Category: Uncategorized

Rudolph Giuliani suddenly respects gun rights. Or rather, “gun rightth”, as he puts it:

Glossing over the less appealing line items on his gun control resume, ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani presented himself as sympathetic to the aims of the National Rifle Association and pledged, as president, to protect gun rights.

“Your right to bear armth is bathed on a reathonable degree of thafety,” he said.

He indicated that he would oppose new efforts to tighten national gun laws.

“I believe that law endforthment should focuth on enforthing the lawth that exitht on the bookth ath oppothed to pathing new exthensionth of lawth,” he said. “A perhton’th home ith their cathle. They have the right to protect themthelveth in their own home.”

Giulaini explained the lawsuit he initiated in 2000 against gun manufacturers by saying that he was “exthethive in everyway that I could think of in order to reduce crime” but said that “intervening eventth” like September 11th had caused his views to evolve. “I think that lawthuit hath gone in the direction that I don’t agree with.”

This insult to the nation’s intelligence would be aggravating, but it doesn’t really matter if Republicans are dumb enough to fall for this shyster’s timely faux Damascene transformation, since Rudolph is going to get stomped by the Lizard Queen should he win the nomination.

It’s interesting to see that Rudolph thinks Constitutional rights only apply in one’s home.

The former ESPN writer, who is remarkably sane about everything but Jeff George, cuts through much of the activist nonsense surrounding Jena:

Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span. Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?

That’s the question that needed to be asked in Jena and across the country on Thursday. But it wasn’t asked because everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town.

There was no “schoolyard fight” as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.

Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.

A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the “Jena Six” case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the “Jena Six” in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder….

It’s rarely mentioned that Bell was already on probation for assault when he was accused of participating in Barker’s attack.

The interesting thing is the way in which so many people are upset about “excessive charges” because the six thugs were forcibly prevented from killing their unconscious victim. And yet, when these barbarians end up killing someone – probably another black man – or raping someone – even odds that it’s a white woman – many of the people now complaining about the supposedly excessive charges will lament the fact that nothing was done the first two, or three, or four times that the thug was convicted of committing a violent crime.

I don’t know if the six barbarians of Jena were trying to kill the kid or not. I wasn’t there; neither were any of those who are publicly proclaiming that attempted second-degree murder charges are excessive. And while there are many good reasons to distrust the U.S. system of justice, it is beyond ludicrous to argue that numerous black men are involved in an attempt to judicially lynch a violent gang of young black men.

Although, I suppose that no one is more sick and tired of violent black criminals than those who most often suffer their depradations, the peaceful, law-abiding black community. If they did want to get rid of these young monsters-in-the-making, who could blame them?

I find Jonathan Haidt’s arguments to be interesting in light of how he is saying something very similar to one of the central points of The Irrational Atheist. After all, it’s difficult to argue for rational materialism when reason only comes into play after the fact, this is one reason why atheists like PZ are so uncomfortable with what he’s suggesting even though he is making a scientific case for moral evolution:

BLVR: So your conclusion is that while we might think that Reason or reasons are playing a big causal role in how we arrive at moral judgments, it’s actually our intuitions—fueled by our emotions—that are doing most of the work. You say in your paper that reason is the press secretary of the emotions, the ex post facto spin doctor.

JH: Yes, that’s right.

BLVR: What do you mean by that, exactly?

JH: Reason is still a part of the process. It just doesn’t play the role that we think it does. We use reason, for example, to persuade someone to share our beliefs.

If Haidt is correct, one of the primary foundations of the New Atheism, and indeed, the secular humanism they champion, is nonexistent. I suspect we are not witnessing the renaissance of Western atheism, but rather its high-water mark, as it is increasingly coming under siege from three sides, paganism, evangelical Christianity and science.

The next U.S. president isn’t ready to declare herself yet:

Hillary Clinton officially declared she’s not a lesbian – not that there’s anything wrong with that. During an interview with The Advocate to be published next week, Sean Kennedy, the gay magazine’s news and features editor, asked the presidential candidate, “How do you respond to the occasional rumor that you’re a lesbian?”

