This one has the strong scent of "well, duh" about it

So a Wilfried Laurier University professor of religion and culture, David Millard Haskell, writes a Washington Post column  in which he cites a study of 22 mainline Protestant churches in Ontario that he and his colleagues meticulously designed in order to allow for this and allow for that, and comes to the conclusion that you and I knew he would come to.

Let me back up just a bit. He starts his piece by citing Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong's book Why Christianity Must Change or Die and conferring legitimacy on it by citing all the liberal theologians who have heaped praise on it since its publication 20 years ago.

Then he lays the groundwork for getting into the methodology and findings of his study by saying basically, "What we found indicates that Spong had the wrong remedy for institutional Christianity."

Professor Haskell, had you afforded Spong the presumption that he was right before you went to the trouble of conducting your fancy-pants study?

Because what you found seems pretty obvious to most people, I feel safe in saying:

We also found that for all measures, growing church clergy members were most conservative theologically, followed by their congregants, who were themselves followed by the congregants of the declining churches and then the declining church clergy members. In other words, growing church clergy members are the most theologically conservative, while declining church clergy members are the least. Their congregations meet more in the middle.

For example, we found 93 percent of clergy members and 83 percent of worshipers from growing churches agreed with the statement “Jesus rose from the dead with a real flesh-and-blood body leaving behind an empty tomb.” This compared with 67 percent of worshipers and 56 percent of clergy members from declining churches. Furthermore, all growing church clergy members and 90 percent of their worshipers agreed that “God performs miracles in answer to prayers,” compared with 80 percent of worshipers and a mere 44 percent of clergy members from declining churches.

Outside our research, when growing churches have been identified by other studies — nationally and internationally — they have been almost exclusively conservative in doctrine. As we explain in our academic work, because of methodological limitations, these other studies did not link growth to theology. But our work suggests this is a fruitful avenue of research to pursue.

I found his tortured striving to see some esoteric reason for this rather amusing:

What explains the growth gap between liberal and conservative congregations? In defense of liberal churches, one might venture that it is the strength of belief, not the specifics of belief, that is the real cause of growth. In this case, pastors embracing liberal theology are just as likely as conservative pastors to experience church growth, provided they are firm and clear in their religious convictions. Yet different beliefs, though equally strong, produce different outcomes.

Got that? It might just be the "strength of  belief, not the specifics of belief."

This is a classic example of cultural observation so clouded by moral relativism that it must deny that which is right up in its face.

I wrote my master's thesis in history on this subject, the emptying of the pews in mainline Protestant churches, 27 years ago.  My own inspiration was the Presbyterian church I had grown up in. Recall that two big issues on America's radar in those days were US attempts to roll back the spread of Marxism-Leninism in Central America, and the outcry on the Left over US nuclear missiles in Europe. The "peace fellowship" hosted by the church was on the anti-freedom side of both issues, quite vocally so.

It hasn't changed. I go by there occasionally and always look to see what kind of banner they are currently hanging on their wrought-iron fence. Sometimes it's one that says, "Torture is always wrong." Sometimes it simply sports a rainbow. The latest one says that immigrants and refugees are welcome there.

And I have it on good authority that its services are sparsely attended.

Professor Haskell, while it's true that fewer post-Americans are going to church overall, the ones who are go because church is - ostensibly, anyway - a unique institution in that it deals with how one is going to spend eternity. If, instead, all one hears is identity politics and guilt-mongering, someone interested in actual church is going to bail and go find a place that talks about the salvific blood of Jesus and the promise of the empty tomb.

Not exactly rocket science if you haven't mucked up your mind with a lot of gobbledy-gook.

Yet more exquisite Northern Soul

The most honest music in the world.

Thursday roundup

The Most Equal Comrade is a real piece of work. Now he's had himself awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service. Talk about a Dear Leader level of creepiness.

Yet another jihadist attack in Turkey, this time a car bomb and shoot-up at a courthouse in Izmir.

By now you've heard about the horrific capture / torture / racial taunting of the mentally challenged white guy in Chicago, the live video of which was posted on Facebook. CNN's Don Lemon - he of the New Year's Eve drunken on-camera subjecting of himself to an ear-piercing - says it wasn't evil.

Bookworm is on a trip of some sort to Vietnam and is blogging about sites she's visiting and insights it's giving her into US involvement in that land when the then-sovereign nation-state of South Vietnam was trying to stave off conquest by the Communist north.

Four days ago, we visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, which is the Viet Cong version of the war. It’s factually accurate, although slanted to show the Americans as mass slaughterers — which is to be expected, because to the victors belong the narrative. Of course, the word “victors” in this case is one I choose carefully, because the US won the war on the ground but, as it has since the Vietnam War, abandoned the fight in the court of public opinion and, therefore, effectively lost the war anyway.

One of the interesting things that the museum admitted was that the Viet Cong violated the Paris Peace Accords because of Watergate. Back in 1973, when Kissinger negotiated a Korea style peace treaty with the Viet Cong and the democratic (and painfully corrupt) South Vietnamese, the museum says that the VCs intended to abide by the agreement because they were scared of Nixon. That is, they expected rough treatment if they violated the Accords.

