This is a time of correction. The wise thing is to keep within budget. To be selective. To regain discretion. And praise God if we have food on the table.
Ecclesiates 7
14In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.
via PCUSA – Devotions – Daily readings for Monday, June 7, 2010.
No king, no politician, can stop the tide. No king can guarantee prosperity to his people. No king can spend money he does not have, without a reckoning.
But most politicians will call this a lie. They want to provide for subjects, not lead citizens. They would rather massage their own egos that accept that the average man also can seek wisdom, and adjust his activity with the times. And they forget that when the average man does this, they are powerless.
]]>… for they lack the spiritual and philosophical roots to handle riducule, argument and repression. They have not grown up — as a religion — with opposition in their own culture.
THOSE LIBERTARIANS LOVE TO PROVOKE, especially on religion. So though I understand and link to some ‘Draw Muhammed Day’ links, I think it’s not going to be understood by the enemy, nor further any real chance of convincing moderates to reject and speak up against jihadism in Islam.As a Christian, we’re used to being mocked and taken on, from the beginning… it started with Jesus. He warned his followers to take up their cross, expect persecution and reviling and such. Got mock? Bring it. Got ironclad anti-religious arguments? Do your worst.Unlike A Certain Religion That Shall Not Be Named, you cannot ‘insult’ the Trinity, or besmirch Jesus. Christ took on all the insult, curses, and besmirchment, and redeemed them with infinite love and death, and burst the tomb where we thought him safe and gone.From the festering wounds of the MoToon Wars, A Certain Religion That Shall Not Be Named can’t handle controversy, mocking, or contradiction. It hasn’t the rational tools, or the spiritual foundations.
via Free Canuckistan!.
I have to add that the Christians are handicapped because they speak the truth and not accept the lies put down in other groups: it is because we are the only way we are hated. (And since Jesus was Jewish, and Judiasm also speaks truth they are are in the same boat)
]]>The oil spill is simply an apt metaphor for every disastrous action of the Obama administration, the kind that keep pouring out of dirty, slimy, corrupt minds day in and day out.
The only final question: is there a cavalry out there, bugles blaring, that's going to ride to our rescue? Two more years of Obama and there's not a smidgen of doubt in my mind that we'll be too far gone to be anything but a countrified Humpty Dumpty. I fully expect freedom's last stand will be in Australia sometime in the next decade. The second Alamo if you will.
via CRUSADER RABBIT: A post By Rachel Peepers, of Eternity Road:
Rachel, take comfort. The Democrats were always like this. This is why they only get four years in. Clinton — economically — was a republican. (His private philandering was in the best traditions of the Democratic party). The best option is that Obama will lose power in November — let is pray for this — and be a lame duck for two years.
]]>There is no expectation that everyone will do English, or PPE. And we ignore gender, ethnicity, race etc in hiring. We want the best.
If this report is the canary in the coal mine, the US undergraduate degree is not only over priced but it also is without merit.
Hat tip the Spearhead
]]>Ross Forman is one of American higher education's best and brightest. He may also be a canary in its coal mine.
Three years ago, he was looking for a university teaching job. He had stellar credentials – an undergraduate degree in history and literature from Harvard and a Stanford doctorate in comparative literature; he'd published in academic journals, coedited an anthology, and organized conferences.
A temporary teaching job in the English department at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was coming to an end, and he was looking to take the next step in his professorial journey. He sent out applications “mainly in the US,” he says, but it was two applications that he sent farther afield that yielded the results: “I got both jobs in Asia: one in Hong Kong and one in Singapore.”
Professor Forman is among a growing number of top-notch American academics teaching at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and other institutions in Asia and the Middle East, part of a trend that is helping Asian universities rise in international university rankings and fueling a crisis of confidence in American higher education.
Since World War II, US higher education has been the gold standard. But challenged by increasing foreign competition, rising tuition costs, government cutbacks, flagging graduation rates, and questions about the very quality of the education being delivered, US dominance in academic and research power is now under threat.
via US college degrees: Still the best among world’s top universities? – Yahoo! News.
via GenderAnalyzer – Determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman.
]]>]]>The flotilla was stocked with the usual assemblage of the wilfully naive: a few hundred European and other “do-gooders,” including even one Jewish Holocaust survivor. They were invited along as a cosmetic imperative; as “human shields.” The violence was, and was intended to be, between the Islamists and the Israeli soldiers they were certain to confront. Those who physically attacked the soldiers were working from the same impulse as suicide bombers; the rest were only there to howl.
It is amazing to me that there are still “liberals” like this, even within Israel. I have actually met people who live a few hundred metres from the front line with an enemy sworn to exterminate them; who think the “road to peace” can be paved with unilateral Israeli concessions. They embody my worst fears for the West at large: that even in the face of extinction, our own “progressive” types will continue to demand the appeasement of our mortal enemies.