“People say a lot of things about me, so I really don’t pay any attention to it,” Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) replied. “It’s not true, but it is something that I have no control over. People will say what they want to say.”

Who to believe, a professional politician or the woman who was having an affair with her husband for a dozen years? As Gennifer Flowers once declared on Hannity and Colmes – much to the obvious horror of both men – people in Little Rock have known about Hillary’s preferences for literally decades.

As an Arsenalista, I am delighted to see The Special One leave Chelsea; no doubt Abramovitch’s millions will be again spent in vain. And yet I will miss him; of all the elegies for the ex-Chelsea manager that have been published, I think this lament is the best:

Oh Jose, how we’ll miss you. Mourinho – the man with the smouldering dark looks and the theatrical temperament. Football’s Marlon Brando. Will we ever see his like in football again? How will we replace this entertaining, contrary and exhilarating being with his Hollywood good looks and sexy accent?

He was beamed down into a world dominated by sheepskin coats, guttural accents, pot bellies and shiny red faces, and now he has left – disappearing under the cover of darkness. What a duller place football already seems without him.

I’ve met Mourinho a few times, and he didn’t disappoint. He was funny, thoughtful (running off to open the door for an elderly woman who was struggling with it, leaping up to offer me his seat), and as alluring and lovely in the flesh as he never fails to be on television.

Like George Clooney only shot through with a raffishness and unpredictability that made him seem exciting rather than prissy. He was never stiffly sophisticated like the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. Mourinho looked as if he spent twice as much on his clothes, but turned up with his top button undone and his shirt slightly crumpled, making him ever so much sexier.

He managed to corner the market (not a crowded one, admittedly) for elegance at matches, while looking like he hadn’t tried too hard.

And it wasn’t just the casual stubble, the Armani overcoat and the effortless air of Continental sophistication that entranced the country’s female population – it was the whirl of poetic madness that seemed to encircle him, like he’d had a glass too many of absinthe in a café on the Left Bank before taking his seat.

I’m just sorry that we won’t see more of his hilarious stunts, like when the Special One interviewed himself in front of a pack of journalists, then demanded praise for the forthright way in which he answered his own questions. And who can forget how he memorably complied with UEFA’s requirement that at least one player and one coach be made available to the press for Champions League interviews; the Special One provided the massive press corps a young weight room assistant trainer and an unknown bench warmer who had played all of 18 minutes that season.

A tale of two cities:

Police in Brussels, Belgium, arrested about 150 participants in a September 11 rally against Islamic power in Europe. Among those arrested were members Belgium’s Vlaams Belang political party and members of the European Union parliament bearing flyers that read “No Eurabia.” Participants in the rally had come from Denmark, Holland, France, Italy and Belgium. Brussels’s socialist mayor, Freddy Thielemans, had forbidden the “Stop the Islamization of Europe” rally on the grounds that it would offend the city’s Muslim community.

So much for those Enlightenment ideals of the European Union; it seems protecting certain religious groups trumps free expression and free association.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Jesse Jackson sees another Selma in Jena, Louisiana; of course, Jesse Jackson sees another Selma every time a white pizza delivery boy takes too long to get to his house. In case you’re not aware of this massive miscarriage of justice, allow me to provide you with a short summary of the Jena affair as it has been described by the self-appointed paragons of racial justice:

1. White individuals are not to be permitted any freedom of association or expression. While bottles of urine containing religious icons, burning American flags and wearing suicide bomb-vests are all protected forms of self-expression, dangling empty nooses from trees are not.

2. Black individuals cannot be expected to refrain from attacking en masse when provoked by opinions with which they disagree and can never be held responsible for physical attacks on white individuals.

Obviously, when six young black men beat up a young white man and send him to the hospital, it is an outrage that they should be charged with criminal activity by a black district attorney. Why, it’s almost as outrageous as the slave trade and little black girls being blown up in church!

