When I discuss class-warfare tax policy, I want people to understand deadweight loss, which is the term for the economic output that is lost when high tax rates discourage work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.
And I especially want them to understand that the economic damage grows exponentially as tax rates increase (in other words, going from a 30 percent tax rate to a 40 percent tax rate is a lot more damaging than going from a 10 percent tax rate to a 20 percent tax rate).
But all of this analysis requires a firm grasp of supply-and-demand curves. And most people never learned basic microeconomics, or they forgot the day after they took their exam for Economics 101.
So when I give speeches about the economics of tax policy, I generally forgo technical analysis and instead appeal to common sense.
Almost everyone gets the point, especially when I point out that politicians explicitly say they want higher taxes on cigarettes because they want less smoking.
And if you (correctly) believe that higher taxes on tobacco lead to less smoking, then you also should understand that higher taxes on work will discourage productive behavior.
Unfortunately, these common-sense observations don’t have much impact on politicians in Washington. Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are pushing a huge package of punitive tax increases.
Should they succeed, all taxpayers will suffer. But some will suffer more than others. In an article for CNBC, Robert Frank documents what Biden’s tax increase will mean for residents of high-tax states.
Top earners in New York City could face a combined city, state and federal income tax rate of 61.2%, according to plans being proposed by Democrats in the House of Representatives. The plans being proposed include a 3% surtax on taxpayers earning more than $5 million a year.The plans also call for raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from the current 37%. The plans preserve the 3.8% net investment income tax, and extend it to certain pass-through companies. The result is a top marginal federal income tax rate of 46.4%. …In New York City, the combined top marginal state and city tax rate is 14.8%. So New York City taxpayers…would face a combined city, state and federal marginal rate of 61.2% under the House plan. …the highest in nearly 40 years. Top earning Californians would face a combined marginal rate of 59.7%, while those in New Jersey would face a combined rate of 57.2%.
You don’t have to be a wild-eyed “supply-sider” to recognize that Biden’s tax plan will hurt prosperity.
After all, investors, entrepreneurs, business owners, and other successful taxpayers will have much less incentive to earn and report income when they only get to keep about 40 cents out of every $1 they earn.
Folks on the left claim that punitive tax rates are necessary for “fairness,” yet the United States already has the developed world’s most “progressive” tax system.
I’ll close with the observation that the punitive tax rates being considered will generate less revenue than projected.
Why? Because households and businesses will have big incentives to use clever lawyers and accountants to protect their income.
Looking for loopholes is a waste of time when rates are low, but it’s a very profitable use of time and energy when rates are high.
Now we have another editorial from the Post that illustrates this distinction.
The bad news is that the editorial (once again) endorses class-warfare tax policy.
…inequality of wealth is a serious problem in the United States. …to an unhealthy degree, wealth in the United States is being gained through unproductive activity — “rent-seeking”… Well-designed government interventions can reduce inequality from the top down, through more aggressive taxation of capital gains and estates… …everyone, poor and rich, has a lot to gain from curbing wealth inequality. The policies that can achieve that goal are neither radical nor complicated.
The good news is that the Post understands that there are serious consequences of going too far.
What remains to be considered are the counterarguments. …could a more aggressive attack on wealth inequality undermine incentives and result in an economic pie that is smaller and, inevitably, more difficult to distribute? If too aggressive, of course, at the bottom of that slippery slope lies Venezuela’s bankrupt socialism.
I suppose I should be happy that the editorial acknowledges the danger of hard-core leftism.
But my concern is that going in the wrong direction at 60 miles per hour still gets a nation to the wrong destination.
Yes, going in the wrong direction at 90 miles per hour gets to Venezuela even sooner, so I’d rather delay a very bad outcome.
That being said, it would be nice if the Washington Post (or any other rational leftists) drew some lines in the sand about limiting the size and scope of government.
For instance, would they agree that top tax rates should never exceed 60 percent?
Both numbers are far too high, of course, but setting some sort of limit would at least show that there is some long-run difference between the rational left and the AOC crowd.
Let’s conclude with some extracts that show why I’m worried that the Post will always be on the wrong side. After acknowledging that there are risks of going too far to the left, the editorial tell us we shouldn’t worry about going that direction.
In fact, too much inequality can undermine growth, too. …the perpetuation of steep inequalities, over generations, can turn into a drag on output…by wasting the potential of those who might have acquired skills or started businesses if not consigned by poverty to society’s margins. …extreme inequality fosters demands for populist policies, which, in turn, damage growth.
To be fair, the Washington Post is at least semi-good on the issue of school choice, so I take somewhat seriously their concerns about not wasting potential.
And it’s also worth noting that the editorial understands that populist policies (which presumably includes lots of anti-market nonsense such as protectionism) would be misguided. Though I’d feel much better about that part if the editorial recognized the difference between moral and immoral inequality.
I’ve only excerpted three paragraphs, but you should read his entire column. It is very tragic that the vision of liberty put forth by the Founders has been so undermined by modern politicians who swear an oath to the Constitution without having any idea what the document actually says.
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” He later added, “(T)he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” Two hundred years later, at least two-thirds of a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget is spent on charity or “objects of benevolence.” What would the founders think about our respect for democracy and majority rule? Here’s what Thomas Jefferson said: “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.” John Adams advised, “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” The founders envisioned a republican form of government, but as Benjamin Franklin warned, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” What would the founders think about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision where the court sanctioned the taking of private property of one American to hand over to another American? John Adams explained: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”
That grotesque abuse of power largely was designed to weaken opposition to Obama’s statist agenda and make it easier for him to win re-election.
Now there’s a new IRS scandal. In hopes of advancing President Biden’s class-warfare agenda, the bureaucrats have leaked confidential taxpayer information to ProPublica, a left-wing website.
Here’s some of what that group posted.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. …ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before.We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
Since I’m a policy wonk, I’ll first point out that ProPublicacreated a make-believe number. We (thankfully) don’t tax wealth in the United States.
So Elon Musk’s income is completely unrelated to what happened to the value of his Tesla shares. The same is true for Jeff Bezos’ income and the value of his Amazon stock.*
And the same thing is true for the rest of us. If our IRA or 401(k) rises in value, that doesn’t mean our taxable income has increased. If our home becomes more valuable, that also doesn’t count as taxable income.
The Wall Street Journalopined on this topic today and made a similar point.
There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. …ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculatingwhat it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.
Some journalists don’t understand this distinction between income and wealth.
Or perhaps they do understand, but pretend otherwise because they see their role as being handmaidens of the Biden Administration.
Consider these excerpts from a column by Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.
Jeff Bezos…added an estimated $99 billion in wealth between 2014 and 2018 but reported only $4.22 billion in taxable income during that period.Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.
Mr. Appelbaum is wrong. The rich have a lot more assets than the rest of us, but they operate under the same rules.
If I have an asset that increases in value, that doesn’t count as taxable income. And it isn’t income. It’s merely a change in net wealth.
And the same is true if Bill Gates has an asset that increases in value.
Now that we’ve addressed the policy mistakes, let’s turn our attention to the scandal of IRS misbehavior.
The WSJ‘s editorial addresses the agency’s grotesque actions.
Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. …ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans. …The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. …The timing here is no coincidence, comrade. …someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more… As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? …Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.
And Charles Cooke of National Review also weighs in on the implications of a weaponized and partisan IRS.
We cannot trust the IRS. “Oh, who cares?” you might ask. “The victims are billionaires!” And indeed, they are. But I care. For a start, they’re American citizens, and they’re entitled to the same rights — and protected by the same laws — as everyone else. …Besides, even if one wants to be entirely amoral about it, one should consider that if their information can be spilled onto the Internet, anyone’s can.…A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.
What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers.
Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea (sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy).
*Financial assets such as stocks generally increase in value because of an expectation of bigger streams of income in the future (such as dividends). Those income streams are taxed (often multiple times) when (and if) they actually materialize.
Open letter to President Obama (Part 644)
(Emailed to White House on 6-10-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
___________________________
At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme asthis Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.”However, Lois Lerner knew different when she misled people with those words. Two important points made by Noonan in the Wall Street Journal in the article below: First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by […]
Ohio Liberty Coalition versus the I.R.S. (Tom Zawistowski) Published on May 20, 2013 The Ohio Liberty Coalition was among tea party groups that received special scrutiny from the I.R.S. Tom Zawistowski says his story is not unique. He argues the kinds of questions the I.R.S. asked his group amounts to little more than “opposition research.” Video […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political views concerning […]
We got to lower the size of government so we don’t have these abuses like this in the IRS. Cartoonists v. the IRS May 23, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Call me perverse, but I’m enjoying this IRS scandal. It’s good to see them suffer a tiny fraction of the agony they impose on the American people. I’ve already […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
Is the irs out of control? Here is the link from cato: MAY 22, 2013 8:47AM Can You Vague That Up for Me? By TREVOR BURRUS SHARE As the IRS scandal thickens, targeted groups are coming out to describe their ordeals in dealing with that most-reviled of government agencies. The Ohio Liberty Coalition was one of […]
Get Ready to Be Reamed May 17, 2013 by Dan Mitchell With so many scandals percolating, there are lots of good cartoons being produced. But I think this Chip Bok gem deserves special praise. It manages to weave together both the costly Obamacare boondoggle with the reprehensible politicization of the IRS. So BOHICA, my friends. If […]
You want to talk about irony then look at President Obama’s speech a few days ago when he joked about a potential audit of Ohio St by the IRS then a few days later the IRS scandal breaks!!!! The I.R.S. Abusing Americans Is Nothing New Published on May 15, 2013 The I.R.S. targeting of tea party […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
We could put in a flat tax and it would enable us to cut billions out of the IRS budget!!!! May 14, 2013 2:34PM IRS Budget Soars By Chris Edwards Share The revelations of IRS officials targeting conservative and libertarian groups suggest that now is a good time for lawmakers to review a broad range […]
In a sign of the censorious nature of the left, Comedy Central removed the “Diversity Day” episode of the popular sitcom “The Office” from its lineup. Pictured: The NBC series’ stars (from left) Steve Carell, B.J. Novak, Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, and Rainn Wilson pose after the show won the Emmy Award for “Outstanding Comedy Series” in August 2006. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
The left is the dominant force in media today. Leftists control all the levers of cultural power, from the TV writers’ room to the film sets in Hollywood. These leftists use their cultural power to dictate what you can and can’t see.
The latest casualty is an episode of the hit sitcom “The Office,” which aired on NBC from 2005 to 2013. Without explanation, Comedy Central removed an episode titled “Diversity Day” from rotation, likely in an attempt to avoid offending some viewers.
The episode mocks lead character Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) as he makes a fool of himself by using various racial stereotypes, employing satire to illustrate just how terrible Scott’s racism is.
Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about the new censorious left, as well as how conservatives can claim their place in the media landscape.
We also cover these stories:
The House Foreign Affairs Committee holds its first hearing examining the rushed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fallout from it.
House Democrats say they intend to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy to finance their $3.5 trillion spending proposal.
An upstate New York hospital system will have to “pause” delivering babies because of a staff shortage caused by some employees’ refusal to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Doug Blair: Our guest today is Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, as well as director of the National Journalism Center. Emily, thank you so much for joining us.
Emily Jashinsky: Thanks for having me.
Blair: Excellent. So, let’s start with your work at The Federalist. You focus on cultural topics like film and TV, and one of the great headlines that I found that you wrote about recently was …
Jashinsky: Oh, boy.
Blair: … “Why Won’t Comedy Central Air The Office’s ‘Diversity Day,’” which is this article that highlights an episode of “The Office,” which is this very funny comedy, and it’s controversial, this particular episode. So, before we get into that specifically, what drew you to writing about pop culture topics in general?
Jashinsky: For me … The book that has shaped my worldview more than anything else is “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray. And the reason that book resonated and changed me is because it gave research and argumentation to a phenomenon that was murkily defined in my own mind as I was growing up outside Milwaukee, about how differently our lives are based on our ZIP code.
Basically, what I was seeing on television, and actually “The Office,” I remember having a moment where I realized how low the ratings of “The Office” were, compared to programs like “Two and A Half Men,” or “NCIS” at the time. And it was like, wow, this is a show that educated people in certain areas of the country are watching a lot more than people in other areas of the country.
And that was just like a light bulb moment, and reading that book really gave voice to something that I had noticed. And so, I’m really interested in … and because I’m an obsessive consumer of lowbrow pop culture … I should say obsessive, or just incorrigible, an incorrigible consumer of lowbrow pop culture, I think it’s really important for conservatives not necessarily to endorse what’s happening on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” but to understand it, and to understand what’s happening on “The Real Housewives” and why, for instance, those shows have some of the most educated viewers of any shows on television.
Why is that? And why are people watching it? What does it mean about our culture that this is something that’s popular with this group of people? And for me, that’s just much more … It’s not that it’s more important, but it’s that, as somebody who actually enjoys paying attention to those sort of artifacts of our popular culture, it seemed like, as a conservative, something that I could offer …
That I’m not ashamed, that those are not guilty pleasures for me. They’re just things that I really enjoy watching. And it is important. It is important, and it can be hard to do it without endorsing those cultural artifacts, but it’s possible, and it is very important to understand.
Well, as a fellow consumer of pop culture, I do think it is quite important that we, as conservatives, are making sure that we are part of that, that we are part of this process, and that we are engaged with culture, and we are engaged with what is going on in the culture. So, specifically about this “Diversity Day” episode, would you be able to explain to our listeners what was so controversial about it, and then what you wrote in your piece?
Yeah. So, what was controversial about it was actually what we used to call anti-racism, and now that phrase has been co-opted, of course, by Ibram X. Kendi, who is paid by our tech oligarchs to the tune of millions of dollars to spread this idea that anti-racism is something that you are either … It’s like this dichotomy. You are either a racist or an anti-racist. And so he would call the anti-racism of “The Office” … and I think this episode, season one, so it would have aired in the early aughts.
Blair: I think it was the second episode ever, I heard, yeah.
Jashinsky: It is literally the second episode. And he would call it just flat-out racist. But what it was, actually, at the time was a satire of racism. And the article that I wrote … and you always end up writing these things from time to time because some episode of “The Office,” or episode of “30 Rock,” or episode of whatever movie, whatever it is, becomes … We’re no longer allowed to touch it or enjoy it, or act as though it had any merits whatsoever.
And so you end up having to repeat this argument that is basically an argument in favor of satire as an art form. And that’s essentially what we have to do now. We now have to argue to the left, the artistic left, and the art-friendly left, why satire is valuable, and “Diversity Day” is controversial because there’s a scene at the end where they are asked to play a game that involves heavily using stereotypes to guess somebody’s race, or gender, or whatever they’re assigned by a placard on their forehead, or an index card on their forehead. And you have to mimic the race on that person’s index card.
And what it does is, shows ugliness of stereotypes, which is on full display. The only reason anybody is laughing at these jokes, it’s not because they’re racist. They’re laughing because the jokes are so racist, not the jokes themselves, but the lines that come from Michael Scott’s mouth. It is just so nakedly racist. And when you laugh … .
This is the basic argument in favor of satire. When you laugh, you reinforce your shared cultural boundaries of what’s right and what’s wrong, of what’s racist and what’s not racist. That’s the value of satire, and it’s the value of satire on “Diversity Day,” where we could all see how gross stereotype and prejudice is. Stereotyping and prejudice are.
And so to have the network dedicated allegedly to comedy pull that from its lineup … So, whenever Comedy Central … This has been happening for at least a couple of years. I reached out to them for an explanation. They did not get back to me. Whenever they play season one of “The Office,” they play the pilot, and then they play episode three. And they just skip right over “Diversity Day.” Controversial episode, yes. Also, one of the most popular episodes, one of the best episodes, one of the most useful episodes.
And this is the network that’s dedicated to comedy in the country, so it’s a pretty disappointing statement on where we are.
Blair: Definitely. And I think you’re hitting on that topic that’s so important, is you’re not agreeing with the character who’s making the statement.
Obviously, when Michael says something inherently racist, you’re not saying, “Yes, Michael Scott, you are 100% correct.” It’s like, “Wow, Michael, you’re kind of an idiot.”
One of the other things that I think is so fascinating about what you said is that the artistic left is this opponent that we have now. It’s so censorious the way that the left handles these topics nowadays.
Obviously, you think about “The Office” as this prime example of, oh, it’s a comedy. And we don’t like what the comedy is, so we just have to cancel it. We have to skip over it. Was it always like this, or are we in this new, woke era where if you don’t like something, you get rid of it?
Jashinsky: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s like this neo-Tipper Gore-ism, but with the parties flipped.
Well, I guess not the parties, but with the ideological, I guess, groups flipped, because it used to be that the left was the bastion. The ACLU used to be a very different organization, for example. I reject what you say, but defend your right to say it. That used to not just be a principle that was important to a lot of people, especially on the artistic left, but on the …
That was just like an American value, period. It wasn’t a controversial thing. It was actually something we championed and celebrated. And when the ACLU would do the horrible work of defending legitimate racists, and just the most disgusting people, we celebrated that as something that we do in this country that a lot of other countries don’t. We let you say that because we know that your ideas are going to fade in the sunlight. Right?
