Judging by Gov. Christie's experience in New Jersey, not so well. As you may have heard, the state's Race to the Top application was disqualified, costing the state some $400 million, "because some clerk in Trenton turned in the wrong Excel spreadsheet"; out of a thousand-plus-page application, one page was incorrectly submitted, so the U.S. Department of Education threw out the whole thing. As you can probably imagine, the governor was not at all happy.
Was the administration being petty, seizing an excuse to deny funding to a political opponent? Maybe; and then again, maybe not. After all, one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained perfectly well by incompetence. Either way, though, this is exactly the sort of thing that Barack Obama promised us his administration would not be about. I don't blame him for not keeping his promise to change Washington—it was beyond human capability; but I don't think it speaks well of him that he made it, or of so many others that they actually believed it. And if preventing these sorts of occurrences is too much to ask, one would think they could at least show some sort of commitment to setting them right. (Unless, just maybe, they are in fact playing petty politics after all.)
It should be noted that the DoE did have one rejoinder to Gov. Christie: they released a video proving that NJ state education commissioner Bret Schundler had not in fact verbally given them the correct information. When the governor found out that his education commissioner had lied to him, he fired Schundler after all.
This went by a while ago, but I decided I couldn't resist posting it; as it happens, I love the real title sequence for Firefly, but this '80s-style version from the folks at i09 is a lot of fun, too; and while they only get two cheers as a result of leaving out Simon (and no, I don't buy the excuse), they get most of the third one back for the way they fixed that.
It's a shame Fox mishandled the show so badly; but I haven't given up hope. You can knock a Browncoat down . . . but keeping one down is quite another matter.
I don't know if they were inspired by the Sound of Music stunt last year at Antwerp's Central Station, but a couple months ago, the Opera Company of Philadelphia performed "Brindisi" from Verdi's La Traviata in the Reading Terminal Market, during their Italian Festival. Just watch, this is too good for words:
You've probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here's the video they took (though I'm not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):
I've been thinking about the President's Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:
That wasn't surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was:
Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he's less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his "Top of the Ticket" blog:
Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.
Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.
I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,
This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.
We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.
Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.
Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that
If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.
This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).
Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?
Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.
Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.
One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to "Revive Us Again" as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland's version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn't take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it's a great version. It's also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:
As long as I'm at it, I've been meaning to post Moses Hogan's phenomenal arrangement of "The Battle of Jericho" ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it's in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now's as good a time as any.
I have thought more than once that someone ought to try to apply systems theory to economics in a systematic way. The application of systems theory to family therapy by Murray Bowen was a huge step forward, as was Edwin Friedman's work in turning Bowen's model more broadly to congregational dynamics and leadership; Rabbi Friedman's book Generation to Generation is one every pastor should read (and periodically re-read). Systems theory helps us to understand that problems don't exist in isolation and can't be addressed as if they did; we all exist within interlocking relational systems, and the problems of any given individual relate to the problems of the systems of which they are a part (and indeed, may have more to do with the health of the system than with that individual).
As a consequence, systems theory teaches us that the brute-force approach to problems, the use of compulsion and coercion, is often not the best approach, because it attacks the symptom without doing anything about the underlying issue—and indeed, will likely make the underlying issue worse. Rather, it's necessary to address problems by changing the system. To do that, you have to identify the ways in which you are supporting the system and enabling its current dysfunction, and then change your own behavior. This changes the incentive structure within the system and shifts the stress of maintaining it off of you and on to the other members; this creates a great deal of pressure on the system which will ultimately, given sufficient time, break it, thus making real progress possible.
The same is true of our economy, which is itself a system—or perhaps one might say, a meta-system, since the "individuals" which interact are corporations, which are their own complex systems—and which is, of course, embedded in the even larger meta-system of the global economy. Problems, whether they be with companies, sectors of the economy, aspects of the economy, or whatever, don't exist in isolation, and can't be addressed as if they did. This means that the brute force approach, the attempt to compel the behavior one desires of a given corporation or industry through legislation and regulation, is at best highly inefficient and at worst actively counterproductive. It's like swatting at a mobile—you put the whole thing in motion, setting it turning in ways you couldn't have predicted, leading to results you didn't anticipate. This is why the Law of Unintended Consequences has such force.
Rather than simply trying to regulate the economy into moral behavior, we need to recognize that it's a complex interlocking system of human relationships, and to try to address corporate and economic issues accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the system is far too complex to be fully comprehended by the human mind, but taking this approach at least gets us closer to understanding the real issues. For instance, don't just look at bad behavior—whether of a rebellious teenager or a company that's cooking the books—look at the structure of incentives within the system and see what that behavior is in response to, and what's rewarding it.
This is not a new idea in the world of economic theory; in fact, it's quite important in the work of the Austrian school of thought, of folks like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. It's one of the reasons I believe they were closer to right than other economic approaches, because they understood and emphasized that the incentive structure drives economic action—that people will tend to do what they have an incentive to do, and to avoid doing what they have no incentive to do—and that when the incentives are out of whack, it will produce behavior which will be bad for the economy. One example of this is Hayek's Nobel Prize-winning theory of the business cycle, which makes clear that if interest rates are set such as to provide an incentive for highly speculative investments, people will speculate; the result will be an economic bubble which will eventually, inevitably, burst. Just check the housing market.
