Attwood Among the Christoids

ML King, April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church

2012-01-16T00:30:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King Day. So I give you his April 4, 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York City - far better, truer, and less sentimental then his "I Have A Dream Speech," which is doubtless why the world likes that one better. As Gerry Rafferty sang, the world is living in its dream, but here Martin King is not talking about dreaming but about waking up!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

A year later to the day, he was murdered for saying these obvious things. How is it any different now, unless it's worse? Just as it is written, the fool returns to his folly as the dog returns to his vomit, and the sow, when washed, to wallowing in the mire.

It is as Jesus said. They murder the prophets, and then they build their tombs, name streets and schools and hospitals after them, and give them a monument and a national holiday. But listen! Don't they hate you just as much if you speak this word of his today, when it is truer than ever?

King reminds me a lot of Solomon, who like him also turned away from God and paid no attention to his own wisdom. It still pays for us to listen to Solomon today, and listen to his wisdom as he should have himself. So I listen to King when he's making this kind of sense, and so should you.

Forgiveness question

2012-01-14T18:19:00.000-08:00

I recently got the following question, and have thought and prayed about it for a couple of days:

I have to write a final paper on any topic on apology, forgiveness or reconciliation. I have chosen to focus on some of Jesus' last words which were "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." I interpret the last preposition phrase to mean that if the persons who crucified Jesus knew what they were doing was wrong, they should not be forgiven. In other words, I believe Jesus would NOT forgive an unrepentant sinner.

First, a minor logic problem. That he asked the Father to forgive them because they didn't know what they were doing doesn't necessarily mean he wouldn't if they did. There might be some other valid reason to forgive them if they do. The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only thing that Jesus put beyond forgiveness. Even high-handed sin, while it may guarantee you a good beating, is not unforgivable.

Leading up to this question is the point that it's prudent to find excuses to forgive people, and to avoid reasons not to if we are justly able to - as the proverb says, "A prudent man ignores an insult." Thus Moses writes in Leviticus 19:18, "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD." So as far as forgiveness means dropping grudges, it extends to pretty near everybody. I know we can follow the example of the scribe in Luke 10:29, who wishing to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" and ask, "Who are the sons of my people?" But the context doesn't seem to recommend it.

Leviticus 19:18 concludes with "I am the LORD," not an afterthought, but a statement of how this happens. Dropping grudges is one of those good and perfect things that comes down from above; we don't get to generate it in our wonderful selves. This looks like a command, but it's really a promise. Loving my neighbor as myself in this case means that since I don't want people, and God, to hold grudges against me, it would be prudent to quit doing that myself. The sanity to see and act on that is a real gift from God.

This sort of forgiveness extends to everyone, and it has a sharp end. When Romans 12:19 says, "Never take your own revenge, beloved," it goes on to say "but leave room for the wrath of God." What's wrong in this verse with executing our own wrath is that this denies room to God's wrath against the perp. This leads us into the call in the next chapter to submit to authorities. When the authorities are unjust, it takes God-sized wrath to handle it, and you don't want to get in the way by trying to settle up with them yourself.

In short, this dimension of forgiveness is not to acquit anybody, or necessarily to expect a relationship. Even if he hurt you, you don't have jurisdiction, so you're turning him over to God's court, and pouring him out of yours. As David said to God, having degraded Bathsheba through the implied threat to murder her husband and then murdering him anyway, "Against you only I have sinned, and done evil in your sight." In God's court, he may find mercy, or he may encounter judgment, and we can live with it either way, because God does no injustice in the end, even if he puts up with it for a while.

On the cross, Jesus spoke of a different level of forgiveness, which leads to a positive relationship. The example he was following was Job, whose captivity was turned when he prayed for his three friends, who went to Job when God told them to if they knew what was good for them (Job 42). Jesus addressed the same question in his parable of the king and the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:21-35). Here, when someone actually comes to you for forgiveness, then you forgive him because you'd like God to forgive you when you need it.

All of this gets badly tangled up when we mix it up with trust. Forgiveness is free, but trust is earned. Doesn't matter what, if anything, I forgive the two-year-old for, or even if there's anything to forgive. I don't trust Twosie to carry the glass of wine over the white carpet, or to parallel park the car.

Lots of times, I've seen people feel that they can't forgive because they then feel obliged to trust. And people will manipulate forgiveness to get trust. "If you forgive me, why don't you trust me?" Well, player, because you're demanding to be trusted, and people don't do that when it's safe to trust them. If I forgive you, I'll let you earn my trust, but if you want me to actually trust you, you still have to earn it.

And they think THIS guy is nuts!

2012-01-02T18:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf-DKyAmNy0

Anniversaries

2012-01-01T23:19:00.000-08:00

A mark of the powers of this world, the "elemental things" that Paul spoke of in Galatians 4, is their conformity to times and seasons. It goes beyond the inclination of people to observe these things slavishly. As Paul wrote, it's inherent in the spiritual powers of this world.

Consider the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960, in which South African security cops mowed down 69 unarmed people with machine gun fire as they demonstrated against the pass laws. 25 years later to the day, South African security cops killed over 20 people on their way to a funeral commemorating Sharpeville. August 6 in the Christian liturgical year is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which commemorates the day on the mountain that Jesus became too bright to look at. That was the day in 1945 chosen to incinerate the city of Hiroshima with a bomb too bright to look at. September 11, 1973, at the prompting of the United States, the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected government and killed thousands of people, torturing and disappearing many more. September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers managed to kill about 3000 people in the United States, accelerating the demise of the American republic.

December 15, 1791 was the day that the Bill of Rights, Amendments 1-10 of the US Constitution. came into force. December 15, 2011, Congress passed legislation empowering the US military to hold anyone that the President decides without charges and for as long as he thinks good.

Vaclav Havel

2011-12-18T18:44:00.000-08:00

Vaclav Havel did more than anyone to bring about the fall of Communist power in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He called the Communist Eastern European dictatorships of the 1970s post-totalitarian, quite different from the straightforward totalitarianism of Stalin. His understanding helped in his own day. Judge for yourself whether it says anything about our own time and place. Consider the following from The Power of the Powerless:

This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself. And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual's desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

And yet having had such understanding and having written these things, Havel supported the American invasion of Iraq, in spirit just like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - except that the Americans in Iraq destroyed far more and killed a whole lot more innocent people, by anyone's count, than the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia. "The expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed . . . military occupation becomes fraternal assistance."

His enemy that locked him up, Communist Party General Secretary Gustav Husak, was the shill for Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia, and Havel became a shill for American invasion, slaughter, and domination of Iraq - which was far more murderous and brutal that either the Soviet invaders or their puppet government - with Havel's hearty approval.

Now that should make any of us tremble for how easily corrupted the best of us can be - whoever the best may be. And maybe that's not me or you!

Learning from the nations

2011-12-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

The Bible contains many prophecies concerning various nations, mostly against them, but what for? Why do we need to know about Moab or even Tyre, unless we are rulers ourselves?

They're an example to guide us in our own affairs. When we see the pride of Moab, or the cleverness and money-grubbing of Tyre, we can take warning for ourselves from how things end up for these nations.

Not only the Bible, but the events that pass over modern states are most instructive. For instance, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi sneered at the rebels in Benghazi and promised to slaughter them, calling them rats. This did frighten people. But unfortunately for him, his father, and his brothers and sister, it provided plausible reasons for NATO to come into the picture and destroy the regime. Muammar is dead, and Saif is in custody. If he hadn't been such a conceited smart-mouth and threatened to kill a lot of people, the Gaddafi regime might have survived.

It's a lot the same in Syria. When things heated up in Deraa in March, Bashar al-Assad was still not in serious trouble. His regime actually had some solid popular support, unlike Ben Ali, Mubarak, or even Gaddafi. Assad even had a good personal relationship with his Turkish neighbor, Tayyip Recep Erdogan. If he had gotten ahead of popular opinion by repudiating his security forces and promptly granting far-reaching reforms, he would most likely be in good shape today.

What made me think more about these lately is two recent scraps with school districts. One noodled around all year and totally failed the kid. When we proposed a remedy, they gave us the one-finger salute and took refuge in trying to paste a mentally retarded tag on the kid in order to build themselves an alibi for having screwed everything up last year. By brazenly trying to ruin the kid's future just to cover their butts with his hide, they obliged Mama Bear to protect Baby Bear. Then, as though their brazen cynicism were a light thing, they followed the advice of their attorney to answer impudently in the manner of Rehoboam, denying everything like the adulterous woman of the Proverbs that eats and wipes her mouth and says, "I've done no wrong!" Then they filed against the parent for a due process hearing, at which point we brought the matter to the world in flyers we distributed at the high school for a couple of days before mediation. So we settled up and all is well now, but they could have saved six months and a lot of money by being reasonable in the first place. Arrogance and cruelty proved expensive, and got them nothing. Indeed, their legal maneuvers were precisely what enabled us to defeat them.

Another district we're working with had a minor problem, easy to fix, which they chose to handle by sending a threatening and insulting email to the parent in order to scare her into signing an IEP she was not comfortable with, and they followed up with a frivolous complaint to Child Protective Services (CPS). That didn't get the parent to heel and roll over as the district intended, because being Mama Bear, she too had to step up and defend her Baby Bear. She brought us into it, and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has now accepted her retaliation complaint. CPS is not happy to be used in this cynical fashion by school districts, who they say pull this stunt all the time. So, having found the complaint unfounded, they advised the parent to pursue the OCR complaint. Disability Rights Learning Center also wants to take up the matter, because they too are fed up with school districts using bogus CPS complaints to retaliate against parents and their kids.

Both of these districts could have learned something from the experiences of the Libyan and Syrian dictatorships, if they had been paying attention. And the moral of the story is, so can I, and so can you.

Muslims and Christians, Ravens and Cats

2011-12-05T20:16:00.000-08:00

We went for lunch to plan our way for 3 kids and a school district that's jerking them around. Very nice Pakistani food. Besides the meal, some was sent away with us, since that is the custom.

That is in fact profoundly wise, very much how God does things. We have communion in the faith, because food sacramentally makes relationship. Understanding this, Paul wrote not even to eat with certain people, while agreeing with Jesus that eating with sinners in the world is fine. And the way it's the custom in Pakistan to send food along with you when you leave, God sends his word along with us, so that in that way his presence lingers. The meal sort of doesn't end. We're reminded as we keep eating it at home.

They being Muslims, we talked about a few theological matters, on which being so much alike, Christians and Muslims have a lot to say each other. Islam came from Eastern Orthodox Christianity, so the ritual observances and liturgical calendar are very familiar to anyone acquainted at all with Eastern churches.

Just as Christians have our Christoids, whose understanding of spiritual warfare is bombing and invading people, who want uppity women to learn their place, and who feel obliged to dominate the state and society to do God a favor, Islam appears to be plagued with a nearly identical class of Muslimoids. Indeed, the principal Muslim-hating denomination in these parts seems to favor Muslim architecture when building their own mosques - uh, church buildings. We really should have no problem understanding one another.

When, as Muslims teach, Jesus returns to destroy the Antichrist (ad-Dajjal) and judge the world, none of us will be proud of how we had the right position on something. In fact, we all will be amazed at how foolish we all were, how truly all of us knew nothing at all. Why not save time and just stipulate it today before we get to God's court? Even today, when God shows up, we come away amazed at how, as Paul wrote, we know nothing as we should.

It is written that God feeds the young ravens when they cry. When our cats cry, if I blow them off for some other little silly purpose, I can feel God looking at me, and not with approval. God hears the cry of those cats - as well he should, I suppose, since both are really good at it.

Maybe God has taught them how to pray. If God hears ravens and cats, who never show the slightest interest in formulating the right positions on the oneness of God, the Trinity, or a variety of other questions that Christians and Muslims are often sure we need to understand correctly and with precision, maybe that's not as essential as we think it is. Maybe it's stuff like, "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God" - by finding out how to walk with God so that these become possible - just as the Bible says. "If your Father listens to ravens and to your cats, maybe he will listen to you, too, O man of little faith. "

Thanksgiving

2011-11-26T01:05:00.000-08:00

Giving thanks is good. It's the truth, because giving thanks is acknowledging that we received it and didn't earn it ourselves. And just in case you congratulate yourself that you did earn it yourself, it is written in Deuteronomy 8 that it is the Lord that gives you power to gain wealth.

Thankfulness is pretty equivalent to being poor in spirit. "The poor use entreaties, but the rich answer roughly" (Proverbs 18:23), an example being Nabal of Carmel in 1 Samuel 25. You're not too anxious to be exacting against others when you're aware of being cut a whole lot of slack yourself. Yes, indeed, if you're big on others measuring up, you're rich in spirit. From the standpoint of the gospel, you're in real trouble.

I'm not comfortable with the Thanksgiving holiday. It's based on a fairy tale, that godly people came here and prospered through God's blessing. In fact, they prospered through plague, robbery, and murder, and they were very spiritually proud and self-righteous people. Like the Pharisees, they were full of zeal for God, but they weren't careful to humble themselves. They proclaimed their own righteousness compared to everyone else in the whole world, and - putting light for darkness as Isaiah expressed it - they actually made of this spiritual pride virtue, instead of the spiritual rot that it was. They and we that have followed in their paths have actually given thanks not to God but to our own nets (Habakkuk 1:14-16), by which we have raked in wealth at the expense of the dispossessed Indians, black slaves, and now the rest of the world. As George Kennan helpfully explained in 1948, we had 50% of the world's wealth and 6.3% of the world's population, and maintaining that disparity was what our foreign policy had to be all about. And behind all the blather about democracy and liberty in the years since, that has been what it has been about, so that what the empire has been doing all this time to the rest of the world has now come home to the American people as well.

Thankfulness is perverted when we profit illicitly and then thank God for our ill-gotten gain. That really is taking the name of the Lord in vain.

However, God makes his rain to fall on the evil and the good, and his sun to shine on the unjust and the just. So God gives to the oppressor and wrongdoer his food and drink as well. It's just defiling and shameful to get through violence what we could have received with gratitude, and with no curse added to it. That way we don't have to lie to ourselves and others about how it really was and is, so we don't have to be so brazen and self-righteous.

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that if you know yourself and you know your enemy you will not meet disaster in 100 battles, whereas if you know neither yourself not your enemy you will be defeated for certain. It may take a while. It was so for Assyria, for instance. But it does eventually work out as Sun Tzu taught. When it's important for us to believe that we are righteous, self-knowledge is not possible. Once we have to believe we are righteous, so that everyone against us is wicked, knowing our enemy is not possible either.

So the Thanksgiving holiday should be a time to reflect on our true condition, our real history, how we've actually come to be where we are. Then we can give thanks for something real, that if we face the truth about who we really are and what we really do, grace is available.

2 districts, 2 teaching experiences

2011-11-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

November 5, the Ontario-Montclair School District sponsored a "Parent Enrichment" conference and resource fair for their parents.

Look. I want you sitting down when you read this, I don't anyone to fall and get hurt. This district believes it's a good thing for parents to be educated in their rights!

So they happily put on your rumpled blogger to teach about Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, its interaction with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the importance of keeping 504 in mind, and how to use these statutes together for your kid. And to mostly Spanish speaking parents, the ones most districts are especially eager to treat like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them manure! Especially in the Q&A, we got into IDEA stuff and such topics as advocacy and negotiating in general. Educate Advocate put an excerpt of one of the sessions on Youtube.

They made copies of the handout and will be making a Spanish translation. I'm not used to a school district wanting me to teach their parents to advocate for their kids, although that is in fact in their interest for lots of reasons - for instance, it makes it more likely that the kids will do better and keep the district from being punished by the state in Program Improvement. They do some smart thinking at Ontario-Montclair School District!

By contrast, we just concluded six months of fighting with a different school district, which to be nice I will leave unnamed. Here's some of the stupid stuff they did to dig themselves in deeper and deeper.

They received the kid from his elementary district and didn't even bother offering to assess him until six months had passed, while nothing worked. Procedural violations like that are harmless, so long as everything goes well, but as soon as it looks like trouble, that's not so good. You go a foot over the stop line, well, whatever. You bump into pedestrians when you do that, someone might want to make something of it. For six months they lollygagged as it developed into a debacle, while they just tried putting more whipped cream on this turd.

Then they all of a sudden wanted to assess, which was fine, but instead of thinking how they could fix it and make the parent feel better - by figuring out something effective for the kid, maybe! - they decided they had to prove that they had done everything right in this total disaster, documented by their own numbers. So they cooked up the scheme of having the educational psychologist add a mental retardation tag to the kid - supposedly to better serve him, but since the law requires all the services needed to meet the kid's unique needs regardless of the qualifying conditions, this was clearly and provably pretextual.

But more important - and district people reading this take note! - this announced to Mama Bear that they had made up their minds to ruin Baby Bear's future for the sole purpose of covering their own butts. So it became Mama Bear's job to whack their muzzles as hard as possible with her claws to rescue Baby Bear from their evil device, and it became our job at Educate Advocate to make sure she got it done. Never mind how morally vile the district's plan might be - if they had a problem with that, they wouldn't have thought of doing it in the first place. My point is that this pitiless cynicism was a serious miscalculation. As the saying is, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." "It's worse than a crime, it's a mistake."

They dragged out the assessment process as long as they could, figuring that Mama Bear would be faced with a done deal and let Baby Bear drift back into the same crappy placement, only dumbed down and stuck with the mentally retarded tag, so that they could quietly push him on and out, dumping him into a sweatshop and a blighted future once out of their hands, but with their hands washed of him. And what was she going to do but file for an IDEA due process hearing, for which she had no money, and which without assessments she couldn't hope to win anyway? But Mama Bear wasn't up for drifting there.

So we filed for a Section 504 due process hearing because they had denied him access to the high school program by not teaching him to read or compute, and by ignoring various physical and emotional disabilities. We also revoked consent to certain items in the district's offer, including the high school placement. So instead of Mama Bear drifting into where the district wanted her, the district had arranged for themselves to drift into where they had no placement for Baby Bear and no way to get under cover except by filing for due process to prove that what they had in mind was appropriate - and there they had some big problems.

So then they made another big mistake. They had asked us to continue the 504 hearing and scheduled a resolution session to work things out - which was wise - but then they took the advice of their attorney during the resolution session to torpedo it and then start writing letters at his direction brazenly asserting their righteousness and insisting on their own destructive placement. Finally, on October 25, almost two months into the school year, they filed to prove that their placement was OK.

In all of this, they left Mama Bear no option to fight to the death, and of course Educate Advocate had no option to support her to the limit. We were OK with their DP filing, because if they lost, their position was disastrous, while if we lost, we would yank consent to all special ed services under IDEA and demand what he needed under 504 - leaving them hardly better off, and us not much worse off. And their filing immediately gave us occasion to take to the public their willingness to spend all kinds of money to lawyer a kid into having his life wrecked instead of giving him what he needs to succeed, and a couple of days before mediation the flyers were being distributed at the high school.

They complained that they had to file, no choice, which was half true. They had to file if they wanted to keep trying to cover their own butts with the kid's hide - but not if they wanted to work out a deal to help him. So we came to an agreement which ought to do that.

If they hadn't sicced the lawyer on Mama Bear and at his direction given her a lot of distortions about the law and pretextual excuses - thereby announcing their intention to do the kid more harm for their own convenience - they would have had pretty much the same deal a long time before with a lot less pain and wasted legal expenses, and a better relationship.

So in this case the district got to learn what can happen when they hire a crooked lawyer to seek the injury of a kid instead of trying to work things out. What did they get for their legal fees? An expensive avoidable fight and a chance at their expense for us to learn and do some community organizing, ending in their having to spend a lot more than they would have even on the placement.

Two districts, two lessons.

One cooperated to help parents get what they need for their kids, which will help the district do a better job for its own good, as well as for everyone else.

One spent money on a sleazy lawyer to force the parents and us to come to them with iron and the shaft of a spear (2 Samuel 23:6-7), training us at their own expense to do a better job defending other kids from their devices. Sometimes you get less for more.

Districts may get less by spending more on sleazy lawyers to wage war against parents. Empires may get less by investing in the domination and invasion of others instead of giving others their freedom and taking care of their own problems. Individuals may get less through their efforts to bully and dominate other people. To seek peace and pursue it isn't just the godly thing to do. It's the easy thing to do. When obeying God is the easy path, let's do it!

Sometimes the bad guys lose

2011-11-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

From a fellow special ed parent:

My now 16 yo daughter was cyberbullied through the creation of a fake MySpace page. The page included references to her disabilities and perceived gender status, along with other vitriolic comments. We sued parents and are in the final stages of actually getting the funds and setting up a special needs trust. So I can't share all the details, yet.

But in the meantime, here are the steps we took (please keep in mind that we live in California)

We notified the school.
We took my daughter to her doctor
We notified our lawyer
We filed a police report
Because under California, cyberbullying is a misdemeanor
And under California law, schools may suspend students for cyber-bullying outside of school hours
We pulled daughter out of school and with doctor's support, placed her on home/hospital studies
When district still hadn't provided a teacher after several weeks, we began dialog with university to locate a doctoral student with a teaching credential
District identified and began providing teacher
We notified local law enforcement that according to principal, a student had confessed (in writing)
The detective we've been working with for several years now has assured us that if another incident occurs, he will make it his personal business to see that the same kid does time up at the local "ranch."
We learned that kid who confessed had been suspended for two weeks
Creator of the fake MySpace page was arrested and convicted
We filed and then settled a lawsuit against multiple individuals (One kid got served in front of everyone on the first day of ninth grade)

The most important thing for our daughter's healing process was taking action in an appropriate fashion - you can imagine her proposed solution. It was a long process but the smile on her face when she says "Kids learned that when you mess with me, bad things happen."

Cyberbullying is a misdemeanor in California. Students can be suspended for cyberbullying outside of school hours and off school property. Juveniles can and will be convicted in California. And victims of cyberbullies can get $$$ from perpetrators.

Awesome Wife

2011-10-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

Our junior cat, rightly named Squeak, who as a kitten 16 months ago wandered up to our front door in the dark, lost an argument with another cat a couple of weeks ago. Joshua noticed that his head was swelling up, but it took us a couple of days to see what Joshua was talking about.

It got bad enough that pus began leaking out, so we drained an enormous amount of pus from the wound, clearly a big bite from another cat, and we got some more the next day. Things appeared to be looking up. But Friday it was hurting him a lot, and Gayle decided to take him to the vet. As she got off the freeway off-ramp, the truck died, and she grabbed Squeak and left the truck. By the time I got there, the cops were about to take the truck away, because Gayle had left no note on it. I barely averted that, but not without having to overpay for a tow.

In the meantime, Squeak, who had been terrified in the truck, escaped from Gayle and ran off into the rosemary bushes across the street from the vet.

Nothing availed to get him back. Gayle saw him once and called him, and he fled immediately. We made several trips back there, and a woman who loves cats came by and lent us a trip, which we baited unsuccessfully several times. Finally, Gayle determined to sleep in the bushes Friday night.

The boys gave her a lot of crap. I knew she had to try, because she couldn't live with herself not to. But I was a complete dishrag. I had no hope, and I was no help. All she got out of me was that I didn't interfere.

About 3 in the morning, Gayle called to say she had recovered Squeak. She was crying, and groaning to God about her stupidity, and how could she live with herself with her stupidity having caused her to lose him? Squeak began to squeak excitedly in the bushes, and then he ran to her and jumped up on her. She put a leash on him and tied him to the steering wheel - no taking stupid chances this time - and she gathered her gear and came home.

Meantime, Squeak's wound had largely healed while he was in the bushes, so he didn't go to the vet anyway.

The truck needs a head gasket, which will be another $800 or so when we're done, but as I said to the mechanic, where are we going to find another decent truck for $800?

Poopsie was tough, and her faith got what she needed from God. I was a useless dishrag, and got schooled in the importance of being more gracious to my fellow dishrags.

