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Pastor of Proclamation Presbyterian Church (PCA) is forced to leave the country against his will.

For the record, I am not in favor of “amnesty.” If we abolish all the evil immigration laws (a redundant description) and apologize for ever having any such laws, retroactively decriminalizing people moving to where they can best find economic prosperity, then there will be no one left to receive “amnesty.”<>биржа копирайтинга текст рурегистрация в rambler каталоге

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I love community stories. I hear them often. Sometimes I take them for granted. But sometimes I am drawn to the uniqueness of it. It is so rare. The Church functions as a community; a uniquely bonded group. Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative provides a story from one of his readers on the power of community:

Around 9:00 AM I was at work with my father. (We own a family business that has been in business since 1946. It was founded by my great-grandfather and grandfather.) At around 9 we received a call from our delivery man that he was in a wreck a few miles up the road. He was OK, the other man was OK, and it was not our guy’s fault. The other man had run a red light and hit him.

Our truck was loaded down with hundreds of pounds worth of material. My father and I got in the truck and drove up the road to the site of the wreck. My father got out and spoke with the police, and I went towards our driver. Then the driver and my father got in the truck and drove the half mile up the road to the hospital. I was left to unload and reload the truck onto another truck. I had people who I did not know, the first responders, and people I did know, stop by to help me. We had the truck unloaded and reloaded in a matter of minutes. A random someone, whose name I did not get, brought us bottles of water to stay cool with while we were outside. The police officers and firefighters greeted me by first name and treated us very well. The people we were delivering to, after we called them, told us they were more worried about our driver than their stuff and they would just come get it from us since it was impossible for us to deliver it today. For some of them this would require an hour of of their day at their own personal or company expense. I was truly humbled by the experience.

My town is larger than yours. We have around 20,000 people in it and the county has around 35,000. So while I do not know everyone, people still treat people like humans around here. I experienced that in a great way, and at no time in all of the problem did I ever feel alone, or that I had to go at it on my own. I am thankful that I live in a place like this. I have had several people offer us prayers. Today I learned that there is something even more special about the place I live.

Do you have any stories like this? Feel free to share.<>online rpg mobile gameреклама медицина

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She comments on why we can’t save medical costs like Singapore does. The answer is that Singapore did not get government “investment” that traps them in higher costs:

So here’s the problem with looking toward Singapore for cost control: We couldn’t do this even if we wanted to. Multi-bed wards pretty much disappeared from the U.S. after the 1970s. My father, who was a budget analyst in the New York hospital system, notes that this had two causes: first, commissions kept recommending private rooms over those noisy, unsanitary large wards. And second, any new beds you built could be paid for by filling them with Medicare patients at “usual and customary” fees. The result was a hospital-building boom, which is why virtually all hospitals are in new buildings, and why, outside of some emergency wards, you’ve probably never spent time in one of those long wards you see in black-and-white films. “American hospitals are rather like hotels,” I was once told by a British colleague who was defending the honor of the rather more spartan National Health Service.

Cost controls that are relatively easy to implement in advance — by, for example, not building shiny new hospitals filled with private rooms — become impossible once you’ve made certain investments. This problem also afflicts higher education. Say we decided, as a society, to go back to the college costs of the 1970s. We’ll fire all the extra administrators, and to hell with whatever it is they’re doing to promote diversity, improve admissions or direct student life. If their missions are critical, we’ll make faculty take them over and cut back on research. Cafeteria service will go back to the fare of my mother’s day (lamb patties and lima beans twice a week — she lost 20 pounds her freshman year, and she wasn’t heavy to start with). Want to get in shape? Go run around the track, because we’re closing the fancy gym.

