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Three videos that have nothing to do with one another. First up, David Goldman. I have linked to David Goldman's work many times. He is a genuine China expert. This video is his July 17 online lecture for the Westminster Institute about his new book, "You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-Form the World."
David is an American economist, music critic, and author, best known for his series of online essays in the Asia Times under the pseudonym Spengler. He is the Wax Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and a member of the Board of Advisors of Sino-Israel Government Network and Academic Leadership (SIGNAL). According to the Claremont Review of Books, the “Spengler” columns in the Asia Times have attracted readership in the millions.
Couple of vids I ran across while looking for something else.
"On 30th July 1915, the Captain of a German U-Boat claimed to have witnessed a gigantic sea creature in the north Atlantic during an attack on a British steamboat. I look at the evidence and discuss the story's credibility."
This is part one of a planned two-part video covering Operation MI. As you can see I spent a considerable amount of time covering Nagumo’s Dilemma. To me it's one of most striking examples of how tough it can be for a commander to make a decision based on the information at hand. I found that to be the most interesting aspect of the battle.
Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road.
Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:
Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking.
("When the Ideologues Come for the Kids," By Andrew Sullivan, Intelligencer). John Sexton comments,
Bret Weinstein published a video arguing much the same thing. He said, “People who are the object of ire from the intersectionalists are going to be backed against the wall together. Who are they going to be? Well, primarily they are going to be straight and white and male.” He went on to predict that this combination of telling people that a) racial identity is paramount and b) your racial identity is suspect creates a breeding ground for the kind of white nationalism that we’d all like to avoid. Sullivan adds another note to his criticism, which is that there is no rational way out of this cult because reason has little to do with it. This is a substitute religion:
One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories.
Speaking of ideologues coming for the kids, I give you Greta Thunberg.
Funny how Greta never goes outside white-majority countries to preach her religion. China and India are by leagues the worst polluters on earth. Has she gone there? Nope. Will she go there? You can bet your life savings, but I won't bet mine. Why? Well, I call racism, and I am darn serious about that.
A CBS News investigation has found child labor being used in the dangerous mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mineral cobalt is used in virtually all batteries in common devices, including cellphones, laptops and even electric vehicles.
A report by Amnesty International first revealed that cobalt mined by children was ending up in products from several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Samsung.
This is not news at all, except to CBS, of course. Electricity-powered cars, as as those Andrew Yang said must 100-percent replace petrol-powered cars, are horrendously polluting to manufacture because of their raw materials, especially rare-earths that are found mainly in Africa.
Forced child labor - actually, chattel slavery - had been used there for years and years for mining. But white elitists in America demand their Teslas, so let the black kids die, who cares. And yes, I am serious about writing that. The green movement in America is racist and exploitative to its very core.
Not to mention that Greenists are often (well, usually), factually incorrect:
But that's okay, because as Joe Biden and AOC have pointed out, the Left deals in Truth, not mere facts.
The Big Money behind Greta Thunberg: "Behind the schoolgirl climate warrior lies a shadowy cabal of lobbyists, investors and energy companies seeking to profit from a green bonanza" -- Greta’s very corporate children’s crusade
This is the Democrats' authority on being black in America, Prof. Kathleen Owens of the University of Chicago, testifying before the House Oversight Joint Subcommittee as they took on the subject of white supremacy.
And here is Prof. Owens directly lecturing black American Candace Owens on how she does not understand what it's like to be black in America.
And here is the tear-down Ms. Owens delivers in return.
Its cover has become acclaimed as the most iconic album cover ever, featuring cardboard cutouts of historical figures surrounding the Fab Four, who are the only live persons in the camera's view.
But not every cutout was used. At the last minute, the cutout of Jesus was set aside, out of frame view. And so was one other figure. And when he heard about it later, boy, was he mad!
The summary is yes, Jesus of Nazareth was an actual, historical man. Both Jewish and Roman figures and writers referred to him. As non-Christian historian Bart Ehrman observes, a ...
... collection of snippets from non-Christian sources may not impart much information about the life of Jesus, “but it is useful for realizing that Jesus was known by historians who had reason to look into the matter. No one thought he was made up.”
The ancient attestation of Jesus as a real person far outweigh almost every other ancient figure. As Ehrman has observed elsewhere, Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius was not a real person. Also, the earliest written reference to Alexander the Great dates 400 years after Alexander is said to have lived. Yet no one says Alexander was not real.
