On the liberal use of racism

Lloyd Marcus writes,

I am so sick of the Left being allowed to make the rules. Imagine the absurdity of a competition in which one side is allowed to set the rules against their opponent. The Left tells us what is racist. The Left tells us what we can and cannot say. The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele's campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house". Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

And yet, a sign seen at a tea party depicting Obama as a witch doctor is considered by the Left to be beyond the pale and obviously racist. Why is the Left, given their track record of bias, granted final authority to determine the intent of the sign? Why do we conservatives so quickly and easily allow ourselves to be put on the defensive?

The rules set by the Left are extremely clear. Racist images of black conservatives and negative images of Bush are fair game. Even a play about murdering President Bush was called "harmless art". Meanwhile, all unflattering images of Obama are racist, and constitute dangerous, potentially violent hate speech.

Now, before you dismiss Marcus' critique as sour grapes, consider this:

I am a black conservative singer, songwriter, entertainer and columnist. Liberals have posted comments all over YouTube and C-SPAN freely using and calling me the "N" word. Because they are libs and I am an uppity, off the liberal plantation, run-away black, all tactics to restore me to my owners are acceptable.

The truth is, in the current political environment, "racist" actually has no concrete, objective meaning. As all derogatory terms eventually are, it has been debased from a meaningful descriptive term to a mere swear word, one which only has one true significance: to denigrate anyone who opposes liberal dogma. "Racist" is to a liberal fundamentalist what "heathen" is to an old-style Christian fundamentalist, and nothing more; it means only the Other, the hated Them, They Who Must Be Condemned.

Now, in one sense, this is a normal linguistic process; but it has been accelerated for the sake of political expediency, and that isn't a good thing at all. In fact, this sort of tactic carries serious consequences for our society, which its practitioners should carefully consider. Cornell law professor William Jacobson put it well:

While the false accusation of racism is not a new tactic, it has been refined by Obama supporters into a toxic powder which is causing damage to the social fabric of the country by artificially injecting race into every political issue. . . .

Not surprisingly, the pace of racial accusations has picked up as opposition has grown. Just in the past few days the usual and not-so-usual suspects have been seeking to out-do each other in making accusations of racism including Eugene Robinson, Maureen Dowd, Jimmy Carter, Rep. Hank Johnson, Chris Matthews, a wide range of Democratic politicians, and of course, almost all of the mainstream media.

The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard. . . .

We are seeing for the first time a strong push-back against the race card players. And that reaction is visceral, much like an allergic reaction, from people who have been stung before.

What's more, as Mark Steyn points out, the real racism and sexism here isn't what the Left is saying it is:

Nobody minds liberal commentators expressing the hope that Clarence Thomas "will die early from heart disease like many black men," etc. Contemporary identity-group politics are prototype one-party states: If you're a black Republican Secretary of State, you're not really black. If you're a female Republican vice-presidential nominee, you're not really a woman. What's racist and sexist here is the notion that, if you're black or female, your politics is determined by your group membership.

There are, it seems to me, two main points to be drawn from this mess. The first is that whatever they might say, the Democratic leadership is worried about a conservative resurgence; to quote Steyn again,

What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek's "Mad Man" cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have "civility" drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper's scrotal "teabagging" slur and characterized as "racists" and "terrorists" what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They're telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into "mad men." Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now. . . .

The media would like the American Right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that's the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That's the better guide to what they're really worried about.

The second is that the Democratic leadership in D.C. cannot win the battle of ideas, or at least don't think they can. Now, there's an important distinction to be drawn here: that does not mean that their ideas are wrong; the most brilliant ideas and the most basic truths can still be made to sound utterly unconvincing in the mouths of defenders who don't really know how to argue for them. I happen to believe their arguments are wrong, but their competence or lack thereof in presenting them is no proof of that either way. The point is, rather, that whether they ought to be able to win the argument or otherwise, the leaders of the Democratic Party cannot, and so they feel the need to try to win by rhetorical thuggery what they cannot win by rational appeal. Dr. Jacobson's summary is apt:

The increasingly hysterical use of the the race card by liberal columnists, bloggers and politicians reflects the last gasps of people who, being unable to win an argument on the merits, seek to end the argument.

In the last analysis, all of this is a blot on Barack Obama. No, it isn't reasonable to expect him to fulfill the post-racial promise of his campaign; the only thing that was unreasonable was him using that to help sell himself as a candidate. However, he is allowing this to happen, and he could stop it if he wanted; and Jules Crittenden is right, he needs to make it stop.

Obama can let a growing chorus of prominent Americans call his failure racism and his opponents racists, a development which is itself driving a deeper partisan wedge and heightening the rancor and bitterness. He can let it further demean our national dialogue and intimidate speech. He can let it be his excuse, a smear in the history books. Or he tell America and the world firmly that in this country, political dissent does not equal racism. He will then have shown himself to be a statesman, who is worthy of respect no matter whether you agree with his politics and policies or not.

It is time for President Obama to take the race card off the table.

Here's hoping—for his sake, for the country's sake—that he does. Soon.

On this blog in history: April 12-16, 2008

Further thoughts on the Ascension: the value of our humanity
On the significance of the fact that Jesus is still the carpenter from Nazareth.

Score one for SCOTUS
Standing up for national sovereignty and the proper separation of powers.

On praying for heart attacks
"Make them stop or make them gone."

What shall we do with a Christless preacher?
A few thoughts on the matter from a working pastor.

Iraq as a litmus test for presidential seriousness
Several truths that are well worth remembering as the President wavers on Afghanistan.

William Safire, RIP

William Safire, who died this past Sunday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79, was probably most significant as a political figure; he won enduring fame when, as a Nixon speechwriter, he coined the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativity," then spent over thirty years as a political columnist for the New York Times. Generally described as a conservative stalwart, he really wasn't all that conservative; what he was, as the Times obituary rightly says, was "a pugnacious contrarian" who never backed down from a fight he could pick.