Christoid Home Visit

2011-10-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

I got a home visit yesterday, my front door standing open as it always does in fine weather. At first, calling from my gate which was standing open as it always does, they seemed like they were trying to sell me something, but I was making no sense. Those people always barge right up to the door, and the last one of those would not shut up or go away until I asked him if I needed to call a cop to get him out of there. The salesmen don't bother me unless they tell me they're not trying to sell me anything. If they frankly say they're selling something and what it is, their chances aren't good, but if it makes sense and they're straight up, it's not hopeless. One of those came on a fiercely hot day last summer and failed to sell me any magazines, but he did get a big glass of water and a bit of salt to guard him against hyponatremia.

If they tell me they're just doing a survey, or trying to do me a favor - but certainly not trying to sell me anything - then the moment what they're trying to sell comes up, I'm apt to ask them, since they ARE trying to sell me something and they're already lying to me, why should I believe anything else they're going to tell me?

Then I figured they were Jehovah's Witnesses. I like talking to Jehovah's Witnesses, although mostly they just shove some paper at me and run off. When we do converse, we can usually get away from the discussions of the Trinity that they present as being vital. I don't have a problem with Trinitarian doctrine, except that it clearly isn't as tidy in the Bible as anybody tries to say it is, and it certainly holds far less interest to any Bible writer than it has for theological debaters of the past 1700 years. In the Bible you see a whole lot more interest in justice, mercy, and walking humbly with our God - which among other things entails some prudence about our own understandings, our place in God's purposes, and his nature - than you do about these supposedly fundamental doctrines which we can hold to, however firmly, with no practical effect on how we live. The Pharisees were great at such theological niceties, to the point that they became theological idiots as Jesus explained in Matthew 23. But justice, mercy, and walking humbly with our God is the trinity through which we have to pass to reach understanding of everything else. If we actually live that trinity, we'll learn something about any other trinity we need to understand.

But they weren't Jehovah's Witnesses. They were inviting people in the neighborhood to a Bible study at their evangelical Christian church, in which I was assured they would be going through the Bible line by line and teaching just what it says.

This is exactly the same confidence I've seen in Jehovah's Witnesses and all the rest that come to my door. They all agree in presupposing that the speaker is - unlike all the others - reading what's there instead of reading into it what's already in his own heart, as they all see is happening with those who disagree with them. It takes a lot of conceit to be saying in your heart that way, "I thank you, God, that I'm not like all those other people that are reading their own notions into what they're reading" (Luke 18:9-14).

I volunteered that the problem I have with American Christianity is that for the past 400 years, American Christians have always found a way to shill for the strong and to justify ripping off the poor and the weak. and I don't see how anybody that actually reads the Bible can do that.

I pointed out that today people shill for the apartheid state of Israel just as their fathers did for those that robbed and dispossessed the Indians and used the Bible to justify enslaving black people. Nothing learned in the past 100 years.

So pretty quick the loving Christian veneer peeled off the guy leading the group. Unprepared to engage my arguments, he discerned the "hatred in my heart" against the Jewish people, because I don't think that robbery and pogroms by the settlers against villagers minding their own business are any more OK for Jews to do than anybody else. And I had "hatred in my heart" against Zionists because I pointed out that Psalm 90 says that God is the dwelling place of God's people in every generation, not the land of Israel or any other piece of real estate. Israel, in replacing God as the dwelling place of Jewish people, is an idol, like anything else that takes God's proper place, but holding to this obvious Bible teaching means I have "hatred in my heart" for Jewish people. Theologically, of course, Jewish is what I am, and Jeremiah and all the prophets were not Jew-haters for telling such similar truths about their fellow Jews in their own day. But they were sure accused of it by the same kind of people as came to my door yesterday.

Speaking of hatred, why are they so enamored of a brazen liar like Brigitte Gabriel, a vicious bigot with a story of her supposed experiences of the Lebanese civil war that is an obvious lie to anyone who knows anything at all about what happened in South Lebanon in those days, who takes the position that Arabs "have no soul!"

It seems to me that people who read the Bible "line by line," and "teach whatever it says," ought to notice how abhorrent her position is to biblical theology, instead of inviting such people to speak at their churches, lapping up their defamatory talk like a dog lapping up its own vomit. But didn't their fathers hate and despise the Indians and black people that they were ripping off, justifying their own evil deeds by perverting the Bible so as to slander those whom they were pleased to oppress?

Going door to door, they work hard to make one proselyte, just as the Pharisees used to do (Matthew 23:15). The guy, proud of his hard work, began insulting me by questioning me about what I was doing for the kingdom of God. Since I just spent a lot of hours in a resolution session the day before hammering out a settlement agreement with the district's very sleazy attorney, so that the kid wouldn't get ripped off as the district designed, I wasn't much in the mood for that snootful.

But in a way he's right. Maybe it's just because I'm old, and tired, and lazy, but I can't abide his kind of hard religious work. And fortunately, the Bible indulges my laziness. It's not hard work that pleases God, but God's work and not ours in our lives. The religious people carry their heavy works around and are consoled by their own zeal and effort, evidence that they really love God. They're spiritual pride addicts, and like any other addict they'll pay big for their drug of choice. But Jesus says his yoke is easy and his burden light (Matthew 11:28-30). I'm glad his gospel is good news for the tired and the lazy. All right, Jeremiah, drive up (Jeremiah 4:1-2):

If you will return, O Israel, declares the Lord, then you should return to me.
And if you put away your detested things from my presence,
And will not waver,
And you will swear, "As the Lord lives,"
In truth, in justice, and in righteousness;
Then the nations will bless themselves in Him,
And in Him they will glory.

The obvious here is that you don't have to knock on doors, acting just like all the other salesmen, in the hope of getting one proselyte to your Bible study so that you might rake him into your bag. What about if you actually believe this stuff enough that you actually live by the life of God by which you swear? Here we have the promise that we believe the gospel enough to live in truth, in justice, and in righteousness, the nations will bless themselves in God and glory in Him.

It's simple logic. If that's not happening, then we are not swearing by the Lord in truth, in justice, and in righteousness. And that should be obvious. That this self-proclaimed "loving Christian" should immediately fall to personal attacks as soon as he can't respond to my argument, what the world calls ad hominem attack, is so contemptible that even the godless world despises such dishonesty - and a representative of God should behave in a way that even the world despises? You do that and expect anyone with any sort of integrity to think you have any acquaintance with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth?

And the way they hate Muslims and Arabs and want to justify any sort of cruelty and injustice against them, like their white supremacist and genocidal Christoid fathers, did they learn Jesus Christ in that way? And where in their Bibles which they read line by line do they learn that if someone is called a Jew - no matter how odious to real Judaism their ways are, as they imitate the Nazis and even use the same language - then whatever they do deserves ourt support? Which of the biblical prophets taught that the wicked get a pass like that just because they are Jews? Isaiah? Jeremiah? Ezekiel? Amos?

I can actually answer that. The false prophets taught that trash (Jeremiah 7:1-7), just as their Christoid descendants are doing today, to their own ruin.

The good news is that this flagrant injustice has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. You people out there that can't stand the Bible on account of their falsehood - it's not the Bible that they're teaching you.

You're right in not being able to stand their falsehood. The Bible actually is concerned with justice, mercy, and walking humbly with your God (Micah 6:6-8, Isaiah 1:16-18). It does teach from Moses up that there is one law for each person (Exodus 12:49; Numbers 15:16, 29) - not a rule saying that black slaves and white masters get different rules, that the Aryan master race and the Jews in Germany and Poland get different rules, that white Americans and the Indians robbed and slaughtered by them get different rules, that American lives and the lives of everyone else have different values, that Zionist settler pogroms against Palestinian villagers are more acceptable than the Nazi pogrom against Jews in Kristallnacht in 1938, or that when the settlers write on the walls "ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS" they are any different from the Nazis they consciously imitate, or that the apartheid state that supports them deserves any more support from a God-fearing person than anyone else who acts that way.

The wife yesterday said she was going to research Brigitte Gabriel. If she does, and digs deep, she will find out the vile nature of the doctrine she is caught up in, and what it is to be persecuted by her crowd for the sake of righteousness. She'll get to explore with Jesus how much or how little she agrees with him that such persecution is a blessing. If she learns and tells the truth, all her loving friends will turn on her, subtly no doubt, but they will make it clear. Her husband can be counted on to pressure her and make her avert her eyes from the truth. She will have to find out that her crowd which holds to these lies is just as opposed to the truth and as quick to punish her for following it (or shall I say Him), as their zealous religious fathers who crucified Jesus in the first place.

That way is tight and narrow as Jesus said, and few there are that find it (Matthew 7:7-14). If you've ever wondered just what makes it tight and narrow, read carefully in Matthew 5:3-12 just how Jesus describes it. You'll see why there's never a traffic jam on that narrow road, especially in churches!

"I will provoke you by those who are not a people, by a foolish nation I will anger you" (Deuteronomy 32:21)

2011-09-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

Chris Hedges, who was there, described in "We Are What We Loathe" how the US response to the 9/11/2001 attacks made Americans become the same kind of people as those who planned and carried out the attacks. No news rhere, but he describes it unusually well, especially the lying that began right away - the 200 or so that jumped to their deaths were scrubbed out of all accounts and video immediately. I hadn't thought of that before:

http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/143-143/4261-a-decade-after-911-we-are-what-we-loathe

William Rivers Pitt was good today. Gave me a new understanding of how thethe young kids have been abused by this 10 year pity party, the 10-year-olds and less that have known only the whiny, violent, emotional self-indulgence of the past 10 years; and the "leaders" that have manipulated fear and rage to get elected and make more money, to rob us of our liberties and even the interest in having them:

http://www.truth-out.org/children-aftermath/1315597025

The disgusting hypocrisy of all this sentimental grieving and whining about the dead gets really clear when you see how the 9/11 first responders are being treated by this nation that supposedly cares so much. It's just like the "Support Our Troops" blather from the same crowd that is very pleased to flatter them while they are there and fighting for nothing, and when they get back have no interest in how they're being ripped off by their rulers who, having squeezed the juice out of them, drop them on the sidewalks and in the mental hospitals - or jam them full of chemical crap and send them on another tour.

Bob Considine, "First Responders' Health Care an Insult to Heroism" http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/332-141/7201-first-responders-health-care-an-insult-to-heroism

People who live by the sword must be killed by it, but not because someone else kills them. Instead, they die by the sword in their own hands, which goes up into their own hearts as Psalm 37 says. We become arrogant, strutting insolently through the earth and doing abominable things, because recklessness and haughtiness are a great way to hide our fear from ourselves. Relying on the sword we become cowards.

God's judgment is clear in that all this godless hatred, arrogance, and unresolved fear makes us extremely stupid, and so we end up doing stupid and self-destructive things. The US has managed to turn what should have been a routine police matter with the world's sympathy and bin Laden in a perp walk into exactly what bin Laden wanted - for the US to be bled to death in stupid wars by its own hand, revealed to the world as being as vile as he said it was, with himself dignified as a successful strategist against America's imperial designs.

That's pretty stupid, especially when the guy explained his plan - in 2004 when it was well underway and working!

We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat . . . We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy . . . All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.

And those benefits to private corporations are exactly why there's a lot of motivation in our rulers and those who purchase them to keep up this stupidity. Too bad for the country, too bad for you, sucker, but they're making out all right.

9-11 Again

2011-09-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's observation that sentimentality is the compassion of the cruel, something like that, that he wrote in Gulag Archipelago - even the title a reminder that the US has been busy metastasizing its own Gulag all over the world for some time, but especially since that day 10 years ago.

Now if all the remembrances and memorials of those 3000 dead people had anything clean about it, wouldn't there be some concern about doing away with cruelty and murder generally? Wouldn't there be some interest in remembering other innocent victims - say, the 3000 people murdered in Chorillo by the US Marines in 1989? After all, what was really wrong with all those people being killed in September 2001, if not that innocent people were killed? But I've noticed for 10 years that if there's one thing these remembrances are all about, it's to forget about anybody else's death and torment, especially at the hands of Americans. That's if they ever notice in the first place. And they don't like it too well when I or anyone else draw their attention to these very many dead and tortured people, innocent victims of US imperial power.

One event Americans can't seem to remember, no matter how often reminded, is September 11, 1973. That's the date the US brought to fruition the overthrow of Chile's democratic government and put in power the especially brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which promptly set out to murder and torture thousands of people with the hearty approval of the American government.

The lesson here for us as individuals is to consider carefully when we want to nurse grievances and take emotional baths in our hurts. It's not about remembering. It's about forgetting. What we want to forget at such times is exactly what we need to remember in order to be sane, generally our own injustice and cruelty.

For a little t rip down memory lane.

And another, since we're doing remembrance.

Regarding debt and how things might unravel

2011-08-08T01:11:00.000-07:00

We had a conversation about debt a few days ago, and it seems worthwhile to consider a more fundamental question than we addressed.

It makes sense to borrow to gain something that you would otherwise miss and which will repay you. For instance, the US federal government borrowed a bit in the early years to build internal improvements like canals and roads. These generated economic activity which allowed the government to recoup it indirectly through taxes from a more prosperous public. That sort of thing is just what governments ought to spend on, serving the common good which everyone benefits from, but which no one can make money doing privately. Examples today include improving streets and lighting so that the expenses of crime are reduced and more people come to buy stuff which the city can tax. They're taxing profitable activity that wouldn't have been there otherwise, so without hurting anybody, they can repay what they borrowed for the street work and lighting - which everyone profits from.

And that brings me to my second point. Debt is all right if it is repaid by generating beneficial things, as the roads and canals did. Otherwise, you can get away with debt for unprofitable activities like war and corruption if, and only if, you have growth, because even if the debt doesn't shrink in absolute terms, growth effectively does reduce it. If my son owes $10,000, then even if he doesn't pay it back for a long time, it matters less all the time as his income rises. This is why student loans can make sense if the education results in a higher paying job, but when it usually results in no job at all, as it is today, student loan debt is for suckers.

And there's a fundamental problem. For the past 400 years, energy has kept getting cheaper and economies have generally grown. Therefore debt even for futile things like war and corporate welfare has been manageable most of the time, because we could grow out of it. When you can't grow out of debt, then over time the creditors get richer from interest in a no-growth economy, and generally there is no paying it back, especially since everyone else is impoverished. In this way stolen wealth actually impoverished the Spanish empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, as it was diverted to war and luxury, while inflation and favors to the rich impoverished everyone else.

From ancient times, this debt trap has been handled in one of two ways. In the Greek city states, revolutions would take place now and then, and lower class revolutionaries always canceled debts. The Law of Moses handled it differently: every 7 years debts would be canceled, and every 50 years all debts would be canceled and, except within city walls, all property would return to its original owner.

Failing to obey this made rich folks continually richer and impoverished everyone else. The results were unrepayable debts and the oppression shouted against by all the prophets.

So long as you have a growing economy, you might stay ahead of your debt, if you're careful. Growth still won't keep you from falling into a debt trap if the cost of servicing the debt exceeds what you can expect in growth. It's true that you can look like you have growth for a while by printing money and creating weird financial instruments that let you play three card Monte for a while.

But with insufficient growth, interest will run ahead and the debt will grow over the long term, unless it is periodically repudiated or canceled. There are various ways to do that if you don't want to do it the Bible way - and just about nobody does. None of those ways is as pleasant as the Bible way.

One way is simple repudiation. That's often the best of these bad alternatives, especially when it's justified, as when banks take advantage of government corruption to lend money for military spending, show projects, or other such futilities. People walk away from bad mortgages, throwing the keys at the lender. At the end of 2001, Argentina repudiated most of its debt, run up by Carlos Menem, and told the International Monetary Fund where to stick its advice. After a few months Argentina started doing fine and has ever since. This is no surprise, since it most closely resembles biblical debt cancellation.

If for any reason they don't want to be straight about it, governments can inflate away their debt. The US government has borrowed money from Japan and especially China by selling Treasury bonds. By magically creating more dollars, the US Treasury magically reduces the worth of everyone else's dollars. The Chinese are repaid the face value of the note with interest, but some of this is new imaginary money, so in reality they are not fully repaid.

Another way is to repackage debts to look like something else. Leading up to the crash of 2008, lenders would package mortgages into derivatives based on these mortgages, and then they made the loans look solid by buying a credit default swap to guarantee the loan. However, the sellers of these credit default swaps - essentially bail bondsmen for loans - weren't regulated insurance companies required to set aside reserves sufficient to actually pay these off if things went ill. This kind of shuck and jive gets really ugly when the music stops, because loans that were supposedly perfectly sound are fiction. This is a lot slicker than inflating away the money, which at least you can see happening. It just turns out suddenly that there is really nothing there. You open the package, and you find a little note saying, "Sorry, sucker," and the next news you know, Lehman Brothers is no more.

That happened in 2008, and they're all still at it, because Bush and Obama agreed upon making all the banksters immune from prosecution, no matter what crimes they committed. Instead, they gave them a lot of free money, making it clear that the biggest ones will always get a free fix from the Treasury. One minor nuisance is that throwing all this money at the banksters, informing them that any bad bet in the future will be covered by the Treasury, has just transferred all this unpayable debt to governments, who we've seen lately are in a lot of trouble, from Greece on up.

There was a simple alternative, if any of these politicians had any concern for the general welfare, and if they'd been willing to forgo the bribes (campaign contributions) of the crooks. They could have done to all of them what they did to Washington Mutual - seize them all, stiff the shareholders, give the bondholders a short haircut, and sell off the profitable remains to solvent competitors. Rewarding all these rich crooks, precisely because they're rich and crooks, hasn't solved the problem. It has just moved things around, bankrupting governments and fleecing whole populations. So long as the music goes on, totally ripping off the American middle class, which will now fall into the ranks of the penniless unemployed, looks like something they will get away with.

But the music must eventually stop in a no-growth economy, because there really isn't more wealth, no matter how many exotic debt instruments you invent. If there are only so many hogs, so many people eventually wind up getting to eat only so many pork chops.

The wrath of the suckers can be redirected against immigrants or their fellow workers in public employee unions, as long as they're dumb enough to think that it's the guys cutting their neighbor's grass, or the teachers, or the clerks at the DMV, that are plundering the economy, and not the billionaires with their hundreds of billions in subsidies and tax breaks. But reality bats last. They can do whatever they want to immigrants and public employees, but fighting on the side of those who are robbing you so as to grind down someone even weaker than you will not find favor with God. Besides, you have to get the money from where the money is, not from where it isn't.

The creditors being cheated don't like it. Unlike the American people, they have not been rendered so stupid by envy and hatred that they can't see what the deal is. Even those radical communist redistributionists at Standard and Poors, when downgrading the US government credit rating 10 days ago, blamed the problem mostly on the Republicans in Congress that are unwilling to make their rich friends pay any taxes. So now the Chinese are talking about getting rid of the dollar as the reserve currency. If that happens, the US won't be able to plunder the world by just waving more dollars into existence, and things will look very different here, very fast.

While governments can still borrow money, they would best borrow money to do useful work, as the US government did with internal improvements 175 years ago. First, forget about feeding the military any more. If it's more than we need to keep the Taliban from making an amphibious landing in California, forget about it - and for that we have the Coast Guard. If an agricultural practice like factory farming doesn't pay its way without subsidies, and they can't afford to clean up after themselves as we were all taught to do in kindergarten, forget about that too.

There are few jobs now, but a whole lot of needful work not being done. We could spend money on getting that work done. We will end up very sorry if it doesn't. Train tracks. Public transport, for when driving becomes unaffordable. Cleaning up radioactive waste so it doesn't get out of hand as things unravel. Bridges. Broken school buildings.

Of course the idea that such good sense could come to the utterly deluded masses of the United States of America seems absolutely hopeless. But who can tell? All of a sudden, we have hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting the same kind of corruption and stupidity we have here - which they have fallen for all these years just as stupidly - and people you never would have imagined working together are waking up. It all started with a woman thrown out of her apartment in Tel Aviv putting up a tent in a park. And things started to unravel for Zine Abeddine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak when a lady cop in Tunisia slapped the wrong fruit seller in the face.

Things will unravel here, since growth and imperial expansion are no longer available to enable us to kick things down the road. We can't export our social problems to the frontier at the expense of the Indians anymore. We can't stuff ever more crap into people's mouths to make delusion comfortable by raping Latin America and Asia and Africa for resources more and more all the time In fact, they're all starting to push back. We are looking at a whole new situation for the United States, which unlike other nations, in 400 years we've never met before.

So will we go the way of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, squaring things by blaming and robbing others even weaker than ourselves? Or will we learn to help the weak as the Bible says and embrace the fellowship of poverty when we're thrust into it, as has happened in Argentina, Tunisia, Egypt - and maybe even Israel? That last is still too close to call. And maybe we are too. I hope so. It's really worth praying for. And it's worth preparing our hearts for.

Interesting evidence that hatred hurts itself

2011-07-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

War Nerd at The Exiled rethinks his disdain in 2005 for the self-restraint of the Irish Republican Army compared to how Al Qa'eda went all out, having noticed how the IRA survived and won their war against Britain, while Al-Qa'eda has pretty much been destroyed.

The IRA was very careful not to kill people, while inflicting plenty of damage on the British economy with huge truck bombs. Knowing that the British government and counterinsurgency people would want civilian casualties to mobilize public opinion against the IRA, they made sure to broadcast warnings to radio stations, newspapers, everybody, to keep the British government from gaining that success.

At the same time, the British were recruiting Protestant paramilitaries to murder Catholic civilians in Belfast in order to provoke the IRA to get into tit for tat revenge killings there, but the IRA disciplined themselves not to respond. Not at all because they were thinking of what Jesus said, I'm certain, they kept turning the other cheek in Belfast, never forgetting that their job was not avenge themselves or even Roman Catholic civilians but to convince Britain to walk away. And the way to do that was to keep blowing up billion dollar targets in London like the Stock Exchange, without killing people, while not letting the British draw everyone's attention to communal strife in Belfast.

By contrast Al-Qa'eda gave way to passion to kill people and burned themselves out.

I see one basic problem in his analysis, though. The IRA and Al-Qa'eda had very different goals, and in fact both have won in their own way. The IRA meant to get Britain out of Northern Ireland and to survive as a successful above-ground political party. Al-Qa'eda was not aiming to expel the Americans. On the contrary, its aim was to incite the Americans to invade Afghanistan and other Muslim countries in order to bleed out and collapse, as the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan before the Americans came to replace them, to the wonder of Russian generals. Al-Qa'eda didn't need to survive as an organization. It needed the Americans to invade and teach people that what Al-Qa'eda said about the invaders was true, so that the population would be mobilized against them. That's how Napoleon's empire was defeated in Spain and Russia, when regular armies could never defeat him. The American thirst for revenged has sucked in the Americans, having deprived them of their senses, just as Al-Qa'eda intended, and Al-Qa'eda was willing to lose its own life to achieve that win.

So both have won in their own way. From these two conflicts we learn that those who must avenge themselves will lose, and the winners are those who turn the other cheek, not being distracted from their goal by temptations to strike back. The one who lays down his life to attain his goal will win, and the one who aims to dominate in order to protect himself will bleed out and lose.

In the Proverbs we read that Wisdom shouts in the public square and at the head of every street. The Wisdom of God is proven true in the most unexpected events and places.

Some Christians Get It!

2011-07-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

John Whitehead is the director of the Rutherford Institute, an evangelical Christian civil liberties organization analogous to the ACLU. They're often on the same side. Imagine that! Christians who think the 4th Amendment and due process are good things, who recognize that imperial domination out there means forfeiting liberty at home. Concepts obvious in the Bible, sure, but hardly suspected among evangelical "Christians."

John Whitehead: The military industrial complex: The Enemy from Within

Similar sanity in Israel today, Zvi Bar'el in Ha'aretz.

July 4th, 2011

2011-07-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

It's hard to do better than Juan Cole's warning to the new Arab revolutionaries:

http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/10-ways-arab-democracies-can-avoid-american-mistakes.html#comment-67118

I will add a little theological diagnosis, though. I pretty much always do!