We know that debate is going to defeat your arguments. We know that having a culture of free expression will defeat it. And what’s interesting, and I forgot to mention this earlier, is that Steve Carell, the star of “The Office,” one of the biggest stars in Hollywood period, a couple of years ago, he came out and said in an interview with a magazine that it would be impossible to make “The Office” today because so much of the humor is predicated on bad behavior. And that’s totally fair game because it’s, again, how we decide and how we understand what constitutes good and bad behavior, and a lot of that is through comedy, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be.
And so this is a liberal Hollywood artist saying the show would just be impossible now. No network would pick up the show. And that means we would be losing out on this decade-long piece of satire that everybody loves in this country, almost everybody loves by now.
It caught on a lot with streaming in a way that it didn’t even when it was on the air. We would just lose all of that, all of that laughter, all of that community, all of that just gone because no studio would pick it up because we can no longer … at least the people who are the arbiters of our popular culture, are no longer willing to take the risk that they get the backlash, personally or professionally, from people on social media, from the woke mob.
And it is absolutely telling on the trajectory of the left, that it went from laughing at, I guess, a Democrat like Tipper Gore, to now being even more censorious than Tipper Gore.
Blair: Right, right. It is shocking how we’ve gotten there. I’m so glad that you actually mentioned Steve Carell’s comments about ‘Would you be able to make “The Office” today?” because there was another show that was this quintessential show of the times, “Friends,” which has now been critiqued as this very insensitive show, even though at the time back in the ’90s, there were some relatively progressive elements to it where …
Jashinsky: Oh, big time.
Blair: Yeah. So, I mean, do you agree with that sentiment that we wouldn’t be able to make these shows nowadays, and what does that say about our culture now that two of the most popular shows couldn’t be made?
Jashinsky: It’s interesting. We’re going in a direction that will be very consequential in a very … Within a few years, we’ll see how this is shaking out, because I think it’s absolutely true. Steve Carell is correct, and a lot of people who’ve observed this with “Friends” are correct that the big networks would not pick up these pilots anymore.
And if they did, they wouldn’t allow the shows to be written as they were in a way that resonated with a lot of people because they’re too afraid to resonate with the people, right, because the people have these tastes that are bigoted and problematic. And so, these shows would not air the way that they do now.
But there’s something really interesting happening with The Daily Wire, for instance, where there’s suddenly this money that is showing up for heterodox art because there’s market demand for it. There’s this immense market demand for people who are not towing Hollywood’s line.
If you watch most comedies that have come out in the last 10 years, they’re miserable. They are utterly mediocre at best. There are so few really good comedies that have come out, and it’s because Hollywood is very risk-averse, and even more so when it comes to comedy because so much comedy has been reevaluated for the worse. And there’s just nothing good. There’s no culture of free expression that’s allowing the commercial art that Hollywood produces to be good and funny. And so, that means there’s major market demand for actually, really good comedy.
And so, I think some of it will sneak through the gates of the mainstream, but you’re also going to start to see more money show up for … When the Daily Wire snatched Gina Carano … So, Gina Carano, star of “The Mandalorian,” one of the biggest shows on television, is axed over a social media post, a meme. She ended up at The Daily Wire, at a conservative media company.
She’s now making a movie with them. She just started filming a movie that she wrote and directed. They just wrapped their first original movie, that’s coming out in January. They already bought a film that I think had run at Sundance, and they premiered that earlier this year. So, they’re moving into the space. And the more that happens, it’s not just going to be conservative companies picking it up. It’s going to be companies that are like, “Wait, if we can raise the capital, we can make money off of this, because there’s a huge market demand.”
So, that’s why I say in the next few years, I think we’re going to see a very consequential trend in either direction.
Blair: I think what you’re talking about is that movie, it was “Run, Fight, Hide,” I believe.
Jashinsky: “Run, Hide, Fight,” mm-hmm.
Blair: Yeah. I never saw it, but I heard it was quite a good movie. But it seems like one of the things that conservatives are now picking up on, is that we were on the defensive in terms of American culture, and the best way to get back on the offensive is to use the market.
You find these movies that we can produce. There’s a demand for it. So movies like [“Run, Hide, Fight”] or this movie with Gina Carano, we’re going to produce it, and we’re going to create it for that audience. Is that what you’re saying?
Jashinsky: Totally. And conservatives have known that for a long time, but haven’t really known what to do about it, because there wasn’t a will among good artists or people who are … not good artists, but people that have the means to create commercially viable art.
So stuff that looks like it’s on the same level of quality as what people go to the movie theaters to see, and what they see when they turn on NBC and prime time. That (A) used to be much more difficult to replicate with less capital, and (B), they’re just used to be less capital. You couldn’t really make good conservative art. But there’s a show that a lot of listeners are probably familiar with called “The Chosen.”
And I remember right when that show … Early in the pandemic, actually before the pandemic really started, I interviewed the creator of the show, and I was like, “Holy smokes.” This film has already crowdfunded more money than the “Veronica Mars” reboot, which was the biggest crowdfunding success in history. And nobody’s talking about it.
Nobody’s talking about it. And it turned out over the course of the pandemic to become just huge. If you watch the show, you can see that it does really have a quality level that’s similar to Hollywood productions.
So to viewers, it seems … And the way, it’s so interesting how they crowdfund. You pay it forward after you watch an episode. It has a little thing on an app. So, you download “The Chosen app,” you watch an episode, and then you pay it forward for the next people to watch an episode, basically. You don’t have to pay, but you can. And it’s really easy, it’s simple, and the product looks just like a Hollywood product.
So, this stuff is getting easier, and the demand is getting bigger. I think that spells … That’s very good news for consumers.
Blair: Absolutely. Now for some of our listeners or viewers who might not be 100% familiar with “The Chosen,” “The Chosen” is …
Jashinsky: “The Chosen” basically is a … I don’t know totally how to describe it. It’s the Gospels in TV form. So it takes the Gospels and breaks them down into episode-size bites and weaves them into the broader narrative. And there are some, I guess, fictionalized elements of it to make it more palatable as a story, I guess.
There’s some dimensionalizing of the characters, for instance, and what their lives might have looked like. It’s not like word-for-word, verbatim things out of the Gospel, but it’s basically true to the stories of the Gospel, and a lot of it is actually word-for-word. So, it takes the Gospels and televises them, basically, in a bite-size episode format.
And it is so popular. It just has taken off. It’s funny, because The Atlantic wrote a story about it a month ago, which … a couple months ago. And I was like, leave it to The Atlantic. After The Federalist wrote this 18 months ago, The Atlantic to suddenly catch on and be like, “We’re the intellectual … We’re really telling the left and the intellectual class what’s trending, what’s happening. So, you’ve been missing this for 18 months.”
But it has become just extremely popular. And again, shows like that, what The Daily Wire is doing, this is very good news for consumers.
Blair: Right, right. They have the choice, and the options to look at something. And it seems almost like there’s part of this idea that it’s just the topics that conservatives care about, as well. It’s not even that you’re not actively hostile, which a lot of shows on television seem to be now to conservatives. It’s “Hey, this is a topic you care about. This is a topic you’re passionate about.”
On that note, I’m curious if you believe that maybe as Gen Z or the upcoming generations start to grow older and they start to have different demands for cultural products and cultural artifacts, as you refer to them, do you think that’s going to be a motivator as well for these companies to start diversifying their portfolios in terms of what media they’re creating?
Jashinsky: Oh, totally. We already see that a little bit with a lot of media companies have different verticals. But the biggest thing we haven’t talked about yet is that the landscape of our entertainment … . Our entertainment landscape is splintering into niches. And the example I always use is, how is it possible that the worst man in late-night comedy, Stephen Colbert, has the highest-rated show of the network hosts?
We can talk about how Greg Gutfeld surpassed him in the ratings recently, and the reason for that is … That’s another one I wrote a couple of years ago when Gutfeld was really successful. I was brought up on “Red Eye.” I love that show, and it really shaped my beliefs and why I entered the conservative movement.
The reason that Gutfeld is really successful, the reason that Colbert is really successful, is that we … You don’t have to put up Johnny Carson’s numbers anymore to be successful in late night. You need to corner a niche, and Gutfeld does it really well. I think Colbert does it really poorly. But if you are somebody who wants a dose of resistance comedy every night, you’re tuning into Stephen Colbert. Right.
And if you’re an anti-woke person, you’re tuning into Gutfeld. And you don’t have to be Johnny Carson that appeals to everyone anymore. And this happens in the news media. It happens in the entertainment media. It’s happening just across the board.
And that’s a good thing. It’s also a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it really gives consumers choice, and it should scare people in the mainstream when they’re not providing the right kind of option, they’re only providing what the people in their C-suites over at Comcast or NBC Universal want, and they’re really restricting their product to those boundaries.
But at the same time, it also means that we have to appeal less and less to what makes us similar, and what makes us laugh as a country, what makes us cry as a country, what makes us proud as a country. You don’t have to appeal across those boundaries because mass media is splintering into niches. And that means you just have to appeal to what your niche likes about the country, or what your niche hates about the country.
And that, I think, is a real loss. I hope it’s one … I don’t know how it happens, but I hope that mass media actually is able to be robust in the future in some form because it does really have a unifying value.
Blair: Right. Right. What you’re talking about is this niche-iffication of comedy in a sense of who can you even listen to at all. I’ll give you an example. To me, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert …
Jashinsky: So bad.
Blair: But they’re all the same, too. It feels as if they’re not really that distinct anymore. Whereas you can get somebody like a Gutfeld … And I’ll tell you my personal favorite was … Oh gosh, what’s his name? Very tall, Conan O’Brien.
Conan was great. I very much enjoyed Conan, and it felt like there was something unique about him. But what we’re getting now, as you said, this niche-iffication. If you are a leftist, you listen to John Oliver. You listen to Stephen Colbert. You listen to all these people. Whereas if you’re on the right, you listen to Greg Gutfeld.
One of the things that I’ve also found particularly true when it comes to these types of cultural discussions about comedy, and about television, and film, is that politics is downstream of culture. So, that was Andrew Breitbart who used to say that. Do you agree with that sentiment that what we’re seeing now is this kind of … politics is now reflecting our cultural landscape? And if not, why not?
Jashinsky: Yeah, it’s a little of both. And so I’ve always been a big believer in that maxim from Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture. I think also it’s … the slight revision I would make to it, and this is … Terry Schilling is someone who’s changed my thinking on this.
Politics is often downstream of culture. It happens in the other direction as well, and you can see that in terms of if you look at really bad decisions that our leaders have made that have shattered communities around the country, closed factories, shattered the communities and the fragile ecosystems that existed in various countries … communities around the country.
That has created … Those political decisions have created a culture of despair in a lot of places in the country. You can talk about the same thing with opioids. So, it goes both ways.
But I think the value and why Breitbart’s maxim caught on and has been so influential in the conservative movement is because it’s something that we have done so poorly at understanding for so long that … We dedicate so much time to the politics and so little time to the culture, partially because there just aren’t a lot of conservative artists. There aren’t a lot of … conservatives also … We’ve had wonderful publications that have done great commentary and writing on high art, on opera, on literature.
But that’s not what most people are consuming. And so that’s what Breitbart really understood, and I think that’s what … . He understood something that the conservative movement didn’t understand at the time, and is getting increasingly better at understanding. So, I think yes, that is very important. Although I also think it’s important to understand that some of our cultural maladies have actually come from political decisions, as well. And it does go in both directions.
Blair: Excellent. Well, Emily, we are running a little low on time, so I want to end on a positive note. So, we talked a little bit about some of the success stories. You mentioned “The Chosen.” You mentioned some of the work that The Daily Wire is creating.
Are there any other success stories that conservatives can point to as, like, “Hey, look, this is something that’s viable. This is something that we can actually make work,” and then secondly, do you have any advice for our listeners who want to directly push back against the left and the war on our culture?
Jashinsky: Yeah. The Substack revolution is a huge success story. Shows like “Breaking Points,” my friend Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, they run that show because they caught just on fire when they hosted “Rising” on Hill TV. And it showed that there was this demand for antiestablishment, really independent news coverage.
We’ve seen that with leftists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, who have just massively successful Substacks, or people on Patreon who are independent newsmakers and do a really good job. The concern there is there aren’t gatekeepers, and maybe some people are going to spread false news. I haven’t really seen that happen yet so far, but the Substack revolution, the Patreon revolution, these are all really positive. The fact that podcasts like this exists, that is a really, really positive thing going forward.
The democratization of the media does have a lot of good stuff, like The Federalists, a great example, independent news website that has broken tons of news, basically was breaking the news about the Russia hoax, right, for years before that was ever … . The entire corporate media basically created the Mueller investigation, a special counsel investigation, that consumed their attention for years. We were one of the only people that were casting doubt on that and with good reporting.
And so, I would point to stories like that. This is really successful. And if you want to be supportive of this trend and to help us move in the right direction, it’s a matter of paying for Substacks, paying for Patreons, relying less and less on the gatekeepers, and the failed institutions, and the media, the entertainment media, and the news media. Relying less on them. That’s not to say don’t rely on them at all, but pay for the stuff. Pay for the independent creators that are doing a good job because that supports them. But it also shows that there is room in the market for capital to invest in independent sources, independent shows, independent everything, and that’s the right direction.
Blair: We’re always fans of the market. So, that was Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, as well as director at the National Journalism Center. Emily, thank you so much again for joining us.
Jashinsky: Thank you.
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A.F. Branco was born and raised in Mendocino County, California, and later relocated to northwest Washington. He served in the U.S. Army Military Police Corps, which offered him the opportunity to attend college on the GI Bill. He is a talented musician — guitar, bass and singing — who played gigs all over the Northwest with his band, Tony and the Tigers.
Over the years, Branco created cartoons as a hobby. Once he saw America under assault by radical leftists, the hobby became a calling and another form of service to the country he loves and swore to protect from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” His toons resonate and inform with razor-sharp humor, accruing a following of patriots everywhere.
Branco has appeared on Fox News, “The Larry Elder Show,” “The Lars Larson Show” and more. His first book, “Comically Incorrect: A Collection of Politically Incorrect Comics: Volume 1,” published in November 2015, was well-received. His calendars sell out each year, as the demand for humorous cartoons increases in an otherwise mean-spirited political climate.
And now, with his book “Make America Laugh Again,” A.F Branco continues slaying the dragons of Leftist Lunacy via the power of the cartoonist’s pencil.
A.F. Branco’s cartoons are in high demand as he slays dragons of Leftist Lunacy with his razor-sharp humor. He has appeared on Fox News, “The Larry Elder Show,” “The Lars Larson Show” and more. Read his full bio here.
Just like I’ve never had (until recently) any reason to define capitalism, I also have never felt any need to define libertarianism.
Some people use the non-aggression principle, but that strikes me as more of a statement about how we should behave.
What if we’re trying to define the rules for libertarian governance?
In that case, my definition is very much based on property rights. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours, and we both have the right to engage (or to not engage) in voluntary exchange.
I realize that’s not the most elegant or comprehensive statement of principles, but I think it provides a useful framework for the debate over vaccine mandates.
Regarding that issue, I’m glad that private companies had the expertise and opportunity to develop vaccines against the coronavirus, and I got vaccinated as soon as possible.
That being said, I definitely don’t think government should force anyone to make that choice.
But I also think that people who opt against vaccination should accept the non-governmental consequences.
What if private businesses decide that customers are only allowed if they prove they’ve been vaccinated? From a libertarian perspective, guided by core principles such as property rights and freedom of association, that should be totally acceptable. And that’s true even if we think the owners of the businesses are making silly choices. After all, it’s their property.
Written by Andrew Egger, it starts by pointing out that there’s a political fight in South Dakota because a private company has announced that all employees must be vaccinated.
South Dakota’s largest employer is Sanford Health, a hospital and health care system that employs nearly 10,000 people in the eastern half of the state. On July 22, Sanford, which operates in both Dakotas and Minnesota, announced it would begin requiring all its employees to get vaccinated for COVID by November 1. Within weeks, two Republican members of the state House, Reps. Jon Hansen and Scott Odenbach, had introduced legislation punching back. The COVID-19 Vaccine Freedom of Conscience Act would give South Dakotans “the right to be exempt from any COVID-19 vaccination mandate, requirement, obligation, or demand on the basis that receiving a COVID-19 vaccination violates his or her conscience.” …By the end of August, state House Speaker Spencer Gosch had come aboard the mandate ban effort as well. …The only problem: Noem doesn’t support the legislation.
Why is Governor Kristi Noem against the legislation?
For a very libertarian reason. She doesn’t think the government has the right to tell a private company how to operate.
…the laissez-faire approach that made Noem a conservative folk hero in last year’s fights has gotten her crosswise with her fellow Republicans on the issue of vaccine mandate bans. “Frankly, I don’t think businesses should be mandating that their employees should be vaccinated,” she said in a video posted to Twitter last week. “And if they do mandate vaccines to their employees, they should be making religious and other exemptions available to them. But I don’t have the authority as governor to tell them what to do.”
Amen.
If you believe in private property, the owners of a business should have the right to decide whom they employ and whom they do business with.
Just as consumers can choose where to shop and workers can choose to leave jobs they don’t like.
Here’s a final excerpt from the article.
“Nobody is stopping you from making that decision [not to get vaccinated], but you don’t have a right to a particular job,” Noem spokesman Ian Fury told The Dispatch. “The business owner has the right to his business. You do not have a right to an individual job, because you don’t own that business.” …Philosophically, that puts Noem firmly in the camp of free-market Republicans past: largely content to preside passively over a state economy in which companies are free to set their own standards of conduct and employees are free to work for companies that share their values—and quit jobs if they don’t.