And oh, how he fought! The Times aptly calls him "a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like 'the president's populism" and 'the first lady's momulism," written during the Carter presidency." This led him, quite reasonably, to his other major column: "On Language," which he wrote from 1979 until earlier this month. In the larger scheme of things, I suppose Safire the linguist, lexicographer, and arbiter of usage was probably less important than Safire the political writer—but in my book, his work on language was more interesting, and is more likely to endure, not only for the work itself but for all those whom he encouraged to follow in his footsteps. As one such author, Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus, writes,

On hearing of his passing, fellow maven Paul Dickson remarked to me that Safire "opened a door which a lot of people got to walk through and play with words as a vocation." That was certainly true in my case. . . .

After becoming editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, I fielded occasional queries from Safire and his research assistants (on everything from "go figure" to "fire wall"). He was always quick to give credit where credit was due, and he also enjoyed coming up with warm-spirited epithets for those who helped him. (I was on the receiving end of "that etymological Inspector Javert," "netymologist," and "longtime capo of the Phrasedick Brigade"—sobriquets that I will always treasure.)

For all his feistiness, Safire was a man who inspired personal as well as professional admiration; Zimmer describes him as "an extremely generous man, both publicly in his philanthropic work with the Dana Foundation and privately with friends and colleagues," and concludes, "He will be remembered fondly for his openness, humanity, and thoughtfulness." Tevi Troy relates a priceless and revealing anecdote that begins in Safire's speechwriting days:

The day before Yom Kippur, Safire left the Agnew campaign for 36 hours to fly cross-country to Washington, arriving at Adas Israel synagogue on Connecticut Avenue just in time for the Kol Nidre service that signals the onset of the holiday.

Unfortunately, the synagogue's rabbi considered himself a bit of a political speechwriter as well, and gave an overly political and unbecoming sermon that evening condemning "those who would use alliteration to polarize our society." As Safire put it in his book Before the Fall, "that's all I needed; the 'nattering nabobs of negativism' was not a sin I had come to atone for." Yitzhak Rabin, who was the Israeli ambassador to Washington at the time, comforted Safire after the sermon and later told the rabbi that he felt the attack was inappropriate, something for which Safire was forever grateful.

Two and a half decades later, Safire and Rabin were reunited at a dinner at the Israeli embassy. The two men got into a heated discussion about the Oslo peace process and, according to Safire, "the man sitting at the table between us—Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who never breaches protocol—blanched at the seeming heatedness of the exchange." Rabin then told the story of that long ago Yom Kippur and explained to Christopher, 'That's why we can get angry with each other today without getting angry with each other."

We aren't islands—we should act accordingly

Tyler Dawn has a very good post up today, one which I encourage you to read, that reminded me of this wisdom from the preacher-poet Dr. John Donne:

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. . . .

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In keeping with this, I also note Tyler Dawn's most recent post; I'll be praying for her, and I hope you will be too.

The key to victory: don't lose your nerve

If Obamacare doesn't pass, it will in the end be because the Democrats forgot that rule. Granted, they have some reason—right now, 2010 isn't looking like a great year for them. Support for the President's health care "plan" (one has to put it in quotes because there is not in fact one coherent plan) is down to 41%, with 56% opposed, and the numbers are even worse among senior citizens; perhaps more importantly, the sense of inevitability is gone, with a slight plurality of voters saying no health care bill will pass this year (and a majority of independents—58%). The President's approval rating continues to sag as well. Still, his Approval Index is somewhat better than it was earlier this year, and the Democrats have pulled to within two points of the GOP on the generic congressional ballot; and perhaps most importantly, the Democratic caucus on the Hill has the votes to pass any bill it pleases with no help whatsoever from the Republican minority. In short, if the Democratic Party actually believes in its declared principles, all its leaders have to do is stick to their guns and they can do what they believe to be best.

Will they? Well, if Rich Lowry is to be believed, maybe not:

That's the prediction of a source in the Senate. He thinks Reid will certainly vote for cloture, but that the bill will be so unpopular—and his own standing in Nevada so precarious—that he'll vote against it on final passage, especially if—as seems likely—the sweetheart deal for Nevada on Medicaid is eventually stripped out.

If—and it seems implausible, but if—one of the two primary legislative leaders of the Democratic Party is in fact prepared to bail on the most important element of his party's political agenda in a bid to save his own skin, then combined with the Senate Finance Committee's decision to euthanize the "public option," one would have to conclude that we're seeing a major failure of nerve. Barack Obama may well need to pull a mighty big rabbit out of his hat if he wants to win this one—and given that he hasn't managed that yet, and seems to have no real idea how he might, I don't know where he's going to find one.

The answer to the dilemma

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 13
Q. Can we pay this debt ourselves?

A. Certainly not.
Actually, we increase our guilt every day.¹

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

God's justice must be satisfied; restitution for our sin must be made. Unfortunately, it's beyond us to do it—we can certainly work to improve ourselves, but we can never even get to the point of perfection in this life, let alone become good enough to start paying the price for past sin. If we're going to get out from under this debt, we're going to need help. But from whom?

Q & A 14
Q. Can another creature—any at all—
pay this debt for us?

A. No.
To begin with,
     God will not punish another creature
     for what a human is guilty of.¹
Besides,
     no mere creature can bear the weight
     of God's eternal anger against sin
and release others from it.²

In other words, nobody and nothing else in this world is able to pay the price for us either. Which leaves . . . who?

Q & A 15
Q. What kind of mediator and deliverer
should we look for then?

A. One who is truly human¹ and truly righteous,²
yet more powerful than all creatures,
     that is, one who is also true God.³

This is the crux of the matter. If there was ever to be any hope for our salvation, it could only come from God; if anyone was ever to satisfy the demands of God's justice and deliver us from the penalty due our sin, it could only be God himself.