However, the earliest writings about Jesus of Nazareth, the letters of the apostles, date beginning less than 20 years after Jesus died during the governorship of Pontius Pilate. And this is the sole figure of ancient time whom skeptics say was fictional.
Here is Prof. Ehrman explaining to a confused atheist why he is wrong in saying that Jesus is a mythical figure.
I do not remember signing up for a retirement newsletter via email, since I am not retiring any time soon. I was about to hit the spam button but decided at least to look at the story index first. As it turns out, it's not bad.
As I am told that at least two dozen of my colleagues will retire this summer, here are three retirement-related links that may be of interest - not only to my ministerial colleagues, but to every other working stiff.
Second, for those trying to figure out what financial goal to set for retirement, there are 8 Levels Of Financial Freedom you can choose from both in retirement and en route. I would say that getting to level 4 is the minimum to achieve while still working.
Level 4: Freedom of Time
What many people desire is more flexibility with their schedules. Freedom of time and financial independence go hand in hand. Together, they are about leaving the rat race to follow your passion, or spend more time with family, and not going completely broke doing it. It could come in the form of more paid time off, flex time or perhaps working remotely on occasion. Not having to take a day off from work just so you can visit the dentist or take your kid to the doctor could be a huge benefit for some.
In retirement? Get at least to level 6. (Frankly, Level 8: More Money Than You Could Ever Spend, does not really appeal to me because, what's the point?)
By actuarial tables, my life expectancy is to age 92, and my wife's is to age 100! So in my retirement planning, I have to plan for her expectancy, not mine. Furthermore:
As you age, your actuarial life expectancy rises because the tables "life expectancy" for a man or woman of any given age simply means that half the men or women who are, say, 63 years old, will die before they reach age 92. But that means that half live longer - and as years pass, you are steadily sliding into the half that lives longer as others, but not you, die.
Ignore the old canard that retired people can live on 70 percent or so of their last working-year income. Expenses do not magically drop simply because you retire, especially if you still have to pay rent or mortgage, and as the article explains, medical costs rise, probably sharply. Plan to match or exceed your working income in retirement.
Along the same line, married couples should structure their retirement income so that the surviving spouse continues to receive income equal to that received while the deceased spouse was still living. In retirement-account parlance, this is known as "Life Plus 100" retirement, meaning that your personal retirement account will continue to pay 100 percent of your retirement pay to your spouse after you die. If both spouses are covered by a pension, they should each select this when they retire. (Other typical options are Life Plus 70, which pays more while you are living but only 70 percent after you die, or Life Only, which means your spouse receives nothing after you die.) It will not be cheaper for a surviving spouse to live than both of you because fixed expenses stay fixed, and at about age 85 or older, fixed expenses dominate retirees' expenditures.
A word about inflation. Let us suppose that you retire this year with a retirement income of, say, $75,000. Since 1913, inflation, which simply means the rate at which a dollar decreases in value over time, has had a yearly average of 3.22 percent. As Inflation Data points out, "That doesn't sound too bad until we realize that at that rate prices will double every 20 years."
Here is the chart by decade.
So if you retire comfortably this year on a level income of $75,000 per year, in 2039 it will be worth just under $39,000. Pension fund managers know this risk, of course, so typically, pension funds offer a payout plan that annually accounts for inflation, at least to some degree.
One more risk? Overspending by retirees, whether by carelessness or need:
The next risk identified by the panel was the expense risk, or the risk of a change in value caused by the fact that the amount of expenses incurred over the course of retirement outpace expectations.
"If you have expenses early on in retirement, large expenses, then your portfolio balance goes down just as fast as if you had a really bad sequence of returns," Dirk Cotton, a retired executive, and a retirement adviser and author of The Retirement Cafe blog.
That is why it is imperative to have a plan for retirement. When I was a student pilot, my flight instructor told me, "Plan your flight and fly your plan." Of course it is unreasonable to think you can plan expenditures all the way from, say, age 66 or 68 or so to your mid-90s. But if you have a plan to start, then you will assess the necessity of changes much better, the extent of needed changes more comprehensively, and the recovery from changes more thoroughly.