Yet this was the very lesson of the Holocaust: Do not agree to go quietly, into the ovens, or into the sea. So long as there is breath in you, and the possibility of resistance, fight.
Israel was herself founded on this “Zionist” premise: that Jews would defend themselves; that they would not “go quietly” again. That they would not depend on the goodwill of false friends. Why should Israelis take advice from people who openly encourage an enemy vowed to exterminate them?
]]>Matthew 14:13-21
13Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
But I have to acknowledge that feminism had a go at removing another thing blokes like to do.
A society-wide push for female independence and an old code of honor that exists to protect women from a dangerous world cannot peacefully coexist, although the latter has chugged on a bit longer than you might expect. One of two things must be true: either women are fully capable of taking care of themselves – in which case they should – or they can’t – in which case they should acknowledge the superiority of men and get busy making themselves useful to them. You can't have it both ways.
Yet while women proclaim their achievements and abilities, we are still bemoaning that fact that men won’t pay for dates anymore, or go round opening doors, or bow out politely after being refused yet still be there to aid and succor in emergency, like Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice. Yet, what is in it for them if they do? I’ve seen women rudely snub men who opened doors for them or otherwise take offense if men offer help.
From Dr Helen, in a discussion abour why people are less empathetic, Dadvocate says:
I’ll stand by my previous assertation that empathy burn-out plays a role. I see it in my own kids. They’re told constantly they should care about nearly everything.
A week or two ago, my 17 year old son complained that “everybody” cared about this and that and these people and that person but would they care about him. “No,” he said.
Given the reality of his experiences at school and outside of his family, he has a point, although exaggerated. Almost all the caring he sees centers around politically correct talking points and not day to day reality. In that sense political correctness contributes to the lack of empathy.
Additionally, political correctness gives a double message. To one group is says, “You should care more.” To the other group it gives the message, “Others should care about you more, give you more, etc.” All of it detached for reality.
I think we need to look in part at the measurement. To be consistent, the researchers in the study would — this is a meta analysis — have to either use the same measure of empathy or normalize the data. Both have problems.
If you use the same measure the way which people fill it out changes over time. The scale is not the condition — it is an attempt to measure the condition. The scale has some inbuilt biases and (to a person born in the late baby boom) reads like something the Brady Bunch would write.
If the study combined measures, there is less certainty as to the scales measuring the same thing: we hope we are describing apples and pears, not apples and elephants.
So… to make comments I need to see the paper. Not a report of a presentation. Perhaps the academic in me is getting too snarky.
Well, the quiz came indicated I scored…
48/70 points = lower empathy than 60% of participants
The website authors neglect to say that that is within the error range of the mean.
Nuff said. and enough for now.
]]>]]>The beauty of obituaries for the still-extant is that they needn’t be limited to those who are about to go home feet first. Preemptive necrology can be practiced on persons who are in the prime of life, especially if they’ve had their little turn in the limelight and will never do anything else of note if they live to be 1,000.
Maybe “prime of life” isn’t the right descriptive phrase for Ted Turner (71) and Jane Fonda (72), Barney Frank and Harry Reid (70), Bernie Sanders (68), Christopher Dodd (66), Bernadine Dohrn (68), and Bill Ayers (65). They’ll all receive medical treatment paid for with our Medicare tax dollars when they have the stroke they’ll get after reading their Pre-Obits. But, aging though these pests may be, they strike this writer as the kind of people who will live on and on and, before they buy the (organic) farm, may be declared “national treasures” if we don’t do something about it now.
Among the younger of the “dead-but-too-dumb-to-lie-down” we find Andrew Lloyd Webber (62). What a joy to get out the knives and hatchets and hammers and tongs and craft fresh reviews of Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera, and Cats. A careful reinspection of the career of Donald Trump (63) might send the man to federal medium security prison (naming rights available). What a stink there is rising from the rotting corpse of the body of ideas held by Paul Krugman (57). And to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (both 59), late—as it were—of Ben & -Jerry’s, let us suggest the flavor “Grateful Deadly Nightshade.”
We all are unreliably correct.
Galatians 2:11-21
11But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; 12for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. 13And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
15We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. 17But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor. 19For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.
Most people rebel here. They think that if they have done good, it will outweigh the bad. Indeed, this is the logic of both the papal indulgences and the Wahabite fighting in a holy war: this act will give them justification.
But this is a lie. And this was a known like 2000 years ago: for Jesus ripped the veil of the law away and showed the justice that underlied it. And no one can live to that standard but intermittently unless they are divine: truly righteous, truly set apart.
This idea — of incarnation — also offends. But the truth offends. Let us seek the mercy of God, and live in the truth, for by ourselves we are merciful rarely and truthful intermittently.
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