According to the museum, all that changed when Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal. The VCs (correctly) assessed Ford as weaker than Nixon, and that was the green light they needed to invade South Vietnam and conquer the country. The lesson I drew from that is that, as we’ve seen with Obama and the Middle East is that weak presidents are dangerous to peace. Bad guys need to be afraid of the good guy, not comfortable walking all over him.

The second interesting thing was that our guide admitted that the VCs lost the Tet Offensive, adding that the Americans lost the war anyway because “the political climate changed.” His statement led me back to something I wanted to explain to the Little Bookworm who’s on the trip with me.

Wars, I said, are often won and lost, not on the battlefield, but amongst the civilians. That’s why Sherman’s march through Georgia was what was needed to end the Civil War. As long as Southern civilians supported the war, their soldiers would just keep fighting until they could fight no more.

In the 1960s and 1970s, although the battles took placer in Vietnam, the real war was between America, on the one hand, and the Russian Soviets and Chinese Communists on the other hand. While the bloody military battles themselves barely reached America’s civilians, the communists were able to do something that Americans were unable to do: namely, wage psychological war against the American population.

My parents, who were no fools, never doubted that the entire anti-war, hippie, drug scene originated with the communists. As Ion Mihai Pacepa explains in Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, my parents were correct. The Vietnam War was a two-front war and the anti-war movement was the second front.

Quinn Hillyer at NRO says that if you want substantiation that Jeff Sessions is no racist, there are several black Democrats you can ask.

Automating ourselves out of work: the predicament that humankind seems destined to impose on itself

Much attention is being given to the matter of automation's role in the disappearance not only of longstanding occupations of all pay brackets, but even recent ones as well.

Streiff at RedState puts the matter starkly, which may well be the way it needs to be put at this time:

Where, you have a right to ask, is this going?

Society has dealt with economic dislocation before. Draft animals meant you no longer had to hitch the Old Lady to the wooden plow. Water mills replaced manual labor beginning in the Middle Ages. With each advance though, the manpower freed up flowed to newer and more lucrative pursuits. The first real break in the relationship between man and machine happened in the early part of the 19th century when an entire industry, weaving, was being eliminated by textile mills. The reaction was the Luddite movement that smashed mechanical looms and burned factories.

The movement was suppressed by British troops with substantial loss of life and over fifty of the Luddites were hanged. Change was imposed and everything went on as before except for the extinction of free weavers and home weaving that forced men and women into the mills as workers.

What makes the Luddite movement different from today is that the Luddites lived at a time where the franchise was reserved to a very small number of voters and many industrial cities, like Manchester, had no representation at all. Their concerns were irrelevant as they had no voice. Today is different. That truck driver who has just lost a $50K/year job to a robot votes.

What happens in industry after industry displaced workers no longer have a place to go because humans simply aren’t in demand? There are no trucks to drive. There is no fast food to serve. There may not even be brooms to push. But these men and women can not only vote they might very well outnumber those people with decent jobs. Keep in mind that well under 50% of the nation pays federal income tax.

Though suppressed, that Luddite inclination has never been far from the surface in Britain. In the early 1980s when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke the miners union by shutting down unproductive and nationalized mines, a columnist in the Economist commented that the difference between Britain and America was that in Britain miners went out on strike so their sons could go to work in the mines, in America miners went out on strike to ensure their sons never had to work in the mines. Maybe we have become Britain? Or maybe the miners we mocked in the 1980s were onto something that is only now becoming obvious.

What next? Because if you want a historical model of what happens when voting citizenry is unemployed and can vote you need to look no further than Rome of the “bread and circuses” era. Will we go the way of France with mandatory job sharing? Or Finland with a guaranteed basic income? At some point you begin to enter Atlas Shrugged territory.

Do you take the Randian/Darwinian route of saying “Devil take the hindmost?” Or, in my cultural vernacular, “root, hog, or die.” And how does this work when you are telling a majority of the nation to piss off? And the impact of this decision will be felt by people who might even be philosophically agreeable to that argument. Already we see story after story of people in their 30s, prime income earning years, moving back home because they can’t find a position in the economy that pays enough to live. The bill payer here is the parents. Do we really think the problems of declining family formation and declining birthrate are divorced from economic uncertainty?

I don’t know what the answer is but I am pretty sure that free trade in this environment is going to be a damned hard sell.

It is a pickle, isn't it? Government "solutions" - either putting a stop to the natural human impulse to innovate, or guaranteeing everyone a minimum income - would inevitably lead to an Orwellian, dehumanizing state of affairs in which meaning would dwindle.

But how is meaning to thrive if there's nothing to do?

I can't even envision the kind of blue-ribbon panel that ought to be assembled to look at it. Would the right ratio of forecasters from various industries, university wonks and government bureaucrats come up with an "aha!" way out?