It seems to be a law that whatever we say about ourselves winds up not being true. There's no better way to be a fool than to be wise in your own estimation. Check out the really infamous, the real monsters - the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Inquisition - and you'll find how impressed they were with themselves and their holy mission.

It works the other way too. Those who are unimpressed with themselves keep surprising you with their wisdom. My wife is a good example.

John the apostle summed it up in few words: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." If you talk straight about your sins, it's not true anymore. You no longer have them. But on the other hand, "If we say we have no sin, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us." As Jesus said to the Pharisees, "Because you say, 'We see!' your sin remains." The people in Laodicea were rich and increased with goods, and in need of nothing in their own eyes, so they did not know that they were wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. It's not so bad to be these things - but not even to know it! That's really pitiful.

So it should be clear why America is in the shape it's in and getting worse. If this law holds, we should expect those who boast of being the land of the free and the home of the brave to be slaves of various addictions and empty pleasures leading to self-destruction, both as individuals and as a nation, and to be afflicted with cowardice to an insane degree. Here we are, groped and x-rayed at airports, seemingly unable to understand that anyone that wanted to blow us up would just blow up the crowd assembled for their convenience at the checkpoint.

Boasting of being the light of the world and a beacon of freedom, the nation has been degraded to a filthy and violent empire that tortures, kidnaps, and locks people away forever precisely because there is no case against them that any court would listen to. The moral leader of the world, the foremost producer and exporter of violent pornography, provisioner and trainer of the secret police for vile dictatorships around the world!

No surprise that a nation that boasts of being "under God" is anything but. No surprise that boasting of being "indivisible," its people are so easily ripped off by pathological rich people and corporations that set their victims against one another, people that have learned nothing since Frederick Douglass saw the white dockworkers hating the black slaves working with them on the Baltimore docks instead of noticing the bosses that were ripping off both of them. And a nation that boasts insanely of "liberty and justice for all" - should we be surprised that no one even expects justice, except the "justice" people can buy anyplace, if they have a good lawyer and a fat wallet? When somebody actually does get justice, who is not amazed, so that everybody talks about it?

In 60 years, 40 as a Christian, I've found an unfailing principle: if what I say invites God to look my way and say, "Oh yeah?" - don't say it! If American Christians don't lay this principle to heart, and soon, there will, in the most literal sense possible, be hell to pay.

The strong, the weak, the sadistic - and the Lord

2011-06-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

It was a real eye-opener years ago when I read John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and came to understand why we find so much cruelty and callousness among Calvin's intellectual and spiritual descendants. Calvin's teaching is well-reasoned and profitable in many ways - any Christian should read it - so why is its fruit often so bad?

One dead fly ruins this perfume: Calvin didn't see the difference between weakness and sin. He kept blaming our wrongdoing on our weakness, quite contrary to the Bible, which says, "When I am weak, the power of Christ rests upon me." And that should be obvious, because when you look around the world, you notice it's the strong, not the weak, that slaughter millions and do really big crimes. You don't get genocides from hookers or from alcoholics lying on the sidewalk. The United States, from the Pilgrims and Puritans on up, has always been a self-righteous society that has admired toughness, despised weakness, and prided itself on individual achievement. Nobody seems to wonder whether what is achieved necessarily makes us better off - that is to say, doing more justice, loving mercy more, and walking more humbly with our God, who can be frustrating to walk with at all, since he frequently fails to get much done, with stopping all the time to attend to people beaten and left lying on the side of the road.

Time magazine drove all this home to me in a fresh way last week, discussing why residential institutions for people with disabilities so routinely engage in beatings, torture, sexual abuse, and even murder - and the state and federal regulators don't care. I'm 60 years old, and in the past 50 years or so that I've paid any attention, I've never seen such people care.

The Time article referred in particular to the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a psychologist randomly divided a group of volunteers into guards and prisoners for a two-week experiment. The guards grew so sadistic, and the prisoners so traumatized, that the experiment had to be stopped after six days.

What I found especially shocking was that a big reason the psychologist had to stop the experiment was that he found himself identifying with the guards and despising the prisoners. He forgot that he was a psychologist and not a prison superintendent, and was impatient with an academic colleague that confronted him on the fifth day with some problems. It is clearly built into us to identify with the strong who oppress and to despise the oppressed and figure they deserve whatever is done to them. Certainly no one wants to listen to them.

This sheds more light on something that has puzzled me ever since Chino Valley Unified School District dragged me into the education industry. People often get elected to school boards because they want to do something for kids, and pretty often because they're not too happy with what has happened to their own kids or to those of their friends. And then almost without exception, they become the enemies of kids and their parents, identifying with the district administration that wrongs those kids and parents and forces them into due process hearings or even federal court. They cover up shocking abuses and willingly persuade themselves of the most brazen lies from superintendents and other administrators. Many kids are killed in school each year, because the murderers have been allowed to get away with dreadful abuses for a long time before. Countless kids, including my own, are severely traumatized, and the perps can depend on the support of their school boards, unless enough public exposure makes that impossible. When legislation is proposed to protect kids against abuse, you can count on the school board associations to lobby Congress and legislatures to kill it or water it down so that it's actually worse than nothing, as happened in 2009. In the eyes of the average school board, the perps, not the kids, need protection. A board member that will stand for kids against the district administration is a very rare creature, whatever he may have been like before he got on the board.

And then the California Department of Education (CDE) doesn't care, and some other state education agencies are even worse, being intent on making it look as much as possible like the districts are doing their jobs. For instance, the law requires that they survey the parents to see what they think of special education. They take care to ask only those parents that will say they're happy, never making the surveys available to anyone with a complaint, and CDE knows all this and approves. So everybody is happy, since only those that are happy are invited to offer an opinion. Did they learn their chops from the People's Assembly of the Syrian Arab Republic?

In contrast, Psalm 41 says, "Blessed is he who considers the poor. The Lord will deliver him in time of trouble. The Lord will preserve him and keep him alive; he will be blessed on the earth."

It's simple: what we do to the helpless, God will do to us when we're helpless, and humility is knowing that, some time or other, we will be in the place of that institutionalized special ed kid that no one wants to hear about. And whatever I want done to me then, I'd better do it to others in that position today.

Psalm 109

2011-06-08T02:16:00.000-07:00

Psalm 109 is one of the imprecatory, or cursing, psalms, along with Psalms 69, 137, and several others. They make people pretty twitchy, because they're quite toughly worded, so folks find all sorts of ingenious ways to explain them away.

Jesus and the apostles were very comfortable with them and quoted them often, so if we're going to follow Jesus and follow the teaching of the apostles, we'd better get to like them, too, instead of trying to explain them away.

I was reading Psalm 109 last week, and I noticed that the key to the whole thing is in what we do with the first four verses, which read like this:

O God of my praise, do not be silent!
For they have opened the wicked and deceitful mouth against me;
They have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
They have also surrounded me with words of hatred,
And fought against me without cause.

Here I recalled Luke 18:9-14, in which the Pharisee prays with himself saying, "Thank God I am not like other men." If you read these first four verses in that spirit, knowing that they apply to someone else, everythig else in the psalm will come wrong, but the problem is in the reader, not the psalm. If we recognize our own behavior in these first four verses, like the tax gatherer saying, "God be merciful to me, a sinner," then everything else comes right. Haven't I done all these bad things to other people myself? I can read Psalm 109 and see the sort of thing I have to depart from in my life, before I want it judged in others, and then it makes great sense.

It's very much what Jesus taught concerning the woman caught in adultery. Sure Moses taught to put such sinners to death, but only if you've repented first yourself, and by then you show mercy on a fellow transgressor. That's a lot different from being OK with his transgression. There are people that are OK with adultery, but Jesus was not, even though to the Pharisees it looked like he was.

Moses also taught that those that worship idols are supposed to be put to death,but if God had put the idolaters to death at the time of the golden calf in the wilderness, those guys around Jesus that wanted to put the woman to death would not have ever been born so that they could make that case. They were standing against their own lives.

Sitting in Beaumont last night and waiting for the school board meeting to start, I was reading Psalm 85, and saw much the same thing. Psalm 85 begins with a prayer for God to turn away his anger, to cause it to cease. I noticed that it doesn't make a lot of sense to pray that way unless we're aiming to turn away from our own anger, to cause it to cease. If I seem to be running into a lot of God's anger in life and I don't like it, maybe it's time to fall out of love with my own anger against other people.

Memorial Day

2011-05-31T01:58:00.001-07:00

Support our troops by keeping them engaged in miserable futility. Don't bring them home and give them meaningful work. It's much more supportive instead to have them kill people and break things where they don't belong - just as the American people would like done to us by some foreign army bringing us freedom from ourselves!

Let's hear from Vietnam veteran Mike Hastie, if any of these "patriots" are willing to tolerate truth from the troops they supposedly support.

Every year Americans honor their veterans on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Everyone is a hero...Great speeches...Jets flying over...Flags and more flags...21 gun salute...Taps...Thank you for your service...The only problem with this tradition is that the American people don’t want to know a god damn thing about what really happens in war. 18 American veterans commit suicide everyday. I can’t tell you how many Vietnam veterans I have met in my life who would have one simple message to the American people: Go Fuck Yourself! Don’t trust a veteran who isn’t angry...

Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
Memorial Day 2011
Contact at: (hastiemike@earthlink.net) T)

One day while I was in a bunker in Vietnam, a sniper round went over my head. The person who fired that weapon was not a terrorist, a rebel, an extremist, or a so-called insurgent. The Vietnamese individual who tried to kill me was a citizen of Vietnam, who did not want me in his country. This truth escapes millions.

Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
December 13, 2004

Support these guys, yes, but stop up your ears and turn your eyes away if they tell you the truth. But do you feel supported when people "support" you that way?

Thank a veteran for fighting for our freedom by depriving others of theirs, as though the measure we measure will not be measured back to us. So shout the American "patriots" who regard the advice of the founders of the republic they supposedly cherish with complete contempt - all of whom warned that war and the military don't preserve our freedoms. That's how we lose them, they all said. Let's hear it from James Madison, in case any of these "patriots" can stand to listen to him - or do they even have any idea who he was?

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.... [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and ... degeneracy of manners and of morals.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare....

— James Madison, Political Observations [April 20, 1795]

Maybe, you patriots, you figure this old dead guy isn't proud enough of the troops, not patriotic enough, as you are. Didn't realize the importance of being afraid of terrorists, or Muslims, or your own shadow, as our torturing, kidnapping, lying, peeping, and defrauding protectors keep reminding us. But there is the detail that what he said is proving true in every way. Read it again!

Why Are Hondas Good Cars?

2011-05-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always remember that you often find outstanding people among those you don't particularly like.

Soichiro Honda

I noticed a lot here. It doesn't just apply to car manufacturing or business. We see here why people don't hire God, who is somebody we don't understand, which is why we miss out on having somebody in our lives that is better than we are. Religious people, like everyone else, are looking to feel better about themselves, and having people around us that are better than we are doesn't make us feel like we're the best there is. Not right away. But if we let such truth into our lives, we'll get to really be better people, and then we'll have real things to feel better about.

Richard McKee, Open Government Maven

2011-05-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

Rich McKee, who co-founded Californians Aware, died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. Many of us will miss him. His daughter Kelly helps us out with public records things, and she helped me force the Special Ed Director's resume out of Chino Valley Unified School District - which showed that that spedhead had about as much background in special education as I do in the fashion industry. This little victory prompted a determined but unsuccessful campaign of retaliation, which faded away with the dismissal of the Human Resources guy who helped coordinate it, as well as her transfer elsewhere in the district. Chino Valley has a long way to go, but I think they've come quite a way. Through his daughter, I'm in debt to Rich for this, indirectly. There are probably lots of cases like this that nobody knows, besides Rich's publicly known succeses.

A tough defeat for Rich was being beaten in an action against the Orange Unified School District in 2009 and being made to pay $80,000 in legal fees. But this, too, ended in an important success. The anti-SLAPP law was amended to forbid the award of fees to winning government defendants unless the action is frivolous.

Don't forget. You don't always lose just because you lose.

The End of Osama bin Laden?

2011-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan at the hands of the American military was announced yesterday, and few will mourn his passing. There was glee in many American cities, as though something great was accomplished.

There is no question that bin Laden's great accomplishment was to provoke the United States to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, just as he intended, and indeed as was his stated purpose, in the hope of bleeding the American empire to death as he had - with American help - bled the Soviet empire. You don't have to like the guy to recognize that he was a brilliant strategist with a deep understanding of his opponent, knowing how to turn his opponent's power to his ruin, while using his own weakness to maximum effect.

Even his death will serve to weaken the American empire's position in the lands it has invaded, while evidently encouraging it to remain there until national bankruptcy. He will be reviled for his criminality, which is uncontestable, although certainly no worse than that of the imperial managers that have used him as a pretext for greater crimes than his.

His worst injury to the United States was undoubtedly his success in provoking the American people to throw their own liberties away with both hands, becoming a vile, thuggish rogue state that disappears people, locks people away forever precisely because they have done no crimes, wantonly tortures thousands and often with sadistic sexual perversion, and which has already murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people to no purpose. Working with his co-conspirators, the Bush-Obama administration and its unprincipled supporters, Osama bin Laden has participated as a junior partner in the most serious destruction of the US Constitution and its republican liberties in the history of the republic. The American republic is most unlikely now to recover, and that is probably the worst thing he has done to us - far worse than killing 3000 people, which we do to ourselves on the highways in a month. That too was his intention, knowing that provoking Americans to express the most vile aspects of our national character would further destroy American authority and power in the world.

But was it bin Laden's responsibility to preserve the American republic and to keep Americans from turning to their own crooked ways (Psalm 125:5)? No, he bears blame for appealing to our basest instincts to ruin us, but keeping ourselves from our own crooked ways is our own responsibility, not his.

It's worth reflecting in this day of bin Laden's death that not many men so completely accomplish in life what they set out to do. In bin Laden's case, he had the active help of American rulers that were delighted with his success because it gave them their chance to establish police state institutions, with the eager agreement of the American people who despised their own liberties along with those of others - being thrilled at the excuse to express their own violence. He could never have done it without us. Osama bin Laden's work is not over. His enemies will see to that, as they have all along.

Lessons from Misurata today

2011-04-16T00:16:00.000-07:00

Today the city of Misurata, on the coast in western Libya, was full of profitable lessons.

Human Rights Watch saw Gadaffi's forces launching at least three cluster bombs into the es-Shawahda neighborhood, and they recovered unexploded bomblets, MAT-120 120 mm ammunition made in Spain in 2007. Spain banned cluster bombs the following year. Apart from being indiscriminate in where they land, the bomblets often fail to explode until a little kid sees the bright yellow toy and kicks it or picks it up.

Qadaffi's forces had managed to close the port on Thursday, but a Greek ship arrived on Friday and was able to unload 400 tons of supplies and take away 1200 sick people, so the opposition had evidently managed to push Gaddafi back and reopen the port. It appears that the resort to cluster bombs was a desperate response to bad news, and there's no question that this play will bite Gaddafi's butt by strengthening people's commitment to getting rid of him. When we get in trouble and don't trust God, it's very easy to be provoked into doing something stupid that will dig us in deeper. Is Gaddafi the only one with this problem?

The Americans, the British, and the French, who at this point can't imagine walking away with Gaddafi in possession of the field, for sure will play this to justify further action, and it will doubtless work. Gaddafi's cluster bombs will go up into his own heart, just as Psalm 37 says. But as Human Rights Watch explains, for the Americans to be indignant about cluster bombs being used against civilians will cause many to laugh out loud. Human Rights Watch explains:

The widespread use of cluster munitions, especially by U.S. and U.K. ground forces, caused at least hundreds of civilian casualties. Cluster munitions, which are large weapons containing dozens or hundreds of submunitions, endanger civilians because of their broad dispersal, or "footprint," and the high number of submunitions that do not explode on impact. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) reported that it used 10,782 cluster munitions,[2] which could contain at least 1.8 million submunitions. The British used an additional seventy air-launched and 2,100 ground-launched cluster munitions, containing 113,190 submunitions. Although cluster munition strikes are particularly dangerous in populated areas, U.S. and U.K. ground forces repeatedly used these weapons in attacks on Iraqi positions in residential neighborhoods. Coalition air forces also caused civilian casualties by their use of cluster munitions, but to a much lesser degree.

So for the British and Americans to make something of Gaddafi's cluster bombs has a funny sound.

Although lying about it today, the United States and probably Britain have also been using depleted uranium munitions, which will be killing Libyan civilians and causing birth defects and cancer for a long time.

I will be glad to see Gaddafi go. It's pretty disgusting to see people who have a problem with Americans supporting a dictator because "he's our bastard" supporting Gaddafi now because he's their bastard. But I remember Jehu the son of Nimshi, who did away with Ahab's house as instructed, but came to grief because he wouldn't obey God himself. For the Americans to punish Gaddafi as he deserves when they are perfectly OK with committing all of Gaddafi's crimes themselves will assuredly lead to more trouble for the United States of America. I'm saying it now ahead of time: when that happens, there's no reason to suppose that it will be because there was something wrong with defending the Libyan people from Gaddafi. It will arise from the hypocrisy of punishing Gaddafi while doing all his crimes ourselves. The log-in-eye thing again. When we see someone like Gaddafi, let's learn from him not to be like him, before we do anything else.

Omar al-Mukhtar, the leader of Libyan resistance to the Italian colonialists, explained it best. Someone said they wanted to kill the Italian prisoners, and Omar Mukhtar told them, "Don’t do that” One of his fighters said, "But they kill us." And Omar Mukhtar said to him, "But they are not our teachers. Therefore we should not learn wrong from them." Instead, as Ezekiel explained, we should learn from them to act otherwise.

Black swans, and the prosperity of the wicked

2011-04-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

Psalms 73 and 37, especially, remark on how the wicked prosper day by day, and then in due time they slip on some banana peel and fall into the fire. I've seen a couple of unusual and interesting descriptions of just how this works from a couple of sharp secular thinkers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a professional trader that wrote Fooled by Randomness about trading strategies and everyone's inclination to be deceived by seeing apparently meaningful patterns in completely random events. This very easily leads to developing strategies that seem brilliant because they lead to steady gains almost all the time, but they're actually very stupid if they cause you to lose everything through a black swan, an unforeseen random event. One example he gave was his neighbor across the street who was very proud of how well he prospered through the 1990s by buying on the dips. And then the 1998 financial panic came along, and he lost his account in a week, and his job very soon after.

Joseph Stiglitz, writing at Al Jazeera English today ("Gambling with the Planet"), discusses the common failure to think straight that has led both to the calamity at the Fukushima nuclear plant and in the 2008 calamity in the world's financial system. In the first place, we do a very poor job of estimating the risks of rare events, since being rare the sample size is necessarily very small, and our normalcy bias inclines us to think that as it is it will ever be.

Normalcy bias, the notion that if it's always been this way it always will be, is refuted in our lives daily, but we just can't believe the evidence. There's no use telling an 8-year-old boy that some day he won't want to be a fireman and that he will be interested in girls. The most stupid example in my experience is when I had a supercold some years ago. There I was, miserable with a 103 fever, and I realized that I was unable to imagine that I would ever feel any other way. There was no way to think differently. I just had to tell God that I was convinced that I would feel that way for the rest of my life. There was no way I was going to think straight about this. I just had to acknowledge that that was how I was thinking and to state before God that I was just incapable of making any sense.

Everyone is subject to this kind of folly. What ruins the wicked is their lack of humility, their confidence in their own thoughts, and their consequent failure to consult God - why would that be necessary, since we are wise and have figured out how it works. As we read in Psalm 1, Romans 1, and elsewhere in the Bible, that is the essence of wickedness. The bad behavior is just a consequence, not its essence.

Now here what Taleb calls the ludic fallacy comes into the question. The ludic fallacy is the notion that games (Latin "ludus," "game"), our models of reality, actually describe reality. So the wise man says, "I know," but he can't discover, as Ecclesiastes reminds us. Sometimes these can be useful tools, but in fact the complications we have to leave out in order to understand things can easily make all the difference. Black swans fly out of those tiny wrinkles on the pool table, and a whole lot more often than we can expect.

The other thing is that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) executives and school superintendents are not rewarded for thinking about black swans. They're rewarded for how they look this quarter or the 2011-2012 school year, and over such an interval, the guys and girls that ignore the danger of black swans get the best results. For 40 years, TEPCO was rewarded for figuring they'd never see an earthquake over 8.2 or a tsunami over 50 feet high. It was cheaper to site the backup diesel pumps on the ground, and that was no problem, because no tsunami was going to pass over the tsunami wall guarding the plant. So when the International Atomic Energy Agency warned TEPCO in 2008 that their plants were not safe enough, TEPCO blew them off. They already knew they were taking their chances.

It's easy now for our wrath to burn against those idiots, but that makes sense only until we consider our own ways and realize that we too really are those idiots. Since we're all this way, let's budget for it. Let's be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger, remembering that wisdom is with the humble. We are designed to malfunction if we close our ears - to other people and especially to God, no matter how bright we may be. It's how God has arranged for pride to go before stumbling, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

This is no academic exercise. The nuclear plant operators and regulators in the United States are no better than their Japanese counterparts. Building the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on an earthquake fault, rated for only a 7.5 - and the retrofit was accidentally done backwards on the second reactor! - and with no tsunami wall at all, doesn't make a lot more sense than how General Electric designed the Fukushima plant for TEPCO.

The importance of small mercies

2011-04-05T15:48:00.000-07:00

I e-filed my federal tax return, and then found a piece of paper that meant that I would have to file a paper 1040-X to fix it. So I spoke to the Lord about it, asking with no real expectation that the IRS would find some reason to bounce it - which would solve my problem. I went back to my email, and the IRS had already just bounced it for a different booboo that gave me another $1300.

We have a friend lately released from the jug who is determined to get himself organized and doesn't feel right about being on everyone else's dole. So when he ran out of money and had nothing to eat this morning, my friend and I prayed about it and discussed it, and we determined that we should fast until he got some food, just to keep the problem on our minds. At one of the state offices he was at today, a woman asked him if he was hungry and laid upon him some eggs and tacos and other things. So we all got to eat.

Neither of these things, if they hadn't been taken care of, would have terribly disrupted our lives. More severe blows are allowed to fall on us all the time. But God's apparent interest in these small difficulties is not small for us, and so doing such small things for others ought to be a big part of how we live.

Orwell on Libya

2011-03-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

Robert Zaretsky in Le Monde Diplomatique today on how Orwell would likely view Libya, in light of his own service in the Spanish Civil War. I reproduce it below under non-commercial fair use:

Libya: what would Orwell do?

Exclusive 17 March, by Robert Zaretsky

Libya’s civil war falls on the seventy-fifth anniversary of an earlier civil war, one that occurred on a neighbouring shore of the Mediterranean and galvanized the world’s attention: the Spanish Civil War. While the causes and contexts could not be more different, the ideals shared by Spanish loyalists and Libyan dissidents seem very similar. In both cases, they sacrificed their lives to resist despotism and defend democracy. And in both cases, western intellectuals proved far more willing to fight these battles to the last drop of the blood of others.

Few thinkers knew this better than George Orwell. In 1936, his long and ungainly frame clad in a ridiculous makeshift uniform, Orwell lumbered into a friend’s office in London. By way of explaining his attire, he announced that he was going to Spain. When asked why, Orwell replied, “This fascism, somebody’s got to stop it.” The only thing Orwell succeeded in stopping, it turned out, was a bullet: while serving as a corporal in an anarchist brigade, he was shot through the neck. Orwell survived, but the Spanish Republic didn’t, eventually falling to Franco’s forces.

At the very end of his account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell returns to England. Sitting in the train with “plush cushions under my bum” and gazing through the window at the “sleek landscape” of Devonshire, Orwell found it hard “to believe that anything is really happening anywhere.” And, quite remarkably, he goes on: “Earthquakes in Japan…revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning.”