Notice the similarities between Jena and Brussels. In both cases, blacks and Muslims are assumed by their left-wing defenders to be some form of subhuman species who must be treated like children lest they give in to their natural tendency to act like savages.

And notice too how Bill Press omits mentioning that the boy he describes as having “superficially wounds” was beaten unconscious and lost his sight in one eye for three weeks. He also describes the gang-attack as a “brawl”, no doubt following CNN’s lead, which inaccurately reported the attack a fight: “CNN reported that there were “obviously no witnesses to the fight.” In fact, over thirty eyewitnesses, students and teachers, were questioned immediately following the attack, all of who implicated one or more of the black students arrested in the case. In fact, some of the accused black students did not stop stomping Barker until they were pulled away from him by some of the teachers, according to testimony given in the trial of Mychal Bell.”

The citation of tennis shoes as deadly weapons seems ridiculous at first glance, however, if they were being used to kick the kid in the head, it’s a perfectly reasonable charge, as is attempted murder. The behavior of the white kids in hanging the nooses was obnoxious, but the subsequent behavior of the black kids was even more obnoxious; I mean, if you’re not invited, then you’re not invited, what sort of punk thinks that acquaintance with another guest is synonymous with an invitation and then tries to force his way into a party? And, it’s worth pointing out, they did not attack either of the two Justins with whom they had problems, they attacked a third kid who happened to be white and have the same first name.

The kid Bailey, in particular, sounds like a typical convict-to-be. Even if he somehow avoids jail in this go round, it’s pretty clear that he’ll be behind bars within four years.

UPDATE – As Nate wisely notes, this situation should be not be hard to understand. Putting an empty noose over a tree limb = not illegal. Attacking someone and putting him in the hospital = illegal. The fact that so many black leaders find it difficult to make this distinction does not speak well of black leadership.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute tests one’s knowledge of the spectrum of American political economy.

You answered 56 out of 60 correctly — 93.33%
Average score for this quiz during September: 75.3%

Two dumb mistakes and two questions that I simply did not know. Slightly embarrassing, but not bad for an emigrant. And it’s significantly better than today’s college graduates, as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute reports the following:

“The average college senior knows astoundingly little about America’s history, government, international relations and market economy, earning an “F” on the American civic literacy exam with a score of 54.2%. Harvard seniors did best, but their overall average was 69.6%, a disappointing D+.”

Jonah Goldberg beat me by a question, the bearded bastard. So, my dear ilk, how did you do? No Google allowed, just bare-brain it.

UPDATE – And don’t talk about the answers in the comments. Allow others to take the quiz unmolested by your opinions and untainted by your hints… we’ll discuss it tomorrow.

Remember when Ron Paul was unelectable because he had less than one percent support in the polls? Remember when Mitt Romney was one of the “Big Three” electable candidates? It looks as if Paul will blow by the well-coiffed Mormon before the end of the year:

30 Rudy Giuliani
22 Fred Thompson
18 John McCain
07 Mitt Romney
04 Ron Paul
04 Mike Huckabee
02 Duncan Hunter
02 Sam Brownback
01 Tom Tancredo

And this should also put to rest the silly notion of Fred Thompson as a hero-in-waiting. As I expected, his entry into the race has eliminated most of his hypothetical appeal.

My evolutionary interlocutor, the honorable Scott Hatfield, has an unrelated but interesting post on overlapping magisteria. Good stuff, touching upon some things about which I’ve been thinking lately. Upon going back to get the link, I noticed that he’s also begun responding to my latest debate post; I shall let him finish responding to the whole thing before I reply.

Few gamers know that the legendary Dr. Johnny Wilson, a leading figure at Computer Gaming world from 1982 to 1999 who served as its editor-in-chief for seven years during its heyday, also happens to be theologian. In addition to teaching courses on game design and the history of games, he has accepted the responsibility for helping revive a near-defunct church in Atlanta. As of our conversation this week, the church consists of 11 parishioners.