I doubt it; the very notion of such a panel reeks of the administrative state that James Burnham warned us about in 1941.

Is, then, the answer for each of us to prayerfully inquire as to the nexus of the world's greatest need and our greatest fulfillment?

That seems closer to the mark, but requires a seismic shift on both the individual and collective levels.

It may be our inexorable destination, though. The ultimate question is, as it has always been, what are we here for?

About that WSJ article on 401(k)s

Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute sets things straight:

More Americans saving more, with retirement incomes at record levels. That’s the failure of 401(k)s?

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday with a great hook: the pioneers of 401(k) retirement savings plans now regret how prominent those plans have become. These early 401(k) advocates believe that retirees would have been better off had we stayed with traditional defined benefit (DB) plans.

“Many early backers of the 401(k) now say they have regrets about how their creation turned out despite its emergence as the dominant way most Americans save. Some say it wasn’t designed to be a primary retirement tool and acknowledge they used forecasts that were too optimistic to sell the plan in its early days.”

The Journal had a great hook. Unfortunately, that’s about all the story comes with. The Journal’s reporting is short on data and long on sources and factoids that agree with the story’s premise. In reality, retirement saving and retirement incomes have improved, and 401(k)s have been part of that story.

In a traditional “defined benefit” (DB) pension, the employer offers retirees a fixed benefit, guaranteed against market risk. In a “defined contribution” pension like a 401(k), employers instead promise only a fixed contribution each year – say, 3% of employee pay – while employee themselves bear the market risk. Risk is bad, so the shift from traditional pensions to 401(k)s must also have been bad for workers. Right??

Not exactly, because there’s a lot more to the story than that.

Part of the Journal article’s problem is just crappy journalism. For instance, the Journal cites three sources who are on one side of the retirement saving debate, but no one on the other side. And there is a debate: unbeknownst to most newspaper readers, peer-reviewed academic studies of retirement saving show a much smaller problem than do advocacy groups like the National Institute for Retirement Security, who the Journal cites. NIRS, for instance, claims that total retirement savings are roughly 25% below where they need to be for retirees to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living. But University of Wisconsin economists John Karl Scholz and Ananth Seshadri found in two articles that on average U.S. household are saving enough for retirement. About one-quarter of households aren’t saving enough, but shortfalls where they occur tend to be small. For their work, which has been cited hundreds of times by other academic studies, Scholz and Seshadri won TIAA-CREF’s Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. But the Journal cites the NIRS study – which is, frankly, not very good – while ignoring the real research? That does no one any favors.

But even laying out some basic statistics can help, if those stats are accurate. For instance, the Journal article features a nice chart – under the headline “Savings Struggle” – showing a declining U.S. personal saving rate since 1970. Some might take that falling saving rate as denoting that workers are putting away less money for retirement. Actually, not. The reason is that the total personal saving rate also includes the amounts that retirees are drawing down from their savings (or DIS-saving) , which lowers the saving rate. And guess what? There are more retirees today than in the 1970s – one-third more, relative to the working-age population. As I’ve pointed out, the total personal saving rate says very little about retirement saving adequacy because, over a person’s full lifetime, their personal saving rate should be zero.

Will even better models for saving for one's sunset years continue to appear? Certainly, if people are left free of government interference in their pursuit of quality lives.

 

LITD likes this guy

Steven Weissman, that is.

Florida attorney and former hospital president, Steven I. Weissman, sent President-elect Donald Trump a petition to end predatory pricing in the healthcare industry. The petition, signed by more than 104,000 Americans, was delivered Wednesday evening to Trump Tower in New York City. It is the first petition of its kind, and the first one the president-elect has received regarding healthcare.

Weissman became the president of a Miami hospital when a friend, who founded the hospital, passed away. During his tenure as president, Weissman was able to get an inside look at how healthcare operates in the U.S., and, in his own words, it was “sickening.”

“The biggest problem in healthcare is that there is no pricing at all,” Weissman tells The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is not a coincidence that the only product or service permitted to be sold in the U.S. without legitimate pricing, is the one which has imposed tremendous financial hardship.”

What Weissman claims is an accurate depiction of what is going on under the noses of consumers, and it can actually be corroborated. Take the cost of sending a simple blood test to a laboratory for analysis. The cost of that one blood test can range from $10 to $400 at the same lab. The differing rates for the same blood tests causes the system to waste an enormous amount of money. For instance, Medicare paid $910 million more than it would have had it paid the rates of state Medicare plans and private insurers in 2011, according to a 2013 report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General.

There are even more dramatic examples. Say a patient is presented to an emergency department with chest pain, a condition that could prove serious as it is an early sign of an impending heart attack. The bill incurred by the patient for hospitalization for chest pain can range from $3,000 to $25,000, or more.

Even if a patient actively sought prices for a given healthcare service, they would have no means of obtaining accurate, valid information.