Switch out Mexico for Middle East and milk for mocha latte, and we see little has changed. This includes the response of intellectuals to desperately complex struggles. In a terse essay titled “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell has little good to say about war. Long spells of boredom convulsed by a mortar blast; incessant squabbles with fellow soldiers over food; bouts of narcolepsy brought on by fear-filled nights; the omnipresent stink and filth of life in the trenches: this is war. “The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life),” he wrote, “is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in.”

Yet Orwell’s fellow intellectuals who had never fought nevertheless exhorted others to fight. The “sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid,” he bitterly observed, was all too typical of the times. The most confident, most insistent and most bellicose voices belonged to those who had never known war. While Orwell had learned that neither lice nor bullets bother to distinguish between good and bad people, intellectuals back home remained gladly ignorant of such matters.

In the current frenzy of advice mongering over Libya, there is the same strain of magical thinking among certain intellectuals. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the aging “new philosopher” better known for his dark suits, white shirts with open collar and mane of greying hair than for his strategic acumen, recently went to Benghazi, trailed by a battalion of photographers. When not posing with Libyan rebels in front of a shell-pocked building, BHL has been writing editorials, giving interviews and holding meetings with President Nicolas Sarkozy, urging the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya and use of “surgical strikes” against Qaddafi’s forces.

While “frappes chirurgicales” sounds more compelling than surgical strikes, BHL’s American homologue, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has hawked the same advice. At the same time, by Robert Kagan, the author of Of Paradise and Power, and William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, joined a group associated with the Foreign Policy Initiative in a letter pushing for immediate action to bring down Qaddafi’s regime.

Orwell was merciless on the complacent certainties of intellectuals. “No-fly zones” and “surgical strikes”? How not to think of Orwell’s remark that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool”? As for the metaphors themselves, Orwell would be equally pitiless: it is this sort of writing that “makes lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Military operations advocated by intellectuals would not be carried out in an aseptic space, but instead in a place of extraordinary volatility. In order to guarantee a no-fly zone, NATO pilots would need to fly constantly over Libya. As for surgical strikes, need we look any further than the use of drones in Afghanistan to know the hollowness of such a phrase, be it in French or English.

Would Orwell, then, have sided with those statesmen who continue to make haste slowly on the question of military intervention? Despite his loathing of bellicose intellectuals on the left and right, despite his recognition that the fog of war is far too heavy to allow for certitudes, and despite his awareness that we simply do not know what kind of government the Libyan rebels would form after Qaddafi’s overthrow, Orwell would make the case for intervention. In his essays, Orwell describes war’s reality so carefully in order to force us to understand what, at certain moments, we must accept if we wish to remain true to our humanity. War is squalid and cruel, but all too often peace can be even more fetid and nasty. In most wars, Orwell insisted, “one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.”

We know which side is which in Libya, just as Orwell knew which was which in Spain in 1936. Needless to say, Orwell was no one’s fool before he embarked for Spain in his mismatching hunting outfit; upon returning to England with a bullet-sized cavity in this throat, he was even less so. In Homage to Catalonia, he reveals the machinations of the Soviet Union and its efforts to control the Spanish unions and Communist party. At the same time, he understood that English and French France arms embargo imposed on both sides in Spain could only push the loyalists more deeply into Stalin’s embrace.

Yet despite all that he had seen, Orwell maintained a kind of enlightened pessimism. Soon after his return to England, he wrote to a friend: “What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical, but it does make me think the future is pretty grim.” The amateurish yet passionate resistance of the Libyan rebels echoes the spirit of the Spanish loyalists under Orwell’s command. In both cases, these accidental soldiers were barely able to shoot a gun, yet were willing to sacrifice their lives in the effort to learn. While the Spanish loyalists fought to save a legitimate and democratic government, the Libyan dissidents are fighting to overthrow a ruler whose willingness to kill his own people at the very least matches the brutality of Franco and his Phalangists.

We do not know what a post-Qaddafi Libya would look like, but it cannot be any grimmer than the current model. Orwell concluded that, at the end of the day, matters were rather simple in Spain. “In essence,” he wrote, “it was a class war; all else was froth on its surface.” It is also a class war in Libya: the few who have everything and are willing to murder and maim in order to maintain their power; the many who are fighting for their dignity. While he would not be surprised, Orwell would be as dismayed by the pusillanimity of the West today as he was seventy-five years ago.

America's man in Lahore today

2011-03-03T04:16:00.001-08:00

The Lahore High Court, as expected, found today at a hearing held at the jail that Ray Davis lacks diplomatic immunity because neither the US Embassy nor the foreign ministry had presented any authentic documents showing that he is entitled to it. But Judge Aujla put off charging him with murder, adjourning the case until the this coming Tuesday the 8th, because the defense said the prosecution hadn't yet provided all the docs detailing the charges.

So far no one in the US government is explaining to the taxpayers why using their tax money to hire people like Davis to arrange for terrorist bombings and shootings in Pakistan is good value for our money. It looks like Davis is going to trial. The Americans have been bullying the Pakistani government to blow off their own law and let Davis walk on these murders, never mind the coordination of terrorist attacks that Davis was engaged in, but they don't dare, for fear that the people will put them on a plane like Ben Ali or Mubarak.

Let's say a supposed consular official from Pakistan kills a couple of FBI tails on Olympic Boulevard in LA and the LAPD picks up, and it then turns out that he was actually working for Pakistani intelligence or maybe some mercenary contractor that rents out retired military hard guys, and his job in the States was to arrange for terrorist bombings and assasinations of American citizens. Would we expect the LA Superior Court to nicely dismiss the case and send him back to Pakistan, maybe with a box of chocolates and a long stem rose?

What kind of mentality lets anybody feel like that makes any sense? Doesn't it look like the thinking of the guy Jesus spoke of that wants to remove a speck from his brother's eye while there is a log in his own? Here is where Malachi sits up and advises anybody that claims to be under God, and who doesn't want to laugh out loud at what Americans expect of Pakistan in this matter, "Consider your ways!"

"He catches the wise in their own craftiness" (Job 5:12-13)

2011-03-02T00:24:00.000-08:00

Mad Magazine could not have made this up. It seems that that nice consular official, Raymond Davis, busted January 27 in Lahore, had some great music on those cell phones, even though he is not yet singing himself.

It seems that Davis had 33 Pakistani contacts in his three cellphones, of which 27 were members of the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taib, the outfit that did that caper in Mumbai a couple of years ago in which 164 died and about 300 more were wounded. And he had made lot of calls recently to these guys. The Pakistani and Indian papers are reporting from intelligence sources that "diplomat" Davis was engaged in recruiting young guys to work for these organizations to blow things up and kill people in Pakistan in order to show that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not safe - presumably to justify their seizure by the Americans. Operation Northwoods comes to mind, the plot developed in 1962 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to kill Americans and blame it on Cuba.

Anyway, Pakistan picked up another guy, Aaron DeHaven, last Friday on an expired visa. Turns out he works for an outfit called Catalyst Services LLC. It seems that according to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the rats are leaving town. and things aren't being blown up in Pakistan quite so much.

Now to figure out what effect this might have in Pakistan, an effective way to use our brain cells is to remember what the Bible says, that God has fashioned all our hearts alike, and then to consider how we as Americans would think. Let's imagine that several hundred Pakistani "diplomats" are running around the States, and recruiting hard guys to shoot Americans and blow them up in order to prove that the United States is an unstable place that should be invaded - and that these things are actually being done in American streets. Now stop right there: how will American citizens respond to that caper when they learn about it?

If you need the Americans for anything - like the Americans need the Pakistanis - how smart would you be to grab the Americans by the nose in that way? So then, how could these clever Americans be that stupid, grabbing Pakistani noses the same way?

It does get worse. If Aaron DeHaven is going to play secret agent man in Pakistan, shouldn't he get his visa renewed? And if Ray Davis is going to be shooting ISI guys on the street, should he be keeping the names of his Taliban buddies on his cell ph0ne contact list? I'm about as well-suited for espionage and covert ops as I am to be a hair stylist, but I think even my tradecraft is better than this!

The biblical lesson seems to be this. These guys delight to do these things because they are wise in their own eyes. The rules don't apply to them as for ordinary people, because they are special, the Superman that Nietzsche wrote of. And so they have been caught in their own craftiness, just as it is written. That happens a lot, but they never learn.

The funny thing about the Bible is that it contains very little of the direction people look for in life - which stock should I buy; how do I get that woman; should I take that job; how can I trick this foreign government or the American public into believing some lie, so that I get to do this or that thing? And because God is silent to such questions, people spend real money and trouble for the advice of clever men, instead of considering that if God won't answer, maybe we should be asking different questions.

The guidance God gives is quite simple: "What does the Lord require of you, O man, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" Sometimes that will look stupid, but the stupidity of God turns out a lot smarter than the cleverness of Raymond Davis and his handlers, doesn't it?

Al Jazeera English Live Feed

2011-02-26T18:31:00.000-08:00

I added that link to the list on the right, so you can easily get there from here. From the live feed, you can go to all sorts of other informative places.

For us old guys, it's a blast from the past, when TV news in the States was actually news 40 years ago, but better. If you're interested in your own history, Americans, go look and see how it used to be in your own country, although as I said, it was never quite this good.

In the States, Jon Stewart's Daily Show is about as close to what it gets to a news show, but Al Jazeera is real news.

While we're in there, the name: Al Jazeera means The Island, and refers to the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

UN Security Council Resolution 1970

2011-02-26T17:54:00.000-08:00

Very good unanimous resolution, including a referral of the Libyan government to the International Criminal Court, targeting travel and the finances of the people in the regime.

The highlight was the Libyan Deputy Ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, thanking the Council for the resolution and calling for the overthrow of this "fascist" regime, specifically asking officers of the armed forces to support the revolution.

There is, of course, no shortage of ironies. The passionate speech of the representative of Gabon, one of those introducing the resolution, condemning violence against peaceful protestors while the Gabonaise cops and army are now cracking heads. The Columbian representative, who, however, failed to mention the paramilitary death squads presently murdering labor organizers in his own country with the approval of his own government. The Chinese representative talking the same way while the Chinese cops are hauling people away before they can even demonstrate in sympathy with those same Libyan protestors. The American representative indignantly protesting violence against civilians while the American occupation force in Afghanistan is bombing the civilian population, destroying their crops and homes, and breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and shooting them or dragging them away. The British representative huffing and puffing about the Libyan security forces doing what they were doing with the arms supplied to them by British arms manufacturers for that purpose - a detail he forgot to mention.

But none of this, I think, can top Hillary Clinton, on February 15 denouncing governments that don't respect freedom of speech.

Emmanuel Margolis commenting in the Connecticut Law Tribune.

The video, with commentary in the Sky Valley News (WA). You have to scroll down a bit.

Equal weights, equal measures

2011-02-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

Moses writes that unequal weights and unequal measures are an abomination to the Lord, which means that from the perspective of God's law, such partiality - being abominable - is in the same bucket as having sex with animals. And Moses is clearly correct, since once we give way to such partiality, no one can say what atrocities we won't wind up making excuses for. Truly, if partiality is permitted, then all is permitted.

Needless to say, partiality is a whole lot more common among folks than having sex with their dogs, and a whole lot better thought of. In general, people generally think it's just fine, like Papa Bush declaring that he would never apologize for the United States of America while certainly believing that others should apologize for their own misconduct. So for Americans, 3,000 dead people in New York on September 11, 2001 is the biggest thing in the world, while 3.000 dead Panamanian poor people in Chorillo in 1989 at the hands of the US Marines is beneath notice, along with the thousands of Chileans murdered and many thousands of others tortured due to the American-sponsored coup of September 11, 1973. Jesus wasn't exaggerating when he said that what is held in honor among men is abominable to God. When we're told not to be conformed to this world, we're being told some pretty radical stuff, and if we actually obey that instruction, we'll be way out of step with everybody.

A particularly disgusting example of how this works has been supplied to us this past week by President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and Fidel Castro of Cuba, who have all been making excuses for Muammar Qaddafi's conduct in the past two weeks. How they would have talked if an American-supported dictator were doing exactly the same things can well be imagined.

No doubt they are correct in figuring that the Americans and Europeans would be pleased to take advantage of the situation in order to control Libyan petroleum. That's how it has always been. But does that change the nature of Qaddafi's conduct or the nature of his regime? And by making a revolting spectacle of themselves through their partiality, are these guys actually doing themselves or anyone else any good?

Now if these gentlemen really laid to heart the way of Americans that make all sorts of excuses for the conduct of their own favorite empire which they denounce in other countries - even as the Americans contract out torture to some of those very countries - if these guys understood that they were looking in a mirror, they might have said to themselves, "Wow, those Americans do look disgusting when they do that. Let's make real sure to learn from them not to do the same!" In this way, when we see a dog eating its own vomit, the proverb warns us to consider that that's what we look like when we return to our same old folly instead of turning away from it and doing it no more.

Instead, they've only seen debating points, seeing these specks in American eyes while taking no notice of the logs in their own. Now with their example in mind, how about asking God just how we're doing just like them right now, and learn to do otherwise. Disgusting conduct can be very purifying to look at, so long as we don't say in our hearts, "Thank you God that I'm not like those guys." The only alternative - the way of life - is to remember that God is really holding up a mirror to us. That way is tight and narrow, and few they are that find it.

"The cruel man troubles his own flesh" (Proverbs 11:17)

2011-02-24T00:26:00.000-08:00

Muammar Qaddafi seems to be headed for the exits, having already killed thousands of people to try to stay in charge. He could have made everything better for himself and everyone else by getting on a plane early, living elsewhere in comfortable retirement. That idiot Daniel Ortega would have been glad to sell him a comfortable pad in Managua. Or Berlusconi across the water in Rome could have worked out something for him. But that ship has sailed now, baby.

The thing that seems to have made the wheels start coming off was when Qaddafi's security forces started answering protests in Benghazi with machine gun fire. Most of the armed forces in town went over to the people, and after several hundred people were killed, Benghazi was in the hands of the people, supported by the army.

As Juan Cole pointed out, Qaddafi here is following the example of Mussolini and his colonial governor in 1930, Rodolfo Graziani, who put 80,000 Libyans in concentration camps, where more than half died, and by 1943 had driven out or killed half the population.

Qaddafi figured that cruelty would work, but the result was that his justice minister, his interior minister, almost all of his diplomatic corps, and most of the armed forces have turned against him.

That's the very purifying moral of what we've been seeing lately. The end of Zine al-Abeddine Ben Ali began when his cops robbed an unemployed vegetable seller of his cart and then laughed at him when he went to complain about it, so that he set himself on fire, and what finished him was when his special security forces deliberately killed people in Kasserine. Four days later, the army had put Mr Ben Ali on a plane.

What finished Mubarak was sending his pony riders and camel jockeys to beat people up, since he didn't dare to try to use the army, thus making clear to everyone his thuggishness and total lack of class - and so he lost the mandate of heaven.

The Americans came to grief in Iraq in great part because of their utter contempt for the lives of people there. You may be sure that it would not be thought fitting to fill the United States with depleted uranium dust to cause cancers and birth defects forever as they've done in Iraq - here in Chino Hills, Aero-Jet leaked a little depleted uranium in the woods and people got very excited indeed. Made them carefully clean it up, but do you think anything like that will ever happen in Iraq?

But this wanton cruelty and contempt for the lives of Iraqi people has brought Americans to grief in Iraq. They all thought it was a great idea to torture people all over the world, but America's torture gulag hasn't really been too helpful to American designs in the world lately, has it?

In Afghanistan, too, slaughtering civilians, destroying their homes and crops, and lying about it hasn't been working out too well. The latest - I could not have made this up - is that after American bombs and missiles had slaughtered 50-64 civilians in Kunar last week in the manner of Qaddafi, General David Petraeus told Hamid Karzai and other Afghan officials in a meeting that the explanation for burned children is that the parents are burning them and then blaming it on the Americans to make them look bad.

This is not going over too well in Afghanistan. How cruel do you have to be to do such things in a country where you have no business to be in the first place? And how cruel and stupid do you have to be, when your bombs and missiles burn little kids, to actually suggest that the parents are burning their own kids as a propaganda stunt? Can anyone imagine American parents doing that? So how do they think of ascribing such deeds to Afghan parents, except that they consider them subhuman? Which seems to account for their willingness to do these crimes in the first place.

In all these examples and many more, we see that cruelty does terrorize people all right, but by the time we're done, those that do it have harmed themselves. Truly, the cruel man, so intent on solving his problems by doing to others what he does not want done to himself, brings his way down on his own head. Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, Bush, Obama, and Petraeus give us great examples not to follow.

So I'm learning from these teachers a new appreciation for the value of doing mercy, and thereby doing good to my own soul, instead of troubling my own flesh by being cruel.

Women in Egypt

2011-02-19T14:32:00.001-08:00

I was talking with a couple of Christians in town last Thursday, and we got to talking about Egypt. I had to hear a lot of nonsense about how it was all organized by the Muslim Brotherhood on Twitter and Facebook by guys that were clean-shaven to conceal their membership in the Brotherhood (who didn't even join the street protests for several days), and how all the Egyptian Christians in their church were telling them how the Brothers were dressing in police uniforms and beating people, so that they could get control of the revolution that way - and now the Brotherhood is going to seize power and turn Egypt into an Islamic fundamentalist state like Iran, which has never happened since the Muslim conquest in 640-641. But it had to be true, since they were hearing this from these Egyptian Calvary Chapel members who in turn said they were hearing it from their family members in Egypt.

I don't know who has heard what from whom, but I really wish people had some sense of the ridiculous, some kind of functioning crap detectors. Ideology, like all idolatry, really makes people stupid. But reality will prevail. We'll see what happens in months to come.

One obvious difference is that in Iran it was Khomeini's baby, which other people joined. There is no equivalent of Khomeini in Egypt. But here's another point, more significant from a biblical point of view. Look at these women. This is the result of hard work in labor organizing, feminism, and other struggles to force an opening in civil society that has depended significantly on women for some time, this latest effort since at least 1998. Those ladies weren't facing those riot cops, and even intimidating them, out of nowhere.

The Bible records that the fundamental injustice among humans, coming after our injustice to God, is gender injustice - specifically men oppressing women. In brief, the woman got deceived and screwed up, and then the man deliberately took her advice, knowing it was wrong. And then their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked.

Only after the man ate and ratified the woman's mistake did the wheels come off. So Paul concluded in Romans 5.12 that it was by one man, Adam, that sin came into the world, and not by the woman.

And then God asked about this, and the woman told the truth, that the serpent had deceived her and she ate, and the man said, "The woman whom You gave to me gave it to me and I ate" - blaming God and the woman in one breath.

And yet millions of people. including rulers of the Christian church going centuries back, ascribe the blame to the woman, even saying she did wrong to blame Satan for his part - much as women are expected today, when their husbands beat them up, to say that everything is their fault.

So I think the role of women in the Egyptian revolution, how they participated and how they were free and safe from groping and abuse during the rallies, makes all the difference.

Watch those pics again. They don't look like what happens to women in Afghanistan, or in the American pornography industry, which produces and exports more violent pornography than any other nation in the world. They don't look like what generally happens to women in American churches either. It's not whether people call themselves Muslims or profess to be Christians or something else that counts.

Just as you would expect from Genesis 3, including the eternal enmity between Satan and Woman (Genesis 3.15), what matters most is what you do to women. What happens to women in Egypt going forward will determine more than anything else how things go from here. Societies that treat women better, as Islam did better than in Europe until around 1800, do better. Those that treat them badly do badly. It's not the theological professions that people make that counts so much as what they do, as we may read in the gospels.

"The wicked are caught in their pride"

2011-02-15T00:37:00.000-08:00

There's a funny story that I know I haven't been paying enough attention to. You neither, perhaps. January 27th, while things were starting to go south for Uncle Hosni, a nice American "consular official" named Raymond Davis was sightseeing alone in a rental car in Lahore when he found himself being tailed by a couple of young guys on motorbikes.

Well, in self-defense he shot and killed both these guys who were armed but never drew their weapons. Ray's self-defense was pretty good for an average diplomat - 2 shots each from his Beretta through the windshield, so he claimed, and two more apiece in the back. Mr. Davis administered 4 pills apiece to his patients, taking care to take pictures of their dead bodies with his cell phone. One of the wives has already killed herself in her grief.

Cops all around the world tend to be unimaginative - in Pakistan too - so the cops in Lahore, like all the American cops I've ever known, just couldn't see a way to picture this as self-defense. So they arrested Mr Davis and found three cell phones in his pockets, along with a Glock and three full clips, and "a small telescope." The American press has on the whole failed to mention these small details in its coverage of the case, but in Pakistan the papers write up the reports they get from the cops the same as they do here. And then another detail turned up - the two bikers were Pakistani intelligence agents.

The consulate claimed diplomatic immunity for Mr Davis, based on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961. But unlike American TV news watchers, the Lahore High Court, along with lawyers in Pakistan, have been reading the Convention, and they have noticed that Article 37, paragraph 2, states that the diplomatic immunity of "the administrative and technical staff," which the consulate said described Mr Davis, "shall not extend to acts performed outside the course of their duties." Lawyers and others in Pakistan are arguing that espionage and the assassination of Pakistani intelligence agents on their own soil with two shots each in the back fall outside the course of Mr Davis's duties. Which I suspect the judges I've met at the Office of Administrative Hearings might agree with.

These Pakistani lawyers also noticed the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963, which the Americans have somehow overlooked, which reads as follows in Article 41:

"Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial, except in the case of a grave crime and pursuant to a decision by the competent legal authority."

The Pakistanis are arguing that the execution-style murder of their agents in their own country is a grave crime, which again any hearing officer might well agree with.

For sure the Lahore High Court agreed, so they took Mr Davis from his comfortable cell in the police station and dumped him in a crowded jail, probably to soften him up without actually torturing him, because the Pakistanis for sure would like to hear Davis sing about what he knows.

The Americans have responded with all sorts of threats and pressure to get the Pakistanis to release Mr Davis, the law be damned, and that's perfectly understandable, since they don't want Mr Davis to sing. And if he doesn't, and he's found guilty of murder, he could end up with plenty of time in custody to tune up his pipes.

So the Americans are actually demanding the privilege of extra-territoriality for one of their junior sahibs. To understand how that goes down in host countries, consider how indignant Americans are just that UN diplomats blow off their New York City parking tickets.

Now close your eyes and do a thought experiment. How will it go down in the average American head if a Pakistani consular official, driving in downtown Los Angeles, is tracked by a couple of FBI guys on their motorcycles? The Pakistani "diplomat" shoots these guys twice each from the front and then gives them two more in the back to polish them off, and then he takes the pictures of their corpses with one of his three cell phones. Besides those, the LAPD finds a Glock and three full clips in his car along with a small telescope. And then the Pakistanis get Hillary Clinton fired for noticing that the Conventions deny the murderer diplomatic immunity and for insisting that they stand trial in an American court. Now when the US government caves and lets the Pakistani "diplomat" fly home, what will you see and hear from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh - or even Harry Reid - never mind the average American?

Consider the arrogance and complacency that make the American government even think of asking Pakistan to swallow such a humiliation, never mind the arrogance of this guy that thought himself entitled to execute Pakistani intelligence agents on the street in their own country. Pride does come before stumbling, and a haughty spirit before a fall, just as it is written. What makes these masters of the universe think that heaven's law carves out an exemption for them?

And they're acting this way in a country through which they must move supplies for their occupying army of 100,000 men in Afghanistan. Yes, lads and lassies, you're playing the Pakistanis much too close. The occupying forces in Afghanistan may find good cause to feel pretty unthankful to the idiots acting this way in their rear.

The more it changes, the more it's the same

2011-02-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

Ynet, the online English-language version of the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, reports today on the impossible situation of civics teachers in Israel because of the rising racism of their students, to the point that it's difficult to argue in class against openly genocidal sentiments.

