Obama, who believes government spends money more constructively than do those who earn it, warns that the sequester’s budgetary nicks, amounting to one half of 1 percent of gross domestic product, will derail the economy. A similar jeremiad was heard in 1943 when economist Paul Samuelson, whose Keynesian assumptions have trickled down to Obama, said postwar cuts in government would mean “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”
Federal spending did indeed shrink an enormous 40 percent in one year. And the economy boomed. Because crises are government’s excuse for growing, liberalism’s motto is: Never let a crisis go unfabricated. But its promiscuous production of crises has made them boring.
Remember when, in the 1980s, thousands died from cancers caused by insufficient regulation of the chemical Alar sprayed on apples? No, you don’t because this alarming prediction fizzled. Alar was not, after all, a risk.
Remember when “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” (New York Times, May 21, 1975) with “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976) which must “stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975)?
Today, while Obama prepares a governmental power grab to combat global warming, sensible Americans, tuckered out with apocalypse fatigue, are yawning through the catastrophe du jour, the sequester. They say: Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the hamsters of sequestration.
You are a committed Christian. You’re not just nominal. And you aren’t simply emotive or thoughtless. You know you are supposed to love the Lord with all your mind. The Bible applies to all of life. You want to take every thought captive to Christ. You have a Christian worldview.
And for that reason, you may be blind.
This is not because the Christian world view is false (thought the visual metaphor may need some balancing). It is because you are taking shortcuts and are too confident in what you know to think that you need to check yourself.
Just because the Christian world view is essential to fully understanding the truth doesn’t mean you need nothing else to learn the truth. You are called to take God’s word and apply it to all of life. But you are perfectly capable of taking God’s word and applying it to your imagination—or to some fictional constructs that you have been taught and have never investigated for yourself.
Think of the culture war and American politics. There are people who need your vote in order to gain their place in the political structure of the United States of America. They know you are a Christian. They know they need the support (at least on Election Day) of people who possess a Christian World and Life View. Do you really think that, even if they plan to go in an entirely different direction, they don’t have ways of appealing to you to deceive and manipulate you to get your endorsement? If you wave the Bible, you are inviting people to use your values to lead you in a direction that might end up being the exact opposite of where they claim they are going.
It is simply not enough to know the truth about God, Jesus, and his ethical directions. You have to know something about your world, your time in history, and the people around you.
Is Islam the biggest threat to Christianity? Knowing that Islam is a false religion and that Christianity is true does not mean you have enough information to decide that question. If Islam is an independent international power, it may be such a threat. If, in fact, Islamic power is dependent on the cooperation and sponsorship of Western governments, then you might need to adjust your estimate and give first place to modern secular totalitarianism.
Should American Christians support Israel (or to what extent and in what way)? Should they support the Federal Government’s containment policy against China? Should Christians regard Putin as a thug and demand more civil liberties for Russians, or perhaps regard him as a thug and figure he shouldn’t worry about “Western” secular civil liberties? Unless they have done due diligence on the history, Christians have no right to hold an opinion on such topics. Knowledge of the importance of the Trinity to the question of the one and the many or the importance of private property to a social order won’t be enough to tell you anything.
Another complication is that Christians may not correctly understand the Christian world view, and they might actually profit from correction on those points from a non-Christian, despite the non-Christian’s central error. It is quite easy to prevent a Christian from receiving such correction by pointing to the unbeliever’s destructive beliefs and practices. I think virtually every Christian critique of Ayn Rand I have seen on the web could easily be used in this way.
One might recommend that Christians simply confess their ignorance and stay out of matters they know nothing about. But that is impossible for Americans today. Everyone—everyone—is recruiting Christians to a foreign policy or domestic cause on the basis of the alleged demands of the Christian worldview. If man-made global warming is real, then Christians must participate and support whatever scheme might fix it on the basis of “stewardship.” But the Bible doesn’t tell you whether it is real or not. If the agricultural developments of the twentieth century were the natural and spontaneous progress of scientific development providing cheaper food on the free market, that will demand one stance from Christians. If those developments were a patent monopoly used by US cold war policy to destroy indigenous agriculture and make other nations dependent on petroleum fertilizers and other purchases from a cartel, that will demand a different stance. Again, the Bible doesn’t tell you any of it.
And many don’t want to face up to how complex our situation really is. They want to add the Bible to a few unquestionable facts. You learn what those facts are, typically, when you hear your favorite Bible teacher or worldview think tank leader refer to anyone who questions or denies them as an “idiot.”
Calling people idiots and denying that they should ever be heard or considered has a far greater role in the “Christian world and life view” as it is actually practiced by Christians than anyone wants to admit.