Caesar worship is alive and well

It's interesting to me how people who screamed bloody murder whenever George W. Bush used a phrase that was even vaguely religious have no problem with religious ceremonies, led by clergy, wearing clerical robes, using the traditional forms of the Christian liturgy, to pray to Barack Obama. When I talk about personality cults and political idolatry and the messianic temptation of the Obama campaign, this is the kind of thing I'm thinking of—except a lot worse than anything I've thought of to this point.

The great political temptation from which Judaism and Christianity delivered us was the worship of human beings; during the medieval period, whoever came up with the idea of the "divine right of kings" brought that partway back, but never all the way. Now, in their reaction against Christian faith and their denial of their need for a divine Messiah, folks on the Left are trying to turn a Chicago machine politician into a secular messiah. It will never work. Put not your trust in princes.

HT: Kevin Carroll, via Toby Brown

On another note

Randall Munroe has a good point here:

Yes, yes, your sugar is a fat-free food. So's everybody else's. Go away.

Can you say "personality cult," boys and girls?

One of the things I missed last week was the creepy little story of New Jersey elementary-school kids being taught songs in praise of Barack Obama. I'm sorry, that's just un-American; in this country, we don't venerate our leaders until they're safely off the stage, and usually dead. This sort of engineered adulation belongs in places like North Korea, not here. I'm with Tyler Dawn—I'd find this just as creepy and just as nauseating if it had been for President Bush, or President Reagan, or anybody else.

Incidentally, for all the folks who were having hysterics and mocking conservatives for their reaction to the President's school speech—granted that that reaction was in many instances excessive—stuff like this is the reason for it. It wasn't that the President was speaking to our kids, it was the suspicion that he wanted to politicize them and turn them into Obamabots—and that the public-school system would, in large part, gladly go along with that agenda—that sent so many people up in flames; and garbage like this only reinforces and aggravates those concerns.

Now, obviously, it's not likely that this was directly orchestrated by the White House; but it's all of a piece with the politics-by-personality-cult approach Barack Obama and his campaign have taken all along. It's the sort of thing that prompted even a liberal like Doug Hagler to complain about the messianic tone of the Obama campaign, which went along with the candidate's apparent messianic view of his own leadership. This isn't even the first creepy video this has produced—not by a long shot.

The problem of filtered reality

All hail the Volokh Conspiracy:

I then said something like—“but it does seem like the overall level of defense is improving all over—I see so many great plays these days . . .” before I recognized how stupid a comment that was. Of course I was seeing more great defensive plays than I had 10 or 20 years before—because 10 or 20 years before there had been no Sportscenter (or equivalent). In 1992 (or whenever exactly this was), I could turn on the TV and catch 20 or 30 minutes of great highlights every night, including 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays; in 1980, or 1960, to see 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays, you had to watch 20 or 25 hours of baseball, minimum. [That’s what ESPN was doing, in effect—watching 10 or 12 games simultaneously and pulling out the highlights]. It was just my mind playing a trick on me; I had unconsciously made a very simple mistake. The way in which I was perceiving the world of baseball had, with Sportscenter, changed fundamentally, but I hadn’t taken that into account. . . .

I call it the ESPN Effect—mistaking filtered reality for reality. We do it a lot. All I hear from my left-leaning friends these days is how crazy people on the right are becoming, and all all I hear from my right-leaning friends is how crazy people on the left are becoming, and everyone, on both sides, seems very eager to provide evidence of the utter lunacy of those on the other side. “Look how crazy they’re becoming over there, on the other side!” is becoming something of a dominant trope, on left and right. It is true that we’re seeing more crazy people doing crazy things on the other side (whichever side that may be, for you) coming across our eyeballs these days. But that’s all filtered reality; it bears no more relationship to reality than the Sportscenter highlights bear to the game of baseball. My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things. Maybe 1% or so, or even 0.1%—which is a very large number, when you’re talking about a population of, say, 100 million. They didn’t get through the filters much in the Old Days, but they do now. All this talk about how extreme “the debate” is becoming—how, exactly, does anyone get a bead on what “the debate” really is? In reality?

HT: bearing blog, via my wife

I think David Post has an important point here—though I will note one somewhat countervailing point: the people on the right to whom liberals point are generally folks whom most others on the right, and certainly the leading voices on the right, would also disavow, and consider something of an embarrassment; they are truly a lunatic fringe. As the case of Van Jones demonstrated, and as the President’s ongoing campaign organization keeps demonstrating, the folks conservatives point to on the left are usually people whom liberals consider mainstream, at least until there’s some sort of hue and cry to make them pretend otherwise. That’s why Mark Steyn went so far as to say,

what is odd to me, if you look for example at the way Republicans are always being called on to distance themselves from their so-called lunatic fringe, the pattern here is that on the other side of the aisle, there is a lunatic mainstream. ACORN should not be a respectable group, and should not be anywhere near the United States Census. But as we saw with the Van Jones story, no matter how radical you are, on the left, it’s very easy for the most extreme radical to get right up close to the levers of power in the United States. That is where, unfortunately, that is where Obama’s lived most of his adult life, and that is where most of his associations are.

None of this invalidates Post’s point; but I do think it modifies it somewhat.

Honestly?

My wife has a good post up on honesty, commenting on a post by MckMama; I think she has a lot of good things to say (which would be one of the many reasons I married her), but I particularly appreciated this:

We want honesty, but we're not prepared for it when we get it. It's too raw. Too scary. Too boring. Too threatening. We want to think we understand. Honesty shows us we don't. We want to think we have the answers. Honesty shows us we don't. We want the world to be a safe, manageable, controllable place. We know that we ourselves are buffetted and thrown about, but we want to think that someday, somehow, we'll get to a place of answers. But when we really interact with each other, we discover that none of us is one self-help book or one good sermon, or one inspirational song away from having it all together. We discover that giving or receiving a bellyful of honesty requires humility and commitment far beyond what most of us are willing to give most days. It means saying things like "I'd never thought of that before," and "I don't understand, but I'd like to." It means expecting to find that we're all sinful, complex, broken people in a sinful, complex, broken world.