The comments mostly blame the victims, and in my experience so-called Christians in the US condone this neo-Nazi racism in Israel using the same pretext, the supposed wickedness of the victims. These people claim that the Bible is the word of God and authoritative in their lives, but somehow they never get around to explaining how hatred and murderous sentiments against people are justified even if those are evil-doers. Like the Pharisees and the scribes, they hold to the doctrine that you should hate your enemy, and yet they amazingly call Jesus "Lord, Lord!" while explicitly blowing Jesus off.

When we find out that finding reasons to hate people doesn't justify us in hating them, that hatred no longer seems so desirable. It's an arresting thought that much of our hatred is motivated by a quest to justify ourselves. We really need to stop and think about that. It's hard to find a limit to how stupid we can be.

If that's you, baby, Malachi's advice is sound: "Consider your ways." As Paul put it, "Examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith," because if you don't believe what Jesus says, then you are by definition an unbeliever, and in calling yourself a Christian you are taking the name of the Lord in vain. Will doing that really justify you?

Cool Egypt videos

2011-02-12T00:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgCziE-Qxg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hllGRlV4nU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH9GfYmzLcI&feature=more_related

Hosni Mubarak has followed Zine Abeddine Ben Ali

2011-02-11T12:37:00.001-08:00

Snowball the cockatoo reports.

Take it away, Snowball!

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/792725/

Humor Break - Hosni Mubarak's last speech

2011-02-11T00:48:00.000-08:00

Instead of that stupid speech, Hosni, why didn't you play them this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aFymSogiUY

A few lessons from Egypt, for us

2011-02-10T12:04:00.001-08:00

First, an excellent analysis of the Egyptian situation, although from a socialist perspective which I respect but don't altogether share:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112101030726228.html

One point he makes that I had missed is that the Mubarak regime has been pushing Islamist moralism and other themes to divide and rule by provoking animosity among the population, for instance against the Christian minority. That seems to explain the general disgust in the present movement with religious bigotry, so that when the Muslim Brotherhood people started shouting their slogans the rest of the crowd shouted them down. Since the protests, no Christian churches have bee attacked, as was happening before. Instead, they're often guarded by young Muslim men.

Another thing worth looking at it is how the rich have all the money, how everything has been privatized so that cronies can get over, and nobody else has anything. The parallel in this respect to what is happening to the United States is quite striking.

Another point is that Egyptian society is not militarized so much as the military is commercialized. The army in Egypt is in business in a big way - real estate, shopping centers, all sorts of businesses. It's not that way here in the same flagrant way, but we get to much the same place. Generals have no trouble retiring into the private war contracting business. That's been so at least since Walter Dornberger, who worked thousands of concentration camp inmates to death at the Nordhausen rocket works in World War 2, came to the States to work in the space program, and became a senior vice president of Bell Aircraft.

This condition has certainly distorted the Egyptian economy, causing all the wealth to concentrate in a few well-greased hands. And Egypt really doesn't need fancy real estate developments in the desert, while farmland is parched. Much the same has happened in the United States, where the same kind of robber class under the Bush-Obama administration has gotten completely out of control. It's so that now it's called economic recovery that corporations are making more money and the stock market is rising because they're doing such a great job of getting rid of American workers and hiring people overseas to work cheap in their place.

Let's look at that slowly. You throw your workers on the street, so that presently they're out of their homes, and you hire someone cheap in China or Malaysia. The job is gone for good, not like job losses in economic downturns, because it's not companies getting rid of workers to hunker down in bad times. They're getting rid of them at all times to move overseas while still calling themselves American companies, for which they're rewarded in the tax code by the Congress which they have purchased. This way they do make more money, which they hoard or spend on hundred million dollar bonuses for their CEOs. So we're having a wonderful economic recovery because the corporations are making lots of money by abolishing jobs and manufacturing capacity. Time was that corporate profits were being skimmed off a healthy economy, so that those profits correlated to everyone else's success. When people were out of work, the corporations weren't making money either. Now their profits are the result of liquidating that economy, so that they are the result of the disintegration of the US economy. These owners of Congress and the President don't need the American economy anymore. GM can't sell cars here, but they're doing pretty well, because they're selling them in China.

Another parallel with Egypt is that Egypt is coming into a crunch because it will soon no longer be any kind of oil exporter, and it will continue having to import grain. It needs tourism and manufacturing. Whatever else happens, rising petroleum prices when Egypt can no longer export will choke the tourist trade while giving no export revenue.

In the United States, the predicament is less immediate but ultimately more dire. The US is a huge petroleum importer, depending on petroleum for food, transport, and even national unity. When the US can no longer borrow to buy it, the US economy will hit the wall.

What then for the US population? The regime, behind a democratic face, has prepared for the wheels to come off by putting in place all sorts of police state institutions, and in fact Obama has accelerated this process. Everybody that sends email is under surveillance and being spied on unconstitutionally, and becoming accustomed to think it's OK because at the moment nothing more is being done. But torture, imprisonment without due process, murder of even American citizens with no due process at all, and pointless security checks have become officially accepted. It's obvious that checkpoints in airports have nothing to do with security, because there are no real terrorists trying to blow up airplanes, which are a tough target just because the cabin door is locked. If any were interested in the American aviation industry, they would blow up the crowd assembled at the TSA checkpoint - and it's clear that our rulers know that won't happen.

So when the wheels do come off, what will the American people do? Will they come together as in Egypt today or in Argentina in 2001, or will they kick down on the weak as it generally is today, as happened in Germany, Romania, and Poland in the 1920s and 1930s? American history has seen both. Now is the time to prepare to be decent human beings in very bad times. I hope we do as well as the Egyptians are doing this month.

Progressive, conservative

2011-02-10T01:08:00.000-08:00

Senator Rand Paul just produced a budget-cutting proposal that doesn't touch Social Security or Medicare and does cut a great deal of corporate welfare. It's that great progressive in the White House that wants to cut Social Seceurity and Medicare while keeping corporate welfare intact.

Paul wants to chop the war industry, too, another thing our great progressives don't want to touch.

And he even wants to send less money to Israel, which is making all sorts of people scream.

That's why I keep remembering that progress is what happens in an egg, while at the same time when people call themselves conservative I want to know what they want to conserve.

Uh oh, a slave revolt!

2011-02-09T00:28:00.000-08:00

The "American Family Association" describes itself as a Christian organization, complete with a "Statement of Faith." So have a look at this video, and pay close attention, boring as it is.

If it were specific to the AFA, then whatever. I'm not picking on them in particular. Their significance is in just how indistinguishable they are from so many others, including some in my church, how predictably they react like the good Christian slave-owners, their fathers, that could flog a slave and wash his stripes in brine, and then go off to church and take communion. The moral idiocy of these people really hasn't changed at all. People don't too often take note of them that they have been with Jesus, do they? Certainly not the poor, to whom they're quick to prescribe more whie phosphorus and depleted uranium, more secret police torturers, more Hellfire missiles. In this last at least, they openly profess what spirit they are of.

Mubarak has amassed a $70 billion fortune on the backs of the poor, and his methods are those of American slave owners. Consider some of the footage in this video that was taken by the cops themselves.

Looks familiar doesn't it, just like the good old days here in the States. You know, back when they had prayer and Bible classes in the schools. The good old days before we fell away from the faith of our fathers, and from their whips and shackles.

And all the Christoids can think about is if these overseers of the slave populations of Egypt and other places lose their perches, what's going to happen to us and to our own safety?

What I want to know is, what happened in American Christianity, in the hearts of these "Bible believers" who blow it off, and in "pro-life" Christians whose trust is in murder, to the idea that our safety is found in the shadow of the Almighty - not in torturers, murderers, and robbers keeping us safe by keeping the poor under their boots?

Truly they're filling up the measure of their fathers, who hired slave breakers, slave catchers, and brutal overseers to torment and degrade their fellow human beings so they could prosper and feel safe going to church and praising God.

Now the good news in this is that the utter powerlessness of the Christian church in the United States today, its total failure to have a positive impact on American culture, is not because there is no God of power such as we see in the Bible. His arm is not short, and the witness of his power in time past is not a fairy tale. Things today are just what the Bible testifies they are whenever people profess to know God and deny him in deeds, having lips that draw near but hearts that are far away - being taken up with robbing the poor and slashing at them like Mubarak's cops in order to feel safe in this present world.

In 400 years, American Christians have always coveted the place of worldly power, asserting that the US is a Christian country - in total defiance of history and the Bible's testimony - in order to document their right to be boss, posting their crosses and 10 Commandments plaques in public places like a dog marking trees.

But what if at some point we stop constantly exalting ourselves and learn instead to humble ourselves, making it our business to follow the steps Paul lays out in Philippians 2? If Jesus went that way, doesn't following him mean to step out on that path ourselves? Maybe that way we might even see some of his results.

2011-02-07T00:52:00.001-08:00

Coptic Christian Mass with Muslims in Tahrir (Liberation) Square. The Coptic crosses are visible behind the crowd, but you have to pay attention. There are lots of people in the way!

As Juan Cole reports, it closely parallels the mass demonstrations against the British in 1919, which eventually led to the modern Egyptian state. A phony independence was granted to Egypt in 1922, much like that given to Iraq about the same time. Real independence for Egypt came in the Free Officers coup in 1952, and for Iraq in the July 14, 1958 coup that replaced the puppet monarchy with an independent state under General Abdel Karim Qassem.

Now that Egypt under Hosni Mubarak has become a satellite of Israel and the United States in exchange for a $2 billion annual bribe from the American taxpayers - who have all sorts of extra money to contribute to Hosni Mubarak's $70 billion personal fortune - the Egyptians are united in seeking real independence, just as they were in 1919, and with the same unity between Christians and Muslims that they had then.

A little child will lead them

2011-02-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkxO2bCbWyw&feature=player_embedded

Great pics from Cairo, especially the last

2011-01-28T15:52:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.sacbee.com/photos/2011/01/rioting-and-chaos-engulfs-egyp.html#mi_rss=The%20Frame

The War You Don't See (2 Thessalonians 2)

2011-01-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

John Pilger's 96 minute documentary. It's worth the time, so we can better understand how this present world deceives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7wXhN5h_Pg

In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul writes that the antichrist will be revealed in all deception so as to bring damnation to all who do not receive the love of the truth. He alludes there to Deuteronomy 13, which also teaches that God uses false prophets and deceivers to lead astray those who are already antagonistic to truth, which in itself is to be the enemy of the God of truth and of his kingdom, no matter how zealous you may be for Jesus.

I marvel at those who have so quickly slurped up the lies of Bush and Obama about the value of aggressive war and the need to bomb, invade, and occupy people all over the world. There's no question that professing Christians love to be lied to by their worldly governments and their preachers, so as to fit in with the sheeple around them and not have to confront their worldly fears and passions. The amazing thing is how they think they can live this way, so fully conformed in their thinking to this world and its values of greed, willful ignorance and love of the broad and easy way, and suppose that when antichrist appears, they will be equipped to see through his deception - and these same people commonly think his coming is imminent, so shouldn't they see the need to prepare themselves?

What God said to Jeremiah holds true: if footmen wear you out, what will you do against horses? If Christians are suckers for the lies of Bush and Netanyahu, how will they see through the real deal when it comes? Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." So when people love lies and resent the chance to wise up, when they just don't want to take the red pill and see the Matrix for what it is, what evidence is there, really, to convict them of being disciples of Jesus? Can anyone really picture Jesus getting excited about the "dangers" this world tells us about, what someone out there might do to us? Isn't he concerned about the hardness of our own hearts instead? Can anyone picture Jesus puttig his hand on his heart and pledging allegiance to a violent and haughty empire of this world, referrling to it as "under God with liberty and justice for all?" Can people who don't even care what Jesus would do in these matters fairly be called his disciples at all?

More on Tunisia

2011-01-16T21:45:00.001-08:00

It seems that the army has definitely been defending the people against Ben Ali's security men, and the army has even been deputizing citizen militias to protect their neighborhoods from these guys. They also arrested the former interior minister and several others for arranging the attacks against the people and the army.

An American living in Tunis and even helping to man the checkpoints in his neighborhood has been blogging at Tunisia Scenario. Well worth reading.

Congratulations, Tunisia!

2011-01-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

One of those dictators most appreciated by both the Israeli and American governments had to leave town Friday, the ill-named Zine al-Abedine ("the servant of faith") Ben Ali. For those who haven't followed the story, on December 17th, the police confiscated the fruit and vegetable stand of an unemployed college graduate for not having a permit, and he set fire to himself in despair. And the Tunisian people finally had enough.

Youtube video of the demonstrations in Tunis.

A little out of date, since Ghannouchi had to resign and make place for the parliament speaker. According to several reports, the army and the regular cops have stood with the people, while the security cops have been running around shooting people, just as happened in Romania in 1989, when Ceausescu went down.

Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom on Israel's grief at the prospect of democracy in the Arab world. Interesting to see this report in al-Ahram, Egypt's semi-official paper, since the Egyptian government may well be next and could not have been happy. A crowd outside the Tunisian embassy in Cairo was rejoicing and shouting "Mubarak next!" and the cops did not dare to beat them up as they usually do.

The chorus of the Tunisian national anthem sounds prophetic:

When the people will to live,
Destiny must surely respond.
Oppression shall then vanish.
Fetters are certain to break.

But for former president Ben Ali, now in Jeddah where Idi Amin retired before him, I offer this old standby from Ray Charles:

Happy new year!

2011-01-03T01:25:00.000-08:00

The gospel is God's good news to the poor, and it's worth pondering that proclaiming good news to the poor is right up there in the mind of Jesus - and Isaiah - with healing the broken-hearted, proclaiming liberty to captives, and setting at liberty those that have been broken in pieces. This is all pretty miraculous stuff, which no shortage of false prophets and false Christs of every kind promise us incessantly. But their campaign promises, the lying claims of their pledges of allegiance, and the change we can believe in never really work out that way, do they?

Thing is, Christians, believing the good news of Jesus presupposes that you believe the bad news of God about the world that makes you realize that we really need good news. To believe any good news that might come along about a successful treatment for pancreatic cancer or heart disease, or even to be interested in it, you have to believe the bad news about pancreatic cancer or heart disease that the good news is about fixing.

That's why the only people that can believe God about his good news are those that are well-acquainted with what the world is all about, the kind of bad news it is for the poor of all kinds, and for anyone that doesn't hold the truth in contempt. God's good news is for the poor because the rest have their good news in full already (Luke 6:20-26). The rich already know that this world is under God and gives liberty and justice to all, so what do they need good news from God for?

You others, hear some bad news, again from Leonard Cohen, which if your ears get properly acid-washed from the good news BS of this world, might prepare those ears to receive some genuine good news:

Listen to it.

Everybody Knows

Everybody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithfulk
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
When you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe's still picking cotton
For your ribbons and your bows
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody know the scene is dead
But there's going to be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach at Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Happy new year! As Jesus says, happy are you poor, happy are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, happy are you when men revile you and hate you and cast out your name as evil for the sake or justice. Not too many find that path, as Jesus said. None of us can, unless we get led there, coerced actually, by God. May we find that blessing this year, in which we know it will be coming apart.

Psalm 137: Leonard Cohen's commentary

2010-12-15T22:51:00.000-08:00

An odd take on it but very accurate. In fact it describes how God has done things in my own life, so I have to look at a lot of things again in a different way. A most interesting and surprising allusion to Psalm 122.

The video

The words:

By the rivers dark
I wandered on.
I lived my life
In Babylon.

And I did forget
My holy song:
And I had no strength
In Babylon.

By the rivers dark
Where I could not see
Who was waiting there
Who was hunting me.

And he cut my lip
And he cut my heart.
So I could not drink
From the river dark.

And he covered me,
And I saw within,
My lawless heart
And my wedding ring,

I did not know
And I could not see
Who was waiting there,
Who was hunting me.

By the rivers dark
I panicked on.
I belonged at last
To Babylon.

Then he struck my heart
With a deadly force,
And he said, "This heart:
It is not yours."

And he gave the wind
My wedding ring;
And he circled us
With everything.

By the rivers dark,
In a wounded dawn,
I live my life
In Babylon.

Though I take my song
From a withered limb,
Both song and tree,
They sing for him.

Be the truth unsaid
And the blessing gone,
If I forget
My Babylon.

I did not know
And I could not see
Who was waiting there,
Who was hunting me.

By the rivers dark,
Where it all goes on;
By the rivers dark
In Babylon.

Humor Break - Simple Explanation of "Quantitative Easing"

2010-11-28T20:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4e8Cb-Dc4I&feature=player_embedded

Wikileaks and the Christoids

2010-11-26T22:41:00.000-08:00

Paul the apostle wrote, "Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them" (Ephesians 5:11).

59 years have failed to get me used to stupidity - clear evidence, I guess, that I'm pretty stupid myself. So I was surprised at church a couple of weeks ago when I praised the good service of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in exposing the vile deeds that our rulers have been doing and concealing, and this Bible teacher fell uncomfortably silent.

Maybe his problem is some kind of dyslexia, so that he reads, "Do not expose the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather have fellowship with them" - and Wikileaks is certainly violating that commandment!

It shouldn't surprise me, since Jesus said that the whores and tax gatherers would get into the kingdom of God before the Bible teachers of his own day, but I keep right on being surprised. People like Julian Assange that do not profess to know God are obeying the apostle Paul's instruction in Ephesians 5:11, while people who teach these words in church turn them on their heads and fling them to the ground.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

Gratitude is good, and I've come up short in it all my life. But as the Thanksgiving holiday comes up, I'm reminded of how people are so often thankful in the wrong way for the wrong things, thereby profaning the entire concept of thankfulness.

For instance in Luke 18:9-14, the Pharisee prays with himself, "I thank you, God, that I am not like other men!" The guy would be way better off if he were not so thankful.

And from the massacre at Mystic in 1637 on up through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American Christians have been giving thanks for their success in the mass murder of civilian populations, forgetting that such successes do bad things to the hearts of those who succeed at them.

If we're actually Christians, let's learn to be thankful for the things that God does - for when we deny ourselves in order to do justice and love mercy, for when we decrease so that Jesus may increase. When the world rejoices, we should often mourn, and when the world gives thanks we should generally be ashamed. If we're in harmony with the Spirit of God, won't we be out of step with the world (John 16:20)? Are we giving thanks to God for what he gives, or to ourselves and our own objects of worship for our success in getting over?

Veterans Day blather

2010-11-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

We had lots of sentimental blather, as always, about how we're supposed to be thankful to veterans for our freedoms. Here are just a few problems:

- If the people talking like this were real patriots, they would pay some attention to the founding fathers of our country. Those guys warned with one voice that standing armies destroy our freedom, not that they protect it. The American armed forces, if the founders are to be believed, are a dire menace to our freedom, not its defenders. And the founders are definitely to be believed. We've reached the point where the generals openly dispute policy with the civilian government, which caves. I won't say that Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Adams would have been shocked, because they foresaw this and would only be disappointed, not astonished. But the war lovers and militarists ought to have the decency to confess themselves to be the enemies of the American republic that they are, instead of wrapping themselves in the flag as they go about promoting its destruction.
- I understand why American "patriots" agree with Chairman Mao that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and since they equate American power with freedom, they therefore suppose that freedom comes from the barrel of a gun. But somehow it doesn't work out that way. Christians at least ought to agree with Paul that liberty is where the Spirit of the Lord is , not where a soldier with a gun is.
- We don't protect our own freedom by going thousands of miles away to trash other people's homes and to rob them of their lives and freedom, and to impose corrupt puppet dictatorships on them. Since what goes around comes around, sending American troops everywhere to terrorize and dominate people can only result in the loss our own freedom, since freedom is for those who grant freedom to others, not for those that enslave others.
- Finally, the truth is that getting our soldiers killed all over the world in order to dominate others is a pagan ritual of human sacrifice. It's pretty obvious that all the sentimental blather about what heroes they are is to over-compensate for the truth - the American people cynically sacrifice the lives of their professional military in wars that they don't even want to think about themselves, never mind fight in, so that they can enjoy their soft lives on the backs of the foreigners so beaten into submission. It's easy to drown such self-knowledge in an empty emotional bath. If people really want to do right by these men and women, how about bringing them back home and giving them real and honorable work to do, instead of sending them abroad to be killers, vandals, and rapists in places like Okinawa that they have no business to be in?

Pagans are always burning their children in the fire to their gods and feeling holy about it, thus hiding themselves from their own blood-guilt. But Christians ought to abstain from this lust of the world. Our call is to walk in the truth, which has nothing to do with the sentimental worship of worldly arms and the reliance on the shed blood of men to give us life and freedom. God provided that through the death of Jesus on a cross and his resurrection, and for a Christian, that's enough. Death which does not involve resurrection is of Satan the lord of the flies, not of God, who is the God of the living, not of the dead.

Even the stones cry out

2010-11-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

The National Post is a Canadian paper that supports Stephen Harper's Conservative government:

http://www.nationalpost.com/Stalinwould%20have%20been%20proud/3737862/story.html

Lots of American Christians are unable to digest a word like this. If they did not reject the assessment of John the apostle, that "the whole world lies in the wicked one," their digestive systems would be stronger. The word of God is good medicine.

How badly things go for us, whoever we are, when we say, "Thank you God that I am not like other men!" (Luke 18:9-14). It is what opens the door to what Paul calls "strong delusion." From the National Post:

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom.

His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death. Ponder that for a moment.

He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering Khadr's trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as "Interrogator 1."

In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer, U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used against Khadr in court.

This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed out of any real court of law, he'd probably be convicted. But even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S. reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes, including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he wasn't even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really, truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord. Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. They were designed to force people to say what interrogators wanted to hear -- yes, I am a capitalist stooge, yes I am a Trostkyite, yes I am a terrorist.

And now Guantanamo's very first military tribunal has its first guilty verdict, thanks to those methods of coercion first perfected for the Soviet Bloc show trial. My God, what have we done? Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling.

- Tony Keller, a former editor of the Financial Post Magazine, is a visiting fellow at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation.

Hard news, bad news

2010-11-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting conversation on an autism forum a week ago, and I came upon a great fundamental truth:

To the degree that we refuse hard news, we become bad news

It's all over the Bible, of course. People murdered the prophets, becoming bad news to themselves and their whole nation, because they hated the hard news, true as it was, that the prophets brought.

Jesus had some hard news for his hearers too. "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you" - and those who wouldn't hear it were gone, hurting themselves and everyone around them. Peter didn't want to hear it when Jesus told them that they would grab him, flog him, spit on him, and nail him on a cross. So Jesus had to address him as Satan - adversary - and when Jesus talks to you like that, you'd best believe you're being bad news.

Now all this is obvious everywhere in the world. When this came up in the autism forum, it was in the context of people being in denial about their kids being autistic, so that they don't get the help they need. Lots of people die of cancer because they blow off hard news that could have saved their lives.

Blow off hard news, be bad news: it's a universal principle. I'll leave other examples as an exercise for the reader. I've been seeing lots of ways I can be bad news a little less, by making peace with hard news when it's the truth.

Who Is a Christian?

2010-10-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

My last post promptly drew a sincere question - how can these people be described as Christians? And then a helpful explanation from one of those "Christians," or Christoids, perhaps. And there's the problem: it is perhaps. The guy certainly isn't talking as Jesus or the apostles would, even being often reproved. He clearly isn't learning from the apostles or hearing from the God he says he believes in, and therefore is certainly not a real Christian, even though he thinks he believes the Bible which he blows off in his personal conduct. Just another empty religious hypocrite, right?

Well, no, I don't know that, and nobody else does. Maybe he is a real Christian. The Lord knows those that are his, and in the parable of the wheat and the tares, it's clear that we can't root up the tares, because we'll root up the wheat with them. The smoking wick gives forth sooty smoke, and no light, but the Lord doesn't quench it. Today the guy is a fool, showing no evidence of the fruit of God's spirit, being a dishonest reviler and somehow convinced that such conduct makes him more persuasive. But how do I know what glory may rest upon him in ten years?