If a patient were to ask what the price of any healthcare service costs, they would be met ubiquitously with one question: What insurance do you have? Gouging occurs because the cost to the patient is not set, it’s determined by “how much can be extracted from each patient on a case by case basis,” Weissman explains to TheDCNF. Effectively, what Weissman is spelling out is that there is no base price for any service in the healthcare industry. Because billing rates are not set, the industry is essentially able to prey on patients at their most vulnerable.

Weissman thinks Obamacare needs to be repealed and replaced in order to help fix the problem of rising costs, but in conjunction with legitimate pricing measures.

“Until there is a requirement for legitimate pricing, we will really never know what prices are supposed to be,” Weissman tells TheDCNF. “Whether we have single-payer, Obamacare, or free market healthcare, we need to know what a legitimate price is or we can never solve the problem.” In our current system, “there is no going rate,” Weissman explains.

Pricing occurs through insurance providers. Patients purchase a health insurance plan, either on the Obamacare exchanges or through a private company, and then enter into a network of hospitals and physicians that are covered in their package. Patients can find out what physicians might charge within their network, but is the extent to which there is any price transparency in the healthcare market.

“If my neighbor’s paying half as much, I’m not entitled to know that,” Weissman explains. “Eliminating networks would be such an unbelievable improvement.”

The problem networks pose for pricing in the healthcare market are easily seen in the working relationship between hospitals and insurance companies. Typically, a patient is presented to a hospital in need of medical care and comes in to talk about the finances and an insurance plan. The person asks, “how much money do I need for this?”

The hospital system has to spend hours getting on the phone to get all the necessary information from insurance companies. Essentially, the physician can’t get the patient an accurate figure until they consult their insurance provider.

“This causes billions of dollars, and thousands of wasted hours,” Weissman tells TheDCNF. “Insurance companies employ entire teams of people to work with physicians and hospitals on pricing, and this could be eliminated by having a posted legitimate price.”

If there were legitimate prices posted, instead of being limited to just a few hospitals and limited number of physicians in a given network, “patients could go to any doctor in the United States,” Weissman exclaims. If networks were eliminated and prices were set by the free market, “no one can charge a patient these fantasy prices that are currently the norm, because they would be violating the law,” Weissman says. “It should be illegal to not have a real price.”

“When Americans can shop competitive pricing for good value, our system will become the world’s role model for efficient healthcare. Total U.S. healthcare costs as a percentage GDP will be slashed and health cost misery will end,” Weissman concludes.

I'm a fairly sharp guy, but I've never fully understood this whole concept of networks. Is it tied to how much government is involved in someone's insurance plan?

(I'm currently experiencing the mysteries of this "network" business, foregoing a fairly advanced device for one situation, and a scan for another, because the doctors who ordered them are not in the network of my new insurance provider. You see, my old provider got out of the "marketplace" business.)

While I may be fairly sharp, I am a huge fan of simplicity. That's one of the main appeals of free-market economics for me. You inquire with someone offering a good or service about the price. The response either suits you or it doesn't. Even other types of insurance work this way.

I hope this guy is consulted by both the legislative and executive branches as we disentangle ourselves from the "A"CA. He has a thorough understanding of what is so currently hosed up, and of what the remedy is: good old economic freedom.

Tuesday roundup

Memo to the House Republican Caucus: back away immediately from your really bad idea to put the Congressional Ethics Office back under the purview of the Ethics Committee. What in the hell were you thinking? The Freedom-Haters are already crowing, "Yes, indeed, that's some draining of the swamp!"


Nicholas Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute has a piece that's timely, given yesterday's announcement by North Korea that it is ready to launch an ICBM. Eberstadt walks us through the last quarter-century of folly on the part of the US and the world generally, which has brought us to this juncture. He then touts a new report by a leading defense intellectual as offering fresh insight into what is possible at this late date:

If the incoming Trump team is looking for examples of the sorts of fresh thinking that just might help constrain Pyongyang’s interests and promote America’s instead, they might want to peruse a little essay titled “An Information Based Strategy to Reduce North Korea’s Increasing Threat.”

This short but important study by Commander Fredrick “Skip” Vincenzo, long a North Korea watcher with United States Forces Korea (USFK), and published in October by consortium of sponsors led by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), shows how the North Korean chess board might be reconfigured to our advantage if the US and her allies were to probe the vulnerabilities of the Kim Family regime in a more forward-sighted manner, and with the many unused or underappreciated tools at our disposal.

He goes on to temper any inclinations to jump at Vincenzo's report as a panacea, though:

There are no easy answers to the North Korean question, of course. Vincenzo’s study is not the final word on making the North Korean problem smaller—nor is it intended to be. But it is a promising first step toward the sort of thinking that may indeed help us make the North Korean problem smaller—and one that, we may hope, will encourage further fresh thinking on the problem, both outside the US government and within it.

"Fresh thinking" becomes more challenging once a rogue power has its arsenal. The big lesson is that when the world's sane, grown-up and righteous nations clearly see that a bad-guy regime is actively working on a nuclear program, they must band together and use all means at their disposal to stop it cold. You don't dither, as has been done with North Korea. As has been done with Iran.