Too often, when we say we want honesty, we just want to be voyeurs. Too often, when we get honesty, we try to trim off the edges so that it will fit back in the box. But we were made by a God bigger than we are, who placed us in a world too complex for us to understand. And he made each of us unique. Different. Should it be any surprise to us when other's individual experiences and stories seem alien to us? When our finite interactions with an infinite God seem too big to handle and comprehend?

Read the whole thing.

Shameless plug o’ the week

Well, things did in fact slow down after Thursday, but not so’s you’d know it by here, since I haven’t really had the time to write the last couple days. I have, however, been able to bring one of the projects I’ve been working on has come to fruition. Our congregation voted last month to change its name, a vote which was confirmed by our presbytery a week ago yesterday; and as part of all the advertising we’re launching to publicize and build off the name change, our Session voted to lay out the funds to build a new website. I’m proud of them for seeing past the cost to the value of that step.

It’s now up; it isn’t completely done (we still need some more pictures up, and another page or two), but it’s pretty close, and I think it looks really good. Most of that isn’t to my credit (I didn’t design it; we purchased the website and the hosting from a company called Clover, with which I’m quite pleased), and my part of the work will no doubt come in for a fair bit of improvement over the next couple months, but for a start, I’m still quite happy with it. In particular, I’m happy that this website includes an integrated calendar, which will be helpful for us, and that it includes a built-in audio player for uploading sermons.

Which means—and I feel rather silly, but this does make me grin—that I now have sermon audio up. Not much as yet, just the first three sermons of my current series on James (I don’t even have this morning’s up at the moment), but the rest will be coming as I can get it uploaded. The quality, alas, isn’t as good as I could wish, since the congregation is still catching up on the technology, but it’s workable. Which is progress, and I’m pleased.

Doers of the word

Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

—James 1:22 (ESV)

It isn’t how much we know that matters most (or how much we think we know), or how good we are at talking the talk, when it comes to the Christian life; what matters isn’t how much of God’s word we’ve read, or how much we’ve studied, or even if we have a degree it. What matters, really, is how much the word has changed us, how much it’s expressed in our lives. Are we people who just hear the word of God and then go on about our business, or are we doers of the word?

It’s not a tough question to answer, really; but it’s an important one, because James says, if you’re not a doer of the word, you’re only deceiving yourself. Put another way, if you say you believe the gospel, and it doesn’t change your life, you don’t believe it. If you listen to the preaching of the word, and you nod your head and say, “Good sermon,” and you don’t go out and put it into practice, you don’t believe it. If you read the Bible, and you understand what it’s telling you, and you don’t do everything you can to live accordingly, you don’t believe it. It’s not enough to say the right things, it’s not enough to sing the hymns, it’s not enough to repeat the Creed, it’s not enough to think all the right thoughts—if you don’t do it, if you don’t live this book, then you’re missing something. You might be saved for later, you might have your ticket to heaven punched, but if all this never leaves your head, if it never reaches your hands and your feet, then you aren’t living God’s life now.

We aren’t here just to think certain things, or even to say certain things; it’s not enough just to know God’s word. That phrase “doer of the word” is an odd one—James here is writing in Greek, but he’s thinking in Hebrew. The Greek verb there is poieo—the noun version, poiēma, is the word from which we get our word “poem”; it can mean “to do,” but its basic meaning is “to make,” and in normal Greek, this would have been read as “maker of words”—in our terms, “wordsmith,” or “poet.” To take the typical Hebrew phrase, “doer of the word,” and just import it into Greek the way he does creates a very interesting bit of wordplay—and a profound one, I think. As Christians, we’re called to be in a very real way God’s poems, to write out his words with our lives, so that people who look at our lives can read his message to them in us.

Put another way, we’re supposed to incarnate the word of God—to make God’s word real in our lives, to wrap the flesh of our lives around the bone of his will and his commands, to become walking examples of his teaching; as we follow Christ, who was the Word of God incarnate, we are called to be “little Christs”—that’s what “Christians” means—to be copies of Christ, copies of the word of God, walking around in this world. The Bible is the word of God written, presenting us with Jesus Christ, the word of God made flesh; and our job is to become the word of God acted out, lived out, in 21st-century America. It’s true, as many have said, that you are the only Bible many people will ever read; it’s also true, says James, that that ought to be enough. If you are the only Bible people have ever read, that ought to be enough to tell them who God is, and who Jesus is, and why they ought to follow him. That’s what it means to be a doer of the word, and not merely a hearer of the word. That’s what it means for your life to be a poem for God. That, says James, is what it means to be a Christian.

(Excerpted, edited, from “The Poem of Your Life”)

Just a quick note

to prove I'm still alive . . . this week has been absolutely crazy; I've been head-down in church stuff, and what energy I've had left over from that has gone to family. I think after today, things should slow down a bit, though. I feel like the prairie dog crouching in the hole, wondering if it's safe to stick his head up.

On a random note, one of the businesses I pass on my way to work is a storage company, one of the local places to rent storage lockers. Out front this last week or so they've had one of those rented message boards with the built-in arrows; the arrow has been pointing to one of their buildings, and the message reads, "FUTURE HOME OF HIDDEN TREASURES." Maybe it's just me, but if I had a storage locker there, I'd be a little worried . . .

On the socialism of big-time sports and the distribution of freedom

I recently ran across a fascinating article by Brian Burke at Advanced NFL Stats on the power law. He uses it specifically with respect to such things as coaching tenure and distribution of Pro Bowl selections in the NFL, but along the way he uses such things as the financial crisis that hit last fall to illustrate and explain the power law, and that's what makes the article interesting (at least to me). For instance, Burke writes,

Our current financial crisis was in part caused by a fundamentally wrong assumption about risk distributions in the debt markets. An oversimplified explanation is that investment companies made lucrative but risky investments, and then hedged against their failure by buying insurance in the form of complex derivatives in case they went bust. These companies thought that they had cracked the code and solved the problem of risk once and for all. (One of the reasons the company AIG is central to the problem is that it's the company that led the selling of all that insurance.)