So, if you live near Atlanta, I’d encourage you to consider supporting Dr. Wilson by attending a service or two at Northwest Baptist Church, located at 1150 Niles Avenue NW in Atlanta. If you have any questions for him or about what he is intending to do there, he can be reached here.

Just to give you an idea of the way in which Johnny approaches his teachings from the Bible, here’s a sample from his sermon on Joshua and Jericho, which is based on his own translation from the Hebrew:

God’s Plan for Spiritual Victory
(Joshua 5:13-6:27)
Dr. Johnny Wilson

I’ve had the privilege of teaching game design courses in both Taiwan and here in Atlanta. Games by definition have two things in common—the risk of losing and the all important victory conditions: how to win. Just this week, a student asked me what needed to be in a game’s documentation and, upon glancing at his notes, I noticed that there were no “Victory Conditions.” When I pointed this out to him, he asked why they needed to be in the rules. I countered with the question, “Why would you want to play if there was no way to win?” The point finally came home to him.

In Joshua 5:13 and the account that follows, we find out what is required to win victories in our lives. To be sure, we can all pretty well answer, “Trust totally in God.” Of course, that is easier said than done. Let’s see if we can figure out what it takes.

First of all, I notice that Joshua wasn’t just hanging around his base camp in Gilgal, the HQ that we spoke of last week. Verse 13 says in the Hebrew that he was “in Jericho.” Of course, the scripture has already told us that the Israelites were in the region of Jericho and up against Jericho, so we can understand it as being in the proximity of Jericho. I believe he is there in order to do some final spying, scouting, reconnoitering before the battle.

And I think it’s important for us to understand this—even though God had already promised victory and even though God would later explain how things were to be done in a very unusual manner, Joshua was doing everything he could do to prepare himself for the battle. You know, I lose patience with those ministers who say, “I didn’t want to go to college or seminary because I was afraid the education would get in the way of having God speak to me. I want my sermons inspired by the Lord.” I also lose patience with believers who say, “I don’t want to make any plans for worship. Let’s just get together and not hinder the Holy Spirit.” Think also of how many churches would rather float along than make any long-range plans. They must not want to “bias” the Holy Spirit!

But how can we expect God to come to us with definitive marching orders if we aren’t prepared to execute them. Naturally, some of you will object that I am reading more into Joshua’s presence beside the city or in the environs of the city than the text gives us. To you, I offer the additional military evidence to be found in Joshua 6:1. There it tells us that the city was sealed tightly so that no one could enter or exit the city BECAUSE of Israel. See! They were already besieging Jericho by encircling it with a human blockade.

As a result, I believe these verses encourage us to: a) Know our enemies – find out as much as we can about the techniques used by Satan and his minions to oppose God’s Holy Spirit and to oppose us as we minister through that Holy Spirit. We need to be aware of accusation, gossip, half-truths, depression, discouragement, false expectations, and the like. We need to be prepared to face the fact that church leaders and members of the fellowship will fail, but recognize that their failures does not mean God failed. And if God is at work in their lives, God will still win in His time.

So, Joshua was apparently scouting out Jericho even up to the last minute, according to our text, and God’s people weren’t allowing their enemies to even get away with incidental movement. So, as Joshua prepared and Israel contained the enemy in a siege, God revealed Himself to Joshua.

“Wait a minute!” some of you protest. “Verse 13 says that there was a man with a sword in his hand. It doesn’t even say that the man looked any bigger than any other man or more fierce than any other warrior. How did GOD reveal Himself to Joshua?”

Read on. As verse 13 continues, Joshua demands to know whether the intruder is for Israel or for their enemies. At first, it rather reminds us of a modern leader telling the world that they are either “for us or against us.” But if we read verse 14, we see that there actually is a different answer. God doesn’t work in “Yes” or “No” binary code. God isn’t FOR Israel or AGAINST Israel. God isn’t FOR us or AGAINST us. Rather, God wants to know if we are FOR or AGAINST HIM! And there’s a big difference!