The bottom line is that libertarians (and small-government conservatives) should not be upset about private companies making private decisions.
Instead, we should get irked when politicians try to mandate those decisions.
In a column for the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer condemns Joe Biden’s recent declaration that companies either must require vaccination or conduct constant testing.
President Joe Biden’s decision to require large private employers to ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus is problematic not just in terms of the Constitution, statutes, and liberty interests, but it is also highly impractical. …This is crazy. If the onus is on the businesses, what are businesses to do if employees refuse to comply? Fire them all? …This rule is a recipe for lawsuits. Will businesses be caught in a bind — penalized for unvaccinated workers but also charged with unfair labor practices if they evade the mandate by reducing payrolls below 100? …If massive new testing is required as a mere screening method, even for those feeling perfectly healthy, how will medical personnel keep up? Who will keep administrative tabs on all this? And if businesses are required to provide time off for workers to get tested, how will their own efficiency and productivity suffer?
Given the fact that Biden is a career politician with no experience in the private sector, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this White House proposal.
After all this is an Administration that thinks copying the failed fiscal policies of Greece, France, and Italy is how you “build back better.”
That being said, intervention from Washington is the not the main cause of America’s education problems. The real problem is that we have an inefficient monopoly systemthat is – for all intents and purposes – run for the benefit of teachers and bureaucrats.
But then I read something that almost makes me think that politicians want the system to be a failure.
Here’s a story from Yahoo! News that I first assumed was from the Babylon Bee. But it’s not satire, it really happened.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation. Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744…,an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian. …The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards… Backers argued…the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” …Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards. “I worry that by adopting this bill, we’re giving up on our kids,” House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said.
I don’t know which part of the story is more reprehensible. Should we be more outraged that state politicians wants to eliminate standards, or should we be more outraged that supporters are implicitly (at the very least) racist in thinking that minority students can’t perform?
This is equivalent to breaking your bathroom scale because you don’t like your weight.
Ethan Chaplin, a Glen Meadow Middle School student, told News 12 last week that while he was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on in math class, a student who bullied him earlier in the day yelled “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.” He was suspended for two days and then underwent five hours of a physical and mental exam at Riverview Medical Center’s crisis unit, his father told NJ.com.
We have another crazy example of political correctness run amok, as reported by the New York Post (h/t: Daily Caller).
Meet 8-year-old Asher Palmer, who was tossed out of his special-needs Manhattan school for threatening other kids with a toy “gun’’ — which he made out of rolled-up paper. …[His mom] was incensed that Principal Micaela Bracamonte told other staffers in an email that Asher “had a model for physically aggressive behavior in his immediate family.’’ Spadone thinks Bracamonte was referring to her husband because he served in the military during the Kuwait war. If that was the reason for the comment, she said, “I find it offensive and inappropriate.’’ As far as the toy gun is concerned, she said Asher, a first-year student, made it out of a piece of paper after discussing military weapons with his dad.
I’ve previously shared many stories of anti-gun political correctness in government schools (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Makes me wonder whether that kind of nonsense is even more counterproductive to kids that some of the excesses of critical race theory.
January 26, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
I have written about 66 heroes of mine in the House of Representatives that voted “no” on the Obama/Biden debt ceiling increase request in 2011. I believe we must have representatives that will vote to restore our freedom and that means voting to cut spending and lower taxes like the Patriots of long ago wanted. Today the Tea Party represented my views the most closely. Lord knows I have written a lot about that in the past. . I have praised over and over and over the 66 House Republicans that voted no on that before. If they did not raise the debt ceiling then we would have a balanced budget instantly. I agree that the Tea Party has made a difference and I have personally posted 49 posts on my blog on different Tea Party heroes of mine.
THIS BRINGS ME TO ONE OF MY BIGGEST ECONOMIC HEROES AND IT IS THE LATE MILTON FRIEDMAN. Friedman had such revolutionary policies such as eliminating welfare and instituting the negative income tax and putting in school vouchers.
The problem in Washington is not lack of revenue but our lack of spending restraint. This video below makes that point.
Free-market economics meets free-market policies at The Heritage Foundation’s Tenth Anniversary dinner in 1983. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his wife Rose with President Ronald Reagan and Heritage President Ed Feulner.
Since the passing of Milton Friedman who was my favorite economist, I have been reading the works of Daniel Mitchell and he quotes Milton Friedman a lot, and you can reach Dan’s website here.
Mitchell in February 2011.
Wikipedia noted concerning Dan:
Mitchell’s career as an economist began in the United States Senate, working for Oregon Senator Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee. He also served on the transition team of President-Elect Bush and Vice President-Elect Quayle in 1988. In 1990, he began work at the Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Mitchell worked on tax policy issues and began advocating for income tax reform.[1]
In 2007, Mitchell left the Heritage Foundation, and joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow. Mitchell continues to work in tax policy, and deals with issues such as the flat tax and international tax competition.[2]
In addition to his Cato Institute responsibilities, Mitchell co-founded the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, an organization formed to protect international tax competition.[1]
The evidence is in: school choice works. Yesterday, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released their third edition of their report “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice.” The report provides a literature review of dozens of high-quality studies of school choice programs around the country, including studies from scholars at Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, the University of Arkansas, the Brookings Institution, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The studies examine the impact of school choice programs on the academic performance of participants and public school students, the fiscal impact on taxpayers, racial segregation, and civic values.
The report’s key findings included the following:
Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.
Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.
Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.
Seven empirical studies have examined school choice’s impact on civic values and practices such as respect for the rights of others and civic knowledge. Of these, five find that school choice improves civic values and practices. Two find no visible impact from school choice. No empirical study has found that school choice has a negative impact on civic values and practices.
On the same day, a new study from researchers at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution found that a school choice program boosted college enrollment among African-American participants by 24 percent.
While many of the findings show only modest improvement, they consistently show that school choice programs produce the same or superior results across a gamut of measures. Moreover, not all the benefits of choice are easily measurable. Some families are looking for a school that better meets a student’s special needs, instills the parents’ values, inspires a lifelong love of learning, or where a student is safe from bullying. These outcomes are sometimes difficult if not impossible to measure in the aggregate, but parents are in the best position to tell the difference for their own children.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
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Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1
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Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 48) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 47) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 46) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 45) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 44) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 43) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 42) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 41) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 40) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 39) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 38) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 37) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 36) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 35) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 34) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 33) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 32) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Congressmen Tim Huelskamp on the debt ceiling Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 31) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 30) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 29) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 28) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 27) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 26) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
Uploaded by RepJoeWalsh on Jun 14, 2011 Our country’s debt continues to grow — it’s eating away at the American Dream. We need to make real cuts now. We need Cut, Cap, and Balance. The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 25) This post today is a part of a series […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 24) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 23) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 22) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 21) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 20) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 19) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 18) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 17) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 16) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]
Sen Obama in 2006 Against Raising Debt Ceiling The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 15) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from […]
But this clip from Yes Minister also captures how bureaucracies operate.
And if you want another reason why bureaucrats don’t like initiative, this cartoon provides the answer.
Our third item shows that you need the correct angle to understand the life of bureaucrats (sort of like these six images).
Our next item shows featherbedding in action.
Never hire one person when you can make it a three-person job (or a lot more if you’re in California).
My final (and favorite) item is this cartoon strip. I don’t know if it’s a parody (like this one) or real, but it does show how bureaucratic pay scales operate.
Our third item also pokes fun at the logic (or lack thereof) of our leftist friends.
Next, the clever folks at Babylon Beeexplain various home-defense strategies for a gun-free world.
Guns are on their way out. And thank goodness! We can’t wait to return to the utopian paradise we lost when guns were invented…Still, once in a great while, you might need to defend yourself against a ne’er-do-well. When those ruffians come kicking your door down, you need to be ready. Here are seven great ways to defend your home against an armed burglar when your guns have all been confiscated.
Here are a few of those options.
Option #3 surely is the best, just as demonstrated in this video.
Yet never forget that there are people who think gun-free zonesare a real answer.
So here are some additions to our collection of communism humor.
I’m among the small minority of people who have never watched Game of Thrones, so I don’t know the backstory on these characters, but this meme has a very appropriate message about the nuclear-level naivete needed to believe Marx’s nonsense.
Though maybe the first frame should say “Readers of Teen Vogue.”
It’s bad news that we’re suffering from a coronavirus that has killed several million people globally, but there’s another virus that has butchered 100 million people.
This next image reminds me of the joke about communism and electricity.
Per my tradition, here’s my favorite item from today’s collection.
I’m always very impressed by the people who are clever enough to create these Venn diagrams, and this one is better than most.
Though I’m tempted to ask who is worse, the soulless Marxist who rambles and can’t be reasoned with, or the people who rationalize, glorify, and justify Marxism?
—-
November 24, 2020
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on: Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm,”
I noticed you mentioned Herbert Marcuse, and I have read of his influence in Francis Schaeffer’s book How should we then live?:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. … but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. … followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898-). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist.
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
_
______________Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I have posted many times in the past using his material. This post below is a result of his material..Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. TrueCommunism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Let me share with you the story of Paul Robeson and it demonstrates that he had to lie about how cruel communism was and the killing of his friend Itzik Feffer.
Paul Leroy Robeson (/ˈroʊbsən/ROHB-sən;[2][3] April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism
Robeson traveled to Moscow in June, and tried to find Itzik Feffer. He let Soviet authorities know that he wanted to see him.[207] Reluctant to lose Robeson as a propagandist for the Soviet Union,[208] the Soviets brought Feffer from prison to him. Feffer told him that Mikhoels had been murdered, and he would be summarily executed.[209] To protect the Soviet Union’s reputation,[210] and to keep the right wing of the United States from gaining the moral high ground, Robeson denied that any persecution existed in the Soviet Union,[211] and kept the meeting secret for the rest of his life, except from his son.[210]
DANIEL J. FLYNN tells a few details in this sad story: Why Did ESPN Showcase a Stalinist on Monday NightFootball?Stalin Peace Prize laureate Paul Robeson lauded on America’s No. 1 sports network. In 1949, Robeson again traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had sent his namesake to school during the 1930s. Robeson had met poet Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels at a Polo Grounds rally of 50,000 people — the largest pro-Soviet event in the history of the United States — that welcomed their Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1943. But by 1949 Stalin wished to kill Jews rather than use them for propaganda purposes. He murdered Mikhoels and later Feffer — but not before Robeson could visit his old friend the poet one last time.
David Horowitz describes this meeting in Radical Son:
In America, the question “What happened to Itzik Feffer?” entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumors that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually, he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us,” he said. “When you return to America you must speak out and save us.”
Instead, Robeson, who later confessed what happened to his son, spoke out in praise of his friends’ murderer.
“Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage,” Robeson recalled of Stalin. “Most importantly — he has charted the direction of our present and future struggles. He has pointed the way to peace — to friendly co-existence — to the exchange of mutual scientific and cultural contributions — to the end of war and destruction. How consistently, how patiently, he labored for peace and ever increasing abundance, with what deep kindliness and wisdom. He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
But it’s also very bad news for poor people, in part because various redistribution programs can lure them out of the productive economy and into total dependency on government (and this will become an even bigger problem if Biden’s per-child handouts are approved).
But it’s also bad news because redistribution programs can result in very high implicit tax rates for low-income people who try to improve their lives by climbing the economic ladder.
I shared an example back in 2012, which showed how a single mother in Pennsylvania would be worse off with $57,000 of income instead of $29,000.
In other words, she would be dealing with a de facto marginal tax rate of more than 100 percent.
If you want to understand how this happens, Professors Craig Richardson and Richard McKenzie wrote about this topic in an article for The Library of Economics and Liberty.
…by expanding public assistance programs, the President’s plan will unavoidably impose a higher, hidden tax rate—known as an “implicit marginal income tax rate” (which we shorten to implicit tax rate)—on low-wage workers who receive welfare benefits. Those workers will pay an implicit tax rate because many welfare benefits are reduced as earnings rise.Ironically, the poorest Americans often pay implicit tax rates that are far higher than the IRS’s explicit marginal income-tax rates imposed on the country’s highest income earners. …Consider a household that receives benefits from only two welfare programs, with one tapering off at 20 cents for each added dollar earned and another tapering off at 40 cents for each added dollar earned. Those cuts create an implicit tax rate of 60 percent, which means the worker has only 40 cents in additional spendable income for each added dollar earned. This implicit tax rate can be expected to affect work incentives in much the same way that a federal income tax rate does.
The authors cite a real-world example.
…consider a real-life, low-income single mother of two children in Forsyth County, North Carolina earning $10 an hour in a full-time job, which means she has a monthly earned income of $1,600 (or $19,200 annually). Suppose the single mother receives monthly benefits from five welfare programs: $425 in food stamps, $1,471 in subsidized childcare, $370 in housing subsidies, $180 in WIC benefits, and $493 in an earned income tax credit (EITC). Her monthly welfare benefits will total $2,939 (or $35,271 a year). Now, suppose the single mother takes a new job paying $15 an hour, a 50 percent increase. Her monthly earned income will rise by $800 to $2,400 (with her annual income rising to $28,800 a year, an annual earnings increase of $9,600). However, she will face decreases in four out of her five monthly benefit streams, with each benefit reduction based on the same $800-increase in earnings (a problem known among welfare researchers as the “cumulative stacked effect”). The single mother will lose $231 in food stamps, $80 in childcare benefits, $216 in housing benefits, and $166 in EITC. Her total decrease in monthly benefits will reach $694 (which means her annual benefit total will drop by $8,328).4 Her implicit tax rate on her added monthly earnings of $800 is 87 percent—more than two times the highest explicit marginal tax rate proposed for the rich. …In addition, the single mother will be required to pay an added $185 a month in federal and state income taxes on her added earned monthly income of $800, which is an explicit tax rate of 23 percent. Adding the 87 percent implicit tax rate to the 23 percent explicit tax rate leads to an overall tax rate of 110 percent. Her raise has left her $79 per month poorer in lost wages and benefits—surely a strong disincentive for her to take the higher paying job.
Here’s a table showing those results.
If you want more evidence, check out Chart 7 from this columnand Figure 8 from this column.
And the same problem exists in other nations as well.
President Biden pushed through $1.9 trillion of new spendingearlier this year, but that so-called stimulus plan was mostly for one-time giveaways. As I warn in this recent discussion on Denver’s KHOW, we should be much more worried about his proposals to permanently expand the welfare state.
When I first got to Washington, I would be upset that politicians wanted to add billions of dollars to the burden of government.
John Cogan and Daniel Heil of the Hoover Institution warned about the consequences of this dependency agenda in a columnfor the Wall Street Journal.
The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. …more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. …57% of all married-couple children would receive federal entitlement benefits, and more than 80% of single-parent households would be on the entitlement rolls.
Many of the handouts would go to people with middle-class incomes.
And higher.
…The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5;still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members. …Two-parent households with two preschool-age children and incomes up to $130,000 would qualify for federal cash assistance for daycare. Single parents with two preschoolers and incomes up to $113,000 would qualify. And some families with incomes over $200,000 would be eligible for health-insurance subsidies. Other parts of the plan, such as paid leave and free community college, have no income limits at all.
The Wall Street Journalopined on this issue last month. Here are the key passages from their editorial.
The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. …entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future. …We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual. For example, it pretends the child tax credit ends in 2025, so its cost is $449 billion over the 10-year budget window that is used for reconciliation bills that require only 51 votes to pass the Senate. But a future Congress will never repeal the credit. …Second, these programs aren’t intended as a “safety net” for the poor or those temporarily down on their luck. They are explicitly designed to make the middle class dependent on government handouts.
The editorial explicitly warns that the United States will economically suffer if politicians copy Europe’s counterproductive redistributionism.
…on present trend the U.S. is falling into the same entitlement trap as Western Europe. Entitlement spending requires higher taxes, which grab 40% or more of GDP. Economic growth declines as more money flows to transfer payments instead of investment. The entitlement state becomes too large to afford but also too politically entrenched to reform. …Only a decade ago the Tea Party fought ObamaCare. Now most Beltway conservatives worry more about Big Tech than they do Big Government. If the Biden Families Plan passes, these conservatives will find themselves spending the rest of their careers as tax collectors for the entitlement state.
Amen. I’m baffled when folks on the left argue that we should “catch up” with Europe.
Are they not aware that American living standards are far higher? Do they not understand that low-income people in the United States often have more income than middle-class people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?
P.S. As I mentioned in the interview, the 21st century has been bad news for fiscal policy, with two big-government Republicans and two big-government Democrats.
That grotesque abuse of power largely was designed to weaken opposition to Obama’s statist agenda and make it easier for him to win re-election.
Now there’s a new IRS scandal. In hopes of advancing President Biden’s class-warfare agenda, the bureaucrats have leaked confidential taxpayer information to ProPublica, a left-wing website.
Here’s some of what that group posted.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. …ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before.We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
Since I’m a policy wonk, I’ll first point out that ProPublicacreated a make-believe number. We (thankfully) don’t tax wealth in the United States.
So Elon Musk’s income is completely unrelated to what happened to the value of his Tesla shares. The same is true for Jeff Bezos’ income and the value of his Amazon stock.*
And the same thing is true for the rest of us. If our IRA or 401(k) rises in value, that doesn’t mean our taxable income has increased. If our home becomes more valuable, that also doesn’t count as taxable income.