Your must-read for today: Michael Knox Beran's essay at NRO entitled "Bacon's Bastards: The Folly of the Technocratic Elite."  The Bacon being Francis Bacon, who predicted that with the spirit of experimentation being introduced by the Renaissance, humankind was going to explore every aspect of reality, to the steady betterment of its condition. It has actually turned out to be much more of a mixed bag:

Everyone knows the blessings of the Baconian revolution. Mechanical reproduction and industrial automation enriched man’s material life. The spread of printed books and newspapers extended his intellectual reach. But progress came at a price: The cultural unit that for more than two millennia served as the focal point of Western community broke down. Agora man, originally Greek, throve in the agoras, the market squares of the West, long after the old Greek cities died, making the common life of Europe vital through the union of arts (theatrical, architectural, festival, liturgical) that have since been severed from their bright agora communion. 

By bringing a highly developed civic art into places where people actually lived — where they ate and drank, shopped and prayed, gossiped and quarreled — Old Western man promoted belonging and social cohesion in a way that eludes his modern descendants. The soft compulsion of tradition and manners, of ritual and customary usage, was as essential to the infrastructure of this older way of life as the laws and regulations upon which we over-rely today. With it came the power, in Peter Laslett’s words, of “reconciling the frustrated and discontented by emotional means.” 

And now, the technocratic impulse is having an unprecedented effect on that most humanizing of activities: work:

Still there remained, in the bereft provinces, that most important socially connective activity: work. Yet advances in automation, together with outsourcing and global competition, are eroding this ultimate social bond, and anxiety about the future is keen, not least in the Brexit shires of the United Kingdom and the Trump counties of the United States.

The elites are quick to shout “guaranteed minimum income,” as though a dole can be a substitute for the belonging and mattering that come with work and community. Pessimistic eschatology has, it is true, become a form of popular entertainment, and hardly a day passes without some charlatan setting up for a sage to preach an apocalypse, but there is reason to think that, should the technocratic vision prevail, the doom mongers may well be proved right. We may yet see a class of self-conceived Darwinian super-animals lording it over a mass of dependent wards of the state, with ever more psychic withdrawal and human shrinkage as the canaille seek refuge from despair in drink and opium. 

At least they will be able to post their suicide notes on Facebook. 

And this observation ought to be of the well-duh variety, but this is, as we know, post-America, where not everyone is going to find it quite so obvious:

 Michael Wear, former director of Barack Obama's 2012 faith outreach efforts, said the Democratic Party is in serious trouble because it cannot connect with theologically conservative Christians. Although he is opposed to both abortion and same-sex marriage, Wear supported Obama because he considered those theological positions, while issues like poverty and immigration are also important to his faith. But other Democrats seem increasingly unable to understand him.

"There's a religious illiteracy problem in the Democratic Party," Wear told The Atlantic's Emma Green. President-elect Donald Trump won every Christian voting bloc. "It shows not just ineptitude, but the ignorance of Democrats in not even pretending to give these voters a reason to vote for them." Perhaps ironically, the party's success at reaching out to young people has also driven a wedge between Democrats and faith.

"It's tied to the demographics of the country: More 20- and 30-year-olds are taking positions of power in the Democratic Party," Wear explained. "They grew up in parts of the country where navigating religion was not important socially and not important to their political careers."

This was not always the case. Wear pointed out James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped President Bill Clinton win the 1992 election. "James Carville is not the most religious guy, but he gets religious people—if you didn't get religious people running Democratic campaigns in the South in the '80s, you wouldn't win." But the new Democrats make James Carville look like Billy Graham.

Memo to the FHers: He is the answer, whatever the question.

 

Christians are the most persecuted religious people in the world

The numbers are in:

According to a new report by the Center for Studies on New Religions, Christians were the most persecuted religious group in the world in 2016.

Figures show that over 90,000 Christians were slaughtered last year and thirty percent of the murders were carried out by radical Islamists. A full report is expected to be released next month by the Italian research group, states Fox News.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration largely ignored the stunning rate at which Christians were being killed around the world in favor of searching out and condemning so-called Islamophobia around the world. 

Newsweek also reported on the study in more detail. In addition to the 90,000 deaths, actually down from 105,000 in 2015, between 500 and 600 million Christians were barred from freely practicing their faith in 2016.

Here’s more info:

Around 70 percent of the killings occurred in tribal conflicts in Africa, with the high number attributed to Christians refusing to take up weapons for reasons of conscience, [study Director Massimo] Introvigne said. A separate report earlier this year found that a large number of Christian deaths were occurring in northern Nigeria, where the terrorist group Boko Haram operates.

The other 30 percent, according to Introvigne, occurred due to terrorist attacks and government persecution, notably in North Korea. Last year, Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim was sentenced to life in prison in North Korea for what Pyongyang described as “anti-state activities.”

The report also noted that outside of Africa, Christians and Muslims were killed at similar rates; however, Muslims are mostly responsible for killing other Muslims.