I realize no one can know everything. But if you’re going to express an opinion on what God thinks about something, you’re going to have to study not only God’s Word but also that “something.” As much as Americans need to read more of the Bible, they also need to read more history and international politics. There’s no way to do otherwise and still claim to have a Christian view of the world as it actually is.
John Calvin famously compared the Bible to the lenses of eyeglasses. That is the point. You are supposed to look through them at the world. Too many Christians stare at the lenses or use them to stare at pictures a few influential Christians have painted for them.
I have written on why I think drones are unethical, here. I spelled out a scenario:
Let us imagine I have a repair guy come over to fix my furnace. It turns out he is moonlighting as a terrorist. Homeland Security has recently identified him as a terrorist. They have just figured out the vehicle he drives and the license number. Because drones are perfectly fine to use in the war on terror. Homeland Security has one over St. Louis looking for him.
The drone spots the van outside our house and sees the man entering our home. So the drone pilot pulls the trigger and fires a hellfire missile at the house…
But let’s change up the scenario. Let’s say that Seal Team 6 raided my house instead. In that case, they would be trespassing, since they would be entering with weapons before they had time to explain the situation to any of us. And there would be dangers of an accidental shooting. But, if people were doing the assassination then it is quite possible the warriors would shoot the terrorist and leave the rest of us alive and even uninjured.
Supposedly, Seal Team 6 went to Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden. We have absolutely no evidence that they did so, but several contradictory stories say they did, so let’s go with it:
If drones are so great, why did they use Seal Team 6? Why not just fly a drone overhead and fire a predator missile? No version of the story has claimed that Osama was holding a hostage whom the Seals wanted to rescue. So what was their reason for not using a drone?
I think we all know why the stories all need Seal Team 6. In order to win a real and certain victory, we need people who serve both as soldiers and witnesses to do things right. Leaving a house in a rubble heap will not provide a confirmed kill. There will be doubts. But a person with a gun can provide a much more certain outcome.
And that shows you what the drones are: throwaway death that we toss at relatively unimportant targets.
“Are we sure that’s him?”
“Who cares–it’s not like we’re risking anyone.”
Drones aren’t for important targets that must be killed. They’re busy-work that has more advantage in providing money for drone manufacturers and terrorizing all the people in a region where the drones are heard flying overhead. When someone really important is targeted, we don’t use them. We send real people.
In one of the many good articles on Obama’s international (and domestic?) appetite for violence, Micah Zenko writes for Foreign Policy,
“During his second inaugural address, President Obama offered two aspirational statements that struck many observers as incongruous with administration policies: ‘A decade of war is now ending’ and ‘We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.’ We should question these observations, not least because of the string of U.S. government plans and activities that increasingly blur the conventional definition of war.”
As far as I can tell, if Obama believes his rhetoric, then he thinks pulling back on American military personnel counts as “ending war.” Of course, he tried to stay in Iraq with multiple bases and he plans to never really leave Afghanistan. But even though they will get combat pay those troops in Afghanistan will be “advisors” or whatever other term is considered pacific enough.
But if Obama believes his rhetoric then he is fooling himself. Just because we do not have troops invading a country at the moment, it is false to say we are not engaged in ongoing warfare. The drones are expanding their killing reach into North Africa. And we have more or less openly made Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates our proxy mercenary army in Libya and now in Syria. (In Obama’s defense, this plan was already developed late in Bush’s second term.)
Thus, Obama has “ended” war by establishing that war is now the same as everyday life—as “peacetime.” We will never go to war again because we will be forever killing people in every nation whom we designate as threats to “national security”—which will, of course, include threats to whatever international apparatus or system of relationships that we designate as “vital” to national security.
So the executive branch will never need to go to Congress for a declaration of war again. A declaration of war pretends that there is some such thing as peacetime that must be temporarily disrupted until peace can be reestablished. But now peace and war will be simply the same. Really, we’ve fulfilled the Orwellian prophecy: It is now official that war IS peace.
And the whole distinction between economic interest and national security interests is inevitably smudged out of existence in this new warpeacetime. Currency wars and drone wars will all be just tools available for the perpetuation of US hegemony.
Of course, Obama’s not going to push US hegemony by name the way Bush did. But that doesn’t matter. The hegemony he strives for (like Bush) really means simply the hegemony of a cartel of people holding office in some nation states and international organizations and some international corporations who will be forever lining their pockets as they convince themselves that they are doing what is best for “the planet”—which is a goal conveniently wide to justify killing terrorists, sponsoring terrorists, starting industry, or dismantling industry. Recall Bush’s attempt to give port security to UAE, or the fact that Henry Kissinger decided not to chair the 9-11 commission after being reminded that to accept the position would mean he would have to reveal if any of the Bin Laden family were included in his client list.