So, here are Don's Official Retirement Planning Tips:
Plan for a specified constant-dollar income all the way to the end of your life, or if married, to the end of the surviving spouse's life.
Save as much as possible as early as possible. Playing catch-up is a poor way to retirement security.
Trying to get rich quick will result in getting poor even quicker.
Follow Jesus and tithe and you will almost automatically stop worrying about money.
And finally, from day one get as much of your retirement investments and savings into tax-free accounts. Here is why:
America will face "serious economic, security, and social challenges" if the national debt keeps growing at this rate. ...
Just hours after Congress postponed a budget vote because lawmakers wanted even more spending, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a 67-page report warning of the "serious economic, security, and social challenges" that will face this country unless immediate action is taken to bring the national debt under control.
The share of debt held by the public currently stands at about 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a shorthand measure of a country's economic output in a single year. The GAO estimates that it is on track to surpass the all-time high of 106 percent of GDP within the next 13 to 20 years. (The numbers are actually worse than that, because "debt held by the public" accounts for only $15.8 trillion of the $21 trillion national debt. The rest is held by parts of the federal government, such as the Social Security trust fund.)
How long can this continue? No one knows. But as Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and economics professor at the University of Virginia, put it, "When something can't go on forever, it won't."
Since we already had the text messages via an FOIA request, this part of the Jussie Smollett mystery probably shouldn’t be considered a bombshell. Tina Tchen, who used to be Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, admitted yesterday that she had intervened in the investigation by putting the state’s prosecutor in touch with some unnamed member of Smollett’s family. What remains unclear is whether or not Tchen did this of her own volition or whether someone in the Obama family prompted her to do it.
Which led Glenn Reynolds to observe, "Some things don’t require any prompting; underlings simply understand what is desired."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller released the report of his two-year investigation this afternoon. According to a "senior DOJ official," there are no additional indictments recommended by the report. Both Senators McConnell and Schumer have called for the complete report to be released to the public. Developing story, obviously.
I mean that literally: serving Democrat politicians want laws to allow the deliberate, pre-meditated killing of future Democrat voters. How else to explain the words of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who openly ...
endorsed infanticide and tried to make it sound as harmless as he could. When asked by a radio host if he supported Virginia legislator Kathy Tran’s proposed law to permit abortion while a woman was in labor, Northam replied:
This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.
Here is the video:
Please note that Northam thinks this is perfectly okay because, after all, "The infant would be kept comfortable" right up until it is destroyed. Maybe the SS should have taken that tack at Auschwitz because, "We will be nice to you right up until we brutally kill you" can't possibly be wrong.
The Federalist points out that the bull being discussed here was presented by Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran, who said this during a subcommittee hearing:
“How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?” [subcommittee chairman Todd] Gilbert asked.
“Through the third trimester,” responded Tran. “The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.”
“Where it’s obvious that a woman is about to give birth, that she has physical signs that she is about to give birth, would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified?” Gilbert asked.
“She’s dilating,” he continued, using the term for a woman’s cervix naturally opening to allow a baby to exit his mother during birth. “I’m asking if your bill allows that.”
“My bill would allow that, yes,” she said.
Which is to say, Tran wants the law to allow the mother to tell the doctor to kill the being-born or newborn (Northam: "the infant would be delivered") infant. While Northam said that more than one physician needs to be consulted, Tran insisted that only one be permitted for the go-ahead.
I do not know words nearly harsh enough to condemn the overt, public murderousness of today's Democrat party specifically and progressives generally. And on the same day that Gov. Northam, considered a rising star in the Democrat party, said that just-born babies should be killed on the mother's whim, the extraordinary hypocrisy of this party was on full display by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D.-Ohio, who said, talking about President Trump,
"Real populists don’t engage in hate speech and don’t rip babies from families at the border."
But the law already allows babies to be literally ripped - as in ripped apart - inside the womb and now Democrats want to allow living, delivered infants to be ripped from life itself.
The Left is already howling at we who explain what Tran and Northam said - accusing us, of course, of being the wrongdoers here.
I used to listen attentively to by left-of-center friends and ministerial colleagues on the matter of public policy, even though I hardly ever found that I could agree with their positions. But I did try to understand their point of view and how they justified it, whether on secular or biblical bases.