The problem was that the insurance was priced based on an assumption of bell curve distributions of market risk. A model known as the Correlated Gaussian Copula was developed by a Chinese mathematician named Li, and it was widely used throughout the financial industry for measuring and pricing risk. Unfortunately, financial markets act more like earthquakes than normally distributed phenomena like rainfall or human height. There are lots of minor fluctuations but occasionally the bottom drops out. The power law distribution has a ‘fatter tail’ at the extremes than the normal distribution, meaning extreme outcomes are considerably more likely.

As Burke explains, power law distributions tend to arise with networks, especially complex, self-organizing ones; thus, he writes,

Power law distributions are noteworthy because they are the signatures of mature self-organizing complex systems. It’s also a feature of ‘rich-get-richer’ systems. So when we see power law distributions, we can make some qualitative inferences about the system we’re observing. For example, the BCS system is certainly a rich-get-richer organization. We can even quantify just how hierarchical it is and how difficult it is for second-tier teams to break into the elite.

The problem with the BCS isn’t just that it’s a rich-get-richer system. That’s just the natural way of the world. Even in supposedly ‘egalitarian’ systems like socialism, the rich still get richer. The difference is that initial outcomes in socialist systems are based primarily on one’s political connections, where in a free market they tend to be based on how productive or innovative one is. The problem is that the elite ‘nodes’ of the BCS have colluded to preserve their status on top, preventing a natural churn in who the elite are.

This is, among other things, an excellent succinct explanation of why socialism doesn't produce the beneficial equality it promises: it actually increases the opportunities for elites to collude to preserve their status on top. The freer the market, the freer the society, the fewer levers they have to do so and the more opportunity there are for upstarts to upstage them and push them out of the way. The more controlled the market, the more controlled the society, the more levers the elites have, and the more ways and opportunities they have to use that control to keep anyone from breaking into their circle and taking their place.

Receive with meekness

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore
put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness
the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

—James 1:19-21 (ESV)

The world tells us, if you want to understand yourself, if you want to know yourself, look at yourself—look at your desires, your impulses, your strengths, your weaknesses, and go from there. But while all of that is valuable, the Bible tells us we need to begin not with ourselves, but with the God who made us. If we have indeed been given birth through God’s word of truth, then to know who we are and how we should live, we need to under-stand that word of truth; which is to say, we need to stand under it, to place ourselves in position to receive and accept it. We must be quick to listen and slow to speak; we must receive and absorb the word of God, chew on it and swallow it and let it change us, rather than spitting it out whenever we don’t care for the taste.

Too often, however, we reverse this—we’re slow to listen and quick to speak. Too often we see ourselves not as the receiver but as the judge, standing over the word of truth to critique it. There are, for instance, those who feel they have the right to disregard or reject the parts of Scripture that say things they don’t like; but really, you can’t do that without rejecting all of Scripture, because the Bible itself won’t let you do that. Once you start doing that, you have rejected the word of God as the word of truth, and have instead set it up as something to be used when convenient to support what you already believe, or would like to believe. Others of us, though we might not go quite that far, still have something of that spirit in us as we read the word—we just resist more subtly, is all.

Now, none of this is to say that we have to believe everything anyone tells us is biblical; clearly, there are a lot of bad interpretations floating around out there along with the good ones. It is, however, to say three things. First, even when confronted with a view of Scripture which we think is false, we should listen carefully, to see if perhaps there’s a grain of truth to it which we haven’t considered; which is often the case. It’s only the arguments opposed to our own, after all, which can show us the flaws in our own views. Second, we aren’t free to resolve our issues or problems by throwing out the Scripture, for to do that is to hush the voice of God in our lives. Third, in all of this, we must be slow to anger, as James says, for human anger does not produce the righteousness of God. Anger over disagreements, anger over being challenged, does not lead to right relationships, either with God or with each other, and must be set aside in the normal course of life. Therefore, James says, we must put aside everything in us that resists the word of truth and receive it meekly—we have already been given it, but we must open our hearts and welcome it, and the transformation it brings.

(Excerpted from “The Poem of Your Life”)

Playing politics with the troops

Check this out:

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

Jim Geraghty, commenting on this, writes,

The base of the Democratic party is fundamentally pacifist and isolationist and has extraordinary, although not complete, leverage over this White House. They want the rest of the world to go away so we can focus on creating the perfect health-care system. . . .

We now know liberal bloggers never meant what they wrote about Afghanistan. We will soon know if the president meant anything he said about that war on the campaign trail.

On that, the Anchoress is skeptical. Sure, six months ago, the President said that the war in Afghanistan is one we must win and could easily lose, that it would be a Very Bad Thing if we did, and thus that we needed to send more troops and push harder; now, though, he has Secretary of State Clinton telling our military commanders that we don’t need to send more troops because the situation really isn’t that bad. (Umm, politicians with no military training or experience who are half a world away from the combat zones interfering with the military commanders on the scene . . . I thought the idea was not to have another Vietnam. Was I wrong?) As the Anchoress sums it all up,

The Afghan war, the “good” war, the “war that needs winning” was—it turns out—just one more hammer meant to beat up Bush.

Now, the Anchoress sounds mostly resigned about this, I think because she never expected anything better out of the Left. Others, though, are less so; Ace, for one, is utterly furious:

But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?

You . . . um . . . voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?

We won’t forget, champ. And we won’t let you forget, either.

Again we see a leftist projecting his pathological darkness on to others. They accused Bush of fighting wars for this very reason. And now, when it’s safe to say so (they think), they concede: We supported a war for the reason we accused Bush of doing so for 8 years.