This is the world our children are growing up in, one where War Is Peace and everyone knows we have always been allied to Eurasian and at war with Eastasia, or the other way around.
Although admitting Saddam Hussein was a “despotic and murderous leader,” Tutu avoids elaborating and offers no alternatives to his removal by Western force. He cites 110,000 Iraqis killed in war but not the many more Saddam killed during supposed peace.
Wow, you mean Hussein killed more than 120,000 of his own people? Did he like, have a big long kill list or something? How many more? Did he, say, I don’t know… maybe…. Kill a half million Iraqi children and then say it was all worth it on national television? I seem to remember something like that…
Oh wait.
OK, forget about our mass murder of Iraqi children in the 90s. Let’s move on. What can make the above paragraph make any sense at all? Consider the logic: Was there any evidence that Hussein was going to kill even half as many again as we killed?
No. He was a toothless dictator.
So because Hussein allegedly killed more, we somehow got the moral authority to make up lies about him to go and replace a horrible secular dictatorship with a horrible radical Shiite dictatorship while killing 120k in the process? I’ll grant the body count is not yet nearly as high, but Iraq has the same secret prisons, the same secret police, and the same torture as before. Only now, we are the trainers and aiders (so I guess this puts us back into “early Saddam” era), and the Christian church in Iraq no longer has protection, and Iran has a new ally in the region. Oh, and it is now also a haven for Al Qaeda. Aside from the Iraqi civilians we killed, we spent American lives to bring about this result.
Yes Saddam committed crimes, but they weren’t our crimes. We’ve ignored and even now ignore massacres and genocides all over the planet. It was never our job to police Iraq. We know this is true because Bush would not have needed to make up lies about WMD.
And then this from Blair:
…and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million including many killed by chemical weapons….
Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld shake hands
Those were US-provided weapons in a US-sponsored proxy war against Iran. The fact that Blair admits that this was a crime deserving of destruction makes me wonder if the Holy Spirit was moving him to prophesy against the Western world.
The article calls Tutu a liberal, which is true and a shameful thing. Sometimes the word of God comes to us on foreign lips and we refuse to listen. I doubt Blair is any less liberal.
Final paragraph:
As to the Iraq War’s morality, it’s still unexplained by critics like Tutu what viable alternatives were available in 2003 regarding a mass murdering dictator who had started 2 wars and joined the Taliban regime in publicly endorsing 9-11. Although Tutu is now over age 80, his claim that the Iraq War has destabilized the world more than any conflict in history indicates he has no memory prior to 2003.
The “viable alternative” was to not lie about Hussein to make him into a threat and to allow the toothless dictator to rot in his country. I have no idea how much the Iraq war destabilized the world compared to Napoleon, but it was certainly a horrible and destabilizing act that was directly against the national interest even though it served to enhance the power of the US Federal Government.
One final note: the picture I included in this post, is not an Iraqi child, but an Afghan or Pakistani girl.
A new poll out by Gallup shows that for the first time since 2000, a majority of Americans believe it isn’t the responsibility of our federal government to provide healthcare to all Americans.
[Note: I have no idea why the image won’t show. Until someone can fix it, you’ll have to follow the link.]
I’m not now, just as I never have, promoting some kind of strategy for getting Obama elected to teach anyone a lesson. But I’m just saying that it could happen.
Today’s Congress is the least productive in the nation’s history. At least, so claims a soon-to-be published paper by Rosanna Kim ‘13.
Kim’s work, which analyzes the 112th Congress using a model of legislative productivity designed by political scientist Sarah Binder, will be published later this year in The Fellows Review. Kim completed the research while working last year as a Fellow for the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC).
What a horror story we live in. It is bad enough we have an committee that meets regularly that justifies its existence by the passage of new laws. Now, they are actually criticized if they don’t pass more faster.
And why is there gridlock? Because there are many people, or a significant minority that opposes the law. What kind of democracy are we going to have if it is considered a problem when Congress doesn’t violate the will of the people?
Israel never had a legislature. Nor did Rome, truth be told. The English Common Law developed without a legislature. In fact, if England had always had Parliament it would never “common law” would never have come into existence.
The law is supposed to be the application of ethical principles to situations. It develops by court processes. It evolves naturally in a society (at least to the extent that the society has a known ethical code that is shared by the members of that society–maybe that helps explain the demand for “legislative productivity”).
Legislatures are interventionists in this natural process in society. They wreck it.