Verse 14 in the Hebrew literally reads: “No! BECAUSE I, I have come now (as) the prince of the host of Yahweh.” That’s an unusual title. It’s only used one other time in the Old Testament—in Daniel’s vision in Daniel 8:11. In that vision, the beast with horns goes after the “prince of the great host.” It’s clear from the Daniel vision that if you oppose the prince of the great host (we would say commander of the great army), you oppose God Himself. It isn’t clear whether the “prince” or “chief” was the righteous high priest who would intercede in prayer for God’s intervention, the archangel Michael as he struggled with the minions of Satan as in Revelation, or some manifestation of God’s own person prior to the Incarnation. But it is clear that God’s holy person was present in the activity of the commander of the great heavenly army and it is clear that anyone who opposed him, opposed God and God’s purposes.

We don’t know for sure how God accommodated Himself to deliver this message to Joshua, but we know it was unnerving to Joshua. When three men that we later find out are manifestations of God come to Abraham’s tent and later, to Sodom, they brought warnings of destruction. When Jacob wrestled with the man, he said he saw the face of God and he was crippled for the rest of his life. When the LORD encountered Moses in Exodus 4, threatening to kill Moses before the great leader could accomplish anything ordered earlier, Zipporah (Moses’ wife) was so afraid that she quickly circumcised their son and threw the foreskin at Moses’ feet, proclaiming him a “bridegroom of blood.” When Pharaoh encountered the destroying angel, it was God’s own judgment of the Pharaoh and the firstborn of all who didn’t have the blood on the doorpost. When Balaam finally saw the angel of the Lord standing in the midst of the road with a sword in his hand, he realized he had only been saved by the miraculous speech of a talking donkey. When Manoah and his wife saw the angel of the Lord ascend into the fire of his sacrifice, he was afraid God was going to kill him. There was no sweet cartoon cherubim when God’s angels appeared. There was no happy “touched by an angel” type of story.

Facing an angel meant to be confronted with as much of the holy presence of God as a human could stand. It was frightening, dangerous, and unsettling. Yet, we should have some concept of this when we come to God in worship—yet, we don’t.

What is clear is that Joshua doesn’t hesitate to declare HIS allegiance. He immediately falls o
n his face and worships. Now, whether Joshua was expecting the man to deliver Joshua’s own praise, petitions, and gratitude to God as a messenger or whether Joshua recognized God’s Presence in the man himself, we don’t know. All we know is that when he was confronted by the divine revelation that HE was to be FOR God instead of God being FOR Israel, he worshipped by humbling himself at the feet of God’s messenger.

It’s so easy for us to depend upon human ideas, plans, and technology. We feel confident in using ideas, plans, and techniques that are familiar and allow us to remain in control. In fact, I think Joshua would have felt perfectly confident if God had allowed him to construct battering rams, siege ladders, and assault teams to go right after the walls of Jericho. Of course, a lot of unnecessary Hebrew blood would have been spilled if he had. And if he had, I’m not sure Israel would have recognized that God gave the miraculous victory.

Unlike many ear-tickling preachers, Dr. Wilson understands that the Christian worldview encompasses the darkness of a fallen world and the majesty of an Almighty God as well as the Gospel of divine love; it is far more than the mealy-mouthed application of the Golden Rule to which too many adherents and detractors alike attempt to reduce it.

I don’t know if Northwest Baptist’s decline is irreversible, or if it will one day be seen as another powerful example of the way in which God can use a single man to transform a community. (Or, if you prefer to put it in magical material reductionist terms, how an individual can prove to be an efficient transmission point for a particularly virulent meme.) But I have twice seen a small gathering of Christians transformed into a powerful assembly of thousands in less than five years; if this is God’s Will for Dr. Wilson and the believers at Northwest Baptist, it will surely happen again. I seem to recall that God has used eleven men to a certain amount of historical effect in the past.