I think Ace is right to be furious at the sickening dishonesty, hypocrisy and cynicism evident here, as these people berated George W. Bush to high heaven for “playing politics with people’s lives” and “using war for political gain” even as—indeed, as the very act of—doing the exact same thing. I agree, if that’s what President Bush was doing (and I didn’t and don’t agree that it was, either by intent or in practice, which is why I supported him), it was reprehensible; but doesn’t that make his critics, who are now admitting to doing so, at least as reprehensible?

Still, I don’t have the energy even to reach, let alone to sustain, Ace’s level of anger; in large part, I suppose, because I too never expected anything better. It would have been nice to believe that President Bush’s critics were all operating out of the degree of moral seriousness and geopolitical awareness they claimed; but in truth, the only ones I ever believed to be sincere were the ones (like Doug Hagler, I believe) who were just as opposed to Afghanistan as to Iraq. I thought (and still think) they were wrong and unwise, but I trusted them to be honest, as I did not trust the posers. As such, I am not surprised, nor even truly dismayed, for the reality merely matches my expectations.

Failure isn't all it's cracked up to be

HT: The Kloska family via The Anchoress

Mary Travers, RIP

It's been a bad month for musicians, I guess (at least those in the folk-pop-rock range); I missed this, but Mary Travers died last Wednesday at the age of 72 after a five-year battle with leukemia. She was of course best known for her time with Peter, Paul and Mary, which was one of the premier groups of the American folk-music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and which is credited with helping to boost Bob Dylan's career. I grew up on their music, and I still love it; all things in this world come to an end, but it's still sad to see it happen.

HT: Jerry Wilson

In honor of Kerry Livgren

Thanks to a commenter on the previous post for tipping me off: Livgren suffered a major stroke three weeks ago. It was bad enough that he had surgery that morning to remove a clot from the language centers of his brain; the surgery went well, and the reports on his recovery (posted on Kansas' official band website; click on "Kerry L. update") are positive. Please be praying.

Since I've been on a Kerry Livgren kick anyway, I thought I'd post a few more videos—this time from the AD phase of his career.

Progress

The Fury

Lead Me to Reason

Carry on

It's way too early in the morning to be up, especially after a long and draining weekend; but up I am, watching Kansas videos on YouTube and working my way towards doing something productive with the time. For the moment, though, I'm just happy to have found these:

Carry On Wayward Son

Point of Know Return

On this blog in history: April 7-11, 2008

Respect: the lubricant of good politics
We should take our political disagreements seriously—but we need to remember that ultimately, we're all on the same side.

The life of faith vs. the life of politics
On the temptation to try to achieve the kingdom of God by political means.

Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God?
Skeptical conversations, part II: What is God like?
Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil
The first three sections of my credo—think of it as a brief survey of all the things I believe about God, the world, the church, and so on.

The church, the prophet, the whale—and God
On the ways we try to sanitize the story of Jonah, and why we shouldn't.

From stick to Starbucks

Someone could probably get a pretty interesting research project on the correlation between the declining number of manual-transmission automobiles and the rising number of cupholders per vehicle. Or something like that . . . it's not cupholders per se that interest me, but cupholders as a proxy for all the things Americans hold in their hands these days when we drive—coffee cups, fast food, cell phones—I've even seen women applying lipstick while driving. We have become a nation of one-hand drivers; if it were not so, would we have drive-through Starbucks?

In any event, it seems to me there has to be some sort of connection between the freeing of the right hand from working the clutch and the increasing occupation of the right hand with non-driving activities. Where the causation lies, I have no idea; but if anyone ever looks into it, I'd be interested to see what they find out.

Are you sure you're looking for the right thing?

There are scientists who like to insist that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence." At least, there are those who like to do so when the subject is the existence of God; I don't know if they chant the same mantra with regard to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). Certainly, though, there are many outside the scientific community who consider SETI a waste of time and money, and who make essentially that argument against it—and not without scientific support (see for instance the Fermi paradox).

Against that, though, xkcd's Randall Munroe raises an important question: are we looking for the right sort of evidence? Can we really say that the evidence for which we're looking is sufficient to draw any conclusions about the existence of extraterrestrial life? Put another way, do we know so much about extraterrestrial life that we can be certain that any such beings would necessarily produce evidence of their existence that meets our pre-determined criteria? Or are we, like these ants, looking for the wrong sort of thing?

This is a cluster of questions deserving serious consideration—and not only when it comes to the existence of extraterrestrial life, but also with regard to the existence of God. As the philosopher Edward Tingley has pointed out, much of the argument offered for atheism rests on the dogmatic insistence that if God exists, he must necessarily be subject to scientific proof based on evidence deemed acceptable by people who are philosophically and emotionally committed to atheism. The insistence is, essentially, "Prove yourself on our terms"; which is, essentially, a justification for the fixed intention to disbelieve. God didn't take that from the Pharisees, and there's no reason to think he has any interest in taking it from the scientific community, either. One suspects he probably has that in common with the aliens, if there are any.

Grace in action

Thanks to Doug Hagler for tipping me off on this one—it's from a while ago, but I had indeed missed it the first time. :)

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

If you're not familiar with the story, read the whole thing to see what happened. Grace doesn't come with a money-back guarantee—people don't always respond—but when they do, God does wondrous things.

A brilliant parody of scientism

courtesy of that consistently brilliant parodist, John Cleese—who truly is, as my wife says, at the top of his form with this one. (Scientism, if anyone is wondering, is the dogmatic faith in science which folks like Richard Dawkins use to replace faith in God.)

The great thing about Cleese, evident here, is his unflagging willingness to skewer everybody, including himself and those with whom he agrees. For an instructive comparison, check out Christopher Hitchens' biting critique in the latest Atlantic of folks like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Al Franken, who (though they consider themselves satirists) are unwilling to do so.