I used to read the admonitions of Jesus to the effect that his followers needed to be ready to be reviled, harassed, maligned, and and even harmed and taken captive. In those days I thought, why is he so preoccupied with this? Who really cares if someone wants to follow Jesus?

Alas, there is something about him and his message that brings a lot of people's stuff up. They can't handle that proliferating in the world.

N ow I see that confessing him as Lord is not something that is done casually.

More exquisite Northern Soul

What more needs to be expressed?

A federal judge with his head on straight

Saying no to the nature-distortion madness, and the totalitarianism issuing therefrom:

On New Year's Eve, a federal judge in Texas issued an injunctionagainst what has become known as the "transgender mandate." The injunction prevented enforcement of a new federal regulation issued this spring whose consequences have been hotly debated, which would have gone into effect on Jan. 1.

The Becket Fund, which litigated on behalf of religious healthcare provider networks, has argued ever since the rule was promulgated that it will require many doctors to perform procedures related to gender reassignment, even on children, and even where it violates their medical judgment, let alone their religious beliefs about sex changes.

The state plaintiffs in the case, who had sued alongside the providers, argued (among other things) that their state laws requiring doctors to act on their best medical judgment would be overturned by this new federal rule. They also argued that the rule would require them to provide state employees with insurance plans that cover sex reassignment procedures.

Judge O'Connor felt that a trial victory for the plaintiffs was probable, and wanted to prevent harm to their cause.  Good on ya, sir!

But can we please dismantle the Health and Human Services Department so we have one less blunt instrument whereby Leviathan can attempt to redefine "sex" and make us all do likewise?

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

From Britain:

The Minister of State for Security has issued a stark warning that ISIS is plotting a chemical attack on Britain.

Ben Wallace said exercises are being carried out to prepare for such an atrocity.

ISIS has the capabilities to produce their own mustard gas, having already used the tactics in the Middle East. 

Troops fighting against the terror group have been left with appalling injuries – including agonising blisters on their skin and badly damaged lungs – in a frightening echo of warfare in the trenches on the Western Front. 

Ingredients to make these bombs are fairly common and easy to obtain, as most of them have other, legal uses. 

Mr Wallace told the Sunday Times: 'They have no moral objection to using chemical weapons against populations and, if they could, they would in this country.' 

As well as having ISIS to deal with, the MP for Wyre and Preston North stated that Al-Qaeda is back on the rise and becoming an increasingly credible threat, and that the biggest threat to the UK is cyber attacks.

From Turkey:

The Islamic State issued a statement on Monday saying it was responsible for the attack on a New Year's Eve celebration at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in which at least 39 people were killed.

The ISIS-linked Amaq News Agency published the statement:

"In continuation of the blessed operations that Islamic State is conducting against the protector of the cross, Turkey, a heroic soldier of the caliphate struck one of the most famous nightclubs where the Christians celebrate their apostate holiday."

As big a threat as ever.

About this crud going around about the Most Equal Comrade's rule being scandal-and-embarrassment-free

Gay Patriot succinctly reminds the purveyors of such nonsense of the actual record:

The last eight years have been pretty bad. But as we prepare to wave good-bye and good riddance to one of America’s truly awful presidencies, there are some low points that stick out in the memory more than others.

Obama’s Iranian-born slumlord chief advisor Valerie Jarrett claims “The president prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.” Really? No scandals? Solyndra, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the Secret Service picking up hookers, his Secretary of Treasury who cheated on his taxes? These weren’t scandals.

I think she meant he isn’t ashamed of his scandals… because he has no capability to feel remorse. People who’ve been told they are flawless gods their entire lives tend to get that way.

And nothing to embarrass himself? So, he wasn’t embarrassed when he walked up to a window and tried to open it like a door? Or, when he and the Danish Prime Minister were yukking it up taking selfies at Nelson Mandela’s Memorial Service? Or when he tried to get a open umbrella through an archway? Or when he made that “workout video” flapping around with those little baby weights. Or, when he gifted Britain’s blind prime minister with a collection of DVD’s that were incompatible with British DVD players.

Again? Not embarrassed? Or simply incapable of feeling shame?

One more thing. Obama has been lecturing Hillary and the Democrats about how they lost by being too elite and out of touch (this from the guy who whined about the price of Arugula at Whole Foods back in ’08.) In his last press conference before departing on his annual lavish, taxpayer funded Hawaiian vacations, Obama lectured.

I became a U.S. Senator not just because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving downstate Illinois and going to fish fries and sitting in V.F.W. Halls and talking to farmers.

No, dirtbag. You only became a US Senator because a corrupt Chicago judge released your opponent’s sealed divorce record and the Chicago Democrat Machine hyped it into a scandal. Your entire political career is the fruit of a poisoned tree, and it shows. Were it not for 7 of 9′s divorce, we would have had Hillary Clinton as president. Which would also have been dreadful.

A little something to set the record straight next time some lefty pollutes your Facebook feed with that it's-been-Camelot  hooey.

Think they'll take heed?

