Dark Brightness

arts of our financial system and many property owners have been in a zombie-like state for much of the last two years, hoping that the lending will start again and the deals will return. No one wants to sell for a loss. Some markets are not ‘clearing’ by matching lower demand and higher supply with a lower price.

Instead, they are frozen in the headlights of the Global Financial Crisis.

via Bernard Hickey : New Zealand a ‘zombie nation’ – Business – NZ Herald News.

I spent some of this week reviewing the situation around the boys visiting their mother. (Yes, they live with me.)

I’m divorced. I hate the fact that I’m divorced. It has been painful, and expensive. However, given the situation my sons were in, it was needed.

Divorce is never trivial. It is never one person’s fault. But the comments here are correct.

The title of the news article says it all – “Divorce Easier as New York Law Ends Need to Lie”. If you have a legitimate reason to end a marriage, you shouldn’t have to lie. And no, “he doesn’t make me feel like a woman anymore” doesn’t cut it, honey. If he busts his ass at work, treats you with respect and otherwise behaves like a decent human being, you have no cause to divorce him. You should’ve thought before you said “I do.”

“There is a human cost and a financial cost” to a system demanding fault-finding, Robert Ross, supervising judge of the matrimonial division in Nassau County, New York, on Long Island, said before the bill became law. “It’s hard to know what impact a new law will have, but we do know that a grounds trial, and the expense and delay associated with it, is not a good thing.”

Of course there is, you empty robe. It’s not SUPPOSED to be cheap or easy to end an arrangement with so much significance. The minute getting out of marriage became as easy as getting a passport is the minute marriage lost all of its sanctity.

Well, in most of the world that has already happened. We now are in a situation where there is serial monogamy. Kids hate it. The couples who split hate it. And the Church, who solemnizes most marriages (the civil laws were driven by the need to deal with non thinkers: originally birth, marriages and deaths were motorized in the parish register) is not taking this seriously.

via In Mala Fide.

I have worked in a variety of hospitals over the last 20 years. There has been increased money, and increased reporting to the Ministry of Health. This has led to an increase in the number of administrators…

The funding of most of secondary care and a fair bit of primary care comes from the government. They are the true customer, for they pay the bill. For example, the Southern DHB, which covers 300 000 people, has a budget of 113 million.

The current government did get the message. The number of targets has been decreased to five, against the protests of the last government, which was in love with preventive services. If you want to know why your GP wants you to be seen for a review of your Cardiovascular risk status annually and asks you to quit when you have never smoked… this is why.

The problem is that, as a country, we are almost broke. The reason we are not a basket case is that various nations that are further down the road to serfdom are even more bankrupt. I’m told that there need to be about 5% cuts in all services (and the Treasurer is quite grumpy the prison population is going up, which increases the spend. The Minister, quite sensibly, wants the money spent on the front line.

How can we help this? This list may be politically unsustainable but could help.

• Destroy the microsoft contract with the DHBs, negotiated by the ministry. The US Veteran’s Administration Health system is about the same size as NZ. They use OpenVista. As the source is open, and the interfaces are well documented., we can modify it. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.
• Move back office functionality well away from clinical care, preferably into recycled buildings. For example, Gore Hospital for the Southern DHB.
• Reduce Quality Control and forms committees — we do not need 23 versions of clinical notes. Senior Medical Officers are supposed to spend time in audit. A monthly audit meeting across the region looking at surgical complications, number of suicides, assaults on nurses would be of more benefit than report forms.
• Get the patients in on the act, particularly with chronic diseases. Open up grand rounds and journal clubs. Share information. Discuss priorities for further development.
• Demand that there is an evidence base behind practice. This does not necessarily mean people should mechanically follow the guidelines, but it does mean that interventions without evidence, such as psychodynamic psychotherapy, should stop. There are more modern, cheaper therapies that do work.
• Provide continuity of service, particularly for doctors-in-training. Senior Registrars should be advised as to what jobs will be available in about two to three years, and encouraged to get training experiences that allow them to move into that job. Nurses and allied health professionals need appropriate continuing education and an ability to work flexibly when they have small children (as well over half the health workforce is women, it does not make sense to not consider that at times they may want to have and raise children). It is cheaper to keep people than hire new ones.
• Move the DHB to direct funding. Vote health was 13 billion last year. Cut taxes, but allow the local DHB to raise local taxes. Thus, if Dunedin wants a gold plated service, they have to pay for it. However, this needs to be balanced with…
• Allowing patients to sue for punitive damages, if their health needs, which they have paid for, are not met.

Has this worked? Well, it used to. I have described a similar system (with the exception of the computers) to the one New Zealand had in 1930.

The leadership of the temple in the period of Roman occupation were somewhat akin to the leadership in some parts of the Middle East now. The land was divided. Some was under the control of the Herodean dynasty, which was fairly corrupt and bloody.

The remainder was being ruled as a Roman province. The area tended to get comptent generals, because it was a powder keg. The lcocals tended to rebel. The compensation for the ruler was that he could make himself quite wealthy from the loot he could acquire.