That door is now slammed shut. After Tran/Northam/Brown, there is no "understanding" possible that stays on this side of insanity. Starting now, I absolutely refuse to tolerate any lecturing by a "progressive" on the subject of morality on any issue, and this is now my number one reason why.
But back to my title for this post, "Democrats want to kill Democrat voters." Why do I say that? because according to the Guttmacher Institute (2014 data), of women who had an abortion,
Thirty-nine percent were white, 28% were black, 25% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 3% were of some other race or ethnicity. ...
... three-fourths of abortion patients were low income—49% living at less than the federal poverty level, and 26% living at 100–199% of the poverty level.
Which means that minority infants were killed in the womb far out of proportion to the share of those demographics in the general population, and these minorities are by far super-majority voters for Democrats.Same with income levels - the demographic described as obtaining three-fourths of abortions are Democrat voters to a very high degree.
That's why I sometimes refer to the murdered infants as "Unborn Democrats." I New York City, for example, more black babies are killed in the womb than are born alive.
But Democrats won't talk about that because shut up.
Doctor Anthony Levantino performed 1,400 abortions until he abandoned that practice. Here is part of his testimony to Congress on how second-trimester abortions are done. (For third-trimester abortions, the baby is chemically killed in the womb and two or three days later the mother's body ejects the dead infant through the birth canal, usually with inducing drugs' assistance.)
When someone demands that a woman must have "the right to choose," remember that this is what that choice means:
As Lincoln said about slavery, "If this is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." But "wrong" is far too wimpy a word to describe this. This is over the edge of evil.
Update: Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran says she was surprised by the pushback to her comments to the subcommittee and has tried to walk back her statements, but in so doing winds up more twisted around than an octopus playing Twister.
Do it the way that The Guardian reviewed Serenity, out this month, starring Matthew McConaughey as "a gigolo/fishing boat captain alongside Anne Hathaway in a thrillingly awful thriller with one of the most ill-conceived twists in recent history."
[Writer-producer-director Steven] Knight has successfully smuggled one of the most gobsmackingly ill-conceived twists in recent history into multiplexes nationwide. To reveal it here would rob the film of a measure of its great and terrible power, so suffice it to say that it would be like It’s A Wonderful Life ending with Jimmy Stewart discovering that everyone in Bedford Falls was a robot.
We have long known and studied dignity cultures and honor-shame cultures. Now sociology professors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning say there has emerged a new kind of social-interaction dynamic: victimhood culture, kicking off with an incident at Oberlin University.
The Oberlin student [who took offense at an email] took a different approach: After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.
But she was met from the original emailer with even more strident claims that she had victimized him even more. And it went downhill from there - "There is no end to conflict in a victimhood culture."
What's distinguishes this culture from honor-shame or dignity cultures? The professors explain:
It isn’t honor culture.
“Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response,” they write. “But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor.”
But neither is it dignity culture:
“Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”
The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”
Now I have two responses. The first is that victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids. It is taking personal disagreements or conflicts to well, this level.
Remember one of the first rules of economics: That which is subsidized increases. When posting one's latest "I'm being repressed!" event across social media or public forums become routine, it will become rewarding. Posters become affirmed in their grievances and over time (not a long time!) want that affirmation again and again. So their level of "I'm offended" get lower and lower, their sprint to public revelation becomes quicker and sooner, and their claims of harm become ever-more insistent and exaggerated.
In short, victimhood culture is not about justice or peacemaking or conflict resolution. Quite the opposite: it is about domination and conflict creation and lengthening the fight, all the better to be affirmed. Victimhood culture is at bottom selfish, self-centered and ultimately self-defeating.
My second response is that victimhood culture is very specifically contrary to the teachings of Christ, so anyone who thinks him/herself a Christian who engages in it very seriously needs to get a new understanding.
Let me start with a referral to my essay of how Jesus rebutted the honor-shame dynamic that was firmly entrenched in first-century Judea, "How Jesus invented individual liberty."
This site has gone through a few iterations. Archived posts from March 2002 - Aug. 22, 2008 may be found at two URLs on the the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2002 and 2003-2008.
This site became active in October 2007 and most of the 2008 posts at the link above are duplicated here. We sometimes transfer earlier posts from the previous sites to this one, but we do not revalidate the links therein. Posts on this site dated before October 2007 are transferred posts.
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