1/29/2014
STATE OF THE UNION--CIRCA 1623
GOAFS II: #79
STATE OF THE UNION—circa
1623
1.29.14
The Pilgrims, in their quest for freedom, had almost
everything go wrong as they attempted to plant a colony in the new world. By
the time they reached the shores of New England in 1620, they were poor, had
barely enough provisions for the first winter, and began to die at an alarming
rate.
By the Spring of 1623, William Bradford, the Governor,
and others sat down and worked out some changes. In a nutshell, they moved from
socialism (the common ownership of labor) and elementary communism (the common
ownership of land) that was not working to what amounted to a free market economy
based on Biblical principles.
It is a long story that seldom sees the light of day in
contemporary history books but what Governor Bradford and his men learned is
something we all should take note of today, as our imperial President cranks up
his rhetoric on “income inequality.”
Bradford summarized what they had learned in six points,
and a post script.
1. In a common ownership of labor and land,
people tend to become lazy, not wanting to work, thus private property must
undergird a free and productive economy.
2. Under socialism, people tend to make up
excuses why they can’t work, so private profit is a key ingredient in a free
economy as well. (Even the Chinese have finally learned this lesson)
3. Communal living breeds discontent, for all
tend to want what others have, but refuse to work for it; so welfare must be
voluntary (private charity) rather than forced (government charity).
4. Socialism is built on pride and a presumed
external equality in an open or ignorant refusal of God’s plan laid down in
Scripture so that differences between the young, the adult and the aged are not
respected. A free economy is built, in contrast, on the respect and dignity of
individual differences.
5. Though some look at the profit motive as
corrupt, it is imperative to see that it is man’s nature that is corrupt,
including those who hold office in government. The free market, in contrast to
socialism, is built on personal incentive and self interest in order to
overcome one’s naturally corrupt nature.
6. Ultimately, God’s design for the economy
rests on voluntary choice, which is far more productive than government force
and the redistribution of wealth.
Later Governor added what should be the 7th
point. Prayer is important. the first spring after these changes, everyone
worked to get a large crop of corn planted. But there was no rain. In the
middle of July, with a hot, cloudless sky, and the corn crop beginning to die,
they had a big prayer meeting in which they humbled themselves and reminded God
of his Providence and asked for his help.
Toward evening of that same day, the clouds came and a
rain that saved the corn. Good rains continued periodically through the summer
and an extended Indian Summer to produce a bumper crop. The Indians (and no
doubt some of the pilgrims as well) were greatly amazed.
I will leave it to you to decide what light this sheds
on the status quo
(Latin for
“the mess we is in”) and even more importantly on the rocky road ahead.
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
Archive: http://crmudgeon.blogspot.com
1/21/2014
41 YEARS
GOAFS II: #78
41 YEARS
1.22.14
'
Forty-one
years ago today the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe .v Wade found in the Constitution that a woman has a right to
have her child murdered in the womb. They were signing the death warrant for
millions of babies (50,000,000 to 55,000,000 so far) and were celebrated by
progressive liberals across the land. The initial decision limited the right to
the first twenty weeks of the pregnancy.
This was
probably the worst decision ever made by the Supremes. They had it all wrong:
they did not have the facts (the plaintiff later admitting to lying about the
case and repented for having been used by the pro-abortion activists): they did
not know the medical data: they did not know the science: they did not know the
history of abortion: they ignored common-law tradition and believing themselves
to be gods, they ignored orthodox theology.
As technology
improved, the Court should have reconsidered its original ruling. While
pro-life activists were pushing to reduce the 20 weeks, pro-abortion activists
were pushing to extend the 20 weeks. The peddlers of death out-pushed the
proponents of life and in 1992, in Planned
Parenthood vs. Casey, the Supremes, effectively ended the argument. Combining
continued legal apathy and gross scientific ignorance with a hubris that was
astonishing, they declared:
“At
the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.”
The effect of this decision
was to propound a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral
laws on which all rights depend. It is a liberty of infinite width and zero
depth. It has served the humanist judiciary well since then to exclude the
troublesome questions of ethics, morality and objective truth from the
discussions of when it is acceptable to murder an inconvenient baby.
The legal murder of babies
was effectively extended all the way from conception to the arrival of the baby
in the birth canal at full term.
I could go on
at length but I will just finish with two encouraging words.
First, there
is reason to be optimistic. The battle for the lives of unborn children is
making considerable progress at the State level (If you want to know more about
this there is good stuff in the January 25 edition of World Magazine.)
Second is the
trending of recent polls. Overall, the poll numbers have shifted in the
direction of pro-life. Abortion is less and less acceptable to the general
public, even when the polls are weasel-worded to get pro-death answers. An
August 2013 Pew Study shows that just 15% of Americans today say abortion is a moral
act. This fact alone seems sufficient to finally get Evangelical Pastors to
recognize their duty to include abortion in the “whole gospel” they profess to preach.