The Wall Street Journalopined on this topic today and made a similar point.
There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. …ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculatingwhat it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.
Some journalists don’t understand this distinction between income and wealth.
Or perhaps they do understand, but pretend otherwise because they see their role as being handmaidens of the Biden Administration.
Consider these excerpts from a column by Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.
Jeff Bezos…added an estimated $99 billion in wealth between 2014 and 2018 but reported only $4.22 billion in taxable income during that period.Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.
Mr. Appelbaum is wrong. The rich have a lot more assets than the rest of us, but they operate under the same rules.
If I have an asset that increases in value, that doesn’t count as taxable income. And it isn’t income. It’s merely a change in net wealth.
And the same is true if Bill Gates has an asset that increases in value.
Now that we’ve addressed the policy mistakes, let’s turn our attention to the scandal of IRS misbehavior.
The WSJ‘s editorial addresses the agency’s grotesque actions.
Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. …ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans. …The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. …The timing here is no coincidence, comrade. …someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more… As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? …Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.
And Charles Cooke of National Review also weighs in on the implications of a weaponized and partisan IRS.
We cannot trust the IRS. “Oh, who cares?” you might ask. “The victims are billionaires!” And indeed, they are. But I care. For a start, they’re American citizens, and they’re entitled to the same rights — and protected by the same laws — as everyone else. …Besides, even if one wants to be entirely amoral about it, one should consider that if their information can be spilled onto the Internet, anyone’s can.…A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.
What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers.
Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea (sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy).
*Financial assets such as stocks generally increase in value because of an expectation of bigger streams of income in the future (such as dividends). Those income streams are taxed (often multiple times) when (and if) they actually materialize.
Open letter to President Obama (Part 644)
(Emailed to White House on 6-10-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
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At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme asthis Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.”However, Lois Lerner knew different when she misled people with those words. Two important points made by Noonan in the Wall Street Journal in the article below: First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by […]
Ohio Liberty Coalition versus the I.R.S. (Tom Zawistowski) Published on May 20, 2013 The Ohio Liberty Coalition was among tea party groups that received special scrutiny from the I.R.S. Tom Zawistowski says his story is not unique. He argues the kinds of questions the I.R.S. asked his group amounts to little more than “opposition research.” Video […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political views concerning […]
We got to lower the size of government so we don’t have these abuses like this in the IRS. Cartoonists v. the IRS May 23, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Call me perverse, but I’m enjoying this IRS scandal. It’s good to see them suffer a tiny fraction of the agony they impose on the American people. I’ve already […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
Is the irs out of control? Here is the link from cato: MAY 22, 2013 8:47AM Can You Vague That Up for Me? By TREVOR BURRUS SHARE As the IRS scandal thickens, targeted groups are coming out to describe their ordeals in dealing with that most-reviled of government agencies. The Ohio Liberty Coalition was one of […]
Get Ready to Be Reamed May 17, 2013 by Dan Mitchell With so many scandals percolating, there are lots of good cartoons being produced. But I think this Chip Bok gem deserves special praise. It manages to weave together both the costly Obamacare boondoggle with the reprehensible politicization of the IRS. So BOHICA, my friends. If […]
You want to talk about irony then look at President Obama’s speech a few days ago when he joked about a potential audit of Ohio St by the IRS then a few days later the IRS scandal breaks!!!! The I.R.S. Abusing Americans Is Nothing New Published on May 15, 2013 The I.R.S. targeting of tea party […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
We could put in a flat tax and it would enable us to cut billions out of the IRS budget!!!! May 14, 2013 2:34PM IRS Budget Soars By Chris Edwards Share The revelations of IRS officials targeting conservative and libertarian groups suggest that now is a good time for lawmakers to review a broad range […]
I was saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. John Raymond Smythies on January 28, 2019 in La Jolla, CA, and I wanted to spend time on several posts concentrating on him.
April 9, 2015
John Raymond Smythies, Center for Brain and Cognition,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0109
Dear Dr. Smythies,
I just can’t get over the fact that you knew Aldous Huxley and Carl Gustav Jung. These are two men that had major impacts on 20th century culture and thinking. I would love to know if you had any more stories to tell about these too intellectuals. I quote both of these men later in this letter. Also did you ever get a chance to meet Bertrand Russell?
I really enjoyed watching your comments You Tube from the 2007 BEYOND BELIEF CONFERENCE and that got me started reading your material. I wanted to discuss the views of you and Charles Darwin.
TWO THINGS MADE ME THINK OF YOU RECENTLY. On April 5, 2015 at the Fellowship Bible Church Easter morning service in Little Rock, Arkansas our pastor Mark Henry described DOUBTING THOMASand that description made me think of you. Moreover, your skeptical view towards Christianity reminds me ofCHARLES DARWIN’S growing doubts throughout his life on these same theological issues such as skepticism in reaction to the claims of the Bible!!!
I’m an evangelical Christian and you are a secularist but I am sure we can both agree with the apostle Paul when he said in First Corinthians 15 that if Christ did not rise from the dead then Christians are to be most pited!!!! I attended Easter services this week and this issue came up and Mark Henry asserted that there is plenty of evidence that indicates that the Bible is historically accurate. Did you know that CHARLES DARWIN thought about this very subject quite a lot?
I just finished reading the online addition of the book Darwin, Francis ed. 1892. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition]. London: John Murray. There are several points that Charles Darwin makes in this book that were very wise, honest, logical, shocking and some that were not so wise. The Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer once said of Darwin’s writings, “Darwin in his autobiography and in his letters showed that all through his life he never really came to a quietness concerning the possibility that chance really explained the situation of the biological world. You will find there is much material on this [from Darwin] extended over many manufacturers years that constantly he was wrestling with this problem.”
Scientism leads to nihilism, with which Western culture, in its politics, art and literature, philosophy and everyday life, is currently awash… Richard Dawkins (2006) makes great play in his recent book The God Delusion of what he calls the appalling propensity of religious people to base their ideas on dogma rather than on the evidence. Well, many do, but this reads strange in a book bursting at the seams with its own dogmas, its uncritical acceptance of metaphysical theories such as Identity Theory, its refusal to take note of the relevant evidence from parapsychology, and its special pleading with regard to the views of Darwin and Wallace on genocide (see Smythies, 2007, for details). For example, Dawkins states that he knows that this life is the only life we have. How could he possibly know that? In these discussions I am reminded of some tadpoles in a muddy pond complaining that they cannot understand the special theory of relativity.
I think that you see from what I say later in this letter that I totally agree with your statement that “Scientism leads to Nihilism.” This is quite evident to me and many others also. Your next point was concerning the evidence that is out there that both religious people and atheists have to wrestle with. I think you will be surprised how much wrestled with this evidence and how he never really was at people with the idea that time and chance had created such a place as earth.
The fact that were associated with Aldous Huxley leads me to believe you are a DOUBTING THOMAS type. YOU MAY FIND IT INTERESTING THAT CHARLES DARWIN WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF THE BIBLE. When I read the book Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters, I also read a commentary on it by Francis Schaeffer and I wanted to both quote some of Charles Darwin’s own words to you and then include the comments of Francis Schaeffer on those words. I have also enclosed a CD with two messages from Adrian Rogers and Bill Elliff concerning Darwinism.
“It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide…Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose.”
Francis Schaeffer noted:
What he is saying is if you say there is a first cause, then the mind says, “Where did this come from?” I think this is a bit old fashioned, with some of the modern thinkers, this would not have carry as much weight today as it did when Darwin expressed it. Jean Paul Sartre said it as well as anyone could possibly say it. The philosophic problem is that something is there and not nothing being there. No one has the luxury of beginning with nothing. Nobody I have ever read has put forth that everything came from nothing. I have never met such a person in all my reading,or all my discussion. If you are going to begin with nothing being there, it has to be nothing nothing, and it can’t be something nothing. When someone says they believe nothing is there, in reality they have already built in something there. The only question is do you begin with an impersonal something or a personal something. All human thought is shut up to these two possibilities. Either you begin with an impersonal and then have Darwin’s own dilemma which impersonal plus chance, now he didn’t bring in the amount of time that modern man would though. Modern man has brought in huge amounts of time into the equation as though that would make a difference because I have said many times that time can’t make a qualitative difference but only a quantitative difference. The dilemma is it is either God or chance. Now you find this intriguing thing in Darwin’s own situation, he can’t understand how chance could have produced these two great factors of the universe and its form and the mannishness of man.
“Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt…”
Francis Schaeffer commented:
On the basis of his reason he has to say there must be an intelligent mind, someone analogous to man. You couldn’t describe the God of the Bible better. That is man is made in God’s image and therefore, you know a great deal about God when you know something about man. What he is really saying here is that everything in my experience tells me it must be so, and my mind demands it is so. Not just these feelings he talked about earlier but his MIND demands it is so, but now how does he counter this? How does he escape this? Here is how he does it!!!
Charles Darwin went on to observe: “—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”
Francis Schaeffer asserted:
So he says my mind can only come to one conclusion, and that is there is a mind behind it all. However, the doubt comes because his mind has come from the lowest form of earthworm, so how can I trust my mind. But this is a joker isn’t it? Then how can you trust his mind to support such a theory as this? He proved too much. The fact that Darwin found it necessary to take such an escape shows the tremendous weight of Romans 1, that the only escape he can make is to say how can I trust my mind when I come from the lowest animal the earthworm? Obviously think of the grandeur of his concept, I don’t think it is true, but the grandeur of his concept, so what you find is that Darwin is presenting something here that is wrong I feel, but it is not nothing. It is a tremendously grand concept that he has put forward. So he is accepting the dictates of his mind to put forth a grand concept which he later can’t accept in this basic area with his reason, but he rejects what he could accept with his reason on this escape. It really doesn’t make sense. This is a tremendous demonstration of the weakness of his own position.
Darwin also noted, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”
Francis Schaeffer remarked:
What a stupid reply and I didn’t say wicked. It just seems to me that here is 2 plus 2 equals 36 at this particular place.
Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
Francis Schaeffer observed:
Can you feel this man? He is in real agony. You can feel the whole of modern man in this tension with Darwin. My mind can’t accept that ultimate of chance, that the universe is a result of chance. He has said 3 or 4 times now that he can’t accept that it all happened by chance and then he will write someone else and say something different. How does he say this (about the mind of a monkey) and then put forth this grand theory? Wrong theory I feel but great just the same. Grand in the same way as when I look at many of the paintings today and I differ with their message but you must say the mark of the mannishness of man are one those paintings titanic-ally even though the message is wrong and this is the same with Darwin. But how can he say you can’t think, you come from a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s conviction, so how can you trust me? Trust me here, but not there is what Darwin is saying. In other words it is very selective.
Now we are down to the last year of Darwin’s life.
* The Duke of Argyll (Good Words, April 1885, p. 244) has recorded a few words on this subject, spoken by my father in the last year of his life. “. . . in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms,and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.'”
Francis Schaeffer summarized :
And this is the great Darwin, and it makes you cry inside. This is the great Darwin and he ends as a man in total tension.
“It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide.”
Francis Schaeffer observed:
So he sees here exactly the same that I would labor and what Paul gives in Romans chapter one, and that is first this tremendous universe [and it’s form] and the second thing, the mannishness of man and the concept of this arising from chance is very difficult for him to come to accept and he is forced to leap into this, his own kind of Kierkegaardian leap, but he is forced to leap into this because of his presuppositions but when in reality the real world troubles him. He sees there is no third alternative. If you do not have the existence of God then you only have chance. In my own lectures I am constantly pointing out there are only two possibilities, either a personal God or this concept of the impersonal plus time plus chance and Darwin understood this . You will notice that he divides it into the same exact two points that Paul does in Romans chapter one into and that Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) will in the problem of existence, the external universe, and man and his consciousness. Paul points out there are these two steps that man is confronted with, what I would call two things in the real world. The universe and it’s form and I usually quote Jean Paul Sartre here, and Sartre says the basic philosophic problem is that something is there rather than nothing is there and I then I add at the point the very thing that Darwin feels and that is it isn’t a bare universe that is out there, it is an universe in a specific form. I always bring in Einstein and the uniformity of the form of the universe and that it is constructed as a well formulated word puzzle or you have Carl Gustav Jung who says two things cut across a man’s will that he can not truly be autonomous, the external world and what Carl Gustav Jung would call his “collected unconsciousness.” It is the thing that churns up out of man, the mannishness of man. Darwin understood way back here this is a real problem. So he says “the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe,” part one, the real world, the external universe, and part two “with our conscious selves arose through chance” and then he goes on and says this is not “an argument of real value.” This only thing he has to put in its place is his faith in his own theory.
Francis Schaeffer noted that in Darwin’s 1876 Autobiography that Darwin he is going to set forth two arguments for God in this and again you will find when he comes to the end of this that he is in tremendous tension. Darwin wrote,
At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons.Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.
Francis Schaeffer remarked:
Now Darwin says when I look back and when I look at nature I came to the conclusion that man can not be just a fly! But now Darwin has moved from being a younger man to an older man and he has allowed his presuppositions to enter in to block his logic. These things at the end of his life he had no intellectual answer for. To block them out in favor of his theory. Remember the letter of his that said he had lost all aesthetic senses when he had got older and he had become a clod himself. Now interesting he says just the same thing, but not in relation to the arts, namely music, pictures, etc, but to nature itself. Darwin said, “But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…” So now you see that Darwin’s presuppositions have not only robbed him of the beauty of man’s creation in art, but now the universe. He can’t look at it now and see the beauty. The reason he can’t see the beauty is for a very, very , very simple reason: THE BEAUTY DRIVES HIM TO DISTRACTION. THIS IS WHERE MODERN MAN IS AND IT IS HELL. The art is hell because it reminds him of man and how great man is, and where does it fit in his system? It doesn’t. When he looks at nature and it’s beauty he is driven to the same distraction and so consequently you find what has built up inside him is a real death, not only the beauty of the artistic but the beauty of nature. He has no answer in his logic and he is left in tension. He dies and has become less than human because these two great things (such as any kind of art and the beauty of nature) that would make him human stand against his theory.
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DO THESE WORDS OF DARWIN APPLY TO YOU TODAY? “I am like a man who has become colour-blind.”
One of the most important questions to face our generation is this: “Are human beings simply the product of millions of years of mindless, evolutionary mutations and adaptations, or are we the creation of an infinitely wise, powerful, and loving God?”
The answer to that question is critical. Why? Because it determines your attitude toward God in heaven and mankind on earth. The debate over human origin is one of the most critical issues of our times.
It’s hard to measure the enormous damage inflicted by Darwinian evolution, the teaching that life arose from a spontaneous spark in a pond of primordial ooze. The amazing thing is that influential scientists themselves are now denying Darwin’s theory as impossible. Yet its destructive effects remain.
For instance, if man is an accident of nature, then there is no fixed standard of right and wrong. So what the Bible calls sexual perversion is now a “lifestyle.” And a human life can be readily destroyed, whether in the womb or partially delivered.
Worst of all, evolution has helped destroy belief in God for millions. Denying biblical creation, evolutionists have “changed the truth of God into a lie” (Romans 1:25).
Should we be surprised that euthanasia is gaining widespread acceptance in our society or that the tide of abortion cannot be turned? Is it any wonder that sexual perversion is received as a valid alternative lifestyle? We have taught our children that they are just another species of animal – and they are finally beginning to act like animals! And our children and grandchildren are still being fed this lie today.
THE DECEIT OF EVOLUTION
What is behind this whole idea of evolution? Why is it such an emotional issue? Why can’t the world simply agree that there is no creation without a Creator, and out of nothing, nothing comes?
Humanist Aldous Huxley expressed the answer to those questions in his book, Ends and Means. Huxley said he and his contemporaries did not want government or morality. So they chose evolution in order to shut the mouths of those who believe in special creation.
For more than 100 years, the evolutionists have succeeded in convincing people that evolution is the only logical, scientific, and intelligent theory of human origin.
But this campaign has been carried out amid deceit and slight of hand on the part of many evolutionists. We’ve all seen the creative drawings of supposed ancestors of mankind, built on a few teeth or a piece of a skull. And the fossil hoaxes perpetrated over the last century are well known.
No wonder in his book Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, the Swedish embryologist, Soren Lovtrup, suggests that he believes that some day Darwinism “will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.”
THREE TELLING ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION
1. The fossil record. Not only is the so-called missing link still missing, all of the transitional life forms so crucial to evolutionary theory are missing from the fossil record. There are thousands of missing links, not one!
2. The second law of thermodynamics. This law states that energy is winding down and that matter left to itself tends toward chaos and randomness, not greater organization and complexity. Evolution demands exactly the opposite process, which is observed nowhere in nature.
3. The origin of life. Evolution offers no answers to the origin of life. It simply pushes the question farther back in time, back to some primordial event in space or an act of spontaneous generation in which life simply sprang from nothing.
____________
As a secularist you believe that it is sad indeed that millions of Christians are hoping for heaven but no heaven is waiting for them. Paul took a close look at this issue too. I Corinthians 15 asserts:
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
I sent you a CD that starts off with the song DUST IN THE WIND by Kerry Livgren of the group KANSAS which was a hit song in 1978 when it rose to #6 on the charts because so many people connected with the message of the song. It included these words, “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
Kerry Livgren himself said that he wrote the song because he saw where man was without a personal God in the picture. Solomon pointed out in the Book of Ecclesiastes that those who believe that God doesn’t exist must accept three things. FIRST, death is the end and SECOND, chance and time are the only guiding forces in this life. FINALLY, power reigns in this life and the scales are never balanced. The Christian can face death and also confront the world knowing that it is not determined by chance and time alone and finally there is a judge who will balance the scales.