The proverb says that to those who rebuke the wicked there will be sure delight, but such sure delight is not promised to us for judging one another. Reproving the wicked is one thing - which we all are from time to time, so that Jesus addressed Peter as Satan right after he had recognized Jesus as the Son of God. Godly reproof is centered on conduct and goes no farther. Judging one another is presumptuous, overdriving our lights. As Paul wrote, "The Lord knows those that are his (we don't!), but whoever names the name of the Lord, let him depart from iniquity."

Christians are those that name the name of the Lord in this world. That's how the Bible gives it to us. "The name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of you," Ezekiel wrote. He wasn't referring to true disciples but to Israel as a whole, the people from whom the world was learning how to think of the living God.

A very relevant example is David's servant Joab. He was altogether personally loyal to David's person, but he never got David's mind on things. So he was always killing people that David didn't want killed. David gave Solomon the task of doing away with Joab after his own death, to avenge the blood of Amasa and Abner whom he murdered. But who could say up to then that Joab was not David's servant?

There are lots of Joabs in the world today, people who would do anything for Jesus, including killing people he doesn't want killed. Just as Joab called David my lord the king and never could learn to do as he said, like not murdering people, these disciples are always slandering Muslims, reviling and misrepresenting other religious opponents, and admiring and following rich guys in fancy clothes and big cars, like the world around them that they love. But if they love Jesus, preach him in the world, confess that he is Lord even when they get hated for it, they're Christians, aren't they?

Well, maybe not, since they're blowing off what he says, and Jesus did say, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and don't do the things that I say?" Lots of people will say at the last day, "Look at how we served you and did all sorts of wonderful things in your name," and they won't be jiving. They'll believe their own plea, which they're making at the judgment seat of Christ and they will be truly surprised when he says, "I never knew you."

But maybe they really are disciples. Who is Jesus asking, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and don't do what I say?" None other than his disciples who followed him up the mountain. And he was curing them with the word of truth, if they could hear it. So how can I say someone is not a Christian just because he's a bruised reed or a smoking wick? I just don't know that.

When someone names the name of the Lord and claims to be his disciple, it takes too long to explain to the world that he's not a Christian, especially since we don't know where he stands - because ultimately we're all what God is going to do about us, and that is not yet seen.

I've been very clear that the United States is not a Christian country. It has a Christian heritage, but so does the whole earth, because God made the whole thing and it bears his mark, and all are descended from Noah, whom God saved out of the flood. And the Christian heritage of the United States is a complicated thing, because it's a heritage of falling away, of enormous spiritual pride and self-conceit - the Pilgrims and the Puritans vaunting themselves as the light of the world, the city on the hill, as they robbed and murdered those they found here, repaying them evil for the good they received from the Indians who kept them alive through their first winter.

It is just shuck and jive to speak of Christians being a small and powerless minority in the US, unable to affect public policy. Is it not the Christian churches who egg on the bombings and invasions of others, and the ever-increasing greed and cruelty of the Israeli state? Evangelical church members consistently show higher approval of torture than any other segment of the American population. So can we just tell the world that these evangelicals, these Bible preachers and faithful students of the Bible, with their public preaching of Jesus, are not Christians? They're Christians, baby. They're apostate from Christ, but in Bible terms they're Christians - in a way. Jesus was shut out of the Laodicean church, standing outside and knocking, ready to puke them up in fact, but Laodicea was still his church.

Let's think further about where all this goes. When Paul writes, "Now we see in a mirror in a riddle," we'd best figure that some things just won't be clear. We're in the church of Jesus Christ, when we're in Laodicea, but he's not allowed in. Does that make any sense? Well, no, but that's how it is. It's being Attwood among the Christoids, among Christians without Christ.

Not like the 1970s

2010-10-12T01:38:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1970s, lots of people were saying we were in big trouble, running out of oil, and so forth. Looks like they were wrong, so why should we pay attention now?

Sharon Astyk explains here what the differences are, but also why they weren't so wrong in what they actually said, rather than what people remember they said. It deserves a careful read.

The odd thing is that Christians are always saying that Jesus is returning any day, in which case things must be desperate and about to hit the wall. At the same time, they're always ready to hear from Rush Limbaugh and other such false prophets that everything is fine with the empire and that those that think the wheels are coming off don't know what they're talking about. Some mutually exclusive ideas need to be rubbed together between the ears of such folks, I'd say.

Thing is, what Jesus and the apostles said about the end applied right then, when spoken to people that were at least 2000 years from that event. If we don't know how those words applied to people listening as Jesus spoke, who would definitely not see his return, we don't have any idea what he was talking about.

If you expect to see how his words apply, you have to stop reading into it that Jesus will be coming tomorrow while the world we're in love with is doing just fine and our favorite empire and "our troops" are taking great care of us - or worse yet, the silly stuff about Christians being whisked out of their SUVs as they're rolling down the freeway.

How do these words make sense no matter when he returns or when the world ends, if we have no idea when that is? You know, we really don't!

In fact, Matthew 24-25 is how it looks whenever the wheels are coming off any civilization, even the relatively minor unraveling of 1914-1918, nonetheless horrifying, which in hindsight clearly was the beginning of the end of Western Civilization - this whole comfortable way of floating above it all and being able to do without God's provision because we've become so good at strip-mining the earth and those on it who aren't as good at killing and robbing as the enlightened West, so that we can live independently of the God who made it all.

So it was, in a small way, when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and exiled the people from their earthly kingdom because God had seen enough of them using it to prostitute themselves to this world, so that the land could rest at last. It was the same when Rome unraveled, because again the Christians worshiped it. And it is again the case today, and again because the Christians have given themselves up to the worship of the kingdoms of this world - the United States most of all, only because it is presently the gaudiest, most arrogant, and most full of the worldly power that modern Christians have chosen instead of the cross.

One thing the Bible makes clear is that bowing down to Satan in order to receive the kingdoms of this world, as Jesus refused to do, never works in the end, although it starts out looking great. And that's what we do, when we rely on these kingdoms through stealing, killing, destroying, and lying - the deeds of Satan - to fight our battles.

Pleasant surprise!

2010-10-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

Stephen passed the GED! He said in the last IEP meeting that he wanted to take it just to see what would happen, and the district agreed to cough up the fee. So he enrolled in the adult school and went an hour or so for several days and took some pretests. They worked out pretty well, but I really wasn't hoping he's pass all five, and with enough padding to pass overall. But we got the poop from the state today, and he has his General Equivalency Diploma.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), this calf does get to stay on the IDEA tit until age 22, and he made it very clear in the last IEP meeting that he means to do so. So we'll work the system for transition services, occupational therapy as needed, whatever, and presently some community college. They did him out of any high school instruction, so I don't feel bad for them. Stephen didn't gain a single high school credit.

Since his other leg was worked on by the cutter on the 24th, he's going to be in a wheelchair for a while. We'll be four months or so winding that up. So we ought to get him on his feet and starting school around the end of January, God willing.

Equal weights, equal measures

2010-09-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

President Obama is now arguing in a federal court that he is not only entitled to kill an American citizen without any due process at all, but that the courts have no right even to consider the legality of the action - never mind such small details as the constitutional prohibition against anyone being deprived of life "without due process of law."

Glenn Greenwald has the details here:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/09/25/secrecy

I remember that when George Bush asserted prerogatives of this kind all sorts of "progressives" went ballistic - and rightly so. But now the same crowd says we all have to support Obama against those terrible Republicans, and they make excuses for Obama doing what Bush did - only more so. Why, exactly, is it so important to support someone who claims dictatorial power with no oversight whatever and not the slightest concern for the Constitution which he swore to uphold and defend at his inauguration? Why was it so important to get rid of Bush for the same things that must be overlooked in Obama, and worse?

7 Questions and answers on Islamic community center

2010-09-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

My friend John Rankin posed 7 questions to prayer leader Feisal Abdul Rauf regarding the planned community center and Islam. My answers to John below, with a few typos cleaned up since I commented on his blog. To see both the questions and answers, open his in a new window:

There are all kinds of problems in your questions to Rauf, especially in how you compare ideal Christianity to practical Islam, whereas the honest thing is to compare equals - practical Christianity to practical Islam, and ideal Christianity to ideal Islam.

Specifically:

1. Islam is no more a one-way religion than Christianity. Islam states that there is no compulsion in religion, and so people are free to leave, just as Christianity allows. In practice, where Islam captures the state or otherwise dominates culture, it coerces people to remain, and in some places even kills them - and in practice that has been the invariable practice of Christianity for the past 1800 years. In theory, both are perfect in this matter. In historical experience, both are bad, Islam being much less so, being the eastern Mediterranean version of the Reformation, which historical circumstances guided in a somewhat different direction.

2. Cordoba was the most tolerant and religiously equal society anywhere at the time, far exceeding the history of practical Christianity from the moment Christians obtained any political power from around the 2nd century onward. It fell somewhat short of the Christian ideal of the level playing field, but it also fell short of the Islamic ideal - no compulsion in religion. But it is perfectly reasonable for an Islamic cultural center, or a Christian church, to apply the standard of Cordoba on its own premises - protection of others as dhimmis. Christians are in fact quite resentful of efforts to apply secular non-discrimination statutes to their own hiring practices, and rightly so. To conflate Cordoba House's application of Cordoba's principals in its own house with a purported goal of establishing a Muslim caliphate over the US as a whole is simply not honest.

3. The tolerance of Cordoba is insufficient, but so is that of Calvin and the other Reformers, who explicitly stated that it was the job of the emperor to punish heresy, and who murdered people over religious doctrine all the time. That the Reformers were more likely to drown you than burn you as the RCs did was not a truly radical departure. Again, you compare Islamic practice to the Christian ideal. Proceeding that way is by no means beyond reproach.

4. In fact, as you've made clear in your own writings, integrity and wholeness are only found in submission to Allah, so that these are equivalent. Moreover, Paul wrote that we are to let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, which clearly implies that peace derives from submission to Allah, so that peace is lost through rebellion against that rule. The Islamic doctrine of peace through submission to God is in fact a biblical teaching happily preserved in Islam. That this is distorted into religious authoritarianism in Islam is obvious. [sarcasm alert] That's very unusual in the history of Christianity, isn't it?

5. The law of Christ is obligatory for all Christians, and it regulates the minute details of our lives. There isn't anything in a Christian's life that is not to be subject to the lordship of Christ. Shari'a can distort that principle by regulating things with a rule that need to be regulated by relationship, but that's just what happens with Moses in Judaism, and most certainly in every Christian tradition.

Moreover, since the Qu'ran refers to Mary and others long before Jesus as Muslims, it is evident that Islam in Qu'ranic thought precedes Muhammad and is indeed submission to God. And John Rankin, among other Christians including Peter Attwood, holds that true peace can be attained only through submission to God. Hence to hold that belief, which is our own, against Cordoba House is certainly not the use of equal weights and equal measures that is required of us.

6. Shari'a no more implies a top-down government than the statutes of Torah do. In fact, the regulations involved are frequently impossible for any government to police and can easily lead one into conflict with the demands of civil government, as in fact they often have. Top-down governments that regulate the small details of our lives are historically quite impatient with religious codes that do the same thing and which do not look to government for their enforcement.

Do governments like Sa'udiyyah, the "Christian" kingdoms over 1500 years, and the modern state of Israel elect themselves as enforcers of such codes, with the connivance of religious people? Sure do - even now in the States, to wit, the Chino Valley Unified School District - so far as they can get away with it. Is there any evidence that Rauf is entertaining such ambitions?

7. Now there's a good question. Will Cordoba House get a chance to see an expression of Christianity that meets or exceeds what Islam teaches concerning Jesus the Spirit of God and the Word of God, who will judge the world by the law and the gospel in the last day? They won't see it in the statement of the previous six questions in this piece.

Take a Quiz!

2010-09-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

From Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse in The American Conservative magazine:

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-american-way-of-war-quiz/

Good to know we don't need anything done here at home!

Hard cat news

2010-09-13T01:52:00.000-07:00

Gayle's old cat, Maggie, had to be put down last week. She's been around for 18 years, sometimes Gayle's only friend. Her kidneys were completely shot, and there was no more to be said.

Gayle is distressed because she did make some mistakes that made things worse than they would have been if she knew better. Thing is, it seems like in all things we do that really matter, we get to see how dumb we were, and how it would have been better if we had more smarts. Only with trivial things do we ever get to congratulate ourselves on how perfectly we played it. Anything more significant than a game of solitaire, we don't get to boast that way.

Gayle has gotten to look at some issues that she wouldn't have without Maggie's death, and so God has used the death of a cat to cause her to draw nearer to God. Gayle also has said a number of times that Maggie taught her how to love.

A dead cat is close to dead last in the world's estimation. So I am reminded of Paul's assessment: "God has chosen foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that he may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God."

Islam

2010-08-30T00:15:00.000-07:00

I've been asked what I think of Islam.

St. John of Damascus lived in Damascus and held high office under the Muslim Caliph in the 8th century, and he regarded Islam as a Christian heresy, not as a separate religion. That was certainly the view of the Christian king of Ethiopia, with whom the early Muslims found refuge, and I agree. I think it's clear that the animosity, which has always been far more prevalent on the Christian side, is a Pepsi-Coke thing. It's the bitter rivalry of those that are alike. Christians have historically hated Muslims and Jews far more than Hindus or Buddhists, for instance, because they are most like us.

Muslims, as I first found in the Muqaddima, believe that Jesus Christ will judge the world on the last day. He is called the Spirit from God and also the Word of God. He rose from the dead.

Historically, I think it's pretty obvious that Islam may be best understood as the eastern Mediterranean version of the Reformation that took place later in Western Europe. These two took different paths for various reasons - for instance, the Catholics didn't collapse in the face of Reformers as the Byzantine empire did before Islam, so that the stalemate of the religious wars in Europe led eventually to both sides losing credibility and giving ground to secularism. That attrition didn't happen in the east, because the Muslims conquered quickly and easily and didn't persecute the Christians. Indeed the Christians were glad to see them, because they were tired of being persecuted by the Byzantines over subtle differences in Christian doctrine, much as a secular Croatian state looks a lot better to Eastern Orthodox Christians than the Roman Catholic Ustashe regime that killed 250,000 of them during World War 2.

Just as the Roman Catholics and the Protestants caricatured each other's doctrines and became more extreme themselves in reaction, the same happened with Islam.

For instance, Islam is horrified by the idea that God might have a son, because the notion of God having sex with a woman and begetting a child on her is an abhorrent notion fit only for the idols of Greek mythology - and it looks like that's where Christians got that idea. Christian doctrine agrees with Islam on that, but the notion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, which has no biblical support, is frequently argued from the premise that Mary became God's wife. This false argument clearly provoked the Muslim response. God does beget sons, but it's not a sexual thing in any way. It is the the divine nature engendered in people who hear and believe God's word, who begot Jesus in Mary through the word of faith that she received from the angel.

That the word of the one God which brought into being the worlds and raises the dead can engender God's nature in those who hear God obediently is not so foreign to at least some variations of Islam. Arabic actually makes all this much more clear than English does, in that walad refers to a son born of sexual union, whereas ibn (related to Hebrew ben) need not. Ibn falistin (son of Palestine), or ibn California, do not suggest that a man was sexually begotten by Palestine or California.

Some Muslims reject the notion that Jesus was actually killed on the cross, based on Surah 4:157, which says, "But they killed him not, nor crucified him." However, the Qu'ran states elsewhere that he certainly did die and was raised, and in fact the mystery is quite easily resolved when we consider what Jesus said himself. "For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again" ( John 10:17-18).

We have a similar history of such controversies in Western European Christianity, for instance the controversy over salvation by faith alone, or the nature of the eucharist. It's evident when we look at the scriptures that both sides are right in different ways, which become obvious if we actually examine the scriptures in context. These are what Paul calls stupid controversies, so it should not surprise us that similar stupid controversies arose in the east, as such things do when the parties are aiming to prove themselves right and the other wrong, rather than to learn the truth.

The present Muslim-hating rage in the United States is quite obviously a manifestation of the kind of pre-genocidal hatred that led to Russian pogroms and the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. It is not surprising in a nation with a Crusader mentality, that wants to bring its gospel to the world with bomb and missile. But it remains shocking that people who claim to be disciples of Jesus should have anything to do with it, and still worse that they should even take the lead in such wickedness.

And since it's no new thing, but the kind of hatred and love of persecuting that we've seen in professing Christians against the Jews and others for the past 1800 years or so, we need to consider that it isn't just Muslims or Jews that are radically mistaken about some things, but Christians too. Jesus said that the tree is known by its fruit. When we look at the fruit these past centuries, considering the record of murder, persecution, robbery, and genocide that Christians have regularly participated in, don't we need to go to Doctor Jesus and get thoroughly and correctly diagnosed and cured before we have anything to say to Jews or Muslims?

The proverb says, "Who can say, 'my doctrine is pure; I am free from my sin?'" That's pretty clear. The way we know our doctrine is pure is when we're free from sin, so if we're not free from sin, something is wrong with our doctrine. The Bible knows nothing of right doctrine and wrong behavior. "The tree is known by its fruit." Our wrong behavior is God's temperature gauge warning us that we have him wrong somehow. Our emphasis on bullet items like the Trinity, baptism, and all the rest - even though it's good to get these right - is our way to kid ourselves that we don't need to heed that gauge. But Jesus says we do.

The Bible on why Christians are last to understand

2010-08-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

Curt has posed a number of great points deserving an answer. I'll address one of his comments here.

He remarked concerning my Hiroshima-Nagasaki post, and the apostasy and worldliness of Christians that condone this deed, that even an atheist can say these things. Indeed, the theological issues are that obvious, so that only professing Christians seem unable to understand them. And back in the day only "Christian" Europe thought it was appropriate to persecute the Jews for not believing in Jesus. Did Jesus ever do that? The Muslims, the Chinese, the Indians - pretty much everyone else had more sense than "Christian" Europe.

The Bible makes it clear that the professing people of God can easily be a synagogue of Satan (Revelation 2:9), that the church ("among you") can easily be where Satan's throne is (Revelation 2:13), and that Jesus may well be outside the church and knocking on the door, close to puking (Revelation 3:14-20). That last, Laodicea, is especially pertinent, since the problem there is that God reproves and chastens those he loves, and so they need to be zealous to receive that correction in order that they might repent - and that's exactly what they want none of.

American Christians are zealous for a lot of things, but not for the reproof and chastening of God, often delivered through such disfavored instruments as Muslims, homosexuals, the ACLU, Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Afghan resistance (Deuteronomy 32:20-21), who have in common only that they have things to tell us that should prompt repentance - and who are hated for exactly that reason, whatever other pretexts are devised.

When people are not zealous for the things that bring about their own repentance, they generally become zealous for things that enable them not to. And as in the case of Saul the son of Kish, or Paul before he met Jesus, or David's general Joab, such zeal generally means killing other people for God's sake.

Hence the unusual eagerness of American Christians to drop bombs on people, to invade them, to imprison and torture them - and all the polls show that "Christians" are more eager than the rest of the American population to do all these things - is revealed in the Bible to be the manifestation of their Laodicean spirit, their hatred of the spirit of repentance. Which is to say, their hatred of the Holy Spirit, which explains why in our abundance of religious zeal, holiness is almost unheard of.

What a free country looks like

2010-08-09T02:31:00.000-07:00

Can it happen here?

Hiroshima, Nagasaki - and the wussiness of American Christians

2010-08-08T00:24:00.000-07:00

65 years ago the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian population of Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on the 9th, three days later. Americans generally approve, although the rest of the world feels differently.

There are some remarkable theological implications in some of the details.

The Christian churches these past 1600 years or so have celebrated August 6, celebrated by the US with the Hiroshima bomb, as the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus was transfigured before his apostles and was too bright to look at. The Nagasaki bomb on August 9 targeted Saint Mary's Cathedral, built by the city's Christians in 1917 after the end of 250 years of persecution. The first bomb, exploded the month before in the New Mexico desert called Jornada del Muerte ("Journey of the Dead"), was named Trinity.

These guys were certainly not afraid to identify themselves and their works with God himself, even destroying Hiroshima on the very day that commemorates the brilliance of Jesus - making their new toy equal to it.

The common excuse for this deed, which was clearly meant to show something to Stalin, is the lives saved by avoiding an invasion. There are several objections to this argument, many noted at the time, and well understood by men like Dwight Eisenhower.

In the first place, no invasion was going to be necessary. Like all others at the time, the Japanese armed forces ran on petroleum, which they could count on not getting. Without petroleum, tanks don't roll, artillery can't be positioned, and soldiers don't get around. You go around them, as MacArthur did to the Japanese garrison at New Britain, and they can do nothing about it. MacArthur had already proven in the Pacific campaign how to defeat Japanese forces with very low casualties, although other commanders at Iwo Jima and Okinawa proved that they could still make it very expensive by not doing it MacArthur's way.

Moreoever, the Japanese were most afraid of the Soviet Union coming into the war, especially since the Red Army had given them a severe thrashing in 1939 and had become far more capable since. That happened on August 8, 90 days after the German surrender, just as the Soviet Union had agreed, and on the day before the Americans bombed Nagasaki.

This pattern of justifying abominable conduct with foolish fears has persisted. They killed 3 million Vietnamese on the basis that the Communists were going to take over the world if they conquered South Vietnam. They have murdered over a million Iraqis and driven several million more from their homes based on various lies, and on fantastic speculations that Saddam Hussein was going to send drones and nuclear bombs into the United States. They continue and expand a war in Afghanistan based on similarly false and deceitful national security arguments, as though bankrupting our own nation in order to invade and oppress others so that they must resist as we would will somehow make us safer. What part of "crime does not pay" do the American people not understand? Why don't Christians realize that this love of being lied to is evidence of deep spiritual depravity and alienation from the life of God?

And then there is the now well developed habit of nuclear war without explosions that the United States has made routine over the years since Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb used 140 pounds of uranium. The United States has used many thousands of tons of depleted uranium in Iraq, burned to fine powder so that people breathe it in. So should we be surprised that the cancers and ghastly birth defects in Fallujah since the Marines trashed the city in 2004 occur at a far higher rate than they did in Hiroshima after the bombing?

For Christians, who know that the nations do what they do, none of this is especially shocking in itself. The Assyrians, and often the Romans, often behaved even more abominably. Our problem is that professing Christians are foremost in excusing these abominations and worshiping the empire that does them. Instead of being the light of the world, so-called Christians are foremost in advocating such violence, fulfilling in our day what is written, "From the prophets of Jerusalem uncleanness has gone forth into all the earth," and again, "The name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of you."

Jesus has called those who follow him the light of the world. Instead, we have arrogantly boasted of being so these past 400 years while being utterly in love with this world so as to identify with the worst of its abominations. Is that following Jesus, being his disciples? If we swallow with delight the camels of mass murder, plunder, and cruel oppression that the world around us has routinely committed since the massacre of the Pequots in 1637 and the enslavement of African slaves at the same time, and worship the flag that waves over such deeds, is it any marvel that such throats easily accommodate the gnats of sexual immorality and other acts of personal worldliness that Christians are so faithfully conformed to, even as our knickers are constantly in a twist over them? If we love the cruelty and domination of aggressive war, can we expect to resist the same cruelty and domination in pornography? Should we be amazed that the immune systems of evangelical Christian men resemble those of AIDS patients, when it comes to pornography?

Can anyone imagine Jesus or the prophets putting their hands on their hearts and affirming the nobility and sinlessness of any nation state in their own days, pledging allegiance to them, as American Christians do to one of the most bombastic and licentious nations that the world has ever seen? Is it Jeremiah that such Christians resemble, or the false prophets that called him a traitor and kept telling the kings and people of Judah how God was on their side no matter what they did?

If we live in such darkness, so full of zeal for Jesus and so full of contempt for what he says in our Bibles, then Jesus says, "How great is that darkness!" If this is how we live and think, why shouldn't the world around us be in ever deeper darkness, and why should that change if we won't?

