Welcome to the asylum

Gerald Warner wrote yesterday about an extraordinary event - the granting, by a judge, of political asylum in America for a German family (see below), persecuted because of how they want to educate their children! (I missed this because I was on a lovely 'day off' and didn't turn on the computer! But thanks to Pete for the lead.) 
And don't forget this is 2010 and not 1933.

He highlights how we as UK Citizens are also citizens of a Europe in which this is happening. 

Do we understand that, as citizens of the European Union, we now belong to a totalitarian state from which fleeing citizens are being granted political asylum in the United States? 

And speaking of our own government: 

The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory. 

Above: The Romeikes

HT Pete Jackson

Ranke the events in order of importance

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was [Leopold von Ranke's aim to reconstruct the past wie es eigentlich gewesen or to those like me who don't speak German 'as it actually happened']. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them. (p15)

a phat one!

and phat fish too

info here

What does 'qualified' mean?

from an article that left me scratching my head as to whether it could be true: here

Haiti

Driscoll speaks about Churches Helping Churches with some great footage of what things are like on the ground.

A pretty cool way of doing a 'reading' at church!

Ch 1

don't forget

the dfnews this week:

Let us pray

One of the distinctions between public and private prayer is that in public prayer we pray as a community for the community and for the concerns of the community. (p 175)

Taxes don't win matches

Notes on Ch 5 - Taxes Discourage Production

This is the chapter where Hazlitt explains why it is unlikely that the wealth 'created' by government spending (see here) will fully compensate for the wealth destroyed by the taxes imposed to pay for that spending.

The government spenders tell us, for example, that if the national income is $1,500 billion then federal taxes of $360 billion a year would mean that only 24% of the national income is being transfered from private purposes to public purposes. This is to talk as if the country were the same unit of pooled resources as a huge corporation, and as if all that were involved were a mere bookkeeping transaction. The government spenders forget that they are taking money from A in order to pay B. Or rather, they know it very well; but while they dilate upon all the benefits of the process to B, and all the wonderful things he will have which he would not have had if the money had not been transferred to him, they forget the effects of the transaction on A. B is seen; A is forgotten. (p 37)

and the consequence for A goes like this:

taxes inevitably affect the actions and incentives of those from whom they are taken

So, for the company who is taxed (heavily), all it's losses are 100% losses and all it's gains are 40/50/60/70% gains (depending on the rate of tax). So it is hard, if not impossible, for it to offset its losses in bad years in the good years and as a result it will adopt a strategy that will minimise the possibilities of any losses (not expanding so fast, not trying new things, not employing more people, improving machinery and factories happen with less vigour etc.):

The result in the long run is that consumers are prevented from getting better and cheaper products to the extent that they otherwise would, and that real wages are held down, compared with what they might have been.

This effect is also seen for individuals and families:

People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or nine months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or three months for themselves and their families.

In conclusion:

In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.

Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt

There are no 'neutral' teachers

in a free society it is the business of a child's parents to decide if their children's minds are to be opened to the possibility that God, rather than man, rules the universe. To educate them on the assumption that this isn't so is not neutral, but as partisan and committed as it is to teach them about the love of Christ as if it is (as I believe it to be ) a reality.

And I have never seen anyone (in print) unmask universities with such candor:

In a society where university education is basically a scheme for disaffecting the young from the beliefs and customs of the home, many now fall into Godlessness during the extended adolescence provided by these subsidised anti-religious seminaries, whose main function is hedonistic pursuit with a bit of education attached at the back. People of my kidney should be making more of an effort to fight for the existence of overtly Christian universities and colleges.

To follow Peter Hitchens' argument see here.

The Medium is the Message

Last night, we watched Frost Nixon and this quote near the end of the film struck me forcibly. 

James Reston Jr says: 

You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist. 

And it reminded me of one of those 'defining' books I read a few years ago and which I want to dust off again. Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'.

Postman's argument is that how we are obliged to conduct our conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture. (p6)

'To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument.... You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.' (p7) 

or


'The shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing  or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television... For on television , discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a  conversation in images, not words.... You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.' (p7)

Of course, there is some irony here. I watched a DVD and these thoughts were all triggered. Doesn't that undermine Postman's thesis? 
Of course, there is an interplay of word and image in the medium of TV/Film and my memory of his book is that it is nuanced on this point. And yet, the quote had force for me because it triggered my memory of an argument I had read in print. So that objection is not as strong as it might seem. 

More potently I have to admit that reflecting on the film, what do I know about Nixon? Not a lot. What do I know about David Frost? Not a lot. What do I know about Watergate and Vietnam? Not a lot. The film did not educate me as much as entertain me. There was much form and not much content.

And perhaps this is where TV is really dangerous. For it gave me the feeling that I know something, when really I do not. And that is both seductive and deadly for me personally.

What effect does it have on a culture that spends so much time consuming this medium?

A Weighty Problem

Apparently 55% of adults in Dudley are overweight or obese.
We do not score well in this department (here).

So I am wondering how the book of Ruth, set in a time of famine for Judah, will be a word in season to us! 
And I am looking forward to finding out.

Decisions

There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse,

even though the end may be dark.

(Aragorn on p 41)

The Bread of Life

Ruth 1:22: So Naomi returned and with her Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, who returned from the land of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Ruth begins tragically. Elimelech flees from famine in Bethlehem by taking his wife and sons to Moab, where death assaults them. First Elimelech dies, and Naomi is left with her two sons. Then her sons die, and she is left with only her daughters-in-law.

But the movement of the chapter is not tragic. It begins in famine, but ends in harvest, and the central turning point of the story is verse 6, where Yahweh “visited His people in giving them food.” Because of Yahweh’s visitation, Bethlehem has again become what its name suggests, a “house of bread.”

Yahweh’s visitation brings more than a harvest of barley. At the same time Israel is beginning to reap the barley, Yahweh is beginning to reap in the Moabites – the Moabites who descend from the incestuous eldest daughter of lot, the Moabites who seduced Israel as they came out of Egypt – those Moabites are being gathered in. Because Yahweh has visited His people, they become a house of bread, a land of milk and honey, and the nations begin to stream in.

Ruth 1 is redemptive history in miniature, depicting the movement from wrath to grace, from famine to feast. It all turns on the great visitation that occurred in Bethlehem, in the incarnation. Ruth 1 is the gospel in miniature: In the midst of the divided nations of the world, He has visited His people in gathering the Gentiles into His house. In the midst of the famine of this world, Yahweh has visited His people in by giving His people living bread from heaven.

http://www.leithart.com/2008/11/02/eucharistic-mediatation/