Guest writers Nancy Price and David Delk say that the solution to this problem is to “strip” corporations of their “personhood” so that free speech laws won’t apply to them.  This is what happens when you don’t pay attention in civics class.  The first amendment says nothing about granting any particular rights to persons, corporations, gila monsters, or any other being in the cosmos.  The first amendment is actually a limitation on what laws the Congress may pass.  The actual text of the amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This amendment just names several areas of subject matter and says Congress is forbidden to make laws on them.  That’s it.  No granting of rights, no definition of persons, privacy, or any such thing.  It says only what the Congress may not do.  And restricting freedom of speech and of the press are two things which the McCain-Feingold act explicitly sought to do.  The Court was correct to say the law was unconstitutional.

The Founders feared the day would come when people began to think of rights as something granted by the government which could as easily be revoked by the government.  This line from the article is example of that kind of thought:

A Constitutional amendment is needed to deny corporations personhood and thereby strip corporations of all constitutional rights conferred on them piecemeal by the Supreme Court over the decades.

The whole problem is that people have begun to think of rights as something conferred on them by the government and have stopped thinking of the Constitution as an outline of what government may — and just as importantly — may not do.  What should be clear to Americans, but isn’t, is that writing a law on the subject of free speech is off limits to the Congress regardless of whom it impacts.  This is the kind of insight you’d have if you assumed God endowed men with their rights and the Constitution was written in light of that fact.  And it’s the kind of thing that would never occur to you if you were unaware of the Christian foundations of our republic.

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Base rate increase

15-Feb-10

Power companies do an appallingly poor job of educating the public.  Part of that isn’t their fault because they are publicly regulated and have to observe a lot of scruples about conflicts of interest.

But part of it is their fault, and words like “base rate increase” are a perfect example.  They need to stop using language like this.  They need to tell the public there are two pieces to your power bill.  One part is like the car payment and the other part is like your gasoline bill.  Everyone in the general public understands that buying a car does not put gas in the tank.  They are two separate things, and you have to explain it like that so busy people get the idea from something familiar.  Very few people will take the time to wade through the gobbledygook of a utility press release about the base rate increase of blah blah blah.  It doesn’t compute.

Here’s the gasoline bill part:  In Florida, the power company is forbidden by law to make a profit on fuel.  Whatever they pay for coal, natural gas,  oil, uranium, or other raw energy sources is passed straight through to the customer with no additions.  If FP&L buys a ton of coal for $50, then the customers get a bill for their share of the $50.  If coal goes to $75, then your power bill goes up because the fuel portion went up.

The other part of the bill, the so-called base rate, is like your car payment.  The base rate pays for the hardware of the power plants, construction, wires, people, land, repairs, bucket trucks, all the ever-rising costs of regulatory compliance, and so on.  The public needs to be reminded in sensible terms that the car payment and the gasoline bill are two different things.  When the company has to replace a coal-fired power plant with a natural gas plant, the car payment has to go up a bit, and it doesn’t matter if the price of the fuel just went up too.  Life is tough all over, even for the utility.  That’s just a matter of educating your customers so they understand what they’re paying for and don’t feel ripped off.  No, not everyone will be convinced.  But the reasonable people will be.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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No global warming since 1995?

14-Feb-10

The guy at the center of ClimateGate, Professor Phil Jones, is on record in the Daily Mail saying there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.  I gather that this means the uncertainty of his data is bigger than the change in his data.  In other words, the margin of error is bigger than the change.  No less important, he’s now conceding the existence of the so-called medieval warming period, a period of time the “deniers” have noted as evidence that climate changes constantly through historical time, that this is perfectly normal and not something caused by industrial-age CO2 emissions or cow farts.

These are astonishing admissions from Jones since he’s been chief Chaldean  for the United Nations team that told us last August, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”  So we’re not dead already?  You’ve got to be a bit relieved, no?

What’s just as important about this, though left unsaid in the article, is that even the new PeeCee term “climate change” doesn’t apply any more.  That term has come into popularity as a wave of blizzards dumped more snow on Washington, D.C., than that city has recorded ever.  The resort to such a dumb eumphemism was always transparently specious since the goal was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which purportedly warm the planet.   So, look.  Either the climate has changed in the past couple of decades or it hasn’t.  If it hasn’t — and according to Jones this is actually the case — then the whole scam collapses.  But even if it has changed some teensy bit, the change is so miniscule it’s beyond our power to measure it.  Long-time readers of AVFTA may recall that this is exactly what I said about the warmists’ claims about temperature measurement.  They cannot possibly know what they claim to know.  And now Dr. Jones is coming clean on this.  About time.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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