Monthly Archives: March 2011

Religion and Economics

March 31, 2011
By
Religion and Economics

By Mike Gray It’s not just that the writers, as thoughtful as they might otherwise be on all matters of faith and morals, do not know anything about economic theory. The problem is even more foundational: the widespread tendency is to deny the validity of the science itself. It is treated as some kind of pseudoscience invented to thwart the achievement of social justice or the realization of the perfectly moral utopia of faith. They therefore dismiss the entire discipline as forgettable and maybe even evil. It’s almost as if the entire subject is outside their field of intellectual vision. Here is a theory (with a debt to Rothbard, Hoppe, Kinsella, et al.) about why this situation persists. — Jeffrey A. Tucker Economics has been called the dismal science, principally by people who find the real world an intractable impediment to their utopian aspirations. They say spirituality and material concerns are mutually exclusive, but Tucker believes this notion needs to be rethought. Remember the feeding of the multitude and the parable of the pearl of great price in the New Testament? As an example , consider the case of the loaves and fishes, an incident in

Read more »

Was Cosmic Evolution the Key to Adolf Eichmann’s Soul?

March 31, 2011
By
Was Cosmic Evolution the Key to Adolf Eichmann’s Soul?

By Mike Gray “I am not prepared to accept anything that disagrees with my naturalistic conceptions … over hundreds and millions of years of development man has developed downwards, to become ‘Homo sapiens’.” — Adolf Eichmann You probably have never heard of Eichmann. Russell Grigg explains who he was: Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) was one of the principal architects of the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered. His task was to maintain the killing capacity of the concentration camps by providing a steady flow of victims. Following his capture in Argentina in 1960, he was tried as a war criminal in 1961 in a Jerusalem Court, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The Israeli Ministry of Affairs appointed a Christian missionary, William Hull, to be Eichmann’s spiritual adviser while he awaited execution. Hull met 14 times with Eichmann. As Grigg points out, the Nazi concentration camp coordinator never once admitted feeling sorry for what he did: During these discussions, Eichmann confirmed that he had been brought up in the Evangelische Church, but said that he did not believe that Jesus died to save sinners. He said he found God through nature and through what the philosophers

Read more »

Under the U.S. Constitution, Islam and Sharia Law Are Not a Federal Concern

March 30, 2011
By
Under the U.S. Constitution, Islam and Sharia Law Are Not a Federal Concern

By Mike Gray . . . . all non-Christian religions ought to enjoy the presumption of religious freedom . . . the First Amendment does not explicitly protect the Islamic faith, nor does it prohibit it. The First Amendment is simply silent about the issue of Islam. Thus Islam should enjoy only the liberty it merits, and permission, for example, to build new mosques can be revoked if Islam does in America what Islam does everywhere it exists in the world, which is labor to subvert democracy and impose sharia law. — Bryan Fischer There seems to be widespread ignorance about, or simply a deliberate disregard of, the First Amendment, particularly with respect to the so-called “Establishment Clause”: . . . . what the First Amendment was all about was simply prohibiting Congress from picking one denomination and making it the official church of the United States, and about protecting all Christian denominations from the intrusion of the federal government. There was no mention of Islam, no reference to Islam, no effort to protect the free exercise of the Islamic faith. Since the Founders intended the First Amendment to apply only to Congress (“Congress shall make no law

Read more »

Prog Rockers Yes to Release New Album, Tour USA

March 30, 2011
By
Prog Rockers Yes to Release New Album, Tour USA

Progressive rock superband Yes has finished production work on their first new album in a decade and plans to tour in support of it this year. Longtime Yes singer, lyricist, co-songwriter, and inspirational leader Jon Anderson will not be participating in the album or tour. Bassist and band co-founder Chris Squire reports that Benoit David has taken over lead vocal duties for the band after having toured with Yes in 2008 while Anderson struggled with health problems that had precluded the band from touring for three years.