The Twitter devotional

This will be of interest to those of you who tweet (I don't, at least right now). Logos Research Systems, maker of Logos Bible Software, posted this announcement today on their Facebook page:

While I try to keep God’s Word in my heart and mind on a regular basis, I must say that among email, work projects, family, Facebook, Twitter . . . my heart and mind tend to stray a little. That’s why I’m excited about the new project we’re launching today.

Today we are announcing the launch of 7 new Twitter accounts that are designed to help you take a moment in your day and meditate on God’s word.

We set the accounts up about a couple week ago to run them through some testing, and I’ve been following them in my personal twitter account. It has been really encouraging to glance over at my feed throughout the day and see a simple reminder of who God is and who I am in Christ.

We hope that these accounts will be a blessing to all you Twitter users and that, amongst the endless chatter of Twitter, you will stop for a moment focus your heart and mind on God’s Word.

Here are the accounts you can follow:

Follow @BibleHope

Every three hours we'll send out a tweet with an encouraging verse from Scripture.

RT @BibleHope: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom... http://ref.ly/Ps27.1

Follow @BibleHour

We'll tweet a different verse from Scripture every hour.

RT @BibleHour: When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.http://ref.ly/Ac2.1

Follow @OToftheDay

Once a day we'll tweet a verse from the Old Testament.

RT @OToftheDay: Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do... http://ref.ly/Jos1.8

Follow @PRoftheDay

Receive wisdom from Proverbs with this once daily tweet.

RT @PRoftheDay: There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. http://ref.ly/Pr14.12

Follow @PSoftheDay

This once daily tweet will give you Psalms to meditate on.

RT @PSoftheDay: RT @PSoftheday: Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits - http://ref.ly/Ps103.2

Follow @NToftheDay

Once a day we'll tweet a verse from the New Testament.

RT @NToftheDay: Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very... http://ref.ly/Tt2.14

Follow @BiblePlan

Read the Bible in a year. Every day includes a reading from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs.

RT @BiblePlan: Today's Reading: http://ref.ly/Ge27.1-28.9 http://ref.ly/Ps9.10-16http://ref.ly/Pr2.3-5 http://ref.ly/Mt10.1-15

Thought on atheism and the use of theology

John Stackhouse wrote a post a couple weeks ago responding to the following quote, attributed to Richard Dawkins:

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?

His response, “What Good Are Theologians?” is, if I understand him properly, an appeal to scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi’s concept of “personal knowledge,” and to the lesson of Basil Mitchell’s parable of the freedom fighter. (He doesn’t explicitly reference either, but he does quote Polanyi in one of his comments on the thread.) I say “if I understand him properly” because if I’m right about that, then a number of his respondents don’t understand him properly—my read appears to be a minority opinion.

The post is well worth reading; but it’s worth reading, in part, to set up the discussion in the comments, which I think is better than the original post. I particularly liked this contribution from one Ian:

As Stan Grenz and Roger Olson assert in their invitation to the study of God, Who Needs Theology, “Everyone is a theologian.” (IVP 1996) The only question remains are you a good theologian or a bad theologian. Of course Dawkins is referring to those of us who are or are becoming professional theologians.

Yet, one also has to wonder about his claims concerning the type of world we have. For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark suggests that we would not have many of the technological advances that Dawkins claims for science without Christian theology. Descartes himself found theological ideas significant for his method and science is indeed indebted to him for good or ill.

Finally, Dawkins has made a career out of theology by pitting himself against a theological worldview and its promoters. One wonders what we he would do without us? Who would read his books?

(At first I thought that was Iain Provan, but then I realized that the name was spelled differently.) Other commenters take on the ridiculously (and arrogantly) reductionistic position staked out by Dr. Dawkins, but I think Ian has hit the key point on the head: everyone is a theologian, in that everyone forms and articulates beliefs about the nature and existence or non-existence of God. The role of the theologian is to inform and critique those beliefs; and the reason for the violence of Dr. Dawkins’ response is not rational, but personal and visceral: he is categorically unwilling to have his beliefs (which are the foundation and justification for that reductionism) either critiqued or informed.

This is characteristic of Dr. Dawkins, as it is of his fellow “New Atheists”; I’ve laid out my views of them before, and I remain convinced that they are the mirror image of whom they imagine their opponents to be: dogmatic fundamentalists who have made their chosen god in their own image and will brook no contradiction of their dogma because it would threaten their chosen self-understanding and way of life. Though they make a great parade of their insistence on reason, their rationalism appears to be of the kind best captured by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography:

So convenient a thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Or, one might add, “believe.” When Dr. Dawkins asks, “What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?” he’s defining “use” on his terms—terms which have already, by their narrowness, predetermined the answer, to ensure that he need not have to grapple with the answer.

Evening prayer

The Lord reveal himself more and more to us in the face of his Son Jesus Christ and magnify the power of his grace in cherishing those beginnings of grace in the midst of our corruptions, and sanctify the consideration of our own infirmities to humble us, and of his tender mercy to encourage us.

And may he persuade us that, since he has taken us into the covenant of grace, he will not cast us off for those corruptions which, as they grieve his Spirit, so they make us vile in our own eyes.

And because Satan labors to obscure the glory of his mercy and hinder our comfort by discouragements, the Lord add this to the rest of his mercies, that we may not lose any portion of comfort that is laid up for us in Christ.

And, may he grant that the prevailing power of his Spirit in us should be an evidence of the truth of grace begun, and a pledge of final victory, at that time when he will be all in all, in all his, for all eternity. Amen.

—Richard Sibbes

HT: Of First Importance

Reflections on Obamacare as potential law

The great misnomer in the health care “reform” debate comes in references to “the health care bill” or “the health care plan.” There is no one health care bill, and no one health care plan. There are various versions of legislation, and much yet to be decided, and probably whole sections that haven't been written. There is in no reasonable sense one coherent piece of legislation.

More importantly, though, even when there is, and even if it passes, we still won’t be that much clearer on what the law is. Randall Hoven explains:

Let's just say that you use HR 3200 as a surrogate for Obama’s plan. It definitely has words—1,017 pages worth. Here is what Congressman John Conyers said about it.