Both Kerry Livgren and the bass player Dave Hope of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and Dave Hope had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same interview can be seen on You Tube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. DAVE HOPE is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.
About the film:
In 1973, six guys in a local band from America’s heartland began a journey that surpassed even their own wildest expectations, by achieving worldwide superstardom… watch the story unfold as the incredible story of the band KANSAS is told for the first time in the DVD Miracles Out of Nowhere.
In 1932 Smythies enrolled at Cheltenham College Junior School, transferred to Rugby School in 1936, and thence to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1940 (18) and to University College Hospital, London in 1942 where he studied medicine (19). He graduated M.B., B.Chir. (Cantab) in 1945. After two years as a Surgeon-Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. as ship’s doctor on H.M.S. Porlock Bay based in Bermuda, he completed his basic medical postgraduate training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, before selecting neuropsychiatry for a speciality. Two weeks into his first psychiatric residency at St. George’s Hospital, London (20), noting the close chemical relation between the psychotomimetic drug mescaline and the neurotransmitter catecholamines, he suggested that schizophrenia might be caused by some abnormality in catecholamine metabolism that produced a mescaline-like substance in the brain. In collaboration with the organic chemist John Harley-Mason and Humphry Osmond his psychiatric colleague at St. George’s, he developed this idea, into the first specific biochemical theory of schizophrenia—the transmethylation hypothesis (5).
Inspired by the fact that mescaline produces such remarkable effects on all human mental faculties and by the interdisciplinary work of Albert Schweitzer, in the same year Smythies decided to tackle the mind-brain problem in a systematic way i.e. by undertaking a rigorous training in neuroscience, experimental psychology and philosophy. So first he worked for one year as a resident in the EEG Department at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London (21). He then took an M.Sc. degree in neuroanatomy, philosophy and cultural anthropology with the neuroanatomist William C. Gibson at the University of British Columbia (22). The neuroanatomical research involved was a study of the synaptic structure in human cortex as revealed by silver staining and was awarded a post-graduate M.D degree by Cambridge (23). His teacher in philosophy was the distinguished American philosopher Avrum Stroll, who became a lifelong mentor and friend. This was followed during the tenure of a Nuffield Fellowship by six months with the Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles in neurophysiology and 18 months at the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge with Oliver Zangwillstudying the stroboscopic patterns (the complex geometrical hallucinations induced by looking at a flickering light). This work has been extensively reviewed by John Geiger (24). Then Smythies worked a further two years in neuropharmacology with Harold E. Himwich in Galesburg, Illinois and with Hudson Hoagland at the Worcester Foundation, before returning to London where he completed his formal clinical psychiatric training with Sir Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley Hospital (25). He then joined the Faculty of the University of Edinburgh for twelve years, first as senior lecturer then reader (26), before being invited to a personal chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, funded by the Ireland family, where he stayed for eighteen years (27).
In 1956 Smythies published his first book “Analysis of Perception” (28) on the mind-brain problem in which he presented a new theory — extended materialism — based on an analysis of fundamental flaws in the current orthodox theory (mind-brain identity) and previous work by Joseph Priestley, C.D. Broad, H.H. Price and Bertrand Russell. A second book “The Walls of Plato’s Cave” followed in 1994 (17) on the same topic. This book was reviewed by Robert Almader (29) who said: “This is certainly one of the four or five most arresting and compelling books written on the nature of consciousness, the mind-brain problem, and human personality.” The theory extends our concepts of consciousness and analyses possible geometrical and topological relations between phenomenal space and physical space linked to brane theory in physics. Recently the distinguished British physicist Bernard Carr (30), following a different line of research, has presented a very similar theory as the basis for a necessary new paradigm shift in cosmology. In 1998 wrote “Every person’s guide to Antioxidants” (37). Smythies gives an account of his work on synaptic plasticity in his book “The Dynamic Neuron” (2002) (8).
Smythies has served as president of the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology from 1970 to 1974 (31), consultant to the World Health Organization from 1963 to 1968 (32), and editor of the International Review of Neurobiologyfrom 1958 to 1991. He was elected a member of the Athenaeum in 1968 (33). He has published over 200 scientific papers and 16 books.
For the last two decades of his life, Smythies worked with Professor Ramachandran’s Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, latterly on the function of the claustrum as well as the epigenetics of neurocomputation, exosomes and telocytes (37–54).
On 2 December 1950 Smythies married Vanna Gattorno of Trieste, Italy. John and Vanna published their joint autobiography “Two Coins in the Fountain” in 2006 (34). Smythies is also the author of a book of poems entitled “Poems from the Edge of Time” (35), and a satirical play “The Trial of God” (36). He died in January 2019 at the age of 96.[3][4]
^Dawkins, Richard, 1941-. An Appetite For Wonder : The Making of a Scientist : A Memoir(PDF). London. p. 12. ISBN9780552779050. OCLC870425057. Olive and Evelyn’s eldest son, my father’s taciturn first cousin Bertram (‘Billy’) Smythies, was also in the forest service […] Bertram’s younger brother John Smythies departed from family tradition and became a distinguished neuroscientist and authority on schizophrenia and psychedelic drugs, living in California, where he is credited with inspiring Aldous Huxley to take mescaline and cleanse his ‘doors of perception’. […] Yorick Smythies, another first cousin of my father, was a devoted amanuensis of the philosopher Wittgenstein.
4. Smythies J.R and Corbett L.C. Psychiatry for Students of Medicine. London, Heinemann, 1976. Spanish edition, 1984.
5. Smythies J.R & Osmond H. (1952) Schizophrenia. A New Approach. J Ment Sci., pp. 98, 309–316.
6. Smythies J. (Editor) Schizophrenia. A disorder of synaptic plasticity. Special volume (59) in The International Review of Neurobiology, San Diego, Elsevier, 2004.
7. Smythies J. R. “Hallucinogenic Drugs”, Chapter 18 in Modern Trends in Neurology, Dennis Williams, editor. 3rd edition. London, Butterworth, 1962.
8. Smythies J. R. The Dynamic Neuron. Cambridge MA., MIT Press, 2002.
9. Smythies J. The Neuromodulators. International Review of Neurobiology, San Diego, Elsevier, 2005.
10. Smythies J. R. The role of free radicals in the brain in health and disease in relation to synaptic plasticity. In: Free Radicals in Brain Pathophysiology. (G. Poli, E. Cadenas & L. Packer, eds.) New York, Dekker.
11. Smythies J. 2009, “Philosophy, perception, and neuroscience” Perception, pp. 38, 638–651.
12. Smythies J.R. Brain and Mind, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, editor and contributor of essay “The representative theory of perception”, 1965.
13. Smythies J. R. The Neurological Foundations of Psychiatry. Oxford, Blackwell. 1966.
14. Smythies J. Science and ESP. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
16. Smythies J. Brain Mechanisms and Behaviour. Oxford, Blackwell, 1970. Japanese edition, 1973.
17. Smythies J. The Walls of Plato’s Cave. Aldershot, Avebury Press, 1994.
18. Records of Christs’s College, Cambridge.
19. Records of University College Hospital, London.
20. Records of St. George’s Hospital, London
21. Records of the National Hospital, Queen Square, London.
22. Records of the University of British Columbia.
23. Smythies J. R., Gibson W.C., & Purkis V.A. (1957) The distribution and morphology of boutons termineaux in the human cerebrum. J Comp Neur., pp. 108, 175.
24. Geiger, John. Chapel of Extreme Experience. Toronto, Gutter Press, 2002. pp. 27–45.
25. Records of the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London.
26. Records of the University of Edinburgh.
27. Records of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
28. Smythies, J. R. Analysis of Perception. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.
29. Almader, R. (1997) Journal for Scientific Exploration, pp. 10, 314–318.
30. Carr, B. (2008) “Worlds apart?” Proc.Soc.Psychical Research, pp. 59, 1–96.
31. Records of the International Society for Neuropsychopharmacology.
32. Records of the World Health Organization.
33. Records of the Athanaenum Club, Pall Mall, London.
34. Smythies J. & Smythies V. Two Coins in the Fountain. (joint autobiography). Amazon.com (Booksurge) 2006.
35. Smythies J. Poems from the Edge of Time. Pulborough, Ellis, 2002.
36. Smythies J. The Trial of God. (satirical play) Amazon.com (Booksurge) 2006.
37. Smythies J. Every Person’s Guide to Antioxidants. Rutgers University Press 1998.
38. Smythies JR. The Dynamic Neuron. Cambridge MA. MIT Press, 2002.
39. Smythies, J., Edelstein, L., Ramachandran, V. The Claustrum: Structural, Functional and Clinical Neuroscience. San Diego. Academic Press (Elsevier). 2014.
40. Smythies J, Edelstein L, Ramachandran V. (2012) Hypotheses relating to the function of the claustrum. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. 2012;6:53. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00053. Epub 2012 Aug 2.
41 Smythies J, Edelstein L. (2013) Transsynaptic modality codes in the brain: possible involvement of synchronized spike timing, microRNAs, exosomes and epigenetic processes. Frontiers in Intregrative Neuroscience. 2012;6:126. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00126. Epub 2013 Jan 4.
42. Smythies J. (2013) Schizophrenia: one coat of many colors. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 27 May 2013 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2013.00043.
43. Edelstein L, Smythies J. (2013) Spike dynamic and epigenetic malfunctions in epilepsy: a tale of two codes. Frontiers in Epilepsy: 27 May 2013. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2013.00063.
44. Smythies J. Edelstein L. (2013) Interactions between the spike code and the epigenetic codeduring information processing in the brain. Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience. 8 July doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2013.00017
45. Smythies J, Edelstein L. (2013) Telocytes, exosomes, gap junctions and the cytoskeleton: the makings of a primitive nervous system? Front. Cell. Neurosci. | doi: 10.3389/fncel.2013.00278.
46. Smythies J, Edelstein L, Ramachandran V (2014). Hypotheses relating to the function of the claustrum II: instructional oscillations and dendritic integration. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 8:7. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2014.00007.
47. Smythies J, Edelstein L. (2013) Hypotheses concerning how Otx2 makes its incredible journey: a hitchhiker on the road to Rome. Front. Mol. Neurosci. 6, 55. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2013.00055. eCollection 2013.
48. Edelstein L, Fuxe K and Smythies J (2014). Life without glutamate: the epigenetic effects of glutamate deletion. Front. Mol. Neurosci. 7:14. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2014.00014.
49. Smythies LE, Smythies JR. (2014) Exosomes in the gut. Front Immunol. 2014 Mar 17;5:104. eCollection 2014.
50. Edelstein L, Smythies J (2014). Epigenetic aspects of telocytes/cordocytes: jacks of all trades, masters of most. Front Cell. Neurosci. 8:32. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2014.00032.
51. Edelstein L, Smythies J. (2014) The role of telocytes in morphogenetic bioelectrical signaling: once more unto the breach. Front Mol Neurosci. 2014 May 13;7:41. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2014.00041. eCollection 2014.
52. Smythies J, Edelstein L. (2014) The desferrioxamine-prochlorperazine coma—clue to the role of dopamine-iron recycling in the synthesis of hydrogen peroxide in the brain. Front.Mol.Neurosci.
53. Smythies J, Edelstein L, Ramachandran V. (2014) Molecular mechanisms for the inheritance of acquired characteristics-exosomes, microRNA shuttling, fear and stress: Lamarck resurrected? Front. Genet. 2014 May 15;5:133. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2014.00133. eCollection 2014.
54. Edelstein L, Smythies J. The role of epigenetic-related codes in neurocomputation: dynamic hardware in the brain. in Edelstein L, Smythies J, Noble D. (Editors) Epigenetic information-processing mechanisms in the brain. Phil.Trans.R.Soc.B. Theme Issue vol. 369, No. 1652, 26 September 2014.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the second video below in the 95th clip in this series are his words but today I just wanted to pause and look at this life.
Quote from Dr. John Raymond Smythies
I would like to describe how mescaline works. These hallucination drugs have a very specific action in two ways. Number 1 they produce fantastic visual hallucinations. These are described by the people who have them (most of them are down to earth scientists such as MacDonald Critchley) as being more beautiful than anything they have ever seen in normal art. Some of these people have the sort of experience as union with God, mystical experiences and so on.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
“Beverly Hills” is a song by American rock band Weezer. It is the first single from the band’s fifth album, Make Believe. “Beverly Hills” was released to US radio on March 28, 2005. The song features Stephanie Eitel of Agent Sparks on the chorus on backup vocals, performing the “gimme, gimme” hook.
Rivers Cuomo‘s story behind “Beverly Hills”: “I was at the opening of the new Hollywood Bowl and I flipped through the program and I saw a picture of Wilson Phillips. And for some reason I just thought how nice it would be to marry, like, an ‘established’ celebrity and live in Beverly Hills and be part of that world. And it was a totally sincere desire. And then I wrote that song, Beverly Hills. For some reason, by the time it came out—and the video came out—it got twisted around into something that seemed sarcastic. But originally it wasn’t meant to be sarcastic at all.”[3]
Cuomo stated that “Beverly Hills” and its solo, third verse, and last chorus of “Falling for You” (from Pinkerton) are his proudest musical achievements: “It’s incredibly fun: a great beat, guitar riffs, catchy vocal style. Besides that, I think the lyrics are incredible in a very understated way. I might as well enjoy my life and watch the stars play. I love it! With this one song we were able to transcend our little niche and connect with all kinds of people, young and old, from all kinds of backgrounds.”[4]
This section needs additional citations for verification.(March 2021)The song is the band’s most commercially successful single. It topped the BillboardModern Rock Tracks chart for a week, spending months near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at number 10) and being certified gold on June 6, 2005; it was also the band’s first song to chart there since “Undone – The Sweater Song” at number 57 in 1994 after 11 years since the rest of Weezer’s other hits from the past had only managed to chart only on the Hot 100 Airplay or the Bubbling Under Hot 100chart. As of September 2018, it is still the band’s highest-charting Hot 100 single. As of January 2006, the digital single has been purchased over 962,000 times on iTunes. It also did very well on other Billboard charts, such as Adult Top 40 (number eight peak), Mainstream Top 40 (number two peak), Hot Digital Songs (number one peak) and Mainstream Rock Tracks (number 26 peak).
The song also made the top 10 on the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number nine, and remaining on the chart for five weeks. The song was nominated for Best Rock Song at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards, the first ever nomination for the band. The video for the song was nominated at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards for Best Rock Video. The song won College Song of the Year at the 54th Annual Broadcast Music Incorporated Pop Awards.[5]“Beverly Hills” stayed at number one on the Modern Rock charts for one week. It was the first number one for Weezer, but this record was later met with “Perfect Situation,” Make Believe‘s third single, which held the pole position for four weeks. The song was the third highest selling digital download of 2005 in the US according to Nielsen SoundScan.[6]
I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s favorite cities!!!!
8-23-16
Dear Hef,
I arrived today in Vegas at 4pm on 8-23-16. While I was in the front office of the hotel there a young man checking in and he was asked how many would be staying in his room this week and he gave a very ambiguous answer.
It made me think of these words from King Solomon in Proverbs 7: I spotted a young man without any sense Arriving at the corner of the street where she lived, Just then, a woman met him— she’d been lying in wait for him, dressed to seduce him. Brazen and brash she was, Walking the streets….She boldly took his arm and said, Come, let’s make love all night,
All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, for many a victim has she laid low, and all her slain are a mighty throng.
I wrote to Hefner in an earlier letter these words:
Francis Schaeffer observed concerning Solomon, “You can not know woman by knowing 1000 women.”
__________
Exalting Jesus in Ecclesiastes Daniel Akin, Jonathan Akin and Tony Merida:
Finally, Solomon indulged in sexual pleasure. In addition to 700 wives (1 Kgs 11), he had 300 concubines (cf. Eccl 2:8). A concubine was a woman given to a man simply for the purpose of sexual pleasure. Concubines were objects. Thus, Solomon could out-locker-room-boast basketball all-star Wilt Chamberlain (who once infamously claimed to have been with 20,000 women!) and infamous playboy Hugh Hefner. So many people are on an endless search for sexual pleasure. They may not have a thousand women literally, but they have that many or more in their pornographic internet history or their romance novels. They constantly look for a new illicit experience in order to be satisfied, but like Solomon they come away empty and disappointed—the high only lasts so long.
_
Genital elephantiasisis an important medical problem in the tropics. It usually affects young and productive age group, and is associated with physical disability and extreme mental anguish. The majority of cases are due to filariasis; however, a small but significant proportion of patients develop genital elephantiasis due to bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mainly lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) and donovanosis.
The counterfeit pleasure of an affair can never overcome the ways infidelity can destroy a life and marriage.
By Dave Boehi
We were praying for someone who was cheating on his wife. And I was struck by what one person said in his prayer: “Lord, work in his heart so that he will think less about the pleasure he is experiencing and more about the pain he is causing.”
That seemed quite appropriate to me. A spouse who is caught up in adultery is living only for the moment, caught up in a fantasy of excitement and desire, and ignoring the very real consequences.