Read more »

Notable Quote: George Friedman on Declaring War

March 30, 2011
By
Notable Quote: George Friedman on Declaring War

By Mike Gray I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done? — George Friedman There are good reasons why the Founding Fathers insisted in the Constitution that Congress declare war first: World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war. The wars fought since have had congressional approval, both in the sense that resolutions were passed and that Congress appropriated funds, but the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think. The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress. Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him. Not only does it make his

Read more »

The Greening of Detective Fiction Criticism—and Publishing

March 30, 2011
By
The Greening of Detective Fiction Criticism—and Publishing

Critics and publishers have dumbed down our understanding of classic mystery fiction in service of a political agenda. By Curt Evans American author Anna Katharine Green’s 1878 mystery tale, The Leavenworth Case (the first of more than thirty mystery works Green penned through 1923), made quite a splash in its day, supposedly selling over 750,000 copies in the decade and a half after its publication. Yet by the beginning of the Golden Age of the detective novel (roughly 1920 to 1939) it had become one of those great, old landmarks on the literary landscape that people dutifully glance at briefly before passing on to something more modern and interesting. Perusing a reprinted edition of Green’s first mystery novel in 1929 (nearly thirty years after he had originally read it), T. S. Eliot, an avid consumer of detective fiction, was moved to wonder why Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales “reread so much better than The Leavenworth Case?”  He noted disparagingly of Leavenworth that it “is simply popping over with sentiment” and “the sentimentality throws a spotlight upon every technical flaw in the plot.” At about the same time T. S. Eliot was looking back over Leavenworth, the esteemed novelist and critic Arnold Bennett was taking a similar literary stroll down memory lane, with the

Read more »

The Dreary Cliche of Literary Fiction: Ignorant, Bigoted Treatment of Religion

March 29, 2011
By
The Dreary Cliche of Literary Fiction: Ignorant, Bigoted Treatment of Religion

By Warren Moore It may seem odd for someone in my line of work, but I don’t read a great deal of what tends to be described as “literary fiction,” at least of the contemporary sort. Too much of it fits the description I once heard Sharyn McCrumb give: “Stories where nothing much happens to people you never really cared about to begin with.” Something I’ve noticed over the years, however, is the scorn I’ve seen for religion. I can’t remember the last literary novel I read in which the characters find spiritual fulfillment in what we might think of as a traditional organized religious community. In fact, what I’ve seen is that when a character is portrayed as a professing member of some organized faith tradition, it’s only to expose their “real” fanaticism (Krazy Khristians!) or hypocrisy (Kid-diddling Kultists!). A parallel trend is the ghettoization of fiction aimed at people of faith. Some of it is deserved — Sturgeon’s Law remains in force, and 90% of self-designated “Christian/Inspirational Fiction” seems to be crap. A similar phenomenon seems to have arisen in the wasteland of “Christian rock,” but that’s a discussion for another post. Back to mainstream literary fiction…. I

Read more »

False Dilemma: To Save the Planet, Abandon Freedom of Choice

March 29, 2011
By
False Dilemma: To Save the Planet, Abandon Freedom of Choice

By Mike Gray “I suggest that he goes and finds himself a space in the local mental asylum. If he wants to bring everywhere to a grinding halt and to plunge us into a new dark age, he is on the right track. We have to keep things moving. The man is off his rocker.” — Hugh Bladon, spokesperson for the BDA (no, not that BDA), the British Drivers’ Association. The lede says it all: Cars will be banned from London and all other cities across Europe under a draconian EU masterplan to cut CO2 emissions by 60 per cent over the next 40 years. More “green” social engineering from Eurocrats: Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport. “That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres,” he said. “Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour.” “Green” is the old “Red”. Lord Monckton weighs in: “The EU must be living in an alternate reality, where they can spend trillions and ban people from their cars. This sort of greenwashing grandstanding

Read more »

The Welfare State Is a Burr Under the Saddle

March 29, 2011
By
The Welfare State Is a Burr Under the Saddle

By Mike Gray Thomas Sowell says Americans are “voting with their feet” in what he interprets as an implicit rejection of Big Government policies: The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched. When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy. These mini-migrations occur irrespective of “race”: The movement of the black population—especially educated young blacks—is the most striking of all. In the past, the massive movements of millions of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was one of the epic migrations of a people—comparable in size with the millions of the Irish who fled the famine in Ireland in the 1840s or the millions of Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. . . . In short, with blacks, as with other racial or ethnic