What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?

To appreciate this statement, you should know that Conyers has been in Congress since 1965; only John Dingell, the bill’s sponsor, has served longer in the House. You should also know that Conyers has a law degree. And now he is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

If a legislator of 44 years, himself a lawyer and in fact chair of the judiciary committee, along with two other lawyers cannot figure out what this bill means, what hope do you, or I, or any "neutral" fact checker have of figuring it out?

William Jacobson, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, chronicled his efforts to understand this “dense House bill” in the American Thinker. He used a “dartboard” method to randomly select pages to analyze, stopping after seven such pages. “I will try to explain what the section and provisions on the page mean. There is no guarantee that I will be able to do so, as some of these provisions may be incomprehensible.”

“Incomprehensible” to a law professor. Also incomprehensible to an experienced legislator and lawyer working with other lawyers. Yet we are supposed to believe, say, the Huffington Post, when it interprets Obama’s health care plan for us?

This is not just a health care issue; it is an issue with all modern legislation. That is, the legislation passed by Congress and signed by a President become ink blots for those left to interpret it in the future. The money to fund the legislation is quite real, but the meaning of the legislation is more like quantum mechanics: there is no “there”, just probability distributions.

In other words, whatever plan passes (if a plan passes at all) won’t be “law” in the sense that we usually think of; it will, rather, be only an approximation. The way things work these days, we might think we know what the law means, but we really don’t until the courts are done making up their collective mind how they want to rewrite—err, I mean interpret—it.

This isn’t the only issue that arises, either, when we stop to consider Obamacare not as a political issue but as a potential addition to the law code. There is in fact a more significant one: is it even constitutional? Retired attorney and constitutional law instructor Michael Connelly, having read all of HR 3200, doesn’t think so:

This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.”

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

Much has been made, and quite properly, of the fact that the President wants to transfer 1/7 of the American economy to government control; but if Hoven and Connelly are right, that’s only the lesser danger. The greater danger is the corrupting effect HR3200 (or more likely, its descendant) would have on our laws and our political process. It’s a funny thing, when a Republican was in the White House, the Democrats raged against the “imperial Presidency”; but when it’s one of their own, they’re happy to go along with an absolutely unprecedented power grab by the Executive Branch. They must not figure they’re ever going to lose another election.

Methinks somebody struck a nerve

—or rather, that a whole bunch of somebodies did, judging by the Left's reaction to the turnout in D.C. on Saturday. Dan Riehl has a good rundown, as does Charlie Martin (HT: Shout First, Ask Questions Later), while Thomas Lifson quotes a spokesman for the National Park Service as saying,

It is a record. . . . We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.

No question, estimating crowd sizes is tricky under any circumstances; the high-end estimate I've seen is 2.3 million people, so it seems reasonable to guess that the actual number of participants was lower, and probably a fair bit lower. On the other hand, the media's attempts to dismiss the crowd as "tens of thousands" is simply ludicrous, given the pictures and videos; there were, at the very least, hundreds of thousands, as one participant makes clear:

Here is a series of time lapse photos of the march from 8:00 am to 11:30am. The crowd was constantly anywhere from 25 to 50 abreast. I know. I walked in the middle of it, along the sidewalks to move forward quicker, and around the entire circuit, up to and beyond Senate Park. At times, we were so crammed together, breathing became strained. Taking the low number, and assuming a line of 25 crossing a given point every second for three-and-a-half hours, gives you about 300,000. Whatever the actual number, it was certainly magnitudes greater than "tens of thousands."

At this point in time, I feel pretty confident saying two things: one, the number of people who turned out for this past weekend's Tea Party is at least comparable to the number who showed up this past January for the inauguration, and probably greater than the record attendance (1.2 million) at LBJ's inauguration in 1964; and two, the dispute really doesn't matter. What matters is, it was huge, the largest grassroots event in American history, and however much the media might try to downplay that fact, the politicians in D. C. know how big it was. What they do with that is up to them, but I don't think any of them are foolish enough to believe the media spin.

The necessity of justice

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 12
Q. According to God's righteous judgment
we deserve punishment
both in this world and forever after:
how then can we escape this punishment
and return to God's favor?

A. God requires that his justice be satisfied.¹
Therefore the claims of his justice
must be paid in full,
either by ourselves or another.²

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

This begins Part II of the Heidelberg Catechism, its account of our deliverance from sin and death; but where we might expect this to begin with an immediate declaration of the good news, the text demurs. Its authors knew that we can only understand the good news of the gospel as good news if we have come fully to appreciate the bad news from which it sets us free. The good news isn't that God thinks we're good enough as we are; the good news is that we aren't good enough as we are—indeed, we're worse than we think we are—but that God loves us anyway, and that though we cannot be good enough to satisfy him, he made a way to be good enough for us.

Understanding that begins with understanding the greatness of God's righteousness and holiness and the absolute character of his hatred of and intolerance for sin; grace must begin with the satisfaction of his justice, either by ourselves or by another. As M. Eugene Osterhaven writes (44-45),

God requires that the creature made in his image give him unconditional obedience and love, and that man love his neighbor as himself. this is the essence of the law. Law and obligation are necessary because God is God. . . .

Man thus stands in debt to God. He owes him the obedience of perfect love but does not give it. Nor is there any escape from full payment. . . .

God is not a man who forgets. He is rather a righteous judge who will "render to every man according to his works" (Romans 2:6). He does not live in some distant place and he does not forget those whom he has made in his own image nor their moral relationship to him. He is the Lord of heaven and earth and he tells all men everywhere that someday they shall stand before him to give account (John 5:28-29; II Corinthians 5:10).

This is why James doesn't say, "Mercy replaces judgment," but rather says, "Mercy triumphs over judgment"; God's judgment doesn't disappear, nor is it set aside, it is rather redirected in his mercy.