Recently a seminary paper came across my desk titled “100 Consequences of Adultery,” written by Philip Jay, a student at Phoenix Seminary. The list provides a stark wake-up call about the ways infidelity can destroy a life and marriage. Here’s a selection from Jay’s list, presented with his permission:
If I committed adultery…
My relationship with God would suffer from a break in fellowship.
I would need to seek forgiveness from my Lord.
I would suffer from the emotional consequences of guilt.
I would spend countless hours replaying the failure.
My wife would suffer the scars of this abuse more deeply than I could begin to describe.
My wife would spend countless hours in counseling.
My wife’s recovery would be long and painful.
Her pain would grieve me deeply and compound my own suffering and shame.
Our relationship would suffer a break in trust, fellowship, and intimacy.
We would be together, yet feel great loneliness.
The reputation of my family would suffer loss.
My sons would be deeply disappointed and bewildered.
My grandchildren would not understand.
My friends would be disappointed and would question my integrity.
I would lose my job at church.
My witness among neighbors would become worthless.
My witness to my brother would be worthless.
My testimony among my wife’s family would be damaged.
I might never be employed by a church again.
I might never be in men’s ministry leadership.
I would suffer God’s discipline.
Satan would be thrilled at my failure.
Satan would work overtime to be sure my shame never departed.
My wife might divorce me.
My children might never speak to me.
Our mutual friends would shy away from us and break fellowship.
I would bring emotional pain to the woman.
I would bring reproach upon the woman.
If the woman is married, her husband might attempt to bring harm.
He might divorce her.
An unwanted child could be produced.
My part in conception might trigger an abortion, the killing of an innocent child.
Disease might result.
Some might conclude that all Christians are hypocrites.
My business could fail because I couldn’t be trusted.
My leadership among those I have led in the past might also be diminished in impact.
My zeal for ministry would suffer and possibly result in others not continuing in ministry.
My health would suffer.
I might have to start life over again.
This same sin might be visited upon my family for four generations.
It’s a pretty sobering list, isn’t it? What’s even more sobering is that many people will consider these consequences and still proceed in their sin. The fantasy is more important to them than the reality.
Also note that, though the list reflects a man’s perspective, nearly all the consequences would also apply to a wife committing adultery. The biggest benefit of this list may be in helping all of us realize the need to set up strict safeguards to ensure that we are faithful in our marriage commitment. If I am convinced of what adultery would do to me and to my family, I will watch my wandering eyes, guard my thought life, and avoid any situations that could put me in harm’s way.
3. FamilyLife exists to help husbands and wives connect with each other around God’s best for their marriage and family. Articles like this are possible in part because of regular financial support of people like you. Will you help us help others with a gift today?
Meet the Author: Dave Boehi
Dave Boehi is a senior editor at FamilyLife. He has written one book (I Still Do), coauthored the Preparing for Marriage workbook, edited dozens of books and Bible studies, and produces the FamilyLife e-newsletter Help & Hope. Dave and his wife, Merry, live in Little Rock, Arkansas, and have two married daughters.
Ecclesiastes 2-3 Published on Sep 19, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 16, 2012 | Derek Neider _____________________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular […]
Is Love All You Need? Jesus v. Lennon Posted on January 19, 2011 by Jovan Payes 0 On June 25, 1967, the Beatles participated in the first worldwide TV special called “Our World”. During this special, the Beatles introduced “All You Need is Love”; one of their most famous and recognizable songs. In it, John Lennon […]
___________________ Something happened to the Beatles in their journey through the 1960’s and although they started off wanting only to hold their girlfriend’s hand it later evolved into wanting to smash all previous sexual standards. The Beatles: Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? _______ Beatle Ringo Starr, and his girlfriend, later his wife, […]
__________ Marvin Minsky __ I was sorry recently to learn of the passing of one of the great scholars of our generation. I have written about Marvin Minsky several times before in this series and today I again look at a letter I wrote to him in the last couple of years. It is my […]
Why was Tony Curtis on the cover of SGT PEPPERS? I have no idea but if I had to hazard a guess I would say that probably it was because he was in the smash hit SOME LIKE IT HOT. Above from the movie SOME LIKE IT HOT __ __ Jojo was a man who […]
__ Francis Schaeffer did not shy away from appreciating the Beatles. In fact, SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND album was his favorite and he listened to it over and over. I am a big fan of Francis Schaeffer but there are detractors that attack him because he did not have all the degrees that they […]
On 11-15-05 Adrian Rogers passed over to glory and since it is the 10th anniversary of that day I wanted to celebrate his life in two ways. First, I wanted to pass on some of the material from Adrian Rogers’ sermons I have sent to prominent atheists over the last 20 years. Second, I wanted […]
Looking back on his life as a Beatle Paul said at a certain age you start to think “Wow, I have to get serious. I can’t just be a playboy all of my life.” It is true that the Beatles wrote a lot about girls!!!!!! The Beatles – I Want To Hold your Hand [HD] Although […]
A CNN report says, “Making American cars greener is a key component of Biden’s economic and climate agendas… But the transition will be difficult; passenger vehicles contribute 29% of total US greenhouse gas emissions, and EVs and plug‐in hybrids combined only account for around 2% of the US auto sales, according to a UAW analysis.”
Similar claims – that “passenger vehicles contribute 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions” – have been echoed repeatedly for a decade but are totally false. The entire transportation sector accounts for 29% of U.S. greenhouse gases, according to the Energy Information Agency. But Transportation includes airplanes, trains, buses, large trucks, and pipelines.
The attached page from Chapter 2 of the latest Transportation Energy Data Bookshows that passenger cars and light trucks account for only 56.6% of the energy used in transportation. Since transportation‐related greenhouse gases are almost entirely from energy use, and transportation contributes 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, that means passenger vehicles account for roughly 16.4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Confusing transportation with passenger cars is a familiar bait and switch trick long used to promote taxpayer subsidies for alternative fuels and vehicles. It was an old hoax back in 2012 when I labeled it “The Transportation Fallacy” in my chapter on “The Politics of Alternative Energy” in the Handbook of Oil Politics.
Remember that the U.S. accounts for only 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions (compared with 30% for China). That means U.S. passenger vehicles contribute only 16.4% to the country’s 15% share of global greenhouse gas emissions – less than 2.5%. But for the U.S. to achieve a 2.5% greenhouse gas reduction through this narrow channel would require abolishing and destroying all U.S. passenger vehicles.
No politician or green lobby is proposing to destroy all passenger vehicles and allow no future sales. Instead, the pricey yet symbolic gestures proposed by President Biden merely promise to gradually replace 276 million registered U.S. vehicles at a glacial pace: A mere 1.5 million of the nation’s 276 million vehicles were electric by 2019, and the average non‐electric vehicle lasts 11.6 years. Trying to dictate that half of future vehicles produced by EVs and hybrids does not tell us how many will be sold, even with fat rebates. Besides, new cars are a tiny fraction of the stock of older cars and trucks. Also, the assumed energy saving from substituting EVs for gasoline vehicles ignores the massive energy involved in manufacturing electric vehicles, and eventually recycling their batteries.
The real reasons we are deluged with so much costly lobbying and propagandizing for subsidizing electric cars are that politicians love to take credit for handing out generous subsidies and those expecting to receive those subsidies will gladly express their gratitude by handing out generous campaign contributions.
Those who claim to believe the childish fantasy that gradually replacing new cars and light trucks in this country with electric models could make any change whatsoever in worldwide average temperatures are either fooling themselves or they are trying to fool taxpayers. To illustrate such deception or self‐deception, The Washington Post notes that “Biden called for spending $174 billion ‘to win the EV market,’ including a nationwide network of 500,000 chargers… as well as $100 billion of consumer rebates for electric vehicles.” More recently, the article adds, “29 members of the House signed on to a letter calling on Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D‐Calif.) to ‘match or exceed’ Biden’s original $174 billion electric‐vehicle proposal.” The previously mentioned CNN story also notes that “An amendment from Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan would provide a base credit of $7,500 to help consumers purchase electric vehicles, an additional $2,500 credit for vehicles made in America and another $2,500 credit for vehicles made with union labor.”
These schemes for an enthusiastic EV spending spree have nothing to do with the international climate and everything to do with domestic special interest politics.
John Stossel: Through 50 years of reporting on scares, only COVID proved true
By John Stossel
Published November 17, 2020 at 7:06pm
I hear that climate change will destroy much of the world.
“There will be irreversible damage to the planet!” warns a CNN anchor.
Joe Biden says he’ll spend $500 billion a year to fight what his website calls an “existential threat to life.”
Really?
I’m a consumer reporter. Over the years, alarmed scientists have passionately warned me about many things they thought were about to kill Americans.
Asbestos in hair dryers, coffee, computer terminals, electric power lines, microwave ovens, cellphones (brain tumors!), electric blankets, herbicides, plastic residue, etc., are causing “America’s cancer epidemic”!
If those things don’t get us, “West Nile Virus will!” Or SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, flesh-eating bacteria or “killer bees.”
Experts told me millions would die on Jan. 1, 2000, because computers couldn’t handle the switch from 1999. Machines would fail; planes would crash.
The scientists were well-informed specialists in their fields. They were sincerely alarmed. The more knowledge you have about a threat, the more alarmed you get.
Yet, mass death didn’t happen. COVID-19 has been the only time in my 50 years of reporting that a scare proved true.
Maybe you accepted the phrase I used above: “America’s cancer epidemic.” But there is no cancer epidemic. Cancer rates are down. We simply live long enough to get diseases like cancer. But people think there’s a cancer epidemic.
The opposite is true. As we’ve been exposed to more plastics, pesticides, mysterious chemicals, food additives and new technologies, we live longer than ever!
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That’s why I’m skeptical when I’m told: Climate change is a crisis!
Climate change is real. It’s a problem, but I doubt that it’s “an existential threat.”
Saying that makes alarmists mad.
When Marc Morano says it, activists try to prevent him from speaking.
“They do not want dissent,” says Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com, a website that rebuts much of what climate activists teach in schools.
“It’s an indoctrination that’s so complete that by the time (kids) get to high school, they’re not even aware that there’s any scientific dissent.”
Morano’s new movie, “Climate Hustle 2,” presents that dissent. My new video this week features his movie.
Morano argues that politicians use fear of global warming to gain power.
“Climate Hustle 2” features Sen. Chuck Schumer shouting: “If we would do more on climate change, we’d have fewer of these hurricanes and other types of storms! Everyone knows that!”
But everyone doesn’t know that. Many scientists refute it. Congress’ own hearings include testimony about how our warmer climate has not caused increases in the number of hurricanes or tornadoes. “Climate Hustle 2” includes many examples like that.
“Why should we believe you?” I ask Morano. “You’re getting money from the fossil fuel industry.” After all, Daily Kos calls him “Evil Personified” and says ExxonMobil funds him.
“Not at all,” he replies. “I’m paid by about 90% individual contributions from around the country. Why would ExxonMobil give me money (when) they want to appear green?”
Morano’s movie frustrates climate activists by pointing out how hypocritical some are.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio says he lives a “green lifestyle … (using) energy-efficient appliances. I drive a hybrid car.”
Then he flies to Europe to attend a party.
I like watching Morano point out celebrities’ hypocrisy, but think one claim in his movie goes too far.
“Stopping climate change is not about saving the planet,” says narrator Kevin Sorbo. “It’s about climate elites trying to convince us to accept a future where they call all the shots.”
I push back at Morano: “I think they are genuinely concerned, and they want to save us.”
“Their vision of saving us is putting them in charge,” he replies.
And if they’re in charge, he says, they will destroy capitalism.
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State of the Union 2013
Published on Feb 13, 2013
Cato Institute scholars Michael Tanner, Alex Nowrasteh, Julian Sanchez, Simon Lester, John Samples, Pat Michaels, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Michael F. Cannon, Jim Harper, Malou Innocent, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus and Neal McCluskey respond to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.
Today I am taking a look at the response of the scholars of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute scholars to the 2013 State of the Union Address.
Swept into office four years ago based, in part, on promises to slow sea-level rise, President Obama initiated a radical climate agenda. It seems we are seeing a rerun in 2013. It is worth asking what is different four years after his first State of the Union Address?
There have been four more years of no global warming. In 2010, there had been no significant world temperature increase for over a decade. The streak is now 16 years long. We have four years of costly lessons on the waste and inefficiency of green-energy subsidies.
The scientific basis for catastrophic climate change gets weaker and weaker. The economic argument for green subsidies has already collapsed. It is time for the administration to quit using both arguments to justify a regulatory and fiscal power grab.
– David W. Kreutzer, PhD, research fellow in energy economics and climate change, Center for Data Analysis
Is President Obama gutting the welfare reform that Bill Clinton signed into law? Morning Bell: Obama Denies Gutting Welfare Reform Amy Payne August 8, 2012 at 9:15 am The Obama Administration came out swinging against its critics on welfare reform yesterday, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying the charge that the Administration gutted the successful […]
Senator Blunt Vows to Keep Pressure on President Obama Over Contraceptive Mandate Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Feb 13, 2012 http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/13/sen-blunt-vows-to-keep-pressure-on-obama-… | Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced legislation to protect religious organizations from Obamacare’s overreach last summer. Now, as President Obama presses forward with his anti-conscience mandate, Blunt is prepared to keep the pressure on the […]
Max Brantley is wrong about Tom Cotton’s accusation concerning the rise of welfare spending under President Obama. Actually welfare spending has been increasing for the last 12 years and Obama did nothing during his first four years to slow down the rate of increase of welfare spending. Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation has noted: […]
Sen. Mitch McConnell: Americans Don’t Approve of Anything Obama Has Done Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Dec 8, 2011 In an exclusive interview at The Heritage Foundation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sharply criticized President Obama for engaging in class warfare and accused him of shifting the focus away from his own failed policies in […]
Obamanomics: A Legacy of Wasteful Spending Published on Aug 12, 2012 by CFPEcon101 This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation highlights egregious examples of wasteful spending from the so-called stimulus legislation and explains why government spending hurts economic performance. **Links to additional reading material** Thomas Sowell, “Stimulus or Sedative?” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/09/stimulus_or_sedative_104… Veronique de […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. Is […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. The […]
Thomas Sowell (This letter was mailed before September 1, 2012) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a […]
I have been writing letters to President Obama almost all of 2012. I have received several responses from the White House but none of the responses have been personal responses from the President. Below is a letter I wrote to the President and a form letter response that I got followed by links to other […]
“Why does the abortion industry assume the right to play God?” asks Charles Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Pictured: an unborn baby at 20 weeks. (Computer illustration: Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
A new report from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute highlights scientific facts about babies at 15 weeks of gestation in the run-up to a monumental and contentious abortion case before the Supreme Court.
The report, called “15 Facts at 15 Weeks” and first obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation, is intended to help the public, media, and lawmakers understand the science behind fetal gestation before the high court considers a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks.
“How can you follow the science of a 15-week preborn baby already being left-handed, with a heart that’s beat nearly 16 million times, and still fight to deny this little boy or little girl all of their unalienable rights?” Charlotte Lozier Institute President Charles A. Donavan asked in a written statement. “Why does the abortion industry assume the right to play God?”
The institute’s report dives into the details of fetal development, noting that an unborn baby at 15 weeks’ gestation has all its major organs formed and that the baby’s heart, which pumps 26 quarts of blood per day, has beaten approximately 15,800,000 times.
Each of the unborn baby’s fingers can move separately, the report says, and the baby will choose between sucking its left or right thumb and will respond to touch and taste.
The baby also will have been practicing breathing for over six weeks and can feel pain, according to the report. An unborn baby girl already will have most of the eggs that she ever will produce at 15 weeks, and much of the baby’s skeleton will have hardened from cartilage into bonet.
“It is interesting to note that in prenatal surgeries, the fetus is anesthetized separately from the mom to create the best outcomes,” Lozier scholar Katrina Furth said in a written statement, adding:
These preborn babies show preferences independent from their mothers and have goal-directed behaviors. To say these amazing, tiny baby girls and boys don’t deserve the same human rights as you and I is to deny the clear evidence of science.
The case known as Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is about a 2018 Mississippi law challenged by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and the Mississippi Center for Justice on behalf of the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, which is called Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
After the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law in December 2019, Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to take up the case.
The Dobbs case will touch on the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 legalizing abortion across the nation, since the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether abortion bans prior to fetal viability are constitutional, signaling that the court is focused on the constitutionality of legal limits on late-term abortions.
“That the Supreme Court is considering this Mississippi law is a promising signal that perhaps a majority of justices wish to give states greater power to regulate abortion,” Steven H. Aden, chief legal officer and general counsel for Americans United for Life, said in a May statement. “At the same time, if the court rejects Mississippi’s commonsense HB 1510 protections, the pro-life movement will face a fundamental reckoning.”
I am a proud member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and I attended the convention in Dallas in July and we have officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
The article below notes:
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
Announcing he planned to introduce a copycat bill, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R), the founder and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, shared a template of legislation lawmakers in other states could fill in the blanks on and reproduce.