Read more »

A Perfectly Realized Nightmare

March 29, 2011
By
A Perfectly Realized Nightmare

By Mike Gray “It’s a Good Life.” An episode of The Twilight Zone, Season  3, Episode 8. First air date, 3 November 1961. Director: James Sheldon. Writers: Rod Serling (1924-1975), based on a story by Jerome Bixby (1923-1998). Billy Mumy (Anthony Fremont), John Larch (Anthony’s father), Cloris Leachman (Anthony’s mother), Don Keefer (Dan Hollis), Max Showalter (Pat Riley), Alice Frost (Aunt Amy), Jeanne Bates (Ethel Hollis), Lenore Kingston (Thelma Dunn), Tom Hatcher (Bill Soames), Rod Serling (host and narrator). Tonight’s story on The Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States, and there’s a little town there called Peaksville. On a given morning not too long ago, the rest of the world disappeared and Peaksville was left all alone. Its inhabitants were never sure whether the world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched or whether the village had somehow been taken away. They were, on the other hand, sure of one thing: the cause. A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines — because they displeased him — and

Read more »

“Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing!”

March 28, 2011
By
“Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing!”

By Mike Gray The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have had were it not for the government promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life to its smallest detail. — Jeffrey A. Tucker Tucker uses The Jetsons, an old TV series, as a springboard for meditation on immutable reality: The galaxy is their home. Healthcare is a complete free market with extreme customer care. Technology was the best (but of course it still malfunctions, same as today). Business is rivalrous, prosperity is everywhere, and the state largely irrelevant except for the friendly policeman who shows up only every once in a while to check things out. The whole scene — which anticipated so much of the technology we have today but, strangely, not e-mail or texting — reflected the ethos of time: a love of progress and a vision of

Read more »

What’s Wrong with Electric Cars?

March 28, 2011
By
What’s Wrong with Electric Cars?

By Mike Gray In theory, nothing. In practice, a lot: One hundred years after the American company Cutler-Hammer was advertising electric vehicles and the first electric charging station, today’s plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) still receive failing grades from consumers and consumer advocates, says Margo Thorning, the executive vice president and chief economist at the American Council for Capital Formation. * A battery for a small vehicle like the Nissan Leaf can cost about $20,000 and still only put out a range of 80 miles on a good day (range is affected by hot and cold weather) before requiring a recharge that takes eight to 10 hours. * Even then, those batteries may only last six to eight years, leaving consumers with a vehicle that has little resale value. * Moreover, home installation of a recharging unit costs between $900 and $2,100. Even so, the federal government goes all squishy at the prospect of everybody having a PEV: Slick TV ads boast PEVs’ supposed environmental benefits, but what they don’t tell you is that a substantial increase in the numbers of them on the road will require upgrading the nation’s electricity infrastructure. * Since half of all U.S. electricity is generated

Read more »

Newswire

In U.S., Nearly Half Identify as Economically Conservative

Bald Eagles Fall to Green Energy

Phillips: Movin' Out

‘American Idol’ Posts Lowest-Rated Finale Ever

Phillip Phillips is the new 'American Idol'

Cooling Global Warm-Mongers

Boy Jesus, Big Screen: Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord' to be Made into a Movie

Ross Douthat: What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens?

Is TV Destroying U.S.?

Confessions of an Atheist Darwin-Doubter

Secularization and Christian Institutions

Biggest Religious Lawsuit in U.S. History Launched, Liberal Evening News Shows Ignore It

Government is Force!: Why individual rights demand limited government and constitutional democracy

A New Dark Age

Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio

"Freedom's Forge" tells the story of how U.S. business leaders were mobilized to build ships, tanks and weapons faster and better than the enemy, to win World War II

How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again

Sections

Packages Seo