There are signs that this is already happening. I wonder how many of you will hear
something where you worship this month about the fact that “You shall not
murder” includes babies from the point of conception?
“Don’t fail to rescue those who are
doomed to die.
Don’t say, ‘I didn’t know it!’
God can read your mind.
He watches each of us and knows
our thoughts.
And God will pay us back
for what
we do.”
Proverbs
24.11-12 CEV
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
Archive: http://crmudgeon.blogspot.com
1/15/2014
TWITTERPATED
GOAFS II: #77
TWITTERPATED
1.15.14
twitterpated
OED
adjective
North American informal
•
infatuated or obsessed: Gus is still
hopelessly twitterpated by Lee,
smiling into each other’s eyes, a
seemingly twitterpated couple glided past
•
in a state of nervous excitement: CBS
execs are twitterpated over this new idea
1940s: from twitter + -pated 'having a head or mind of a specified kind' (from pate); popularized by the 1942 film Bambi
I saw Bambi when I
was 8 or 9 years old. The word “twitterpated” rapidly came into use to describe
the state of mind of a young person desperately in love for the first time. The
other day it came to me that it may be time to dust off this ancient word and
put it to good use.
Some of you may be
familiar with THE WEEK, The Best of the U.S. and International Media. It
is a kind of executive summary, of what you will find in Time or Newsweek,
written for people with very short attention spans. A few years back I
subscribed but let it lapse when they weren’t telling me much I did not know
already. Last week a current copy arrived with an offer they thought I could
not refuse—I refused it but I did read it.
There is little in it
that goes beyond the surface of events but near the end there is always a two
page essay called “The Last Word.” This week the essay was written by Kathryn
Schulze, a writer of books.
“Seduced by Twitter”
was a very interesting read. When the author was getting ready to publish her
first book, she was told by the publisher that she had to get Facebook and
Twitter accounts. She says “I was prepared to hate writing 140 character tweets.
Instead, tweeting took over my life.”
She soon tired of
Facebook but found a community of like minds on Twitter and it literally did
take over her life. She went from 370 tweets in all of 2010, to 5167 tweets in
the first 10 months of 2013.
She began to think in
140 character chunks, not a good thing for an author of books. She found it
almost impossible to be in a room, alone with her thoughts for any length of
time—a fatal blow to the craft of writing.
To make a long story
short, I will quote the interesting analogy she uses and the admission she
makes at the end of her essay.
“…the addictive nature of Twitter is a feature, not a bug.
But, with apologies for changing metaphors in midstream, it feels like a bug to
me. There is a class of parasites in nature that hijacks the nervous system of
other creatures, causing them to behave in ways that are against those
creature’s best interests, but in the interests of the parasite. A flatworm
called Euhaplorchis Californiensis, for instance, takes over a species
of fish and makes it swim to the surface and wiggle around, thereby rendering
it highly visible to hungry birds passing overhead: a bummer for the fish, but
great for the flatworm, who dreams of an afterlife in an avian gut.
“Sometimes I think that twitter is such a parasite, and that I
am one of its hosts, so effectively has it hacked my brain. Ask me what I love
most in my life, and how I want to spend what limited allotment of it I have,
and I will tell you that I want to be around friends and family, reading, or
writing, or in the outdoors, body and mind at play in the world. Ask me what I
did today, where all the hours went, and –well, check, my Twitter feed. Kathryn Schultz 2013
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher,
playwright, literary and social critic and one of the twentieth century's major
poets. He was born in 1888 in St. Louis and moved to England in 1915 where he
became a citizen in 1927. He died in 1965. His “Complete Poems an Plays” is one
of the more dog-eared volumes on my favorites shelf.
Coming to the end of this blog I found lines
from two of his poems wanting to come in. The first is from “The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock,” written in 1917. The poem is about a man near the end of
his life looking back and wondering if it was worth it all. (Google the poem,
it is worth a look) He seems to sum it all up in a few short lines:
I have measured out my life in coffee
spoons…
I am no prophet—and here’s no great
matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness
flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold
my coat,
and snicker,
And, in short, I was afraid.
I cannot imagine Eliot tweeting, but were he
writing today I can almost see that line this way;
I have measured out my life with
mindless tweets…
The second poem that wanted to get into this
blog is in “Choruses from The Rock.” The poet is lamenting the thinness of life
in the city of London. In the third section he wrote this:
And the wind shall say: Here were decent
godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.
Were he to bring this into the 21st
century, I can image it looking like this:
And cyberspace shall whisper: here were
decent godless people:
Their only monument, the latest gadget
And a million mindless tweets.
This is not to condemn all tweets—Much of the
wisdom of King Solomon recorded in the Book of proverbs, would fit easily into
the 140 characters allowed by Twitter. For example, Proverbs 10.19 has only 59
characters, 70 if you include spaces. I think I will quit now before other
things show up wanting to be included.
With lots of words comes
wrongdoing, but the wise restrain their lips.
Proverbs 10.19 CEB
'
Jerry Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