And the leadership? They were now political families and the theologians, particularly the Pharasees, who were popular with the people. Many of whom are still quoted, for their teachings are in the commentaries collated to become the Talmud.

So Jesus heals someone on Saturday.

John 5:1-18

¹After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

²Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. ³In these lay many invalids – blind, lame, and paralyzed. 4, 5One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. ⁶When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” ⁸Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” ⁹At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Now that day was a sabbath. ¹⁰So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” ¹¹But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” ¹²They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” ¹³Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. ¹⁴Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” ¹⁵The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. ¹⁶Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. ¹⁷But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” ¹⁸For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.

The Pharasees were smart. They knew exactly what Jesus was saying. We should not delude ourselves. Jesus himself stated he was one with God. This is not what Moses or the prophets said. The Pharasees could not accept this. Stephen stated, but a few years later…

Acts 7:30-43

³⁰“Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. ³¹When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight; and as he approached to look, there came the voice of the Lord: ³²‘I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look. ³³Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. ³⁴I have surely seen the mistreatment of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. Come now, I will send you to Egypt.’

³⁵‘It was this Moses whom they rejected when they said, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ and whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. ³⁶He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years. ³⁷This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up a prophet for you from your own people as he raised me up.’ ³⁸He is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living oracles to give to us. ³⁹Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him; instead, they pushed him aside, and in their hearts they turned back to Egypt, ⁴⁰saying to Aaron, ‘Make gods for us who will lead the way for us; as for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’ ⁴¹At that time they made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and reveled in the works of their hands. ⁴²But God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? ⁴³No; you took along the tent of Moloch, and the star of your god Rephan, the images that you made to worship; so I will remove you beyond Babylon.’

Stephen points out that the ancestors his audience in Jerusalem were so proud of rejected Moses, and continued to take along Moloch — the God to whom children were sacrificed — and the pagan pantheon. Stephen stated that as you rejected Moses (who you claim to teach) you had rejected the one who sent him. The leaders did not need a commentary to get the implications here. They were quite familiar with whom he was quoting. The message was rejected, and in anger Stephen was killed.

If we take Paul seriously — we are the children also of the covenantal relationship Isreal had with G_d. We were grafted on to the tree of faith. We tend to follow leaders who — like the Pharasees — give us rules to live, teachings on how to apply the word of G_d in our day. Like Isreal, we carry idols in our heads.

We tend to turn back to paganism. The consequences of this have not changed: our young are destroyed (for Molech is about controlling the population), Preistesses tend to conflate their theology into some form of incoherent syncreticism,. In the same way, they conflate the emotions of devotion with eroticism. The boundaries that keep us sane and safe are dissolved. And, if this continues unchecked, the nation is destroyed, either by defeat or by the collapse of the population.

For if you are too busy being a preistess, playing politics, seeking the power of leadership, you do not have time to raise your children, or ally with your spouse.

This cartoon of those the theologian Calvin and the Puritan philosopher Hobbes by Nana Matusumoto challenges us on the usual perception of these two men as remarkably dyspeptic men. They are seen as dried up, judgmental, and without any humour. If you read the Life of Calvin, he was accused by his enemies of being corrupt, and loving men far too much.

What both of these men did was explore the nature of our wrongdoing, without fear. Calvin took the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and (before that) Augustine — and pushed them to the edge. As David wrote.

Psalm 51

1Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

2Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. and cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

The reformers were forced to confront the fact that they could not get people to live righteously by teaching alone. In fact, they had to deal with the errors in their own teaching — Luther wrote some very intemperate comments about people who revolt against unjust rulers — and in their own behaviour. The reformers were not able to sit in a university chair on in the back room of a monastery and think. They were writing as they ministered  in parishes. Their pastoral care informed their thinking. But they were… blunt. This is the short version of how the Heidelberg Catechism manages this issue

Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own,  but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ;  who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins,  and delivered me from all the power of the devil;  and so preserves me  that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation,  and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life,  and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

Question 2. How many things are necessary for thee to know, that thou, enjoying this comfort, mayest live and die happily?

Answer: Three;  the first, how great my sins and miseries are; the second, how I may be delivered from all my sins and miseries;  the third, how I shall express my gratitude to God for such deliverance.

Question 3. Whence knowest thou thy misery?

Answer: Out of the law of God.

Question 4. What does the law of God require of us?

Answer: Christ teaches us that briefly, Matt. 22:37-40, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and the great commandment; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Question 5. Canst thou keep all these things perfectly?

Answer: In no wise;  for I am prone by nature to hate God and my neighbour.

If we do not see ourselves as perfect, but instead see that we by nature will hate and despise others, we have an explanation for the distress, misery and guilt we have when we do wrong. We are not saying here that it is OK to hate our neighbour and God — we are acknowledging that we do this.

And here lies one of the paradoxes. Because I am aware of my own wrongdoing and need for forgiveness I am more tolerant of my neighbour’s weaknesses. I am aware that I probably irritate him more than he irritates me. Again, this does not mean we should not confront evil. But we can separate confronting evil from the person, and be compassionate to the person.

And this allowed the Puritans to not only be seeking righteousness, but to be jolly. Not acknowledging this leads to the a judgmental, hypocritical condemnation of the joys in this life..