I realize that, due to our political circumstances and the nine rulers of the US known as the Supreme Court, that American conservatives have come to oppose “judge made law.” But, in general, judge-made law is far preferable to legislatures.
For further reading, I highly recommend Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni. It is by no means a Christian book, but it is of great value to Christians and will help them understand ancient Israel and how law is supposed to develop far better than many other Christian works.
So Barack Obama won. He won pretty handily if you count the electoral votes (303-206). The popular vote was a little closer (61 to 58 million), and some of the contested State votes that gave him the electoral advantage were very close. Even so, take a moment to compare this to the 2008 election. Back then Obama got almost 70 million votes and McCain about 60 million. 11 million less people voted this time around. And what is a more surprising, Romney got 2 million less votes than McCain did back in 2008.
Okay. So three days after the election, what do I think about all of this? First, whatever the numbers may be, I will be amazed if President Obama is able to do much of anything this term. He’s not a leader. He’s a campaigner. He’s been campaigning for the last 5 years. He’s got professionals that advise him well. He knows what people want. He’s got a knack for appealing to certain kinds of people, which as this election has shown, turns out to be the majority of the voting public. But he hasn’t done anything in the past four years worthy of the name “leadership.” He’s “led from behind” on every issue, even the big ones like the stimulus and Obama care. He’s not a leader. He’s a campaigner.
Jason Hood over at the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology asks the following hypothetical question about an imagined future scenario:
Mexico and other Latin American nations, not least given recourse to a combination of Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism. They begin to get drug violence under control.
Then they turn their attention northward: they decide to “fight the real enemy” and declare war on the United States.
Their primary goal is the end the violence of abortion in our country. Secondary concerns include the carnage of self-centered drug abuse, global leadership in pornography and the sexual trafficking of women and young girls–horrors which leak into Latin America from the USA. The US stubbornly refuses to accept outside help, and Latin Americans have had enough.
So the question is, Americans, for whom do you fight in this thought experiment? And what do you make of the justification for war?
I think this is a good thought experiment. Is the CSATO (the Central & South American Treaty Organization) waging a just war or not?
We could go into particulars.
Like:
Would they be justified in sending us an ultimatum with the threat of mass civilian bombing behind it, on the rationale that we would certainly capitulate and the threat would save lives?
And, when we refused the ultimatum, would they then be obligated to drop all the bombs because they couldn’t be perceived as bluffing?
And, could CSATO and Mexican Officials claim that the resulting dead babies were really the responsibility of “the Americans”?
This is an excellent analysis of how much can be wasted over wishful thinking. But it also pretty much spells out the producers v. dependents scenario that most Conservative/Libertarians fear (which I guess slipped through in the article because it was off topic). I’d love to get the writer in a room and ask him some questions about what he thinks this all means.
Romney advisers say it was impossible to compete against Obama’s huge war chest. They also envy his ability to leverage the presidency for his campaign. Young voters were told about new provisions for student loans and Obama’s support for same-sex marriage, an issue that appeals to young voters. Hispanic voters were wooed by the president’s plan to waive the deportation of children of illegal immigrants. One Romney aide also included the much-debated changes to welfare requirements as a policy aimed to win over African-American voters. “It was like they had a calendar,” said one Romney aide. With each month, the Obama administration rolled out a new policy for a different segment of their coalition they hoped to attract.
Conservatives have two things (humanly speaking) going for them.
1. Hatred of slavery. Romney didn’t believe in this. He figured if the 47% didn’t pay taxes/or were dependent (which? I was never clear on this). But while more dependency will obviously favor the giver of gifts, it isn’t going to be that great experience for everyone. Some will hate it. If they get the idea that the government has destroyed the economy and is benefiting from that destruction by moving more people into dependency, we have every reason to hope for a backlash.
2. Greece Benefits are only attractive when the government actually gives them to the people who are voting for them. Obama is gambling that he can spend and spend some more and not feel the repercussions while he is still in office. Maybe he will make it and escape offshore after he leaves office. But there is a debt Doomsday about to hit. Republicans have contributed to that horrible situation, but Obama has made their sins look almost insignificant. We need to put out a consistent message so when the Obamalypse hits, everyone knows its name.
As a Christian, there is also a lot more to do. But on the level of appealing to a secular culture on economic issues, I think these two points are really important.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
Obama, who believes government spends money more constructively than do those who earn it, warns that the sequester’s budgetary nicks, amounting to one half of 1 percent of gross domestic product, will derail the economy. A similar jeremiad was heard in 1943 when economist Paul Samuelson, whose Keynesian assumptions have trickled down to Obama, said postwar cuts in government would mean “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”
I have written on why I think drones are unethical, 
Archbishop Tutu’s Moral Meltdown
