Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Mike Whitney: Why Iran's Jews are Better Off Than Gaza's Palestinians

Bet you've never heard this:
25,000 Jews live in Iran. It's the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iranian Jews are not persecuted or abused by the state, in fact, they are protected under Iran's constitution. They are free to practice their religion and to vote in elections. They are not stopped and searched at checkpoints, they are not brutalized by an occupying army, and they are not herded into a densely-populated penal colony (Gaza) where they are deprived of the basic means of survival. Iranian Jews live in dignity and enjoy the benefits of citizenship.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Do You Know THIS Jesus?

Great thoughts on the identity of Christ from  "Take Your Vitamin Z":
Most will say that they think he was an all around good guy who did some good stuff.  They are cool with Jesus.  But have they understood his claims? Most have not.

Don’t let them say that he is a good guy.  He is NOT a “good guy”.  Good guys don’t say things like "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me".  Roll that one around in your brain for a bit.

Do You Know THIS Jesus?

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sound Money Policy From an Unexpected Source

One of the best explanations of sound money and the perils of fiat currency I've ever seen - and not an Ivy League economist in sight.




BTW, this kind of thing is illegal in the United States because of Legal Tender Laws through which the government has virtually eliminated monetary competition.  If competing currencies based in gold or silver were allowed to circulate along side federal reserve notes, the worthless paper would soon lose its appeal.  

This, of course, would lead to all manner of mayhem such as the elimination of inflation, reduction of people's dependence on Washington and stability of retirement savings - things the government cannot abide if they wish to maintain (or increase) their present level of control over people's lives.

HT: Lew Rockwell

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Fear and Self-Loathing in Lausanne - Reformation21 Blog

Carl Trueman on the importance of polemics:
...let's bin this sad, misguided self-loathing on the polemic front. We must repent where necessary, where we have crossed the line; but, just as necessary, we must fight where we see the truth is at stake. We should be grateful for the truth that polemics have preserved so that we have a gospel to proclaim; and we should not allow a misguided commitment to being nice to allow us, in effect, to dump huge problems on the next generation by running up a massive theological and moral deficit in the church of the present.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

From the 'Why Don't We Ever Learn from History?' File:

"The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border (of Afghanistan), I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."- Zbigniew Brzezinski

Monday, August 9, 2010

Preparing for Hyper-Inflation - Part I

Most students of history are aware of the runaway inflation that took place in Germany during the 1920's where a wheelbarrow full of German Marks was needed just to purchase a loaf of bread.  By the end of this nightmare it took 100,000,000 German Marks to buy one US dollar. More recently the African country of Zimbabwe has faced a similar situation.  The Zimbabwe dollar is literally not worth the paper its printed on. Shop keepers will no longer accept it as payment so people spend their days panning or digging for small bits of gold with which they can buy food.

Could this happen here?  Many people, myself included, feel its a real possibility. The National Inflation Association is predicting that America could be faced with hyper-inflation as soon as 2014 or even 2012. And they are not alone in this belief. If these predictions are correct, there are things you and I should be doing right now to prepare.

First of all, every family should begin immediately storing non-perishable food and water.  Find a spot in your basement, a closet, even under a bed if necessary and begin to sock away food items. This can be done by purchasing extra items each time you grocery shop or you can purchase items from any of several different disaster preparedness merchants who offer food specially packed for long-term storage.  I've used a company called Emergency Essentials several times and been very pleased with them. 

The items you'll want to consider are those that can be easily stored long-term, are filling and nutritious and that your family will eat (though what they are willing to eat may change in an emergency situation!).  The staple items in our food storage plan are rice, pasta and pasta sauce, canned meats and dried beans.  Beans and rice are especially easy to store in quantity. If you choose to store these out of the original packages (recommended) you will want to be sure the buckets or containers you use are safe for food. 

Conventional wisdom is that you should have enough food stored to feed your family for six months in case of emergency. So, if you don't have a food storage plan, you should start one immediately since building up to that level will take time.

Next time we'll talk about some other things you will want to do right away to prepare for a possible hyper-inflation scenario a few years down the road.

