Author: VD

There is much that we do not understand about Jesus Christ. A baby born of a virgin, an innocent crucified as a criminal, a Prince of Peace come to divide brother from brother. I myself don’t understand the common portrait of the meek, mild and mealy-mouthed Savior, when the man of whom we read in the Bible is massively self-confident, brutally sarcastic and possessed of enough strength of character to empty a Temple with the force of his rage.

In one of history’s great metaphors, Paul tells us that now we see through a glass darkly. But even through that obscured glass, we see enough of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, that our hearts and minds are stirred to follow Him, each in our own clumsy and faltering way. As He warned it would, the world mocks what it does not understand and kills what it fears and hates. Let it look on in bewilderment, scorn and fear again today, as Christians around the world once more celebrate together the Resurrection of Our Lord and His victory over the grave. For history has shown that there are few words more lasting or powerful than those four simple words of celebration and salvation.

He is risen. Alleluia.

Gail Collins doesn’t understand the basics of sex:

This is what happens when a bunch of guys go to a place where their families can’t keep tabs on them. Of course, there are women in Albany — about a quarter of the lawmakers, although very few with any significant power. But the political culture, incubated over several centuries, is about guys on a road trip. The best argument for electing more women to State Legislatures might be that they put a damper on the fun.

Or, far more likely, this would lead to significantly more scandals since in addition to more female politicians, there would be more female staffers, interns, and lobbyists, since women generally prefer to surround themselves with women. Adding more women into the equation, and therefore creating more opportunities for sexual contact, isn’t terribly likely to reduce the incidence of sexual activity. One would think this conclusion would be totally obvious since the very scandal Ms Collins cites was an affair between the new governor of New York and an employee in the governor’s office. By Collin’s reasoning, if only more women had worked in that office, Mr. Paterson would have found it easier to resist temptation.

Chick logic… I’m never sure if I find it more amusing or appalling.

I never thought Obama was anything but a rabbit; now that the rabbit has foolishly refused to gracefully exit the race, he’s being thrown to the hounds:

Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation. Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama’s church.

If the Lizard Queen doesn’t completely destroy him in the coming Pennsylvania primary, I have no doubt that we’re going to see some seriously ugly and well-documented information released about B. Hussein Obama. At this point, my guess is that he backs down quietly behind the scenes after losing badly in Pennsylvania and agrees to accept the VP slot, the “race” continues with both candidates suddenly electing to take the high road, and after some pretend drama at the convention, the “surprise” peace accord and unity ticket is announced to the public. Otherwise, if he chooses to stubbornly fight on, his Magic Negro persona will be destroyed too thoroughly for him to remain a viable candidate of national scope.

Like most Americans, Scott Hatfield doesn’t understand what the Enlightenment represents. Nor does he understand how completely I reject it:

Again, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner because of your rhetoric. The hyperbole about the Enlightenment era as a whole was not needed to make the point that absolute secularization has born some bitter fruit, but you just had to have your broad-brushed flourish. I guess that’s the Vox Style. Oh, well, dead horse. You haven’t addressed the central point that good things came out of the Enlightenment (such as the Bill of Rights). If I’m wrong, please show me where the First Amendment can be derived purely from Christian theology as widely accepted prior to 1800.

The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment are absolutely not products of the Enlightenment. First, for Scott’s edification, I point out that the Enlightenment is a fundamentally authoritarian movement:

The first major Enlightenment figure in England was Thomas Hobbes, who caused great controversy with the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651). Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, people were self-serving and preoccupied with the gathering of a limited number of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes continued, it was essential to have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, John Locke came into the picture, promoting the opposite type of government—a representative government—in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries, it was clear that Locke’s message was closer to the English people’s hearts and minds. Just before the turn of the century, in 1688, English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king James II and installed the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In the aftermath of this Glorious Revolution, the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that granted more personal freedoms.