At the July 17th session of THE CHRISTIAN LAWMAKERS meeting in Dallas, I really got a lot out of the expert panel moderated by Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes entitled ABOLISHING ABORTION IN AMERICA. Here below is what Wikipedia says about Senator Hughes:
On March 11, 2021, Hughes introduced a fetal heartbeat bill entitled the Texas Heartbeat Bill (SB8) into the Texas Senate and state representative Shelby Slawson of Stephenville, Texas introduced a companion bill (HB1515) into the state house.[22]The bill allows private citizens to sue abortion providers after a fetal heartbeat has been detected.[22] The SB8 version of the bill passed both chambers and was signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on May 19, 2021.[22] It took effect on September 1, 2021.[22]
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human…
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Tucker: Democrats have abandoned their ‘my body, my choice’ argument
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert presides over a Senate committee at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. in this March 14, 2018, file photo. Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers met recently to talk model legislation and pass resolutions. Kelly P. Kissel, Associated Press
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers has officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
The model legislation, called the Heartbeat Model Act, was accepted unanimously by the executive committee during a Saturday meeting.
The Texas bill it is based upon, Senate Bill 8, bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The legislation also allows for any state resident to bring a civil suit against a doctor who performs an abortion after a heartbeat is detectable. Under the law, a woman who has an abortion would be liable to civil suits, as would anyone who supported her in the act — from family members to the receptionist who checks her in at a clinic.
Not only is the doctor liable, but anyone found aiding and abetting,” said Texas legislator Bryan Hughes, the bill’s author, during the Saturday meeting, which was led by the organization’s founder and president, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert.Texas state Rep. Bryan Hughes speaks during the opening session of the 2015 legislative session on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay, Associated Press
Speaking to the Deseret News on Monday, Rapert said the provision allowing residents to bring civil suits against anyone involved in an abortion is like “putting a SCUD missile on that heartbeat bill — they can’t stop it.”
Rapert was the author of a similar 2013 bill in Arkansas, portions of which were later struck down by a federal judge. At least a dozen states have implemented a variety of abortion restrictions in recent years, leading numerous observers to say that the landmark 1973 Supreme Court abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, is under threat.
Speaking Saturday to the Christian legislators gathered in Dallas, Hughes reminded the legislators that the Heartbeat Model Act is just a starting point and that the legislation will have to be tailored to work within each state’s laws.A anti-abortion supporter argues with those who attended a press conference and rally held by the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 25, 2015. Stacie Scott, Deseret News
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers formed last year with three key goals: to offer conservative, Christian legislators networking opportunities,; to help lawmakers share bills that have been successful in their states so that legislators elsewhere might push through similar legislation; and to support Christians running for local, state or national office.
At the policy conference last week, the organization worked toward meeting these goals in various ways, including by approving the Heartbeat Model Act. The executive committee also passed a resolution supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself from terror attacks” and creating a standing American-Israeli Committee.
Speaking to the executive committee, Rabbi Leonid Feldman, who was born in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned there for his pro-Israel activities, remarked that the Jewish people “remember our friends.”
This conference and this organization will be remembered by the Jewish people,” he said.
The organization also approved a resolution in support of “election integrity.”
The executive committee also approved a second piece of model legislation: the National Motto Display Model Act. Based on bills passed in Arkansas in 2017 and this year in Texas, the legislation requires public schools to display the national motto “In God We Trust” when printed versions of the motto are donated to schools or copies of the national motto are bought with funds from private donors.
“As the Texas House sponsor of the Motto Act, I am proud to see a model put out by the NACL so that legislators from every other state can have a mechanism to ensure our citizens — especially our school-age children — are reminded of our nation’s motto,” said Tom Oliverson, a state representative from Texas and chairman of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ national legislative council.
During the executive committee’s meeting on Saturday, Rapert said Hobby Lobby would make frames available for a reduced price if they’ll be used for national motto displays.
Asked Monday what other pieces of legislation the organization might adopt as model legislation in the future, Rapert told the Deseret News that the National Association of Christian Lawmakers is already weighing some options.
Since religious freedom is central to the organization, it could end up adopting model legislation similar to bills promoted in Texas this year by Oliverson. He supported three measures designed to make it harder for the government to force church closures during public emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and a bill that would ensure homeowners’ associations can’t infringe on homeowners’ rights to display religious symbols.
WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, for now stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state.
It is the strictest law against abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion. At least 12 other states have enacted bans early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
The high court’s order declining to halt the Texas law came just before midnight Wednesday. The majority said those bringing the case had not met the high burden required for a stay of the law.
“The Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”— Chief Justice John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts (Supreme Court)
“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts,” the unsigned order said.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented along with the court’s three liberal justices. Each of the four dissenting justices wrote separate statements expressing their disagreement with the majority.
Roberts noted that while the majority denied the request for emergency relief “the Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”
The vote in the case underscores the impact of the death of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year and then-president Donald Trump’s replacement of her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Had Ginsburg remained on the court there would have been five votes to halt the Texas law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called her conservative colleagues’ decision “stunning.” “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” she wrote.
“A majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”— Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Supreme Court)
Texas lawmakers wrote the law to evade federal court review by allowing private citizens to bring civil lawsuits in state court against anyone involved in an abortion, other than the patient. Other abortion laws are enforced by state and local officials, with criminal sanctions possible.
In contrast, Texas’ law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone involved in facilitating abortions. Among other situations, that would include anyone who drives a woman to a clinic to get an abortion. Under the law, anyone who successfully sues another person would be entitled to at least $10,000.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In a statement early Thursday after the high court’s action, Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion providers challenging the law, vowed to “keep fighting this ban until abortion access is restored in Texas.”
“We are devastated that the Supreme Court has refused to block a law that blatantly violates Roe v. Wade. Right now, people seeking abortion across Texas are panicking — they have no idea where or when they will be able to get an abortion, if ever. Texas politicians have succeeded for the moment in making a mockery of the rule of law, upending abortion care in Texas, and forcing patients to leave the state — if they have the means — to get constitutionally protected healthcare. This should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country who cares about the constitution,” she said.
Texas has long had some of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, including a sweeping law passed in 2013. The Supreme Court eventually struck down that law, but not before more than half of the state’s 40-plus clinics closed.
Even before the Texas case arrived at the high court the justices had planned to tackle the issue of abortion rights in a major case after the court begins hearing arguments again in the fall. That case involves the state of Mississippi, which is asking to be allowed to enforce an abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Associated Press writer Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
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June 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to reach out to you because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration.
Over and over on my blog I have written about your efforts as Vice President and President to attack legally the rights of our unborn babies in the USA. These views of yours are due to your allegiance to the humanist worldview which Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHaye exposed in their books. Your vast support from humanist groups in the 2020 election proves my point. No wonder we have seen criminals let go and an effort by Democrats (namely VP Harris) to defund the police. The Bible recognizes the sinful nature of humans and calls for the authorities to have the power of the sword in Romans 13! However, there have been times when the IRS has been used against freedom of expression such as the past persecution of the Tea Party. The Founding Fathers did NOT think the King was above the law! Unfortunately many lawmakers today don’t care about the law very much it seems which is a result of loss of a Christian Consensus influence in our society!
America’s second-ever Catholic president supports abortion rights, leaving the bishops unsure about how to move forward.By Emma Green
MARCH 14, 2021
Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion. Now in his 70s, Naumann watched Biden—America’s second Catholic president—transform into a vocal supporter of abortion rights while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Naumann runs the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and also leads what the Catholic bishops describe as their pro-life activities. He has suggested that Biden should no longer call himself a devout Catholic. At the very least, Naumann says, Biden should stop receiving Communion, a holy sacrament in Catholic life.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently convened a working group to discuss how the bishops should interact with Biden, and how they should deal with the challenge of having a visibly Catholic president who defies Church teachings on a central issue. Naumann was part of that group. Conflicts have already arisen: Naumann recently co-authored a statement expressing moral concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was developed and tested using cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. He also joined a statement from a group of the country’s top bishops celebrating the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, but called it “unconscionable that Congress has passed the bill without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion.”
John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13
GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY
THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN
ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL
THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?
Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
One New Testament writer says that Romans 13 has “caused more unhappiness and misery . . . than any other . . . verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants . . . used to justify a host of horrendous abuses of individual human rights.” Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, Cantrell says, “Both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security. . . . “‘Trust us,’ said government . . . ‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”
Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion; elevating the LGBTQ agenda, the bizarre transgender deception. The culture has become anti-truth, we all know that. The truth is the biggest threat to lies. William Pitt, well-known name in English history, said this: “Necessity (i.e., public health, common good) is the plea [of] every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants. “Get people afraid, and they’ll do whatever you want. A fearful society will always comply; panicking people will believe anything” [(Cantrell)].
“During the gruesome and bloody days of the French Revolution, when 40,000 innocent [people] lost their heads,” you would be interested to know who was operating the guillotine: the Committee for Public Safety [(Cantrell)]. One writer says, “Governments now get voted into power by promising to oversee housing, education, medicine, the economy, [the] currency, a minimum income, food, water, land, and the list goes on. The government become a parent, and the citizens are dependents. The government in this role becomes a monstrous juggernaut of bureaucracy, devouring taxes and trying to regulate every detail of life.” And they definitely want to regulate the church and silence its proclamation.
In his book The Glorious Body of Christ, Kuiper wrote, “Our age is one of ecclesiastical passivism. . . . When a church ceases to be militant it also ceases to be a church of Jesus Christ. . . . A truly militant church stands opposed to the world both without its walls and within. . . . Time and again in its history the church has found it necessary to assert its sovereignty over against usurpations by the state.” And Kuiper gave some biblical examples, like when King Saul or King Uzziah usurped the priesthood, stating, “In both cases a representative of the state was severely punished for encroaching [on] the sovereignty of the church.”
“Lord Macaulay of England summed up the Puritan reputation this way” [(Cantrell)]. He said of the Puritans, “He bowed himself in the dust before his Maker; [as] he set his foot on the neck of his king.” Kuiper says, “Ours is an age of state totalitarianism. All over the world statism is [rising] . . . . In consequence, in many lands the church finds itself utterly at the mercy of the state whose mercy often proves cruelty, while in others the notion is rapidly gaining ground that the church exists and operates by the state’s permission.” We do not operate by the state’s permission; we operate by the Lord’s command.
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Francis Schaeffer discusses this more in his fine book CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO:
PAGE 437
CHAPTER 3 THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH AND FREEDOM
And now it is all gone!
In most law schools today almost no one studies William Blackstone unless he or she is taking a course in the history of law. We live in a secularized society and in secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociologically good for society at the given moment; and wha they arbitrarily decide becomes law. Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841-1935) made totally clear that this was his position. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Those who hold this position themselves call it sociological law.
As the new sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving the “inalienable rights,” etc., it has been natural that this sociological law has then also moved away from the Constitution. William Bentley Ball, in his paper entitled “Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Frontier,” says:
i propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for two reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the “higher law”; second, because, that being so, secularism tends toward decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the “higher” criteria of a constitution.
This moving away from the Constitution is not only by court rulings, for example the First Amendment rulings, which are the very reversal of the original purpose of the First Amendment (see pp. 433, 434), but in other ways as well. Quoting again from the same paper by William Bentley Ball:
Our problem consists also, as perhaps this paper has well enough indicated, of more general constitutional delegation of legislative power and ultra vires. The first is where the legislature hands over its powers to agents through the conferral of regulatory power unaccompanied by strict standards. The second is where the agents make up powers on their own–assume powers not given them by the legislature. Under the first, the government of laws largely disappears and the government of men largely replaces it. Under the second, agents’ personal “home-made law replaces the law of the elected representatives of the people.
Naturally, this shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty. Mr. Ball closes his paper:
Fundamentally, in relation to personal liberty, the Constitution was aimed at restraint of the State. Today, in case after case relating to religious liberty, we encounter the bizarre presumption that it is the other way around; that the State is justified in whatever actions, and that religion bears a great burden of proof to overcome that presumption.
It is our job, as Christian lawyers, to destroy that presumption at every turn.
As lawyers discuss the changes in law in the United States, often they speak of the influence of the laws involved in the reentrance of the southern states into the national government after the Civil War. These indeed must be considered. But they were not the reason for the drastic change in law in our country. This reason was the takeover by the totally other world view which never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States). That is the central factor in the change.
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It is parallel to the difference between modern science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and the materialistic science which took over the last century. Materialistic thought would never have produced modern science. Modern science was produced on the Christian base. That is, because an intelligent Creator had created the universe we can in some measure understand the universe and there is, therefore, a reason for observation and experimentation to be pursued.
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
There is exactly the same parallel in law. The materialistic-energy, chance concept of final reality never would have produced the form and freedom in government we have in this country and in other Reformation countries. But now it has arbitrarily and arrogantly supplanted the historic Judeo-Christian Consensus that provided the base for form and freedom in government. The Judeo-Christian consensus gave greater freedoms than the world has ever known, but it also contained the freedoms so that they did not pound society to pieces. The materialistic concept of reality would not have produced the form-freedom balance, and now that it has taken over it cannot maintain the balance. It has destroyed it.
Will Durant and his wife Ariel together wrote The Story of Civilization. The Durants received the 1976 Humanist Pioneer Award. In The Humanist magazine of February 1977, Will Durant summed up the humanist problem with regard to personal ethics and social order: “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.”
Poor Will Durant! It is not just difficult, it is impossible. He should have remembered the quotation he and Ariel Durant gave from the agnostic Renan in their book The Lessons of History. According to the Durants, Renan said in 1866: “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” And the Durants themselves say in the same context: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
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Along with the decline of the Judie-Christian consensus we have come to a new definition and connotation of “pluralism.” Until recently it meant that the Christianity flowing from the Reformation is not now as dominant in the country and in society as it was in the early days of the nation. After about 1848 the great viewpoints not shaped by Reformation Christianity. This, of course, is the situation which exists today. Thus as we stand for religious freedom today, we need to realize that this must include a general religious freedom from the control of the state for all religion. It will not mean just freedom for those who are Christians. It is then up to Christians to show that Christianityis the Truth of total reality in the open marketplace of freedom.
This greater mixture in the United States, however, is now used as an excuse for the new meaning and connotation of pluralism. It now is used to mean that all types of situations are spread out before us, and that it really is up to each individual to grab one or the other on the way past, according to the whim of personal preference. What you take is only a matter of personal choice, with one choice as valid as another. Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. This new concept of pluralism suddenly is everywhere. There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference. On a recent SIXTY MINUTES program on television, for example, the questions of euthanasia of the old and the growing of marijuana as California’s largest paying crop were presented this way. One choice is as valid as another. It is just a matter of personal preference. This new definition and connotation of pluralism is presented in many forms, not only in personal ethics, but in society’s ethics and in the choices concerning law,
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Now I have a question. In these shifts that have come in law, where have the Christian lawyers been? I really ask you that. The shift has come gradually, but it has only come to its peak in the last 40 or 50 years. Where have the Christian lawyers been? Surely the Christian lawyers should have been the ones to have sounded the trumpet clear and loud, not just in bits and pieces but looking at the totality of what was occurring. Now, a nonlawyer like myself believes I have a right to feel let down because the Christian lawyers did not blow the trumpets clearly between, let us say, 1940 and 1970.
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When I wrote HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? From 1974 to 1976 I worked out of a knowledge of secular philosophy. I moved from the results in secular philosophy, to the results in liberal theology, to the results in the arts, and then I turned to the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. I read Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, and I must say, I was totally appalled by what I read. It was an exact parallel to what i had already known so well from my years of study in philosophy, theology, and the other disciplines.
In the book and film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? I used the Supreme Court abortion case as the clearest illustration of arbitrary sociiological law. But it was only the clearest illustration. The law is shot through with this kind of ruling. It is similar to choosing Fletcher’s situational ethics and point to it as the clearest illustration of how our society now functions with no fixed ethics. This is only the clearest illustration because in many ways our society functions on unfixed, situational ethics. The abortion case in law is exactly the same. It is only the clearest case. Law in this country has become situational law, using the term Fletcher used for his ethics. That is, a small group of people decide arbitrarily what, from their viewpoint, is for the good of society at that precise moment and they make it law, binding the whole society by their personal arbitrary decisions.
But of course! What would we expect? These things are the natural, inevitable results of the material-energy, humanistic concept of the final basic reality. From the material-energy, chance concept of final reality, final reality is, and must be b it nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law. There is no way to ascertain “the ought:” from “the is.” Not only should we have known what this would have produced, but on the basis of this viewpoint of reality, we should have recognized that there are no other conclusions that this view could produce. It is a natural result of really believing that the basic reality of all things is merely material-energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.
No, we must say that the Christians in the legal profession did not ring the bell, and we are indeed very, very far down the road toward a totally humanistic culture. At this moment we are in a humanistic culture, but we are happily not in a totally humanistic culture. But what we must realize is that the drift has been all in this direction. if it is not turned around we will move very rapidly into a totally humanistic culture.
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The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.This is what has happened. The abortion law is a perfect example. The Supreme Court abortion ruling invalidated abortion lawsin all fifty states, even though it seems clear that in 1973 the majority of Americans were against abortion. It did not matter. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that abortion was legal, and overnight they overthrew the state laws and forced their will on the majority, even though their ruling was arbitrary both legally and medically. Thus law and the courts became the vehicle for forcing a totally secular concept on the population.
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. I also respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children. I wanted to encourage you to investigate the work of Dr. Bernard Nathanson who like you used to be pro-abortion. I also want you to watch the You Tube series WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop. Also it makes me wonder what our the moral climate Of our nation is when we concentrate more on potential mistakes of the police and we let criminals back on the street so fast! Our national was founded of LEX REX and not REX LEX!