We still wouldn’t reach the cost levels of the 1950s, because the buildings are still there. The grounds have to be maintained. Everything has more lights, and the buildings aren’t built to be warm in winter and cool in summer; they’re built on the assumption that they’ll be climate controlled. Frequently the windows can’t even be opened, so it’s going to get awfully stuffy in there unless you turn on the A/C. You can’t shut down the fabulous new fitness center and go back to using the old gym, because the old gym was probably torn down. Unless you want to invest billions of dollars in reconfiguring the nation’s campuses, they’re going to be inherently harder to operate than the campuses of yesteryear.

What I take away from this is that government “success stories” are writing the line “and they all lived happily ever after” before the story is really over. No wonder Keynes final answer (for his lucky generation) was that they would all be dead before the “long run” came.<>регистрация а в каталогах самостоятельно

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Essentially, what we are hearing is this:

• There is such a thing as a just war.
• Waging such wars is essential to the preservation or creation of some great good.
• Once a population stops a leader from an unjust war, it is likely that
  • The population will oppose a future just war
  • Bad guys will think that they are safe because our nation will not wage a future just war.
• THEREFORE: We must go ahead and wage this unjust war.

Essentially, the Just War tradition is being used to justify waging unjust war.

The definition of “just war” has already been demonstrated to be far too broad over the last twelve years or so (or perhaps 212!) but this is even worse.

Of course, these enemies of civilization who hold positions of authority in Conservative media and the GOP are completely ignoring the fact that they are siding with anti-Christian, Jihadi, heart-eating, live-girl-dismembering terrorist Sunnis against minority Christians, Shiites, etc. Bashar al-Assad is a brutal killer, which is precisely how he managed to impose pluralism and tolerance on that region. Al Qaeda has always hated his secular regime. We have had lots of brutal killers as allies before—like, for instance, Assad, who helped us by torturing some of the suspects we sent to him less than a decade ago. I’m not approving any of this but just pointing out the hypocrisy.

Our meddling in affairs that are not our business has likely already placed deadly chemical weapons in the hands of Al Qaeda affiliates. US foreign policy has made us more vulnerable, not safer.

But even if all that were not true, obviously this argument for “credibility” essentially justifies anything. It is nothing more than a rationalization for homicide.<>anonymizer-vkontakteфирмы по продвижению ов

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I have a few brief thoughts over here.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the addict’s only hope. God’s people become the means of grace for those seeking refuge in other gods. The sacraments become even more meaningful to those who suffer under the weight of unending temptations. In bread and wine, men and women can rest and partake of the goodness of One who suffered and experienced temptations of every kind. The addict’s hope must be in Jesus. If he seeks any other savior the addiction of the heart will lead to death.

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Professor N.T. Wright’s The Case for the Psalms is now available. The introduction is quite captivating. His personal plea is for a return to the Psalms. The Psalms are “full of power and passion, horrendous misery and unrestrained jubilation, tender sensitivity and powerful hope.” But they psalms have been neglected. They have been used occasionally as a fill-in for worship services making its titanic role minuscule. Wright observes that popular worship songs sprinkle a few phrases occasionally, but overall, the “steady rhythm and deep soul-searching of the Psalms themselves” have been displaced. This is not to say that churches should only sing Psalms. I personally believe it is unwise to neglect the beautiful theology of the Church put into music. Wright says, “by all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy.” Crazy indeed.<>поисковая оптимизация плюсы минусы

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Gary Demar has to correct once more the current apocalyptic craze in light of a potential war of Syria. Jan Markell says “the Syrians’ use of chemical weapons makes her think about Isaiah 17, which foretells the complete destruction of Damascus, which hasn’t happened in thousands of years.” But according to Demar,

Damascus was utterly destroyed in fulfillment of what was predicted in Isaiah 17. The destroyer himself —Tiglath-pileser — said so in his Annals: “I took 800 people together with their property, their cattle (and) their sheep as spoil. I took 750 captives of the cities of Kurussa (and) Sama (as well as) 550 captives from the city of Metuna as spoil. I destroyed 591 cities from the 16 districts of Damascus like ruins from the Flood.”

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