In other words, PRIOR to the publication of Locke’s work and long before 1800, the English Protestants established a Bill of Rights that explicitly rejects the Enlightenment concepts of Hobbes and most of the French philosophes who came along later. There was little new about the American Bill of Rights, it was mostly an explicit extension of its English predecessor, which includes freedoms of speech and religion, from Parliament to the individual. Even the original Bill of Rights built upon the concepts of the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 and Henry I’s Charter of Liberties of 1100. When viewed from a historical perspective, it is obvious that democracy, divided government and guaranteed rights cannot reasonably be considered Enlightenment concepts, as all three predated the Enlightenment by centuries. Indeed, the distinguishing factors of the American and French Revolutions were that while the former was a) Christian and b) skeptical of government power, while the latter was a) anti-clerical and b) trusting in government power. One has merely to examine the broad limitations on the “human rights” of a genuinely Enlightenment-based government, such as the First French Republic, the European Union, or the United Nations, to understand that the concept of unalienable individual rights endowed by a Creator is not only foreign to the Enlightenment, it is downright antithetical to it.

In summary, the Bill of Rights did not come out of the Enlightenment, it was the result of combining the medieval tradition of the English Common Law with 18th century American Christianity. This latter influence is overt, because it was from their shared Christian tradition that the American revolutionaries derived the concept of God and God-granted rights as being superior to government, whereas the Enlightenment tradition does not recognize God and therefore accepts no supra-governmental limitations; all Enlightenment rights are expressly granted by government and can be freely abrogated by it at will. I recommend that Scott examine Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Articles 17 and 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner may have best summed up the primary challenge of a post-Christian Europe. “I knew what was the West, and I don’t know what the West is now.”

It’s incredible that so few people understand why most college degrees are worthless nowadays:

My daughter said to me the other day, “Why bother going to college Mom? You have a great degree, from a great college and it means nothing. I think I might move out of the country.”

When a) a college degree is no guarantee that the possessor has even a rudimentary education and b) half the population has one, it’s downright stupid to waste time and resources acquiring one, especially if you’re pursuing a degree that isn’t in a technical field for which there is proven demand.

Brad Wardell explains why copy protection is pointless:

Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose…. “When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.”

TIA is in a similar position. Most of its potential audience has never heard of it, so worrying about a theoretical loss of bookbuyers based on a few thousand downloads is absurd. As it happens, more copies of the physical book have been sold than been downloaded for free… and the fact that the most easily found etexts are those of the bestselling books should suffice to prove that only a very small percentage of ebook pirates were ever potential customers.

It was only a matter of time before people began to notice one of the truly great blogs… and get offended by it:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

Events will prove you wrong:

We imagine we can ditch Christianity and yet the good things we have inherited in our way of life will continue. They will not. Christianity formed Western civilisation and is so consubstantial with it that if Christianity goes, the lot goes with it. Let TS Eliot, writing in 1934, give us a text to think about this Easter: “Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?”

What would be amusing if it wasn’t tragic is the way that parochial Americans who don’t know the first thing about Europe point to the dying European countries, especially the Scandinavian ones, as evidence that secular post-Christianity is viable. The rector’s article also shows how foolish it is for Christians to think that there will not be severe consequences when the Church follows the lead of Man.

The comments following the article are particularly interesting. It is amazing how many idiots genuinely believe that the Enlightenment was a significant factor in forming a Christian civilization that predated it by centuries. The Enlightenment was, and is, nothing more than a destructive perversion of Christianity that led to the horrors of the French Revolution, the October Revolution and the future evils of the European Union.

It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It never has been:

Both parties are quick to employ our military. It’s the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party – each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.

And why is the military the only policy tool that works? Because it doesn’t have to do anything but break things and kill people. That’s the one thing that government is perfectly capable of handling. Why so many people want more of it, when there is centuries of evidence demonstrating that all one ever gets from it is more broken things and more dead people, is something I will never understand.

Ben Bernanke defies the common Keynesian position:

It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s infamous ‘liquidationist’ thesis, that weeding out “weak” banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view. In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

This jocular statement has never gotten the widespread attention it deserves, even if the current Fed Chairman errantly attributes this demonstration of Fed responsibility to the famous monetarist when it was actually the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard who first made the conclusive case in his 1963 book America’s Great Depression. It’s interesting, however, to see how Bernanke is, despite his promise, following the same general model that his predecessors did. I’ll have more detailed analysis of this in a future Voxonomics to see just how closely the Fed is imitating history, but needless to say, this doesn’t bode terribly well for the future.

I have to say, I’m really impressed with this timely step by WorldNetDaily, even though I knew nothing about it. If I understand my principles of socionomics, this is a definite bear sign as a broadening interest in technical analysis usually indicates volatility and a down market.