Great Ben Shapiro column today at Daily Wire. He lists five New Year's resolutions leftists should live by. They are

• Tell Lena Dunham to go away.
• Don't overuse intersectionality; gendering glaciers makes you sound out of touch with reality.
• Recognize that other people have the same right to speak their mind as you do.
• Understand that nobody is more or less moral and pure because of their identity.
• Stay clear of Black Lives Matter's polemics; it doesn't help anyone.

As rockers either die or keep slogging themselves onstage, the grandiosity of their entire enterprise begins to show itself to be an illusion

The saying about coincidence being God's way of remaining anonymous came to mind as I came across the headline "What Happened to Rock Music?" this morning. Obvious clickbait for a guy like me, if you have read / listened to the post immediately under this one.

It's a piece by New Republic news editor Alex Shepherd and, while it's drenched in the left-of-center cultural presumptions to be expected from such a source, gets its basic conclusion right.

Pared to its essentials, it's a collection of short reviews of several memoirs by aging-boomer rockers that came out this year: Mike Love, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Phil Collins. Shepherd compares and contrasts the tones and styles of each. The common thread he sees emerging from their sum is a defensiveness about how history is coming to define them, an underlying message along the lines of "I'm more than what former colleagues have portrayed me to be!"

The question of how each writer-musician bumped up against the cultural context of the period of his greatest impact is also dealt with. Mike Love's rift with cousin Brian Wilson seems to have really been catalyzed by the late-1960s shift from institutionalized trappings of American adolescence (surfing, hot rods, girls and hamburger hangouts) to musical and lifestyle experimentation in uncharted territory. For Collins, it was emerging as a post-Genesis star in the "unhip 80s," about which Collins maintains a "sense of humor."

At least from Shephard's overview, it seems that Springsteen's sense of where he fit when he burst onto the 1970s had less to do with the tenor of that decade than with an ethos he picked up at age seven and which continued to inform his growth as a rocker ever afterward:

Here’s Springsteen writing about Elvis’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show:

THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED!! A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OF LIBERTY HAVE BEEN RUNG!! A HERO HAS COME. THE OLD ORDER HAS BEEN OVERTHROWN. The teachers, the parents, the fools so sure they knew THE WAY—THE ONLY WAY—to build a life, to have an impact on things and to make a man or woman out of yourself have been challenged. A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT THE WORLD IN TWO.

Springsteen’s memoir runs hot, as it should, given his penchant for marathon four-hour shows. 

This is the essential problem of rock. It "runs hot." It's essentially a mode of expression geared toward a particular window within a human lifespan, and that window occurs before the halfway point of an average lifespan. During that time, hormones are coursing with their initial fury through the individual's veins, and the question of where the self fits into the larger scheme of a societal landscape that of necessity must be ordered somehow or other first arises (telegraphed by Holden Caulfield at the onset of the 1950s). The individual hasn't much grasp yet on the overall sweep of history (which, when or if eventually studied, shows us that nothing is new under the sun, and that cultures and countercultures nave been colliding all over the globe throughout our species' existence), and hasn't yet grasped that there might be reasons to observe and care about how dear old Gramps sees decades of choices affecting the trajectory of his life. What the teenager is left with is his or her feelings.

The confluence of cultural factors was perfect for giving birth to rock and roll. Technology had given us the solid-body electric guitar, which, because it turned the strings' vibrations into pure electronic signal, could be an overpowering, not to mention rudely raw, voice in a musical ensemble. Mid-50s kids were the first adolescents in human history to have sufficient spending cash in their pockets to be full participants in consumerism. Intellectual attention was being heaped on them, from Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" to the 1944 examination of the adolescent sociopathic personality Rebel Without A Cause, which was indeed the inspiration for the 1955 movie of the same name.

So here we have a man well into his own 60s, Bruce Springsteen, still basically driven by the all-encompassing thrill he experienced that night in 1956 when he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. He, and much of his generation, have maneuvered through the world in the intervening decades driven by a countercultural impulse, a basically leftist sense that there is some kind of "establishment" to be brought low by the nobility of the New Human's feelings.

Seeing no need to avail themselves of the aforementioned lessons of history, they come up against, say, the eternal differences between male and female and conclude that it is some kind of conspiracy of inequity, or they see sprawling industrial operations encroaching on the pristine state of pure nature  and do not stop to consider the astounding advances in human comfort, convenience and safety that have arisen therefrom.

No, they throw fits. They institute gender studies programs at universities. They stage exercises in moral preening like the Dakota Pipeline protest.

Shephard also makes mention of an event that occurred last year:

And then there was Desert Trip, derisively and accurately labeled “Oldchella,” the mega-concert featuring Dylan, The Rolling Stones (who incidentally released their first good album in three decades in 2016), Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, The Who, and Neil Young. In one respect, Oldchella was a fitting jewel in the crown of 2016: a testament to rock’s decaying influence.

You have to ask yourself, seriously, who the hell would bother with the time and expense of attending something like that? And why? 