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
PS: In this series of letters John MacArthur covers several points. In the first letter, he quotes you saying that the greatest threat to America—he said on one occasion—is systemic racism, which doesn’t exist; he said white supremacy, which doesn’t exist with any power; and then he said global warming, which doesn’t exist either, and if it does, God’s in charge of it.
In reality the greatest threat to this nation is the government, the government. And I want to show you how we are to understand that. Turn to Romans 13
In the 2nd letter, Dr. MacArthur noted When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose
In the 3rd letter Dr. MacArthur noted The world is the enemy of the gospel. The world is the enemy of the church. I pointed out that this manifests itself today in the form of HUMANISM.
In the 4th letter Dr. MacArthur points out how much today the devil is having his way in our society and that the Bible predicts that these will get worse!
In the 5th letter Francis Schaeffer points out “The HUMANIST MANIFESTOS not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other non theistic religions.”
In the 6th letter Dr. MacArthur noted God has given government the sword, the power; and when they prostitute that power and they begin to punish those who do good and protect those who do evil, they wield that power against the people of God.
In the 7th letter Dr. MacArthur asserted, Throughout history, even in the Western world, people lived under what was called the divine right of kings. Kings were believed to have had a divine right. This was absolute monarchy. What broke that was basically the Reformers. The Reformers—a little phrase was “the law is king,” not the man.
In the 8th letter Dr. MacArthur noted that today the United States “Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion.”
Judge gives preliminary OK to $3.5M settlement of IRS case is discussed about the 2013 lawsuit during the Barack Obama administration over treatment of conservative groups who said they were singled out for extra IRS scrutiny on tax-exempt status applications. Then Dr. MacArthur talks about persecution in the Book of Daniel.
“These are groups of law-abiding citizens who should have never had their First Amendment rights infringed upon by the IRS,” Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots umbrella group, said Wednesday. “These are groups that want the government to be accountable.”
The government has been used to persecuting people they don’t like for centuries! Let me just share a portion of that sermon by John MacArthur with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, says, “If [there’s] no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” And that point is exactly when the early Christians performed their acts of civil disobedience, even when it cost them their lives. “Acts of State which contradict God’s [Laws] are illegitimate and acts of tyranny. Tyranny is ruling without the sanction of God. To resist tyranny is to honour God. . . . The bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right, but the duty to disobey the State.”
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human Dignity
Sunday Night Prime – Dr. Bernard Nathanson – Fr Groeschel, CFR with Fr …
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Francis Schaeffer pictured above
Larry King had John MacArthur as a guest on his CNN program several times.
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Max Brantley, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Arkansas Times, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (3)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (2)
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
90 years ago today on September 12, 1931, Adrian Rogers was born and I wanted to celebrate today by repeating one of my favorite posts from Adrian Rogers messages! In the 1970’s and 1980’s I was a member of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where Adrian Rogers was pastor and was a student at ECS from the 5th grade to the 12th grade where I was introduced to the books and films of Francis Schaeffer. During this time I was amazed at how many prominent figures in the world found their way into the works of both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and I wondered what it would be like if these individuals were exposed to the Bible and the gospel. Therefore, over 20 years ago I began sending the messages of Adrian Rogers and portions of the works of Francis Schaeffer to many of the secular figures that they mentioned in their works.
After being elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Adrian Rogers met with President Ronald Reagan.
Below my good friend Byron Tyler from my old days in the Bellevue Baptist Youth Group interviews our former music director Jim Whitmire. I respect both of these gentlemen tremendously.
This was the average sanctuary crowd when I was growing up at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis. Now take what you see and multiply it by three, because they had three morning services. This photo was taken sometime in the early 1980’s
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Adrian Rogers was my pastor from 1975 to 1983. I was amazed at he would teach the Bible and relate it to current events such as abortion. For instance, he stated, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”
I took what he said and sent it to Carl Sagan and Sagan responded on December 5, 1995:
Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.
(Carl Sagan and his third wife Ann Druyan pictured above)
In fact, I took excerpts from Dr. Rogers’ sermons and sent them out to many skeptics, and received responses back from Nobel prize winners such as Milton Friedman, George Wald, James D. Watson, and Nicolaas Bloembergen. Other scholars who took time to respond were Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-), Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , John Hospers (1918-2011), and Michael Martin (1932-).
Then we attended the European conference in Belgium and we first flew to Paris and rode in the back of a truck across France to Belgium. My good friend David Rogers and I were the only ones from the Bellevue Baptist youth group to go with OM that summer to go on missions in Europe. David went to Austria and I went to Manchester, England. David later served several years with OM.
Also during our trip David’s father was elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention. I was sitting next to David when he took the call from his father that he had decided to place his name into the election.
Adrian Rogers stood up for the inerrancy of the Bible and he did that during his time as President of the Southern Baptist Convention. This story below discusses that key part of Southern Baptist history.
KATHERINE BURGESS | MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL | 6:00 am CDT July 9, 2019
Joyce Rogers speaks about her husband, Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers, an influential Southern Baptist conservative.KATHERINE BURGESS, THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Forty years ago, a pastor from Memphis was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
He didn’t know it at the time, his wife said, but the election of Adrian Rogers would launch the “Conservative Resurgence” — called the “Fundamentalist Takeover” by its opponents — that solidified conservative control of the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
For Rogers, the debate centered around how the Bible was viewed, said his wife Joyce Rogers, who recently spoke with The Commercial Appeal about her late husband.
“He would like to be remembered as a man of God, one who stood for the Bible,” she said. “He would have died for his belief about the Bible.”
Adrian Rogers speaks at the 1988 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.SOUTHERN BAPTIST HISTORICAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
By 1979, Southern Baptists had been fiercely divided for years, with particularly heated debates occurring in the seminaries, where many professors were accused of holding liberal views of the Bible.
Southern Baptists were divided among two camps called “conservatives” and “moderates.” The conservatives believed in the doctrine of inerrancy, which Baptist Press, the news arm of the convention, describes as “the doctrine that the Bible is completely free from error regarding theology, history, science and every other matter to which it speaks.”
Many of the moderates, according to Baptist Press, also believed in inerrancy but were comfortable with a variety of beliefs within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Bill Leonard, professor emeritus at Wake Forest University who used to chair Baptist Studies, said it’s “academically impossible” to disengage politics from theology.
Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers was a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention.SOUTHERN BAPTIST HISTORICAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
For example, many leaders in the conservative resurgence were closely allied with the Republican Party, Leonard said.
“Many of them were Southern Baptist in ways that would move the denomination as much as possible into becoming a consistent Republican base, a consistent voting block,” Leonard said. “We know now that 40 years later, that was also successful.”
Moderates in the convention had also advocated in favor of abortion access and the ordination of women.
Rogers was a reluctant candidate, seen as a ‘rising star’
Even as Southern Baptists began to gather in Houston for the 1979 annual meeting, Rogers hadn’t agreed to run.
That didn’t stop well-known pastor W. A. Criswell from telling pastors days before the election that, “We will have a great time here if for no other reason than to elect Adrian Rogers as our president.”
The statement caught Joyce Rogers off guard.
“At first I was so mad at him, because I thought he (hadn’t) got permission to say that or anything,” she said. “But it became obvious that God was in it.”
Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers was a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a leader in the denomination’s conservative resurgence.BAPTIST PRESS
Some moderates were also watching Rogers.
According to Baptist Press, moderate C.R. Daley later said, “Some of us saw the rising star out of Memphis named Adrian Rogers — in my mind the most brilliant of his group, the one who poses the gravest threat to the Southern Baptist Convention. It was obvious that he was to be the king. It was obvious to some of us that he wasn’t the kind of king we wanted.”
Southern Baptist leaders Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler developed a strategy of how to take control of the Southern Baptist Convention.They determined that if conservatives won the presidency for 10 consecutive years, they could use the president’s appointive power to gain majorities on all Southern Baptist boards and agencies. That included the six seminaries and the two mission boards, said Barry Hankins, professor of history and department chair at Baylor University.
Patterson, who was later president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently been discredited and removed as seminary head for his handling of sex abuse claims. Last year, Pressler was accused of rape and other sexual misconduct. He has denied the allegations, according to Baptist News Global.
But in 1979, Patterson and Pressler were influential and respected leaders. Pressler was a former state representative and a judge in Houston while Patterson was president of Criswell College in Dallas.
“What they needed was a good candidate, so they recruited Adrian Rogers to be the candidate they would run in 1979 to try and win,” Hankins said. “He was a winsome personality with a great preaching voice. He was staunchly conservative in his theology, in favor of conservatives having a sort of test for leadership in the convention, but he was not in any way a hard-edged personality type.”
If Rogers hadn’t been a pastor, he would have had to become some kind of orator, Hankins said, with his “golden voice.” In 1987, Rogers would go on to found “Love Worth Finding,” a television ministry that extended to 194 countries.
At the time, Rogers was also pastor of one of the largest churches in the convention, Memphis’ Bellevue Baptist Church. The church was located in downtown Memphis, and rapidly growing.
By Rogers’ retirement in 2005, the church had grown from 9,000 members to more than 29,000 members and relocated to its campus in Cordova.
Hankins said his sense is that Rogers was able to “stay above the fray” during much of the division. He didn’t take on leadership because of politics, Hankins said, but because he believed the inerrancy of the Bible was necessary to furthering evangelism.
On the day of the election, Rogers was chosen with 51% of the vote.
Rogers was a pastor first
Raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, Rogers met his wife in the fourth grade. He liked to joke that they didn’t get serious until the sixth grade.
Joyce Rogers, who still lives in the Memphis area, said she isn’t sure how her husband developed his views about biblical inerrancy.
“I always say he was a man of conviction and courage,” she said. “He’d just sit with his Bible in his hand and see that (something) didn’t agree with what the Bible would say.”
Adrian Rogers stands with his wife Joyce Rogers in a photo from before they were married. The couple were childhood sweethearts.SUBMITTED
Rogers became pastor of a small church during his freshman year of college at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. The couple married at the beginning of their second year of college.
Later, Rogers pastored a church in Merritt Island, Florida, but agreed to visit Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis when they said they wanted him as pastor. He told his church in Florida that he didn’t think he’d take on the job in Memphis, Joyce Rogers said, but when they arrived, “there was almost electricity in the air.”
Surprising the couple, leadership at Bellevue voted to approve Rogers then and there — before he said yes to accepting the position. The couple ended up agreeing and moving to Memphis, where Rogers remained until his death in 2005.
“His great desire in life was to be a pastor,” said the Rev. Bob Sorrell, who was associate pastor at Bellevue for many of Rogers’ years there. “That took first place in his life after his family. I think the service, as far as the convention was concerned, was an opportunity that was provided to him and for him, but his greatest desire was to be the pastor of the church.”
Even with speaking duties and other requirements as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Rogers made sure to almost always be in the pulpit at Bellevue on Sundays, Sorrell said.
A plan with no compromise
Joyce Rogers holds a photo of her late husband Adrian Rogers, who was a key leader in the Southern Baptist Convention’s conservative resurgence.KATHERINE BURGESS
Ultimately, Pressler and Patterson’s plan for the convention worked.
Rogers was the first in a long line of conservative presidents — culminating in a mid-1980s meeting in which 45,000 Southern Baptists showed up in Dallas to try to elect either a conservative or moderate candidate.
“By that time everyone realized what was at stake and both sides were recruiting, putting the word out, (saying to) go to the convention and vote,” Hankins said.
By the early 1990s, the convention was “fully in conservative hands,” Hankins said. Some moderate congregations left and formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Rogers later held two more terms as president in the 1980s.
There’s a quotation from her husband that was placed on a plaque and gifted to Joyce Rogers that now hangs on the wall outside her Memphis area home.
It’s known as the “no-compromise” statement that he made at the height of the struggle over the future of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“We don’t have to get together. The Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t have to survive,” Adrian Rogers said. “I don’t have to be the pastor of Bellevue. I don’t have to live. But I’m not going to compromise the word of God.”
Katherine Burgess covers county government, religion and the suburbs. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com, 901-529-2799 or followed on Twitter @kathsburgess.
Twenty years I had the opportunity to correspond with two individuals that were regarded as two of the most famous atheists of the 20th Century, Antony Flew and Carl Sagan. I had read the books and seen the films of the Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer and he had discussed the works of both of these men. I sent both of these gentlemen philosophical arguments from Schaeffer in these letters and in the first letter I sent a cassette tape of my pastor’s sermon IS THE BIBLE TRUE? You may have noticed in the news a few years that Antony Flew actually became a theist in 2004 and remained one until his death in 2010. Carl Sagan remained a skeptic until his dying day in 1996.Antony Flew wrote me back several times and in the June 1, 1994 letter he commented, “Thank you for sending me the IS THE BIBLE TRUE? tape to which I have just listened with great interest and, I trust, profit.” I later sent him Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution too.
The ironic thing is back in 2008 I visited the Bellevue Baptist Book Store and bought the book There Is A God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew, and it is in this same store that I bought the message by Adrian Rogers in 1994 that I sent to Antony Flew. Although Antony Flew did not make a public profession of faith he did admit that the evidence for God’s existence was overwhelming to him in the last decade of his life. His experience has been used in a powerful way to tell others about Christ. Let me point out that while on airplane when I was reading this book a gentleman asked me about the book. I was glad to tell him the whole story about Adrian Rogers’ two messages that I sent to Dr. Flew and I gave him CD’s of the messages which I carry with me always. Then at McDonald’s at the Airport, a worker at McDonald’s asked me about the book and I gave him the same two messages from Adrian Rogers too.
Dr. Rogers on Evolution
With the steadfast support of friends like you, Love Worth Finding will continue to hold high the banner of Jesus Christ.
THREE TELLING ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION
1. The fossil record. Not only is the so-called missing link still missing, all of the transitional life forms so crucial to evolutionary theory are missing from the fossil record. There are thousands of missing links, not one! 2. The second law of thermodynamics. This law states that energy is winding down and that matter left to itself tends toward chaos and randomness, not greater organization and complexity. Evolution demands exactly the opposite process, which is observed nowhere in nature.
Dr. George Wald of Harvard:
“When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility…Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion — that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God…I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” – Scientific American, August, 1954.
3. The origin of life. Evolution offers no answers to the origin of life. It simply pushes the question farther back in time, back to some primordial event in space or an act of spontaneous generation in which life simply sprang from nothing.
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I actually had the chance to correspond with George Wald twice before his death. He wrote me two letters and in the first one he suggested that he was just using hyperbole when he made the assertion that is quoted by Dr. Rogers. He also suggested the religion of Buddhism although he said he was not a Buddhist himself, but he thought that would be closest to the truth which he thought was atheism.
During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know […]
7News : Web Extra: Ricky Gervais on God Published on Mar 23, 2014 He’s not shy about sharing his opinion with 5 million social media followers so Ricky Gervais was happy to clear a few things up for us too. __________________________________ Discussion (2 of 3): Antony Flew, N.T. Wright, and Gary Habermas ___________ The Bible and Science […]
Piers Morgan Tonight : CNN Official Interview: Ricky Gervais says atheism shouldn’t offend Uploaded on Jan 20, 2011 Ricky Gervais tells CNN’s Piers Morgan why he’s an atheist, and why his jokes about God shouldn’t offend believers. The Bible and Science (Part 01) __________________________________ Antony Flew tells what the book THERE IS A GOD: “How the world’s most […]
And I especially want them to understand that the economic damage grows exponentially as tax rates increase (in other words, going from a 30 percent tax rate to a 40 percent tax rate is a lot more damaging than going from a 10 percent tax rate to a 20 percent tax rate).
Part of that often includes showing an image of a “philoso-raptor” pondering whether the principle that applies to tobacco taxation also applies to taxes on work.The plans also call for raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from the current 37%. The plans preserve the 3.8% net investment income tax, and extend it to certain pass-through companies. The result is a top marginal federal income tax rate of 46.4%. …In New York City, the combined top marginal state and city tax rate is 14.8%. So New York City taxpayers…would face a combined city, state and federal marginal rate of 61.2% under the House plan. …the highest in nearly 40 years. Top earning Californians would face a combined marginal rate of 59.7%, while those in New Jersey would face a combined rate of 57.2%.
Folks on the left claim that punitive tax rates are necessary for “fairness,” yet the United States already has the developed world’s most “progressive” tax system.
being gained through unproductive activity — “rent-seeking”… Well-designed government interventions can reduce inequality from the top down, through more aggressive taxation of capital gains and estates… …everyone, poor and rich, has a lot to gain from curbing wealth inequality. The policies that can achieve that goal are neither radical nor complicated.
But my concern is that going in the wrong direction at 60 miles per hour still gets a nation to the wrong destination.
using its power to persecute and harass organizations associated with the “Tea Party.”We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.
Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.
…A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.
It has incompetent employees.
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Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert presides over a Senate committee at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. in this March 14, 2018, file photo. Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers met recently to talk model legislation and pass resolutions. Kelly P. Kissel, Associated Press/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22726922/AP898166992908.jpg)
Texas state Rep. Bryan Hughes speaks during the opening session of the 2015 legislative session on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay, Associated Press/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22726936/merlin_1112102.jpg)
A anti-abortion supporter argues with those who attended a press conference and rally held by the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 25, 2015. Stacie Scott, Deseret News
The Daily Hatch 