Instructive new kitten

2010-07-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

We came home about three weeks ago and met a 10 week old kitten waiting at the front door. I picked him up, and he adopted us.

They say that you can pick your friends but not your family. Hospitality means you don't necessarily get to pick your friends either - anyone who comes under the shadow of your roof can likely claim your protection.

So it's true of God that we have not chosen him but that he has chosen us, as Jesus said, and as Paul wrote in Romans 11 and elsewhere. But it's also true that whoever comes to Jesus he will in no way cast out. Just as that kitten got to adopt us, we get to adopt God if we want.

Stephen named him Squeak, which indeed he does. He has also sometimes been called Littledick when he steals Maggie's food, which is bad for him. Maybe he reminds somebody of Little Richard. The color isn't too far off.

He also does furious battle with a shoelace, Gayle's shoe, a piece of plastic wrap, or a scrap of paper thrown at him. When God looks at us, how often does he see us fighting similar battles, and against like things? And does it entertain him as Squeak entertains us? I think so, and I believe that Proverbs 8 backs me up.

Squeak likes to sleep behind me on the chair when I'm working. When he climbs up, it's better when I'm wearing a shirt. He thinks I'm Dad. Never mind that I'm overlarge and have only two feet, among other ways in which I differ from his kind. He takes a broader view of such things than many people, who fail to recognize kinship due to such differences as degree of suntan, language spoken, citizenship in some national entity, or whatever.

As Isaiah says, the ox knows its owner and the ass his master's manger, but that's more than God's people know that really don't know him. And like those animals, Squeak, too, is a good example.

How the other side lives

2010-07-20T00:28:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else, I've been shocked by the devastation caused by BP's folly and reckless conduct in the Gulf of Mexico, and how the lives of millions of people will be wrecked for keeps. And like lots of others, I haven't really noticed that so many others have had to suck up the same devastation of their lives at the hands of Texaco and Royal Dutch Shell for decades - and did we really care about them?

Ellen Cantarow, writing in Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/LG20Dj04.html

In so many ways, large and small, we keep getting reminded that when we're indifferent to the plight of others - especially when our willful blindness serves to let us profit at their expense - we're asking God to serve us what we prescribe for others. And these prayers are sometimes answered. For our own good, let's learn to pray differently, both in word and deed!

What we lose when we win - Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

2010-07-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

See his post here:

It's not clear to me that LeBron James was the bad guy portrayed here, because what did he owe Cleveland except 7 years of the best hoops he could deliver, and didn't he do that?

But although I think the rabbi is wrong on this detail, he's definitely right on his larger point:

Yes, we all want to win, and no, none of us enjoy losing. But the price we're prepared to pay for our victories is that which will determine our essential character.

So in all contests, there are two. The smaller contest is with the opponent. The larger, the one that counts, is over who we are. We need to fight the small fight in such a way as to win the big fight. To make everything clear, God will sometimes ensure that the cost of winning for real is to choose to lose the little one, no matter how big it feels.

The details of this truth in each of our lives I leave as an exercise for the reader; for the writer, too.

Winning hearts and minds

2010-07-11T00:28:00.000-07:00

It's fun to kill in Afghanistan, says top US commander

- The story in the Independent, UK newspaper

See some video here, which everyone is watching, now that he is being appointed commander of Central Command.

I'm not outraged, as some are. I just wonder how the people managing these invasions and occupations think that this is going to improve their prospects of making the natives love their American overlords, especially in Afghanistan, where all occupiers find the audience to be a pretty tough room in the first place.

How do you like paying for this nonsense at around a billion a day? You wondering why there's no money for schools, or infrastructure, or good medical care, or even unemployment benefits for those whose jobs have been lost by wrecking the economy so war contractors can get rich, congressmen can get their campaign contributions - their quid for their quo - and Obama can look tough?

Anguish of the Age - Robert Jensen

2010-07-10T01:23:00.000-07:00

Jensen's piece below calls to mind a good deal of biblical teaching. In the first place, it gives some details on how at the end of the age, men's hearts will fail them for fear (Luke 21:25-26). In this, Jesus was drawing on Psalm 46.

It's important to recognize that although Jesus says he is coming like a thief in the night, the signs of his coming are obvious and cause men to lose heart precisely because you don't have to have any special spiritual discernment to see how it is and draw the lessons that we can't go on this way. Not to see requires a solid commitment to full-time self-deception - finding "peace" in the refuge of lies.

Indeed, without God there really is no hope, but that doesn't mean that there is no hope, and it doesn't mean that God can only be found in tidy little Christoid religious systems. And that's not new: Jesus explained to the woman at the well in Samaria that you didn't have to go to Jerusalem to find God with the help of the scribes and Pharisees, because he could be found by anyone in spirit and truth.

None of this has to reach the question of when Jesus is returning. We don't know that, but the end of any civilization looks and feels close enough to the end of the age that we can learn the right lessons from the experience, just as though the Lord is in fact returning - lessons which always apply. Whenever the Lord may return, let's prepare by getting it right in rehearsal.

That, reader, is now.

Finally, the kind of anguish Jensen speaks of here is the proper attitude of any biblical Christian - as it is written, "Blessed are those who mourn." What was right in the life of Lot, in which it's hard to find anything right, is that his "soul was vexed every day" at the iniquity he had to live with in Sodom, even though he sat in Sodom's gate. Rejoicing in unceasing pain, as Job put it, is the tight and narrow path that few find.

Why does Jensen, who is not even clear that the God of the Bible exists, have it a lot more clear and biblical than the average Christoid populating our churches? Well, I think that's obvious. He's pursuing the truth, rejoicing in unceasing pain, while Christoid religion is all about taking the broad and easy way by hiding from these unpleasant truths - that is, rejecting the cross. And rejecting the cross, especially when such rejection is wrapped in religious devotion, is service to Satan, as Jesus made clear to Peter (Matthew 16:21-23).

Enough of my warm up. On to Professor Jensen.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/22-4

The Anguish of the Age: Emotional Reactions to Collapse

by Robert Jensen

We live amidst multiple crises -- economic and political, cultural and ecological -- that pose a significant threat to human life as we understand it.

There is no way to be awake to the depth of these crises without an emotional reaction. There is no way to be aware of the pain caused by these systemic failures without some experience of dread, depression, distress.

To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse.

Though I have felt this for some time I hesitated to talk about it in public, out of fear of being accused of being too negative or dismissed as apocalyptic. But more of us are breaking through that fear, and more than ever it's essential that we face this aspect of our political lives. To talk openly about this anguish should strengthen, not undermine, our commitment to political engagement -- any sensible political program to which we can commit for the long haul has to start with an honest assessment of reality.

Here is how I would summarize our reality: Because of the destructive consequences of human intervention, it is not clear how much longer the planetary ecosystem can sustain human life on this scale. There is no way to make specific predictions, but it's clear that our current path leads to disaster. Examine the data on any crucial issue -- energy, water, soil erosion, climate disruption, chemical contamination, biodiversity -- and the news is bad. Platitudes about "necessity is the mother of invention" express a hollow technological fundamentalism; simply asserting that we want to solve the problems that we have created does not guarantee we can. The fact that we have not taken the first and most obvious step -- moving to a collective life that requires far less energy -- doesn't bode well for the future.

Though anguish over this reality is not limited to the affluence of the industrial world -- where many of us have the time to ponder all this because our material needs are met -- it may be true that those of us living in relative comfort today speak more of this emotional struggle. That doesn't mean that our emotions are illegitimate or that the struggle is self-indulgent; this discussion is not the abandonment of politics but an essential part of fashioning a political project.

I would like help in this process. I've started talking to people close to me about how this feels, but I want to expand my understanding. By using the internet and email, I am limiting the scope of the inquiry to those online, but it's a place to start.

My request is simple: If you think it would help you clarify your understanding of your struggle, send me an account of your reaction to these crises and collapse, in whatever level of detail you like. I am most interested in our emotional states, but any exercise of this type includes an intellectual component; there is no clear line between the analytical and the emotional, between thinking and feeling. An understanding of our emotions is connected to our analysis of the health of the ecosystem, the systems responsible for that condition, and the openings for change.

Because I may draw on this material in public discussions and for writing projects, please let me know how you are willing to have your words used. Your writing could be: (1) "on background," not to be quoted in any forum; (2) "not for attribution," permission to be quoted but not identified; or (3) "on the record," permission to be quoted and identified. If you don't specify, I will assume (2).

My plan is to report back to anyone interested. If you would like to be included on that distribution list, let me know. Please send responses in the body of an email message, not as an attachment, to robertwilliamjensen@gmail.com.

Whether or not you write to me, I hope everyone will begin speaking more openly about this aspect of our struggle. If there is to be a decent future, we have to retain our capacity for empathy. Most of us can empathize with those closest to us, and we try to empathize with all people. The next step is to open up to the living world, which requires an ability to feel both the joy and the grief that surrounds us.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film "Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing," which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Information about the film, distributed by the Media Education Foundation, and an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Independence Day

2010-07-05T00:57:00.001-07:00

Jesus got into an argument with some people that believed in him (John 8). He said, "If you continue in my word, you will indeed be my disciples, and you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

They responded that they had never been the slaves of anybody - never mind that they were under Roman occupation as their mouths were moving.

Jesus replied that whoever commits sin is the slave of sin. Freedom then involves freedom from sin. When we're dependent on sin, for example, in bondage to the love of money or swollen with pride, we're slaves. Always. Bragging about our independence is just as nuts as those believers in Jesus under Roman occupation boasting that they had never been slaves of anybody.

Like them, who were slaves of sin but also of men, Americans today are slaves of men in every way and far from independent in any way. Being addicted to petroleum, we are slaves of those from whom we must import it. We are slaves of the Chinese, the Japanese, and everyone else that we must depend on to lend the US $2 billion a day, since as it is written, "The borrower is the slave of the lender."

We are slaves of those who buy the federal Congress and all of our state legislatures with their bribes, who do everything to lead us to medium term, never mind long term, destruction in order to make the most possible profit this quarter. We are addicted to war, so that we can't walk away even from stupidly following the Soviet example of self-destruction in Afghanistan, returning like a dog to its vomit to our own march of folly in Vietnam 50 years ago.

We are slaves of a stupid and fanatical ideology of "democracy" and the "free market" , which has demonstrated its impracticality, worthlessness, and total divorce from its stated principles as much as Soviet Communism did back in the day. Promoting democracy means invading, bombing, subverting, and starving those that vote wrong - for their own interests - instead of voting to be dominated and exploited. The free market means corporate domination and rip-offs of whole nations including our own - the freedom to be robbed.

This insane ideology doesn't even work for us, never mind those robbed and murdered in our names. Our jobs are disappearing forever. Our homes are being foreclosed on. Our services are being taken away. Our infrastructure is falling apart. And all of this so that the banksters and their pals who have trashed and plundered the American economy for short term gain can make even more money at our expense. Are we any less bewitched than those who always had an explanation for the failures of Communism?

Jesus said, like all that came before him, that those who humble themselves willl be lifted up, and that those that exalt themselves will be abased.

I saw a lot of proud Americans yesterday - so declared their T-shirts. Proud of what? Who among us that saw any other nation behave as ours does would think that that nation had anything to be proud of? When our deeds and condition are shameful, shouldn't we put away our pride and be ashamed? Or as Jeremiah said, is it a virtue that we are unable even to blush? Did it go well for those people to be that way?

Perhaps if we put away our conceit and bombast and learn to be ashamed - being in so many ways the shameful nation that we are - if we hear and declare the truth before our God, then we might find mercy and escape from the trouble, unlike what we've ever seen before, that is quite obviously coming our way. If we continue in our scoffing and audacity, surely then, "Pride comes before stumbling, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

The only real independence, as Jesus said, is found in submission to and dependence on the truth. The independence that Americans celebrate is proud self-assertion and empty boasting, and that is dependence on sin - the way of death, although it seems right in our delusion. We have gone very far down that road, and professing Christians deepest of all in this insolence. Let us pray, for real, and turn from our ways.

Fourth Sermon to Chino Valley school board ( 6/17/2010)

2010-06-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

Good evening. I’m going to try some biblical and hard thinking on the budget, since there is little of either, and the budget calls for both.

I went to the rally the 7^th. I couldn’t get into it. Shouting slogans against budget cuts is useless. Every politician is a champion of education, blowing a trumpet in front of himself. If they don’t deliver, they’re in too big a fix to do so – shout in the street all we want.

So where’s the $30 million the district wants to see? Doesn’t the fear of man keep us from stating the obvious, to our own ruin?

First, it is wasted on pointless wars, and on the care and feeding of banksters and others that give us the best government money can buy. That $30 million dollars you need: it’s keeping 25 soldiers in Afghanistan for a year to beat people into submission because they push back, just as we would against an invader like ourselves. This is no fight for freedom – our Founding Fathers all rightly said that such wars are how we lose our freedom, as we take it from others. Look around, and see how right they were. All this, so the President can look tough to be seen by men. For this worthy end people should kill and die, and our schools and much else should go in the toilet.

On the state level, consider just one point. Why do we insist that oil companies get to take California petroleum nearly for free, when almost every other jurisdiction takes a cut for that loss? They should prance away with it while our kids do without, and we sit there silent at this, like graven images? What is written in the Proverbs? “He that robs the poor, and he who gives to the rich, both alike shall come to poverty.” Look around. That isn’t true?

Finally, what about us? Hear Isaiah’s description of our budget process:

“You numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses you broke down to fortify the wall. You also made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to its maker, nor did you have respect for him who fashioned it long ago.”

If you did, would you do injustice and cruelty to the weak, hiring fancy lawyers to wrong them with crooked reasonings, as though the district’s welfare depends on such devices?

Have you not seen that the proverb is true, “One is generous, and his wealth increases; another withholds more than he should and it leads to poverty?” How has it worked out these 3 years we’ve known each other - solving the district’s problems by robbing the weak?

Roger Waters - "We Shall Overcome"

2010-06-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Jesus said in the gospels to the scribes (Bible experts) and Pharisees ("separated ones," devoted religious people) that the whores and tax gatherers would get into the kingdom of God before they did, and in Matthew 23, Jesus documented just how much more blind and foolish they were than ordinary people.

This is still seen today. Always amazing, but is it not just the word of God proving true?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMMHepfYVc

Third sermon to Chino Valley school board (6/4/2010)

2010-06-04T00:04:00.000-07:00

Good evening my four brothers.

In the first of these talks that I was asked to give, I laid out the basics of what God calls for in rulers, and the nature of the doctrine that has led you otherwise, since the snare is laid in vain in the sight of any bird.

This evening, some how-to.

I was being kept awake in pain last week, and I called to mind a really stupid thing I did 33 years ago. I’m no longer quite that dumb, so I wondered why I needed the review. Then I saw that I need to learn better how to distinguish mercy from indulgence. That’s the real reason I screwed up back then. Defining that issue was worth some pain!

Is that same confusion making you feel the need to protect the abusers of our kids? I have a lot more to learn on this, but I think I see this far. Indulgence is going easy on somebody unjustly, at someone else’s expense. Mercy is going easy on someone because it’s mean – unjust – to do anything else. If the public is to trust you with our kids, you have to learn how to stop being nice to their abusers at their expense.

A related thing. Doing justly and mercifully isn’t something that good people just do. It’s discipleship, training, like learning how to play golf, fix a car, or take out a hot appendix. So Isaiah says, “Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” Am I going too far if I add? "Defend the special ed kid, and plead for his hard-pressed parents, instead of hiring fancy lawyers to plead against them."

You obey none of this because you haven’t learned how. But Isaiah goes on to say, “Come let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are as scarlet, they’ll be whiter than snow.” Hang out with God and reason with him. Good company cleans up bad morals.

If Isaiah’s advice sounds unreasonable to you, my brothers, you’re practical atheists, having a form of godliness, but denying its power, which is his presence and guidance in real life. This problem can be cured.

I do want to share a good report. One of you, I hear, accompanied a parent to their IEP meeting and told the district people to quit noodling around and give the kid what he needs, already – and it happened. I’m not sure it’s true, but if it is, that’s a great start, and may this mustard seed grow into bigger things.

It's confirmed - the Messiah has not yet arrived

2010-06-01T22:29:00.000-07:00

For those Obamacrats who still haven't heard. It's hard to top this . . .

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/30-0

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T13:21:00.000-07:00

A big theme in the Bible is God's people becoming tasteless and good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled by men (Matthew 5:13), having joined the ungodly in the worship of their idols. In the book of Judges this happened over and over. Later on, Samaria, the northern kingdom, went into exile for the same reason, as described in 2 Kings 17.

Another 135 years, and Jerusalem also went into exile - having ignored the example that God had given them in Samaria - for serving the gods of the nations, for doing injustice to the poor, and especially for offering their children in sacrifice to the gods of this world.

From Cain up, people have been offering sacrifices to God that he does not appreciate at all, because they don't offer first the sacrifice that God wants, which is above all to be listened to, just as people made in his image want (Psalm 40:6-7). One of those sacrifices that God always hates is human sacrifice. There are two apparent exceptions: Abraham's offering of Isaac, and the death of Jesus on the cross. But both of these were offerings to God in the expectation of resurrection, which God had specifically promised, and not to death.

The doctrine we hear preached on Memorial Day, in contrast to the Bible teaching, is that death itself sanctifies. A violent, often sexually immoral, and arrogant young man dies a sucker in a shameful war of aggression on behalf of corrupt politicians and war profiteers, spreading misery and destruction in a far away land whose people have the same right to be left alone by invaders as we claim for ourselves - and he is made clean and holy simply because he got killed in the course of warfare in behalf of American power!

For unbelievers to believe such nonsense is understandable, because pagan religion has always found holiness in violent slaughter, from the Aztecs eating the hearts of their still living victims in their temples to the men of Tyre and Carthage burning their little children in the fire to Baal. When people do not know how the living blood of Jesus makes us clean when we abide in the truth and walk in the light (1 John 1:6-10), they will understandably hope to be made clean by the strangest things.

But where do "Christians" in America get the idea that sanctification comes of being killed in the service of any nation in this world? Could someone please show me that in the Bible someplace? And why don't these American Christians teach that Vietnamese, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Afghans are made holy by being killed repelling the invaders of their lands and homes? Or don't the prophets and Jesus and the apostles get to direct the thinking of Christians in such matters? Indeed, 1 Corinthians 13 puts it plainly enough: "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing."

I don't think it's all that mysterious, really. With very few exceptions, the bottom line for American Christians is America - their present world whose friends they are - and not Jesus. Their attitude is best expressed by Ahaz, who replaced the altar of the Lord with an Assyrian altar, saying of it, "On the great altar burn the morning burnt offering, the evening grain offering, the king's burnt sacrifice, and his grain offering, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land, their grain offering, and their drink offering; and sprinkle on it all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice. And the bronze altar [the Lord's, which Ahaz moved to one side] shall be for me to inquire by."

Their home is here, not in the heavenly places, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Jesus, and our Father in heaven, are important little gods in the American Christian pantheon, deserving, to be sure, to be obeyed and believed where it doesn't conflict with the prior obligation to worship America, in whom they live, and move, and have their being. The blood of our children killed or psychologically shattered by the wickedness they've been sent to do is to be offered on the altar of American militarism, along with the grain offerings of our wealth and that of generations to come, our civil liberties, and what remains of our republican institutions - while we claim that this folly in some way protects our freedom. But we'll then go to church to inquire of God, to pray and to sing hymns, pretending to godliness.

In the same way the European "Christians" all signed up for their national crusades in 1914. The Holy Spirit led the German Lutherans to die for Jesus in the service of the Kaiser. The very same Holy Spirit led the British to war against the Germans, the Huns. And in Russia, the Holy Spirit moved the Orthodox Christians in their holy crusade against the Austrians and the Germans. All this presumption and gross blasphemy left European Christianity in the shape it is in today - God is not mocked. But do American Christians fear God at all, to learn from this example and others like it?

It's fine to offend God by conforming our thinking to the world around us in contempt of his testimony, but to speak the truth about American nationalism and its conceits - now that would offend our fellow religious people, who would hate us for following Christ in opposition to the lies they love! But the apostles teach that we're to shine as lights in the midst of this perverse and corrupt generation - full of self-deception, murder, licentiousness, and empty nationalist self-congratulation. Do we shine as lights among them when we repeat their pagan pieties after them, like Ahab's prophets telling him to go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper - agreeing with their murders, their kidnappings, their invasions and bombings, their tortures and disappearances of the innocent? Did Jesus and the prophets sit still for such things?

This Memorial Day and every day, shouldn't Christians remember Jesus Christ, remembering all else in the light of what he has to say?

A few good questions - Rep. Ron Paul, Republican of Texas

2010-05-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68iKXzOKlOY&feature=player_embedded

Second sermon to Chino Valley school board (5/20/2010)

2010-05-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

Good evening.

In the first of these talks two weeks ago, I briefly set before the four professing disciples of Jesus on this board what the faith requires of those in your position. Mr. Joseph responded with a “commercial,” gratefully received by Mr. Youngblood, in which he spoke of the “delicate balance” you must find between doing justice to any individual kid and the needs of the group as a whole. I already knew that Mr. Joseph is a nice guy, and I’m still more grateful to him for so clearly dragging into the open the bad doctrine that gives rise to your bad behavior.

This “delicate balance” is all about how you have to agonize about aborting the life of this or that individual kid for the sake of the larger interests of the district. We parents of these kids, who do not appreciate your difficulties, just don’t understand.

To paraphrase Caiaphas in John 11:49-50, we parents know nothing at all, nor do we take into account that it is expedient that one kid should have his life wrecked for the convenience of the district, so that the whole district can avoid trouble.

As you know, Caiaphas was explaining why Jesus had to be done away with, because doing justice to this one man would be too much trouble.

None of this is to say that you’re especially bad people, or that your apostasy is unusual. It is only what Paul wrote of your fathers long ago in First Corinthians 2:8: none of the rulers of this age has understood, for if they had understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Jesus said, “Whatever you have done to the least of these my brothers you have done to me. You do to the least of kids in this district what your fathers did to Jesus because you believe about them what Caiaphas believed about Jesus – that you cannot afford to do them justice and mercy. In this you are greatly mistaken, knowing neither the scriptures nor God’s power, because Jesus warned you clearly that if you cause the least of these kids to stumble – any single one of them – it would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea. The problem is not the failure of Attwood, Higgins, or Keltner to understand the wisdom of this world in which you trust. The problem, as Paul wrote, is your failure to understand the wisdom of the God that you claim to believe in.

There’s more at stake for us than whether we help a school district to get over. Jesus lived and died for kids and other eternal human beings, not for school districts.

Stephen medical news

2010-05-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the 14th, Stephen got the surgery done on his right foot. Looks good. The surgeon said that the first week it would hurt so bad when he set it on the ground that he would wonder whether it would be better to pee in his bed than to get up to go to the john, but not so. Asked to rate the pain, he says - meh. Seems like God has listened to us all that have prayed for him.

We're looking at 6 weeks for the bone to heal, another 6 for the Achilles tendon to become reliable, and another month or so to shape up the leg after withering in the cast for 3 months. Then the same thing on the left foot. So after about a year, he should be able to walk normally, run, and stand without pain like other folks.

We're supposed to see the surgeon, Morris Baumgarten, on the 19th for the post-op.

In other news, we had his IEP meeting Thursday the 13th, in which the district predetermined that the NPS they've placed him at is where he has to go, threatening to yank his tutoring if he doesn't show up there. They know well that his present tutoring is the only educational endeavor that has worked at all these past three years. And this in the face of the DBH report, which documents how he can't function in their NPS placement. That same report recommends residential placement, which the district is eager to shove him into - but who can imagine doing that now that we're doing Stephen's feet? And with his feet as they are, who with a straight face can ask Stephen to go to the worthless NPS placement? It's a good schlep from the parking lot to anywhere in the school that he would go to see the teacher and get homework. And we're going to persuade him to go through all that for what? The district offered Home & Hospital. Do they think Stephen has forgotten what happened the last time the district offered him Home & Hospital?