To try to rationalize the economy, then, to produce steady, sustainable growth, we need to understand (as best as possible) how our laws and regulations and the decisions of government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae create incentives for counterproductive behavior; and then we need to work to change those incentives to reward behavior that will produce long-term health rather than short-term big profits. This means not trying to fix the economy by regulating it more—indeed, it might well mean deregulating it to some degree, not because "business can be trusted" (it can't, but neither can government), but because deregulation simplifies the system and makes it easier to see what's actually going on.
Hayek, by the way, though an advocate of the free market, was by no means opposed to regulation; he was enough of a realist about humanity to recognize that there is a proper role for government to play in economic matters. As such, there have been those on the Right who have criticized him for not supporting the free-market system enough. From an Austrian perspective, it seems to me, the key is that the government should only regulate cautiously and with humility, out of the expectation that it knows and understands far less than it thinks it does.
Regulation to prevent clear injustice is necessary, as are efforts to insure the free flow of information, because most people will abuse the system if you give them a clear shot and a big enough reason; but regulation to try to control outcomes is almost certain to backfire. When the government tries to pick winners and losers, you end up with crony capitalism and the disasters we're seeing now. The best we can do is to try to keep the process as fair as possible, so that everybody's playing by the same rules; try to keep the structure of incentives as rational as possible, so that the market isn't tilted either towards excessive risk or excessive caution; and to remember this insight from Hayek's 1988 book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (quoted at the end of the rap video "Fear the Boom and Bust"):
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Incidentally, the odds are pretty good that you've seen that rap video, produced by filmmaker John Papola and economist Russ Roberts (of George Mason University and the blog Café Hayek, which I have in the sidebar), which envisions a rap duel between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes; after all, it's now up to nearly 1.2 million views for one version of it on YouTube alone. If not, though, unless you absolutely can't stand rap—and maybe even then—you really ought to watch it here; it's a great piece of work. Then go read the explication of the video (which I linked above) by one of the posters on Daily Kos (yes, seriously), and Jeffrey Tucker's piece on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You'll be amazed how much you can learn from a rap video. (For my own part, I'm no more a Keynesian than I ever was, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for his work now than I did.)
This is an excellent bit from Mark Driscoll laying out the nature of true repentance vs. the false repentance of worldly sorrow—the sort of thing we see in celebrities like Tiger Woods, who practice what he dubs "a pagan version of Catholicism."
One doesn't usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It's a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate's personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don't count; that's just boilerplate.)
The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in '08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn't even have his party's nomination yet. It's a good way to go, I think.
I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me; I enjoy an accolade like the rest. You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery Of all the Who's Whos and So-and-Sos That used to be the best at such-and-such; It wouldn't matter much.
I won't lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights; We all need an "Atta boy" or "Atta girl." But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides The temporary trappings of this world
I want to leave a legacy— How will they remember me? Did I choose to love? Did I point to You enough To make a mark on things? I want to leave an offering A child of mercy and grace Who blessed your name unapologetically And leave that kind of legacy.
I don't have to look too far or too long a while To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy; It's an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile, Where moth and rust, thieves and such Will soon enough destroy.
Chorus
Not well traveled, not well read; Not well-to-do, or well-bred; Just want to hear instead, "Well done, good and faithful one."
I posted a comment on this on a friend's Facebook page and thought I'd note this here as well. It is honestly bewildering to me the way the Left refuses to recognize that the anti-Western wing of Islam, particularly its jihadists, is adamantly opposed to all that liberals profess to believe and hold dear. I don't want to jump to the negative conclusion and assume that they're all either moral cowards or secretly enamored of Islam's totalitarian impulses, so I keep looking for a more charitable interpretation . . . but so far, I have failed to find one.
Update: Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News has an excellent column up about this, pointing out an important truth:
About the same time Holder was refusing to utter the threat that cannot be named in the Obama administration, security officials in Indonesia—the world's largest Muslim nation and third-largest democracy—foiled a plot to assassinate the president and top officials, massacre foreigners in a Mumbai-style attack and create a state governed by Shariah, or Islamic law.
That last goal provides a clue as to who was behind this violent conspiracy, though Attorney General Holder may not be able to recognize it. But it is important to do so because in spite of 9-11, Times Square and every event in between, Americans are not the primary victims of Islamic extremism. Muslims are.
Over the past decade, radical Islamists have carried out successful terrorist attacks in Amman, Baghdad, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Riyadh and Sharm el-Sheikh, to name a few Muslim targets. Muslim civilians and leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto, are their principal casualties. In the countries and forbidden zones where they have been able to establish Shariah rule, Muslim women are treated like chattel, Muslim gays are summarily executed and Muslim girls are doomed to illiteracy and honor killings.
America may be radical Islam's fount of all evil. But more often than not, citizens of Muslim nations are their first prey.
Holder and the president he serves do no favor to the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims when they refuse to identify our common enemy. You can't delegitimize what you won't even acknowledge exists.
This is a snippet of a presentation given at Stanford by former Hewlett-Packard CEO (and, of course, current GOP candidate for the US Senate from California) Carly Fiorina. It's a good analysis of the problems that make any real change difficult—something which applies to pastors and churches as much as it does to politicians and governments.