In a postmodern world where forms of entertainment are pretty much infinite, who is motivated to go to a festival headlined by icons from a half-century ago?

Old-timers have been featured at a lot of contemporary festivals for some years now, with Young, McCartney and others having appeared at Bonaroo, for example. This gives us some glimpse into who considers this a worthwhile investment of resources. There is a swath of the now-approaching-their-forties people who, having heard all this music on their parents' stereos growing up, and having been regaled with Springsteen-esque recollections of the Ed Sullivan Show and how it changed everything, regard these figures as so towering that any chance to see them in person before any more of their deaths occur is not to be missed.

One more noteworthy point about Shephard being the author of the TNR piece is that he basically falls into the demographic depicted in the paragraph above, and therefore gets some of the finer points of these figures' impact a little inaccurate. Particularly in the paragraph in which he enumerates the musicians who died in 2016, he indicates a skewed understanding of the significance of a few of them. (Leon Russell, for instance, would be more properly described as a ubiquitous Southern California studio presence who took his Oklahoma sensibility wherever he went than a mere "weirdo visionary".) Granted, he is presenting his list with an eye toward brevity so as to move on to larger points he wants to make, but it bolsters the point that rock, fairly uniquely among history topics, is treated differently by those who "were there" than by those who subsequently developed an interest in it. And I'm really over the meme about "taking nonwhite music and sanitizing it for white audiences." Such shorthand leaves out essential chunks of the story.

But, for all the admittedly brilliant performances and compositions, for all the drama of the melding of soundtrack and actual tumultuous events (think the Stones playing "Gimme Shelter" as Meredith Hunter was beaten to death with a pool cue right in front of the stage at Altamont in December 1969),  and for all the power that comes with the sheer volume that was only possible from the dawn of rock onward, it's not hard to make the case that rock as an unprecedented game-changer in human history is a wildly overblown concept.

It was basically a hissy-fit, because, as P.J. O'Rourke has explained, "we didn't want to clean the bathroom."

Some exquisite Northern Soul to kick off your 2017

Starting to rethink the entire matter of teaching rock & roll history on the community-college level, something I will be doing when the spring semester begins, as I have every spring since 2002. In the early days, the age range of my students was much greater than now. In fact, in the early days, some students were older than me. That hasn't been the case for several years. The range has pretty much narrowed to the commonly-regarded age bracket for college students: 18 - 23. In those days, my vinyl collection was still up here in the office, and I'd take LPs and 45s into class to let students have a visceral interaction with those artifacts. Alas, with all those records in plastic tubs in the basement now, that's not available to me as a teaching tool. So I'm left with using current technology to attempt to convey the experience of getting one's music from a delivery form that was an integral part of the listening experience.

Anyway, you may see more just-because music posts for a while, as I re-examine what it means to be the steward of the passing on of some kind of insight to be gleaned from this particular angle of approaching 20th century American and Western history.

Had not listened to this gem for a while. Darrell Banks recorded for the biggest of Detroits non-Motown R&B labels in the 1960s, Revillot. Hence he never became the big star that Marvin Gaye, the Miracles or Supremes became.

The reason this arrangement still has that unmistakable 60s Detroit vibe to it is that Mike Terry, whose mighty baritone sax was such a key element of so many Motown hits, can be heard here.

Which is not to overlook Banks's masterful turn as a soul stylist nonpareil.

Massacre in Istanbul

By now you presumably know about the jihadist dressed as Santa Claus who shot up an Istanbul nightclub on New Year's Eve, killing 35 and wounding 40.

A few thoughts:

Turkey was not so long ago regarded hopefully by European organizations such as NATO and the EU, thought to be a model for the melding of secular government and a basically Islamic society nonetheless tolerant of minority demographics.

Even Erdogan started out showing promise along these lines, but now is showing himself to be yet another autocrat preoccupied with regional predominance, thus given to shrewd moves that don't easily fit a discernible pattern.

There was the attempted coup in July, leading to the jailing of hundreds of journalists, opposition political figures, academics, etc. by the Erdogan regime.

2016 has been quite a year for attacks as well:

• 29 killed in February in Ankara
• 37 killed in March in Ankara
• 45 killed in June in Istanbul
• 54 killed in Gaziantep in August

And that's the short list.

Tensions rose between Turkey and Russia after Turkey downed a Russian warplane in November 2015, but seem to have eased, given the gracious diplomacy on both sides after Russia's ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at a reception at an art gallery last month. Turkey has also been a participant, along with Russia and Iran (Turkey's clear rival in the predominant-regional-power stakes) in the recent negotiations for a ceasefire in the tangled Syrian civil war (talks at which Most-Equal-Comrade-ruled post-America was notably absent).

With a considerably greater degree of hellish proceedings continuing apace in other countries in that part of the world, and with tourism still bringing in visitors to check out the food and architecture, it's still possible to look at Turkey as a reasonably stable, somewhat Westernized nation on the surface anyway. A closer examination reveals something less amenable to easy classification.

In short, it's a nation-state that bears watching in 2017.