The kid I'm working for in the Antelope Valley needs real math remediation, and I found someone that does ed therapy, majoring in math, who comes highly recommended by folks that I trust. She may be perfect for Stephen too. My assignment Monday is to look into that, and then I can respond to the district with further suggestions.

I had a nice conversation the day before the IEP with the incoming spedhead. Things may be better once she takes office July 1 in place of Heather Williams. Williams is moving to Human Resources, where she'll be dealing with union officials instead of ruining the lives of vulnerable kids. Better for the kids of the world, I guess, that she go there rather than leave the district and become a spedhead somewhere else. Too bad for the taxpayers of Chino Valley, no doubt, who would be better off not having to waste their money on such administrative dead weight.

Now I have to prepare my mini-sermon for the board meeting this coming Thursday.

First in a sermon series to the Chino Valley school board (5/6/2010)

2010-05-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

Good evening.

In your biographies, four of you declare your faith in Jesus, and you tell us what you do in church. One of you advised me to talk about Jesus here. To learn, to do, and to teach the word of God is indeed the real deal, so I’m taking your advice. Here then are some Bible basics, which I’ll apply to district business.

The good news is that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Jesus asked, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and don’t do what I say?” so if we’re not doing as he says, we’re not really calling on the Lord, but instead taking his name in vain, and that’s no help.

James agrees with that, reminding us that faith without works is dead. It follows that faith which is not dead is not without works, which is why all we need is faith, as Paul also wrote. A car without wheels and an engine is dead, but a car that runs includes these.

So what are the wheels and engine of real faith? Micah 6:8 says, “Man, what does the Lord want from you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Closing the three schools because you and Heatley judged those people too weak to resist – taking his advice when you knew what an unprincipled liar he was - did you do justice to those people, or love mercy? When you walked in the counsel of your crooked lawyers to pick an unjust fight with Lewis, did you walk humbly with your God? When you aid and abet injustice to Megan Higgins and to so many others, reasoning that if you do them justice you might then have to do justice to others - God forbid - are you doing the word of God that you claim to believe? When special ed robs kids, not even saving money but just being mean, and you back them up, carefully hiding your eyes from their malice, is that justice and mercy to the abused? What if it were your own kids? Mr. Joseph has written that we should forget all this and move on, but the past is not past until you forsake it in repentance, and have you even considered doing so? When we hurry to forget the past, we repeat it by way of reminder.

Aiding and abetting injustice, enabling merciless and cunning abuse, and walking complacently with your clever lawyers has been expensive trouble. Learning to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God might work better. What you teach in Sunday School, learn again to do it here!

Mothers Day

2010-05-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of sentimentality around Mothers Day. Sentimentality is the emotional bath people take instead of actually loving people - that is doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God - so I find it nauseating. From Revelation 3:14-20, I'm convinced that in this my feelings are somewhat compatible with those of Jesus.

An unsentimental, practical, and therefore helpful, perspective from Donna Smith of National Nurses United.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/09

Can you mock this church?

2010-05-03T00:27:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times about some actual Christians in the Roman Catholic Church. It's great to see something working as designed. Read it. It's good to see that it's not ALL BS all the time. And while you're in there, you can reflect that the hostility of the secular press toward religious people is mostly not about hostility to the gospel. It's because the gospel is the last thing to be seen among Christoids. When some evidence for Jesus turns up, they respond just fine - indeed, they like the real Jesus when they see him a good deal better than the professing Christians generally do. Which, judging by who crucified him after fighting him all the time, is what we read in the gospels, isn't it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02kristof.html?src=me&ref=general

Faith and straight thinking

2010-04-26T02:57:00.000-07:00

It's usual to think of faith as an unreasonable thing, what Mark Twain called believing what you know isn't so. Lots of religious folks resent Twain for this remark and many others like them, especially if they read his Letters from the Earth, but since they agree with him that faith obeys God by defying reason, they shouldn't complain about Twain's assessment. Don't they commonly meet doubts and objections with such great advice as, "Just believe, brother!" (never mind such small details as whether or not you know it's true)?

As Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out, the notion that faith is irrational comes to us from the ancient Greeks, who held that poetry and other divine revelation came to people in a state of madness. Straight thinking and divine revelation are in different realms. But the prophets knew nothing of such nonsense, and neither did Jesus or the apostles. Faith for them is believing what is true in the spirit of a sound mind. The problem people had with Jesus is that he made sense and they couldn't refute him. You never catch Jesus, like today's Christoids, telling people what a virtue it is to believe in contrast to getting good answers. With Jesus, they'd shut up because he had good answers, so that they became afraid to even ask him a question. And faith, of course, is to ask him more questions right at that point where the religious people shut up, knowing that our irrationality is about to get challenged.

What got me thinking about this tonight was reading King Hubbert's paper on peak oil, presented to the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, in which he predicted that American production would peak about 1970, which he called just right, and in the world as a whole in 2000. He was wrong about that by about 5 years or so, due to the demand collapses caused by economic recession in the 1980's. We now seem to have peaked at 83 million barrels a day.

I was at a school board meeting in the Antelope Valley at which the Davis Demographics company presented a report on what the school district could expect over the next few years, and even 30 or more years ahead. They were figuring that eventually the population in this desert, far from Los Angeles or any other big city, could be expected to reach the limits of municipal zoning! I thought to point out that this was all based on the assumption that cheap and abundant petroleum and water would be there for ever, which is a fairy tale. Did the district actually pay money to be told such nonsense? Indeed, the US Dept of Energy's projections of supply and demand state that supply will fall short of demand in 2012 and be 10 million barrels a day short by 2015 - and the US Joint Forces Command agrees. The oil companies know they won't be pumping any more, which is why none of them are bothering to add refining capacity.

There's nothing controversial, really, about the train wreck the world economy is heading for, quite apart from what the Dow Jones averages may do this week. The remarkable thing to me is how professing Christians often greet this news.

On the one hand, they're excited about how Jesus will be returning any moment, which in fact our Bibles tell us is certainly not yet the case, just as Paul warned people not to expect right away in his own day. But faced with evidence of the sort of thing that the Bible tells us to expect before Jesus returns, they rely on the authority of people like Rush Limbaugh to blow it off. If they really think Jesus will show up any moment, why are they so sure that the "beginning of birth pangs" that Jesus spoke of won't be happening first?

That's what it looks like to be devoid of real faith. You can irrationally hold totally conflicting notions in your head at the same time, and nobody can, by patiently counting the objects in front of your face, persuade you that these 2, plus those 2, really do add up to 4 and not 5. But as James writes, the wisdom from above is pure and reasonable - or as Paul puts it, it's the spirit of a sound mind. That's what biblical faith looks like.

The high places and the low

2010-04-26T02:24:00.000-07:00

I was reading Micah yesterday and noted in Chapter 1 that God will come down to judge the high places of the earth. God is humble and comes down, and this can be a problem for us if we're pushing up, because the high places get trodden on. As James wrote, God resists the proud. I've noticed that it really sucks to encounter the resistance of God, and with pride, that encounter is guaranteed.

Micah cites two examples: Samaria, the capital city of the northern kingdom built by Omri on a high and defensible hill, and Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. Being high and trusted in by their inhabitants has turned out in history to be bad for both.

Psalm 40:4 says, "Blessed is that man who makes the Lord his trust, and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies." It is indeed a blessing to escape the bewitchment of the proud. People admire pride, seeing it as courage, and they are drawn to the audacity and insolence of the proud doer, so long as his pride is not directed against them. In fact, I've defiled myself with that kind of admiration from people, and that's an economy I'd best drop out of!

What manner of man is the prophet (Heschel)

2010-03-24T23:17:00.001-07:00

What manner of man is the prophet? A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the marketplace. Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. The world is a proud place, full of beauty, but the prophets are scandalized, and rave as if the whole world were a slum. They make much ado about paltry things, lavishing excessive language upon trifling subjects. What if somewhere in ancient Palestine poor people have not been treated properly by the rich? So what if some old women found pleasure and edification in worshipping "the Queen of Heaven?" Why such immoderate excitement? Why such intense indignation?

Reading this I saw that the nit-picking of the Pharisees and the passion of the prophets look to the world (and to Pharisees everywhere) like the same thing. I want to learn a lot better to really distinguish these. I'm not rash enough to be too sure that I do.

I see more clearly just what the folly of philosophy consists of. It's not intellectual subtlety that makes philosophy foolish. It is its high-mindedness, its conceit, the notion that abstractions are somehow "higher" and more important than the concerns of widows and orphans and the justice and mercy due to them. The same high-mindedness is perfectly at home not only in graduate schools but in the most know-nothing anti-intellectual church, concerned with its doctrines, rather than with the widows and orphans that get the attention of the prophets.

The Prophets (Heschel)

2010-03-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

I've started taking another look at Abraham Joshua Heschel's work on the prophets, and I really got blessed just reading the introduction again. If you've never read it, go get yourself a used copy cheap from bookfinder.com. It's one of those books worth reading again after things have happened in life; being a different person, one may see new things.

This is one of the advantages of repentance, it occurs to me. If we remain the same, so does the rest of the world, but when we change, everything around us changes with us and becomes new. Repentance is the answer to boredom. So if you're bored, seek repentance!

"First remove the log from your own eye . . ."

2010-02-26T00:17:00.001-08:00

The value for us of the prophecies against the nations, such as against Moab in Isaiah 15-16, is that we see in them on a big scale what applies to us personally. When we read about Moab 2800 years ago, it's not really about that nation back then. We're intended to see ourselves in the mirror and wise up.

Here is log-in-eye disease on Imax, if we care to look, revealed by the simple questions of Tom Engelhardt.

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB26Df02.html

And people who call themselves Christians support these guys. Do they read their Bibles? Does believing in Jesus have anytihng to do with paying attention to what he says - that thing about abiding in his word?

Judge not lest you be judged

2010-02-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting comment on my entry on Yvonne Chan's experience of reaping good fruit from her kindness long ago. Maybe somebody else can make sense of what this anonymous poster had to say. He or she says I'm violating the command not to judge lest I be judged, and reaping what I sow - by which he/she means bad things. No problem judging me, anyway.

What stones am I throwing, and what bad things am I reaping? Yvonne Chan reaped a long-deferred blessing in exchange for her good work 35 years ago - there's something wrong with commending that? Or is there something wrong with speaking up for the speechless against the prejudice of an agency that's being paid by the taxpayers to provide impartial resolution of their matters? Don't the oppressed deserve relief? Don't you think that you do, when it happens to you?

It's pretty obvious when we read the prophets and Jesus, say Matthew 23, that Jesus isn't forbidding us to rebuke wrongdoers and be specific in naming their wrongdoing. Indeed, in the proverbs it is written that to the one who rebukes the wicked there will be sure delight.

Folks that like to quote Jesus saying not to judge lest we be judged generally do so when they want somebody to shut up. It's not because they care to learn and obey it themselves, because in the very act of quoting it they are themselves judging and condemning the guiltless for telling the truth in defense of the helpless. To quote the words of Jesus when we can't be bothered to understand them and live them out ourselves is actually quite unwise and dangerous. First let's learn and begin to do, and only then begin to quote them. This way when we do we'll maybe know what we're talking about.

You reap what you sow

2010-02-19T19:28:00.000-08:00

I went to the Advisory Council on Special Education meeting in San Diego yesterday the 18th to join with others in documenting the prejudice of the Office of Administrative Hearings against parents and their children. I think we got the job done, and maybe it will bear good fruit.

But the thing that really got my attention was a side comment by Yvonne Chan, a member of the State Board of Education. The transmission went on her fancy car, and she was looking at $10,000.

Back in 1968, she taught Special Ed. She happened to run into one of her former students at the dealer. So instead of having to argue about who would spring for the transmission, she got out of there with a new car. I was moved to remark that it was a good thing she treated the kid right 35 years ago in class! It took a while, but Yvonne Chan reaped what she sowed, and it's a good thing for her that she sowed some good seed back in the day.

2010-01-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

Iraq War veteran says the obvious, but unusually well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8

40 years ago, Martin Luther King said the obvious - pretty much the same obvious!

http://icujp.org/king.shtml

"I see you"

2009-12-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

Stephen and I saw the new James Cameron movie, Avatar, this morning. The key sentence, repeated three times, is "I see you." And that makes all the difference.

When the Pharisees have a problem with a certain prostitute washing his feet, Jesus asks, "Have you seen this woman?"

When 4 men bring a cripple and make a hole in Jesus's roof to let him down when they can't get in the door, Jesus doesn't see the hole he'll have to fix. He sees their faith, indeed he saw the 4 men carrying the ark of the covenant.

When we sell ourselves to do evil, it's essential for us not to see. When it comes to our blindness, Jesus's question hangs in the air - "Do you want to be healed?"

When we see the dead babies, the birth defects from the US military's depleted uranium, the piles of rubble that used to be the homes of people like us, and the tortured and the starving wherever the imperial forces go, "Support our troops!" is no longer so easily shouted. To be a good friend of the world, to fit in, and to still sleep at night, it's essential not to see. In the language of The Matrix, we have to take the blue pill so we can live in pleasant illusion and not see how it is. When we take the red pill, the world doesn't look so pretty, but the red pill is the pill of life that God offers. I'm rather sure that that is why Adam and Eve didn't eat from the tree of life in the middle of the garden when they had the chance.

When we don't want to see, the prince of this world owns that piece of us. At that point we are his faithful disciples. We'll prove that by stealing, killing, destroying, and lying - or at least giving approval to those who do.

Another thing in Avatar - the heroes are traitors, depending on who's looking.

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a traitor or a hero? When the AVH, the Hungarian secret police, began firing on the crowd in front of the Parliament building on October 25, 1956, was the Soviet tank man who decided to clean the AVH snipers off the roof with his machine gun a traitor or a hero? Were the men of the St. Patrick's Brigade who deserted the American invaders to fight for Mexico in 1846 traitors or heroes? Was Elijah really the troubler of Israel that Ahab thought he was?

The past is never really past - until it's faced and forgiven

2009-12-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

This coming Sunday, that rabidly anti-Israeli paper, the New York Times Review of Books, reviews Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza," a comic book format account of two Israeli massacres in Gaza back in 1956. A couple of points stand out for me.

One of them was Moshe Dayan's advice in a speech six months before to be "tough and harsh" because the Palestinians in Gaza saw across the border that the Israelis were building their own homes in the villages that they had been robbed of - a perfect example of Eric Hoffer's observation that we hate people because we've done them wrong. Which suggests that the way to get over hatred is to start by acknowledging whatever wrong we've done to them and quit doing it.

Another point made in the review is that the world forgot what happened because lots else was happening in the Suez war. And then what the review doesn't mention is the further distraction with the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the same time. So the world paid no attention to these 500 or so men and boys coldly and methodically massacred in Khan Younis and Rafah as the Germans had done on a larger scale to the Jews in Babi Yar 15 years before.

It turns out, though, that what the world forgot matters anyway. The little boys who survived didn't forget, and the Israelis who got away with it and found themselves free to continue in this Nazi spirit with no consequences really didn't forget either. As Ecclesiastes puts it, "Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the hearts of men are wholly set in them to do evil." It's hard to imagine a better way to corrupt people absolutely than to give them assurance of impunity for the evil that they do, and so doing the evildoer such a favor is a pretty horrible crime to commit against him - an instance of the saying, "A flattering tongue works ruin."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Cockburn-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Christmas music

2009-12-24T18:34:00.000-08:00

Keeping kosher for Christmas

Israeli arms merchant Rafael's Bollywood video. Heartwarming!

Two great old men died this week

2009-12-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

Sunday the 20th saw the deaths of two remarkable old men - Lester Rodney, and Grand Ayatollah Hosain Ali Montazeri.

Lester Rodney was born in 1911 and was the sports editor of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, from 1936 to 1956. He and the paper campaigned against the exclusion of black players from Major League Baseball for a good 10 years, when nobody else wanted to say anything about it, especially the mainstream papers. He left the Communist party when he couldn't stand its failure to deal with Stalin after Krushchev's denunciation of his crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

Grand Ayatollah Hosain Ali Montazeri was second in line after Khomeini after the Iranian revolution of 1979. When the regime began killing and torturing large numbers of people in 1988, Montazeri protested in letters to Khomeini, and eventually broke with him publicly. People wondered why he didn't just keep quiet until Khomeini's death, and then make things right when he became Supreme Leader. He responded that his conscience wouldn't let him sleep at night being aware of the injustices and human rights abuses that he would have to pretend not to know of. He followed Jesus in not bowing down to falsehood in order to obtain the kingdom. He was 87 years old at his death. Hundreds of thousands of people came to his funeral in Qom and observed it in other Iranian cities this week, even though the police have often been beating them up.

I'm not a Communist or a Shi'a theologian, but in these men I recognize quality, people better than myself. They're good for me, teaching me humility and calling me to better than I am, in a small way just as God does. Why do we so seldom get that from Christians?

Peace and division

2009-12-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

I got a call this morning from my friend who was being assured by a family member that she would be defeated because there was disagreement in her family, and "a house divided will fall." The remedy of Job's friend was that mom was supposed to exercise authority over her boys to make them do what she thought best. And that man-made unity made by human will is supposed to stand!

Of course the same Jesus who said that about the devil's kingdom if it were actually fighting against itself also said, "Don't think I came to bring peace. I came to bring division - in one house father against son and against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

The unity that God looks for is not established by us. It comes from above (Psalm 133), like every perfect and good gift (James 4). And it doesn't happen until we stop trying to enforce our own order and unity and permit ourselves to be subjected to the order and unity of the truth. That's the long way around, but it's the only way around. Like Jesus hanging stark naked on the cross, we'll look like public spectacles while we wait for it to be done right by our God. Tough indeed to go there. But that is the only path to resurrection. And we can't explain it any more than Jesus could win any arguments with his tormentors there on the cross, except in the conscience of one thief.

Afterwords, as the earth quaked and and the sky grew dark, as the graves were opened, as the veil in the temple was torn - now things were different. In his death according to God's will, Jesus won some arguments he wasn't going to win otherwise, including the one that really matters - against death.

We're not going to get there through our zeal and determination, or by applying anybody's rules, including Bible rules. God has to take us to school to become like him. There are some great classes there that nobody signs up for. It has to be court-ordered, which is how we find out that there is a Court in heaven that rules (Daniel 4).

So Jesus says, for instance, not to resist him who is evil, but he didn't forget the proverb that reads that those that keep the law strive against the wicked. The scribes and Pharisees felt pretty resisted, didn't they?

What is this all about then? Well, for sure it means at least that our response is never to be to what someone says or does, but to how God wants to handle it. We're not to resist the wicked but to stop being wicked ourselves, instead listening to the God of truth and following him in the situation. That way those that hate us can help us to learn obedience by giving us some practice.

Well, how does that look? Sometimes God wants to let himself be pushed around and be weak, so to follow him means to go there with him. Sometimes God wants to push back, so then we need to go there too. And all the time, we need to learn from what God does with us how to deal with others. It's fine to be tough with others if we're up for God being tough with us when we act the same way - and sometimes that's just how it has to be - but if that whoopass isn't what we prescribe for ourselves then how can we prescribe it for another?

Veterans Day - a word of warning

2009-11-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

By Neal Gabler
Boston Globe, October 13, 2009

THE HOARIEST and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician, Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. This country is "the last, best hope of mankind," or the "shining city on the hill," or the "great social experiment." As if this weren’t enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called for a "government as good as the American people," thus taking national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

Carter was speaking when Watergate was fresh, and government had been disgraced, but still. The fact of the matter is that whenever anything really significant has been accomplished by our government, it is precisely because it was better than the American people.

Think of World War II, America’s entrance into which was strenuously resisted by the populace until Franklin Roosevelt carefully laid the groundwork and Pearl Harbor made it inevitable. Think of civil rights, which Lyndon Johnson pressed despite widescale opposition, and not just in the South. Even then it took more than 100 years. Or think of the current health care debate in which Americans seem to desire some sort of reform, just not a reform that would significantly help people in dire need, while the Obama administration is pushing to provide that assistance. In the end, government has inspired Americans far more than Americans have inspired their government. They are too busy boasting.

There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world.

Consider what it means. By what standard is one nation any greater than any other nation? Yes, the United States has vast material resources - we rank eighth in gross domestic product per capita - but we also have, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the "highest inequality and poverty rate" in the world, outside of Mexico and Turkey, and things are getting worse. Nothing to boast of there.

Yes, we have a relatively high median income, but our standard of living as measured by the Human Development Index of the United Nations ranks us only 15th in the world, behind, among others, Norway, France, Canada, and Australia. Are they better than we are? Even our home ownership rate trails that of the citizens of Canada, Belgium, Spain, Norway, and even Portugal.

Yes, the United States has the best system of higher education in the world, but, according to an Educational Policy Institute report, we rank 13th in the affordability of that education, and we are much less successful with lower education - 11th in the percentage of the 25 to 34 population with a high school diploma and 22d in science education. And though Americans love to crow about the "best health care" in the world, the fact is that according to the World Health Organization Index, we actually rank 37th in the quality of our health care. And we are still the only industrialized country in the world without a national health care system.

Even when one considers anecdotal evidence - "If this isn’t the greatest country then why do so many people want to come here?" - the case isn’t particularly persuasive. Mexicans cross the border to the United States for economic opportunity. Turks go to Germany, Indians and Pakistanis to Great Britain, Arabs to France. This isn’t a sign of our special greatness, just a sign that desperate people seek a more powerful economy for their betterment.

The point of all this isn’t that America doesn’t have a lot to be proud of. It does. The point is that just about every country has a lot to be proud of, and America has no more right to assume it is the greatest nation in the world than does France, Switzerland, China, or Russia.

None of this would make much difference if the self-congratulation was just harmless bragging. But there are consequences. A country that believes it is the greatest in the world is also less likely to be constrained by that world. One could argue that the Iraq war was a direct result of a sense of national infallibility. So was our willingness to torture, our reluctance to admit our mistakes in Afghanistan, our culpability in the global recession, and our foot-dragging on global warming. Such a nation is also less likely to introspect or to strive for true greatness because it believes its greatness has already arrived.

There is something bizarre about a country whose leaders have constantly to toady to their constituents and in which any criticism is tantamount to a lack of patriotism, but that describes America today. Every politician feels compelled to ape Jimmy Carter’s old words to the point where our alleged greatness has also become our national mantra.

It seems eons ago when Bobby Kennedy, a politician who didn’t like to stroke even his own supporters, actually scolded a rally for booing Lyndon Johnson because, Kennedy said, Johnson couldn’t have done what he did in Vietnam if he didn’t have the American people, including Kennedy’s audience, as his facilitators.

We aren’t going to hear that sort of honesty from political leaders any more because the American people are too thin-skinned and arrogant to tolerate it. Arrogance in an individual is unbecoming. It is no more becoming for a nation. The Greeks understood that the gods punished mortals for their hubris - for feeling that they were godlike. They knew that overweening pride preceded a fall. One suspects that nations are no more immune to punishment than individuals. A nation that brooks no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. The result may be a government that is as good as the American people, which is something that should concern everyone.

/Neal Gabler is the author, most recently, of "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination."

http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=4611

Board meeting

2009-11-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

I went to the Board meeting with Bill Zeman and read Jeff Morris's letter accusing me of sexually harassing CVUSD female staff. People were pretty shocked and some found it outrageous, including at least three of the Board members. To my amazement, they really were unaware of this caper.

Fred Youngblood put on the agenda for next time to repeal the action of May 2007 putting the lawyers under the control of the Superintendent. It's not at all clear that Mr. Joseph knew about it either. It may have been cooked up by some of his subordinates, who got the lawyer to send it without even letting him know. If so, that's pretty audacious, even insubordinate.