For more information on the basics of food storage, watch this short video from NIA:


Friday, August 6, 2010

The White Horse Inn Guys on Selling Jesus

A much needed discussion of the impact of American consumerism on the church.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Words of Wisdom (8/5)

"Regime uncertainty is the opposite of the rule of law. It is the rule of the whims of the people in charge and what mood they are in on any particular day. It is usually associated with third world dictatorships and plays a major role in why some countries remain poor. When a business cannot predict whether a government will issue a permit, confiscate or nationalize their capital investments, tax them into bankruptcy, or arbitrarily stall their operations, they tend to do business elsewhere. This type of government hostility is not conducive to wealth creation and it is tragic to see it chasing away businesses here when we need the jobs and productivity more than ever." - Ron Paul

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The Same, Only Different

I recently came across an excellent post from Phil Johnson called You're Probably a Cessationist Too.  In it, he makes the point that what most continuationists claim (at least those outside the studios of TBN) is that the modern "sign" gifts are not really the same gifts described in the New Testament - despite the fact that they call them by the same names. For example he says of charismatic apologist Jack Deere:
One of Deere's main lines of defense against critics of the charismatic movement is his insistence that modern charismatic gifts are actually lesser gifts than those available in the apostolic era, and therefore, he suggests, they should not be held to apostolic standards.
Trouble is, these "lesser gifts" are nowhere described in Scripture. It seems to me the issue is not cessationism or continuationism, the issue is consistency.  If I'm going to claim that a gift described in scripture is still applicable today, I must also claim that it works today the same way it did in the first century - or show from scripture, why that is not the case.  Charismatic proponents often point out that there is no verse we can cite to definitively say the sign gifts have ceased.  That's true. However, I would point out there's also no verse we can cite that says they changed form either.

We can't have it both ways.  Either they continue today as they did in scripture or they do not.  If they do not, we should stop trying to match people's subjective personal experiences to terms used in the New Testament to describe miraculous events.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Wanna-be Housing Recovery

In this excellent analysis, Jim Quinn reveals the rotten foundation that underlies the housing "recovery".

Some of the highlights:

  • The $8,000 first time buyer credit did nothing to stimulate housing sales - it only pushed existing demand forward at a cost of $15 billion to the tax payers.
  • Far from helping people down on their luck, HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program) has simply allowed people who make poor financial decisions to keep making them at a cost of $75 billion to the tax payers.
  • New home sales are currently 200,000 units less per year than they were in 1963 when the US population was 121 million less than it is today.
  • At the current rate of sales, banks have 9 years worth of inventory of foreclosed homes - with more foreclosures in the offing due to what he calls "a tsunami" of mortgage resets on the horizon for ARMS, etc.
Well worth a read in its entirety:

John Paulson Will Be Wrong This Time by Jim Quinn

Sunday, August 1, 2010

That Family Up the Street


Have you ever heard an analogy  like this used to defend US military excursions across the globe:

“If my neighbor is beating his child in front of me, I should stop him. If he takes the child a few blocks away, my obligation doesn’t change—were I to know about it.”

I've heard this or something similar many times used to justify our involvement in any number of places around the world. Most recently I heard it as a result of the tragic story in Time Magazine about the shameful treatment of women in Afghanistan.  The argument is that the US must continue to wage war there because to pull out would be to turn these women over to the Taliban and, after all,  we have a moral obligation to bring truth, justice and the American way to the whole world.

However, this analogy falls flat for several reasons:
 
First of all the individual and the state are not one - except in totalitarian societies.  They do not have the same interests, function, or responsibility.  So, what an individual should or should not do in a particular situation really cannot be extrapolated to the state. The job of the US military is to protect US lives and territory, not to be nation builders or the world’s policeman.
 
Secondly, we’ve applied this particular kind of “justice” very selectively. We’ve had many “neighbors” who were beating their children that we not only did not invade, but we subsidized (think Suharto, Marcos, Pinochet, the Saudi Royal Family, etc.)

Thirdly, the analogy should really be this: You see your neighbor beating his child.  You then go around to the rest of the neighborhood and assess everyone a fee to deal with it.  You then hire the children of some of your other neighbors to go and deal with the situation.  Exercising your own sense of justice is one thing, expecting other people to exercise it for you at the cost of their lives and treasure is another.

Finally, the analogy assumes we have the ability to actually to stop this kind of thing as well as the resources to do so - we don't. We’re going on these foreign excursions using money we’ve borrowed from the Chinese because we’re broke. You know the Chinese, they’re that family up the street who beats their kids, but heck, they provide us with a lot of stuff so what can you do?


(Interestingly, another travesty that was actually stamped out by the Taliban has seen a resurgence among the 'good guys' that we support in Afghanistan - the rape of young boys. Could it be that neither side has the moral high ground and we should just mind our own business?)